Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

[ailbhe]

Wait - all those maids and hired hands described as French are actually black, aren't they?

I think I preferred the books before I realised that.

Comments

[moustachios.livejournal.com]

Just got back from a week visiting relatives in Quebec, so I'm coming late to the comments, but... yeah. Discrimination, historical and current, in Canada is very much tied to language (which is tied to religion, as most French-speakers were/are Catholic, and also to race, as we've tended to marry Natives much more often than later WASP settlers). This might be interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_White


It's been slowly changing since the seventies, but the old prejudices still come out here and there. The last two days we were there, we had little day-trips to Montreal, and we ate in restaurants instead of packing a lunch or snacks. When we ate in small greasy-spoon places, the waiters greeted us in French; when we went to a higher-end spot, they greeted us in English. I was rather intensely pissed off.