by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

A couple of our local papers published thick handsome collections of photos not so long ago. The black and white snaps were meant to capture the passing century and ranged from the familiar (the postcard-purty ramshackle east end dépanneur, complete with beer bike and Kik Cola sign) to the haunting (a throwback shot of a dozen miserable-looking workers chipping away ice and shovelling snow in Verdun, like a chilly arctic chain gang).

Turn the page, and Hey Diddle Diddle: it’s a picture of a party-oriented bunch at jazzy Café St. Michel in the 1950s; brown and pink cats and fiddles intertwined in giggling delight, pleated skirts and hepcat ties all tangling into each other’s delighted owners, oblivious to skin tone.

And as sure as the cow jumped over the moon, you can feel it on your fingertips before the page turns… and yep, there he is: anti-segregationist baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson on one knee, tilted bat leaning his starched cotton Royals uniform.

These pictures seem proof of a central defining myth in this burg: ours has long been a love-knows-no-colour, ethnically-enlightened city, where all are considered for their human value regardless of ethnicity. It’s a fairy-tale segregation-free land where the fork ran away with the spoon.

I want to believe our city’s enduring myth of tolerance and indifference to race, creed, colour, language and gender. But Papa Gepetto, our nose is growing.

Not only is the myth of integration false, in many ways, segregation is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice it.

In the past decades anglos haven’t moved en masse to the West Island as some random coincidence, but rather as a concentrated ethnic migration, considered Canada’s greatest case of “voluntary segregation.”

But segregation is also evident on your street. Peer into the Café Portugal on Duluth, an alluring lounging spot with a huge picture window looking onto the cobble-stoned strip. I’ve never seen a female inside the place. Now it’s entirely possible—albeit a mathematically slim one—that the place was jammed with women on the times I didn’t walk by. But that hopeful belief was quelled when I met a young female relative of a manager who confessed that when she walks into the door, “everybody stares at me, they want me out.”

Men can also be excluded unreasonably. I once walked by the YWCA on Crescent with a female who wanted to see if the place was worth joining. When I sauntered over to look at the condition of the pool, I was physically stopped. For not only were men unwelcome inside, they weren’t even allowed to look at the pool.

Then there’s religion. According to local demographic expert Jack Jedwab, Montreal’s Jewish population is Canada’s most geographically concentrated and has the lowest intermarriage rate of any Jewish population in North America. And yes, Christians still attend church based on skin colour as much as anywhere in the States, although there’s liturgical justification to do so.

Our governments also support segregation. For example, the feds withdraw benefits from natives who choose to move away from reserves. Meanwhile, in Quebec, all three levels of government—particularly the provincial—have almost exclusively hired white francophones.

Perhaps most ironic of all, the city which the Brooklyn Dodgers employed to attack segregation so long ago now has a municipal administration that uses sport to encourage it. The city licenses and provides facilities for soccer leagues whose participants all share the same ethnicity. Next time you see a soccer game in a city park, notice that Africans, Caribbeans, Haitians, Arabs, Italians all participate in their own distinct leagues, which don’t play each other (although admittedly, the odd exception sometimes runs around waiting for a pass, which makes us feel better about the ethnic intermixing, like Eminem in 8 Mile).

Some might argue that grouping together might reinforce community solidarity or identity or some nonsense. But in fact ghettoization limits valuable cultural exposure, to the minority and majority groups alike, reinforces a sense of foreignness and misunderstanding, and kills exposure to new ideas, networks, attitudes and career paths.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca