Themed section introduction: Emerging research on racial/ethnic inequality in Canada

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and spread across Canada in early 2020, there was an urgent need to determine whether and how its health, social, and economic consequences were distributed across population groups in Canada, particularly by race/ethnicity. This proved to be challenging. Although data on COVID-19 infections and deaths were available for Canada and its provinces, high-quality, individual-level data about the race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics of those infected with COVID-19 was limited (Choi et al., 2021). This data vacuum made it extremely difficult to assess whether there were racial/ethnic disparities in the vulnerability to the pandemic, especially early on.

Even before the pandemic, researchers have pointed out that data on race/ethnicity has been largely unavailable and inaccessible in Canada, which makes it difficult to meaningfully investigate issues of equity, opportunity, and (dis)advantage among racialized groups in Canada (e.g., Robson, 2021). Canada's data landscape stands in stark contrast to the United States and the United Kingdom. For instance, unlike the U.S. census, the Canadian census does not explicitly ask respondents to report their race. Rather, respondents are asked to select their identity from a list of categories that conflate race, ethnicity, and national origin. This means that Canadian research on race/ethnicity is often hamstrung by missing demographic data and by an overreliance on the White v. “visible minority” binary—a broad, rather unhelpful catch-all category that eschews variation in the experiences of different racialized groups.

The lack of race-based information in Canadian data reflects a long history of resistance to or ambivalence about race. Policymakers and researchers have displayed a reluctance to highlight differences among Canadians or to point out the ways in which we fall short of Canada's policy and national identity of multiculturalism. However, refusing to acknowledge the existence of racial inequalities, discrimination, and racism generally has the effect of exacerbating disparities and hindering our ability to address them head on (Thompson, 2008). By not collecting detailed race-based data, we weaken our ability to document the ways in which social, political, and economic institutions in Canada are racialized and the unequal outcomes experienced by racial minorities in the labour market, education, the criminal justice and immigration systems, and elsewhere (Reitz & Banerjee, 2007).

To this end, one of our goals for this themed section of Canadian sociology's flagship journal was to highlight the exciting work being done on the topic—and particularly the innovative ways researchers are marshalling data to tell important stories about racial/ethnic inequality in Canada. The authors in this section responded resoundingly to the call for more, and more granular, research on racial/ethnic inequality in Canada.

This themed section begins with a macro-level perspective on the experiences of discrimination. Vaswani, Sutter, Lapshina, and Esses make several useful contributions. First, they compare the prevalence of racial/ethnic discrimination among immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and racialized individuals across a variety of social contexts (e.g., at work or school, in the housing market, and when accessing public amenities like transit). Second, the authors home in on these groups’ experiences in smaller and mid-sized communities. Much of the research on immigration, assimilation, and discrimination focuses on Canada's larger cities on grounds that most immigrants to Canada settle in large urban areas. The experiences of immigrants in smaller and mid-sized communities have been largely understudied despite the geographic dispersal of the immigrant population more recently. The need to study the experiences of racialized immigrants outside of traditional immigrant gateways is made ever more important given Vaswani et al.’s findings suggesting that racial/ethnic discrimination may be especially high in smaller and mid-sized communities. Residents in these communities are less exposed to diverse populations, may feel less comfortable with individuals from ethnic and cultural backgrounds unlike their own, and may feel threatened by the demographic changes occurring around them. The authors also uncover a large degree of variation across the communities in their study. Future research should pick up where this study leaves off and investigate potential mechanisms explaining this cross-community variation. Why, for instance, would two-thirds of visible minority immigrants report discrimination in communities such as Guelph, St. Thomas-Elgin, Wellington, or Huron-Perth, whereas a much smaller share (about one-third) experience discrimination in London-Middlesex?

Next up, Malette and Robson focus on persistent race-based inequalities within a particular institution—education. Despite the substantial expansion of postsecondary enrollment over the past few decades in Canada and elsewhere, sizable gaps in access, enrollment, and attainment remain between White and racialized students. The authors set out to disentangle the impact of race and immigrant status on students’ receipt and acceptance of a university admissions offer on the other. A major strength of this study is its use of administrative data. By using census data from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), they draw on a rare data source with more granular information about individuals’ race/ethnicity than typically exists in large, nationally representative data. These data include students’ self-identified race, thereby allowing the authors to avoid falling back on the usual White/visible minority binary. A particularly noteworthy finding is the considerable heterogeneity within the overly broad category of “visible minority.” Educational disadvantage is not uniformly distributed among non-White students. For instance, Black students are 34% less likely than White students to be admitted to a university, while East Asian students are over three times more likely compared to White students. Foreign-born East and Southeast Asian students are especially disadvantaged and are less likely than their Canadian-born counterparts to confirm a spot at university. As the authors note, future research should explore why some racial/ethnic groups remain disadvantaged in postsecondary education even as the sector has expanded and opened up. The findings here suggest an urgent role for more and better micro-level longitudinal data that can track individuals as they grow up and progress through various institutions over the life course in order to identify where and when they encounter barriers on the path to university participation.

Finally, Cai and Qian take us into more intimate terrain by focusing on the “digital enclaves” that are created when online daters from immigrant backgrounds act on their preferences for romantic partners and for the platforms they perceive will facilitate matching with those traits. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrants who use online dating platforms in Vancouver, the authors examine what immigrants value in their potential partners and why they might value certain traits. Respondents evince a strong preference for dating partners of the same ethnicity (i.e., Chinese), highlighting race/ethnicity as a key organizing framework for social relations—even in a diverse metropolis (like Vancouver) and in a context (online dating) in which partner selection is theoretically unbound by physical constraints. At the same time, many respondents also required that their potential partners be Canadian permanent residents, suggesting the importance of security and assimilation. In line with U.S. studies, Asian men are among the least desirable partners, and they encounter sexual racism both on- and offline. In an attempt to optimize the probability of fulfilling these preferences, the authors argue that users’ inclination to use Chinese-oriented dating platforms create “digital enclaves,” which resemble ethnic enclaves in physical spaces. These digital enclaves also fill a more general void: respondents reported difficulty making friends in daily life in Vancouver, let alone finding a partner who met their criteria. In these ways, the proliferation of technology-assisted dating in cyberspace is not likely to disrupt patterns of partner selection, preferences for racial/ethnic homophily, or intergroup social distance. Rather, online dating may leave racial/ethnic boundaries largely intact.

Taken together, these three studies provide more nuance and specificity to the study of racial/ethnic relations and inequality than is often found in Canadian social science. The authors leverage primary and secondary data to move beyond the White/visible minority binary, to explore the intersections between race/ethnicity and immigration in patterning inequality and social relations, and to draw our attention to new and understudied contexts in which inequality is generated and social relations are enacted (i.e., smaller communities as opposed to large metropolitan areas, and dating in cyberspace). At the same time, these studies highlight the relative nascency of actionable research on racial/ethnic inequality in Canada, at least compared to the more robust research and data available in the United States and the United Kingdom. Together, these studies underscore the need to document the persistence and emergence of race/ethnicity-based disparities and to clarify where, when, and why such inequalities persist between racial/ethnic groups in Canada. They also encourage research that moves beyond the White/visible minority dichotomy, and that collects and creatively uses high-quality survey, administrative, and qualitative data that includes race.