Tuesday, February 16, 2010

What took you so long?

I was wondering how many seconds would pass before someone ferreted out the racist undertones in this story:

Dark-skinned immigrants urged to take vitamin D

I only had to scroll down to the fifth comment:

I'm wondering if this advice is also meant for dark-skinned people who are not immigrants, but are Canadian born? My parents immigrated to this country from South Asia more than 40 years ago, but i was born here. So, either, my vitamin D levels are not affected with the same problem because my skin is used to this climate, OR, the researchers of this study can't conceive that dark skinned people can actually be born here, and that we're called Canadians and everything!?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being an immigrant, obviously, but it feels like the journalist or researchers are forgetting that there are a whole lot of brown people who were born here, so they might want to address that in their limitations to their study, that: a) did not study dark skinned people who were born here, therefore don't have specific results of that group; b) didn't decipher between dark skinned immigrants and dark-skinned Canadian born (who's origin is of South-Asian descent), resulting in no control group or lack of list of differences/similarities; OR c) Just didn't bother about using the right language, resulting in coming off as thoughtless and, let's be honest, a little bit racist.

No comments:

Post a Comment