A spike in racism towards South Asians has been seen in Canada this year. Graphic Myriam Ouazzani
Hannah Scott-Talib,
Local Journalism Initiative
Anti-immigration sentiment in Canada is fuelling South Asian racism online
There has been a steady rise in racism towards South Asian communities in Canada over the past couple of years, and one of the main culprits might be social media.
This year, xenophobia can largely be traced down to anti-immigration rhetoric being spread in online comment sections without regulation, as well as Tik Tok trends that mock South Asian cultures.
“There’s so much normalized hate towards South Asian communities [in Canada],” said 19-year-old Bangladeshi Concordia student Afra Azreen, who moved to Montreal in 2022.
Dipti Gupta, professor of Cinema and Communications at Dawson College and Fine Arts at Concordia University, said she believes that this racism stems largely from a lack of acceptance towards immigrants. It’s a sentiment that she said she has experienced herself throughout the past couple of decades living in Canada as an immigrant.
“I think people feel a sense of anger and fear in thinking that somebody is coming here and not following a certain culture,” Gupta said. “They feel that somebody is less than [them], not realizing, at the end of the day, we all need to treat each other as human beings first.”
During the months of January, February, May and June 2024, Canadian immigration officials refused more visitor visa applications than they approved. The ratio of refused applications to approved ones was the highest recorded since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A recent poll from the Leger for Association of Canadian Studies revealed that, in cities such as Toronto, targeted racism towards Sikh Indian immigrants in particular has been on the rise this year.
Indians are currently the largest demographic of immigrants coming to Canada.
“There’s a lot of ‘Othering’ in general [towards South Asian immigrants],” Gupta said, referring to Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism. The phenomenon describes how Western culture intellectually holds itself above the East, or Asia.
“This ‘Othering’ has only accelerated in some ways, and has become more prominent,” Gupta said. “[It] stems from a fear that the ‘Other’ is not as educated, or is less than [Westerners].”
According to Azreen, it’s not uncommon to find social media videos mocking South Asian culture in some way or another these days, particularly when it comes to videos of street food being made in countries like India.
“They’ll be [making] a cultural dish, and then people are hating on it in the comments,” Azreen said. “People are very quick and harsh to make these comments, it gets blown out of proportion and that wouldn’t have happened if it had been a different culture.”
“It tends to be [seen as] different, and usually it’s a bad type of different,” Ayaaz Esmail said on the topic of South Asian food. The 23-year-old grew up in Vancouver with Indian and Ugandan heritage. “It’s that fear of the unknown, and fear perpetuates hate, which makes people ignorant.”
Both Azreen and Esmail expressed that, throughout their lives, they have experienced being stereotyped as a result of their ethnicity.
“I’m generalized under a picture of people who hate women, or who hate gay people,” Esmail said.
As an Ismaili Muslim, Esmail said his identity gets mixed into stereotypes pertaining to people from certain Middle Eastern countries, despite him having no relation to these countries.
“We’re rarely shown the really positive pictures of my faith, [or] of other people’s faith,” he said. “It really sucks because we’re all just generalized as brown.”
On her end, Azreen said she believes that gender plays an important role when it comes to stereotyping South Asians online. She said her experience as a woman differs from those of South Asian men.
“Gender does play a huge role, and it works in a way that’s kind of opposite to what you’d think,” Azreen said.
According to her, South Asian women fall on either side of the coin—either they are fetishized for qualities that are similar to Western beauty standards such as minimal body hair and white skin, or they are considered undesirable if their South Asian features stand out and are perceived as masculine.
“The more cultural someone looks, the more this hatred is there,” Azreen said, adding that she believes that brown women often have to go out of their way to prove their femininity when it comes to appearance.
On the other hand, she mentioned that South Asian men are almost always perceived as being undesirable according to Western beauty standards. As an example, she stated that well-known TikTok accounts such as CityBoyJJ, known for doing street interviews in Canadian cities, reveal these harmful stereotypes to be prevalent.
“[The interviewers] go around and ask, ‘Which ethnicity would you not date?’ And it’s always South Asian,” Azreen said. She specified that, from what she sees, these answers are often given by white women about South Asian men.
In addition to the normalized appearance-based racism she’s noticed and experienced, Azreen said that videos of violent and destructive situations from her home country have recently surfaced online, leading to a rise in ignorant and hateful comments. Bangladesh is currently undergoing a revolution, and the online response to social media footage of buildings burning and collapsing as a result of the revolution left Azreen feeling afraid.
“It’s real footage from my country, and the comments were just making fun of it as if it wasn’t real,” she said, citing comments from the video that stated things like “average day in Bangladesh” or even “average day in India.”
But when it comes to social media, this type of reception is unsurprising to Gupta.
“We are all sucked into this kind of vortex of social media now,” Gupta said. “If [social media] is used in the best way, it can impact a lot of people. But does that happen all the time? A large cross-section of us believe that it is [solely] a mode of entertainment.”
In general, Canada has a reputation for being an immigrant-friendly country. But people like Gupta believe that with the all-too-common instances of racism and xenophobia that South Asians experience, this reputation might not be accurate.
“Despite all the efforts that we put into our system, into our policies, into our education and everything else,” Gupta said, “we’ve not been able to rise above this [racism].”
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 2, published September 17, 2024.
