by Sunanda Mongia

Andrew Stewart's murder on December 3rd has shaken Toronto. The schoolboy was chased by a mob of 10-15 boys young like him and armed with pool cues, hockey sticks and at least one knife.

The reaction was, "is this Americanism coming to Canada?"

School killings as in US-why are children walking around with knives? But guns and knives are not really the issue for if people  have violence in their hearts, they  will make  weapons out of  pool cues and hockey sticks.

Now that this murder has been committed, as per reports, people in the neighborhood have started talking about how tension was simmering, and the drugs and violence that were becoming common. Children of different races had been involved in skirmishes since the beginning of term and last spring official attempts had been made to regulate the students. Obviously then, there are underlying and urgent issues that cannot be ignored any longer.

Stray remarks about racialism and revenge are also being reported. As a new immigrant the issue is for me particularly a question mark: was it worth my while to come to a violence-prone city from halfway across the world? Having no friends and foes here and no personal agenda, I can look at the issue with some objectivity and even with no need to be politically correct. I can even speak with some experience of social discord for India's multiplicities predate contemporary Toronto's social assortment of race, culture and ethnicity by a few centuries.

My first impression of how these disparities are handled reminded of the Indian solution -if we do not talk about them, they will go away. But any observant new comer in Toronto sees people leading separate lives wrapped up in their sense of ethnicity-driven by what I have elsewhere called "militant multiculturalism". This currently fashionable militant multiculturalism slots each issue without giving us the generosity to look at them one by one. Private diversities are respected so much that they are promoted at the expense of public assimilation

As  a reaction, in a silent consensus  Canadian society has developed a social code that  has two visible principles:

1. In the workplace we are all Canadians provided you know Canadian English.
2. Outside the workplace to each his own.

The professional camaraderie may spill over to the commute back home in the subway or the bus but beyond that, social relationships are strictly within the community.

I have watched countless strangers in the bus-the general instinct is to sit next to a person of one's own racial type. Non-integrative behaviour is thus accepted on the basis of militant multiculturalism.  The adults have obviously saved themselves a lot of emotional effort by keeping their social and professional lives separate.

In comparison to this the children study in multicultural classrooms. And the parental insulation has aggravated the problem of the children who must interact in school and the playground. Their parents do not give personal model of racially, culturally or ethnically integrated behaviour and the unacknowledged idea is that once this generation of children will grow up together racialism will loose its force. Is this not expecting too much from children? We are hoping that they would solve the problems we cannot even acknowledge. And, these children have to negotiate these demanding relationships through the seductions of drugs, unregulated individualism, racialism and pervasive models of violence.

With a more interactive social structure, when two boys fight it would not be  an Indian or a white or a black or East Asian, they would be two school boys who have yet to learn that there are better ways to resolve their differences. The parents have to forget longer histories of suppression, so   that they can at least give to their children immediate histories of integration. The one good thing about historical mistakes is that you can learn from them without having to commit them personally. And ultimately it is a very basic lesson that they have to teach that Canada today does not belong to whites or blacks or the first people or the second or the third-it belongs only to the law-abiding.

But, of course it is so much easier to blame influences of TV and alien immigrants and US examples and violent ethnic and religious backgrounds. It is far more difficult to introspect and to see where we are failing our children. Ask Cheryl Stewart: it is not easy to see your child dead and that too, so needlessly.