Aggression and Bullying in Multicultural Canada: The Experiences of Minority Immigrant Girls and Young Women 1666926426, 9781666926422

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Aggression and Bullying in Multicultural Canada

Aggression and Bullying in Multicultural Canada The Experiences of Minority Immigrant Girls and Young Women Shila Khayambashi

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Khayambashi, Shila, 1977- author. Title: Aggression and bullying in multicultural Canada : the experiences of minority immigrant girls and young women / Shila Khayambashi. Other titles: Experiences of minority immigrant girls and young women  Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023039265 (print) | LCCN 2023039266 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666926422 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666926439 (epub) | ISBN 9781666926446 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Teenage immigrants—Canada—Social conditions. | Women immigrants—Canada—Social conditions. | Immigrants—Canada—Social conditions. | Aggressiveness in youth—Canada. | Racism—Canada. | Canada—Race relations. Classification: LCC F1035.A1 K43 2024  (print) | LCC F1035.A1  (ebook) | DDC 305.9/06912—dc23/eng/20230913 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039265 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039266 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I dedicate this book to the young, brave immigrant women and men who shared their memories with me throughout this research. Their memories of hardship, pain, anger, and tears made these individuals the strongest people I have ever met. This book would not be possible without them.‌‌ I also would like to dedicate this book to the brave girls and women of my mother country, Iran. The women have been fighting injustice with their health, freedom, safety, and lives.‌‌ ‌‌Woman, Life, Freedom!

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction

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Chapter One: Immigration Youths: Living with Aggression, Isolation, and Unhomeliness

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Chapter Two: “I Hated High School”: The Experiences of the Young Minority Immigrant Women in Canadian High Schools

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Chapter Three: Minority Immigrant Youths and Adults Aggression

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Chapter Four: The Good, the Bad, the Repulsive



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Chapter Five: My Accent, My Name, My Identity: The Physical World Versus Cyberworld Conclusion‌‌: True Meaning of Being an Immigrant in Canada Bibliography Index

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121

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About the Author



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Preface

This book results from thirty-one interviews (twenty-seven first- and second-generation immigrant young women and four first- and second-generation immigrant young men) located in the Greater Toronto Area, Hamilton, and York Region, Ontario. This book, however, only reflects on twenty-five of the interviews collected from female participants and two interviews collected from male participants. The interviewer met with the participants in various public places in Toronto, York Region, and Hamilton, such as York University’s library and Student Center, McMaster’s library, and different coffee shops and eateries; on one occasion, the interviewer conducted the interview in her house. This book’s participants, aged 18–35, were from diverse cultural, geographic, sociopolitical, economic, ethnic, racial, and academic backgrounds. Most of the participants of this book migrated to Canada as their parents’ dependents, except for one participant, who came to Canada as an independent youth refugee. This research employed convenience and snowball sampling to recruit willing participants. As the initial step for this research, the interviewer approached the first- and second-generation immigrant university students in the Greater Toronto Area, York Region, and Hamilton. She invited them to share their experiences with peer aggression and systematic injustice. Many of these students accepted, and some encouraged their friends and colleagues to participate. The recruited participants already informed their friends about the research topic, and these new participants showed interest in participating in the research. In this stage, some participants were even asked to complete joint interviews, during which the researcher conducted two interviews simultaneously. There was no deception in this research; the potential participants could ask questions before, during, or even after the interviews. Since this research had no point of deception, the snowball sampling and joint interviews did not affect the research’s validity. This book conducted a series of semi-structured, face-to-face interviews by applying the qualitative approach. The semi-structured interview method ix

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opened a dialogue between the interviewer and the interviewee. These semi-structured interviews included twelve open-ended questions, allowing the interviewee to add their autoethnographic account to the topic.1 The open-ended nature of the questions, combined with the interviewer’s semiformal nature, invited the interviewees/participants to recount and share their experiences about the utmost sensitive and harsh stages of their lives. During these interviews, the interviewer listened to the experiences and memories of first- and second-generation immigrant women with peer aggression, precisely due to their ethnic and racial backgrounds. Through the analysis of each interview and the common themes and shared experiences among the collected interviews, the interviewer studied the concept of violence and aggression among and against the young first- and second-generation immigrant girls and young women in Canada. This book employed a feminist and post-colonial methodological approach for its interviews to avoid and minimize the influences of the power imbalance between the interviewer and interviewee. As feminist and post-colonial scholar Patricia Hill Collin explains, there is always a power imbalance between the interviewee and the interviewer due to the position of power that the interviewer holds.2 In this imbalance of power, the interviewer’s gaze burdens the interviewees.3 For this book, the researcher was aware of her position of power. Therefore, applying a qualitative approach and feminist and post-colonial methodological approach, the interviewer created a safe space for the interviewees to explore their experiences regarding this research. GENDER LIMITATIONS IN THIS RESEARCH The most substantial limitation of this research was the lack of engagement of male participants. This lack of attention directed this research to focus mainly on the interviews collected from the women and their experiences. For this research, the female participants accepted the researcher’s invitation to interview positively. On the other hand, while the researcher did try to recruit male participants, she encountered a low number of male subjects. Despite the researcher’s outreach to the potential male participants and on some occasions, their initial enthusiasm during our one-on-one meetings (which acted as screening/introduction), young men did not agree to follow through with the interviews. For example, during an initial meeting, one young Middle Eastern man told the researcher that his friend jokingly told him to “go back to the hellhole he came from.”4 When the researcher contacted him to set a date for an interview, he refused to speak with her and denied the narration of his friend’s insult. In this follow-up, he mentioned he “had never had any bullying experience with anyone in Canada at all.”5 After receiving rejections

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from a few potential male participants and conducting a few short interviews with a few male participants, the researcher concluded that women are more open to speaking about their experiences with racism, lack of belonging, and unhomeliness. Minority men, on the other hand, usually attempt to downplay the sense of rejection by the dominant culture.6 Of the few young men who followed through with the interviews, only two spoke with me for the interview’s entire expected length. The other male participants answered the interview questions with short answers, which depicted these interviewees favorably. In some cases, the participants’ idealistic responses were shocking because they contradicted themselves several times in the interviews’ short duration. At this point, as an interviewer and a researcher, I could not use the collected interview since I knew it was deceitful. For example, in one case, during his initial screening and off the record, a participant spoke about the physical and psychological hardship and abuse he experienced when he arrived in Canada. This participant described how his peers shunned him in high school. However, when we met for the interview, the same participant began describing himself as likeable and popular during his high school years, having never experienced a sense of oppression, aggression, or isolation. There are a few possible reasons for these young men’s altering the accounts of their experiences and their sudden withdrawal from participating in this research. Getting involved in this interview would threaten these young men’s sense of masculinity or reassure their sense of unhomeliness in their new host country. While I will explain these hypotheses in the next section, I will further examine these theories in my future research. NOTES 1. Whitehead, 2005. 2. Khayambashi, 2022. 3. Ibid. 4. Participant 0, in discussion with author, initial invitation, December 5, 2018. 5. Participant 0, in discussion with author, follow up, December 20, 2018. 6. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019.

Acknowledgments

I am in debt to Dr. Shirin Khayambashi for writing this book. I could not finish writing this book without her continuous support. She has been my sister, my editor, my confidant, my counselor, my therapist, and above all, my friend. Thank you so much, Shirin! I want to thank Mom and Dad, Mina Gandomani and Rahmat Khayambashi. I appreciate and value the hardship you experienced through the process of migration. You always said that “you did it all just for us.” Thank you, Dr. Shahbaz Khayambashi, for all your help! You came through whenever I needed you. Finally, I thank Courtney Morales and Emma Ebert, my former and current editors. Their encouragement and can-do attitude made this book possible.

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Introduction

Migration is an individual’s geographic, social, economic, and cultural displacement. This geographic movement complicates the relationship dynamic of the migrating parents and their children. This complicated relationship begins well before migration. The migrating families tend not to consult the youth members during the decision-making process of migration, the time of departure, or even the country of destination. Children and youths are the silent and nonvoting partners of the migration process regardless of its nature, whether spontaneous, forced, or premeditated.1 In most cases, the migrating parents do not consult their children about their migration status because the migrating parents are uncertain about these legal conundrums themselves. All of these contribute to the tension between migrating children and their parents.2 In many cases, while children and youths have no choice in migration, they become scapegoats for their parents’ lack of recognition in the new host nation. These children suffer due to their parents’ frustration and humiliation in their countries of settlement.3 In some cases, the new immigrant parents who encounter the hierarchy of power in their new host countries project their anger and anxiety onto their children. Ethnic minority youths and children experience increased domestic maltreatment post-migration due to the pressure of migration that the parents experience.4 The new immigrant children in puberty are doomed to deal with their hormone-driven state of living alone while their parents deal with their own challenges in the new county.5 While these young bodies experience hormonal development, they must adapt to their new lifestyle, which is replete with poverty, parental neglect, and social responsibilities.6 These young individuals suddenly face a reduced family-budgeted lifestyle since the host country (country of settlement) does not recognize their parents’ foreign credentials, skills, and experiences. Immigrant youths suddenly lose their privilege of private space and must share bedrooms with their siblings. These young immigrants must babysit and tutor younger siblings, share clothes with their older siblings, and learn to become self-reliant.7

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Introduction

The overwhelming hardships and responsibilities make migration harsher for immigrant youths than their adult counterparts. These young bodies lack the life experience to understand the new difficulties. Simultaneously, immigrant parents do not communicate important familial and financial issues with these young individuals. Immigrant children become outcasts in family discussions and decision-making after the migration.8 The lack of involvement in the family discussion creates a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness among this population.9 MINORITY INDIVIDUALS IN CANADA Canadian visible minorities are Canadian indigenous, immigrants, and citizens whose ancestors are unrelated to British or French (or other Western European) backgrounds.10 The individuals who have migrated—or their parents have migrated—from the global South and East are considered minorities in the global North. Being a member of a minority culture has its own intersectionality and hierarchies, depending on the bio-phyco-socioeconomic and political position of the minority individuals. The sphere of “us versus them” posits Canadian immigrants from the global South and East, among the Others; these minority immigrants remain outsiders, compared to the Western inner groups.11 Although the mainstream culture downplays and denies racial inequality in Western social settings,12 visible minorities experience racism and social injustice in every aspect of their lives.13 The visible minority Canadians, especially immigrants, encounter social, economic, academic, and racial injustice in Canada.14 Ethnic and racial minority immigrant youths from the global South and East have lower expectations for their future than their European-origin counterparts due to experiencing the multifaceted unhealthy environment and a lower sense of “personal power.”15 Minority immigrants’ socioeconomic shortcomings, political devaluation, cultural differences, linguistic barriers, and expectations for assimilation and acculturation contribute to this attenuated sense of personal power.16 Visible minorities’ poor access to secure housing, nutritious food, and job opportunities are among Canada’s most visible examples of these shortcomings. The inaccessible resources negatively affect minority immigrant youths’ physical, mental, and social well-being.17 The migrationrelated poverty and its outcomes are more common among first- and secondgeneration visible minority immigrants than their first-generation immigrant counterparts from non-visible minority groups.18

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MIGRATION Migration is a daunting and challenging process, which begins in the home nation and continues even after the traveling ends. During the initial stages of the migration, Canadian immigration officials assess the potential migrants’ applications based on a series of qualifications and characteristics—known as the point system—and rank these candidates accordingly.19 The applicants whose points place them in the higher levels of this ranking system will receive official documentation and permission to migrate to Canada. This lengthy and precise examination of the migrating applicants’ credentials falsely conveys the individuals’ impressions that their education and expertise are recognized in Canada.20 While preaching multiculturalism, Canada practices racial inequality and internalized racism toward immigrants of non-European backgrounds. The pervasive disparity is still a valid concern in ethnic minorities’ everyday experiences.21 A young Middle Eastern-origin woman discussed her prolonged battle with her former high school authority when they attempted to label the month of February as Multicultural Month instead of Black History Month.22 This high school argued that they did not want to “leave out any cultures.”23 Yet, this school took over Black History Month, a symbolic recognition of the anti-slavery movement.24 This month has signified the struggle of undocumented and illegalized individuals.25 Further, Canada must celebrate multiculturalism daily if it is a multicultural nation. It should be the country’s mindset. The concept of bilingualism in Canada is a loud and clear example of hypocrisy. As Eve Haque26 mentions, when Prime Minister Trudeau labeled Canada in 1971 as a multicultural nation “within a bilingual framework,” it reinforced two classes of citizens: the Anglo-Francophone and the other ethnic languages. The dominant culture treats others who speak English with an accent as inferior or people with disabilities. A young second-generation Middle Eastern-origin woman described how her high school personnel raised their voices while talking to her parents, who were first-generation immigrants with an Arabic accent.27 She jokingly mentioned how she always wanted to tell them her parents were bad at English and not hearing.28 A young African-origin woman described how she taught herself to speak English fluently in the school library since her peers did not tolerate her “bad” English.29 Upon their migration, the highly skilled and educated new immigrants experience a “process of deskilling,” which disqualifies them from being employable in the professions they have extensive education and experience.30 Refugees face even harsher and bleaker lives in Canada than their immigrant counterparts.31 Canada has advertised itself as a multicultural nation, and with the growth of transnational migration, foreign scholars have

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Introduction

chosen Canada as their destination country. Since the 1971 enactment of the multiculturalism policy, Canada has become known for its stand on creating “cultural communities” and promoting cohabitating, “intercultural” relationships among these communities with the least amount of hostility.32 However, Canada dismisses minority immigrants’ credentials and assigns low-paying stereotypical “survival jobs” and occupations to these new immigrants.33 Consequently, the highly accomplished new immigrants from the global South and East, stripped of their foreign qualifications, are forced to take more than one unskilled job to secure their livelihood in the hegemonic White culture.34 Meanwhile, the host country expects the new immigrants to master the country’s dominant language, and recent immigrants strive for available leisure time to meet this expectation. The long hours of low-paying labor reduce these individuals’ free time, during which these new immigrants would improve their proficiency in the dominant language. The lack of competence and fluency in language skills prohibits minority immigrants from improving their career prospects and consequently ghettoizes these individuals with low living standards.35 The lack of mastery of English in Anglophone provinces of Canada has left foreign-accredited doctors to act as cab drivers and high school teachers as custodians.36 The new immigrant parents’ experience with long hours of non-specialized labor as the only available source of income directly affects their children physically, mentally, and emotionally.37 The long hours of unskilled labor deprive the immigrant children of their parents’ supervision and attention at the crucial stages of their lives.38 Extended research demonstrates that active parental involvement and relationships with their children’s schools positively affects their children’s academic success based on parental support and the school authorities’ raised expectations.39 Immigrant children and youths whose parents cannot maintain these academic involvements stand in a less favorable situation.40 IMMIGRANT CHILDREN’S MASTERY OF THE LANGUAGE The new immigrant parents face difficulties mastering the host country’s language due to insufficient time and resources post-migration. The immigrant parent’s lack of fluency in the host country’s dominant language affects their children in a multidirectional and intersectional manner. The children of immigrant parents suddenly find themselves in an unpaid position as linguistic and cultural translators between their parents and the dominant Western society around them. This unpaid labor of love becomes an extra burden for these young immigrants suffering from systematic racism. Due to their

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parents’ English—or French—deficiency, the new immigrant youths find themselves responsible and in a parental position for themselves and their siblings—parent-school relations included.41 This newly assumed parental responsibility affects these new immigrant youths’ growth and productivity. Moreover, compared to their parents’ slower progress, the quick pace of language acquisition skills of children and youths exacerbates an already symbolic separation between the parents and children.42 The altered parental relationship and the deteriorated family connectedness would negatively affect the children and youths’ trust and confidence in their parents. Consequently, this lack of confidence in parents deleteriously impacts the child’s emotional and psychological well-being.43 In some cases, the minority immigrant parents’ insufficiency in speaking English affects their children directly. The school authorities, such as teachers, reprimand the young immigrant individuals due to their parents’ lack of fluency in English.44 The school authorities force these minority youths into ESL classes, treat them unethically, and direct them toward general courses—all these would limit these individuals’ future success.45 These treatments directly correlate with these young individuals’ future success and career choices. UNPAID LABOR OF IMMIGRANT CHILDREN As mentioned above, the dominant culture’s language proficiency usually alters intergenerational family roles. For example, usually in new immigrant families, the children learn to speak the dominant language of the host nation faster than their parents due to multidirectional socioeconomical factors. The children’s language proficiency transforms these individuals into the “designated translators,” “paraphrasers,” “culture brokers,” and health advisers for their immediate, and in some cases, secondary family members.46 These children and youths become nonconsenting and non-paying laborers who function as their parents’ ears and mouths in mundane interactions with the outside world. The children who take the translators’ role lose their secured pre-migration position as the family’s protected dependents.47 The migration alters these children’s lifestyle and childhood quality.48 Taking the role of the translator allows these children to access their parents’ most private and personal accounts. The immigrant children’s inclusive access to their parents’ most confidential information alters their relationship with their parents and confuses their familial boundaries.49 The unpaid labor of love has a long-term economic effect on immigrant children’s lives. The youths from the dominant culture invest their leisure time into their routine school projects and after-school part-time jobs. Part-time

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Introduction

jobs have few immediate and long-term positive outcomes for these youths, such as building networks, financial stability in adulthood, and attaining skills and references.50 While having a part-time job would benefit a young adult in accomplishing academic and social goals, immigrant children get exhausted and overworked without getting paid or recognized for their labor.51 ACCULTURATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Every country of settlement expects its new immigrants to undergo a degree of acculturation. Acculturation happens when individuals have immediate contact with an unfamiliar culture that differs from theirs.52 The host country subjects the immigrant individuals to sociocultural pressures to accept the host country’s cultural norms upon their arrival.53 Immigrants adopt the new host country’s culture through acculturation by altering their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs.54 Refusing these cultural norms would lead to serious social consequences for the new immigrants, such as ostracization, isolation, and ridicule.55 The social setting, social media, and mass media punish the individuals who resist the behavior-altering process of acculturation. These social and cultural settings stigmatize these individuals as unfitting. Rejection of acculturation would label these individuals as those who do not belong to the nation and are fresh off the boat (FOB).56 The labels remind minority immigrant youths that their newcomer status is unchanging, regardless of how long they reside in Canada. Many immigrant youths struggle to fit in the new culture; these individuals try effortlessly, so the dominant culture spares them from the demeaning label of FOB. This fast-paced acculturation process does not allow immigrants—especially immigrant youths—to develop a hybrid identity or an integrated self. Stuart Hall57 justifiably explains, “cultural identity is not fixed; it is always hybrid.” Therefore, post-migration, a migrating person must be able to adapt to the new culture and form a hybrid cultural identity. However, world citizens need time, space, and choice to develop their hybrid identities, and immigrant youths do not receive these privileges.58 The Western mindset observes acculturation as a fast and inevitable process for every immigrant youth. The new immigrants, especially the immigrant children and youths, must quickly develop their acculturated identity under severe external and internal pressures.59 Therefore, acculturation and cultural adjustment processes are not as organic as the Western mindset narrates. These are challenging strategies for many first-generation immigrant youths.60 Acculturation would lead to negative emotional and psychological consequences for those experiencing it. For example, “acculturation stress” is an expected outcome of this process that negatively affects the new immigrants’

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psychological, emotional, and physical well-being.61 The new immigrants usually experience depression and extreme despair soon after their migration, which are perfect examples of acculturation stress. These psychological and emotional hardships and illnesses might be reported or unreported. Some of these psychological consequences persist in the new immigrants for ten years or longer after migrating.62 In addition to acculturation, immigrant youths from the global South and East, whose original cultures differ from the Western culture, face the experience of aggression in high school, as they routinely get stigmatized and isolated.63 The hostility these individuals tolerate ranges from physical assault and sexual harassment to shunning and false accusation. These young individuals learn they cannot trust their peers or authorities during high school. The young immigrants realize that, despite what the media and popular culture advertise, high school is not a fun haven to remember for many youths. Significantly, the immigrant youths dread high school and remember the terror they experienced there for years to come. Minority immigrant youths usually experience long-lasting consequences from violent days in high school.64 JOINING THE ENCLAVE Ethnic minority communities create ethnic enclaves in response to systematic racism in Western countries.65 Ethnic enclaves are the limited and secluded areas of the cities where specific ethnic minorities live and trade with each other.66 The new host country’s systematic racism reminds the immigrant youths of their difference from the dominant culture. The Western world deprives minority immigrant youths of gradually integrating into a supportive environment. Simultaneously, White culture inferiorizes, infantilizes, and fetishizes the young and displaced bodies.67 The global South and East youths become subjected to undesirable stereotypes.68 The host country’s dominant culture negatively labels the young immigrant bodies based on their stereotypical characteristics, such as their country of origin’s stereotypical undesirability. It evaluates them as unwelcome immigrants.69 These negative labels would become an additional burden on an already challenging life in a new nation. Consequently, obstacles arise for the minority immigrants who take refuge in their diasporic communities and seek support from their ethnic group. The dominant culture subjects minority immigrant individuals to diverse forms of aggression, including labeling, “ethnic profiling,” and rejecting them, while they refuse to be inclusive or accommodate their diasporic communities.70 In a few cases, the first-generation immigrant youths’ strong desire to belong to their diasporic communities drive these vulnerable individuals

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Introduction

into culturally rooted adverse lifestyles and practices.71 This population’s need for belonging transforms them into willing participants to get involved in “peer-based” gang-related and criminal activities.72 Instantaneously, these “bad” immigrants become the dominant representations of young immigrants for the Western media as foreigners who refuse to abide by “Canadian values.”73 These few young stray immigrants become the scapegoat for the Canadian justice system to consider every minority immigrant involved in a judicial matter guilty unless proven otherwise. This book is an overview of the lives of minority immigrant youths in Canada since it closely examines the experiences of twenty-six first- and second-generation minority immigrant young women and one man from the global South and East. This book provides a critical lens on the lives of these individuals and how they negotiated their everyday interactions with others from minorities and the majority culture. There has been a void for the voices of young minority immigrant youths to narrate their experiences of how the host nation treated these individuals, their characteristics, and their cultures. This book aims to fill the gap regarding these silenced Canadian populations’ experiences. CONCLUSION The transitional state of the migration, coupled with the age-related bio-psycho-social transition of childhood to adulthood, creates a double adjustment for immigrant youths.74 The acculturation assigns minority immigrant youths a new identity and culture besides their familiar ones. Quick acceptance of new identities makes these young individuals strangers to themselves.75 Nevertheless, these immigrant youths endure a continuous internal struggle to acculturate to be accepted by the host nation. These young minority bodies migrate to Canada as dependent on their immigrant parents.76 However, since the children master the country’s dominant language faster than their parents, the dependency shifts, and their parents become dependent on them. This linguistic accomplishment would put these young immigrants in unpaid, multifaceted translator roles for their parents and other family members. Minority immigrant youths experience internal acculturation pressure while struggling with external sociocultural obstacles, such as racism, ostracization, loneliness, and culture shock. These repressions force immigrant children to seek support from their ethnic enclaves.77 Finding refuge in their ethnic enclaves challenges the minority immigrants in the host country. This book problematizes the label of the outsider that minority immigrant children assume throughout their lives in their new host

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countries.78 This chapter questions Canadian multicultural allegations while first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths suffer from isolation, segregation, poverty, cultural racism, and unhomeliness. Further, this book analyzes the topic of aggression among and against immigrant children in Canada at micro, mezzo, and macro levels. AN OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS Each chapter of this book observes one of the multidirectional issues that minority immigrant youths encounter. However, the main themes in this book are the issue of minority immigrant youths, their state of unhomeliness in Canada, and the Canadian multicultural fallacy. The first chapter of this book focuses on the core topics surrounding migration and related issues, such as migration, ethnic minorities, a state of unhomeliness, symbolic ethnicity, and ethnic hierarchy. This chapter familiarizes the reader with the migration experience of immigrants from the global East and South. The second and third chapters relay the hardships and the trauma that minority immigrant youths, specifically young women, experience in Canadian educational institutions. These chapters examine the inter- and intra-violence among minority immigrant youths. They cover the diversity of experiences with violence, including racially motivated acts of aggression committed by most student bodies, school personnel, counselors, and administration. The experience with violence is further accentuated by how immigrant parents address the stressful high school lives of minority immigrant youths. Chapter 4 explores Canada’s systematic and cultural racism and how it affects immigrant youths. This chapter attends to the young first- and second-generation immigrants’ accounts of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, harassment, and isolation. Here, the first- and second-generation immigrant youths—especially women—from the global South and East discuss their encounters with systematic and societal abuse due to their physical, cultural, and religious characteristics in Canada. Chapter 5 of this book explores the gendered experiences of first- and second-generation young immigrant women. This chapter observes how Western culture constantly objectifies these young women’s bodies, minds, and cultures under the labels of liberation, beauty, or civilization. This chapter briefly explores cyberaggression among minority immigrant youths, especially cyber-sexual aggression against minority immigrant women, which is gravely unreported/underreported due to cultural standards and honors.79 The final chapter of this book, which acts as the concluding chapter, highlights each chapter’s significance while giving a sense of cohesion to the book at hand. This chapter revisits the discussion of the second chapter focusing on the affairs of first- and second-generation

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minority immigrant youths in Canada. This chapter critically reflects on the challenges of migration for first- and second-generation immigrant youths in Canada and the taken-for-granted multicultural policies. The chapter provides the readers with an overview of the book’s main topics, such as multicultural policies in Canada, to instigate discussion about the gap between the theory and practice of the young immigrant experiences. NOTES 1. Reed, Fazel, Jones, Panter-Brick and Stein, 2012; Clauss-Ehlers, Akinsulure-Smith, 2013. 2. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 3. Dreby, 2012. 4. Dettlaff, Earner, & Phillips, 2009. 5. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 6. Yun, Fuentes-Afflick, and Desai, 2012. 7. Isik-Ercan, Demir-Dagdas, Cakmakci, Cava-Tadik, and Intepe-Tingir, 2017; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 8. McBrien, 2011. 9. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 10. Ogmundson and Doyle, 2002. 11. Kazemipur, 2014, 21. 12. Bonilla-Silva, 2006. 13. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 14. Livingstone and Weinfeld, 2018. 15. McBrien, 2011, 86. 16. Ibid; Berry, 2006. 17. Hilario, Vo, Johnson and Saewyc, 2014. 18. Bragg and Wong, 2016. 19. Chemin and Sayour, 2016. 20. Walsh, Brigham & Wang, 2011 21. Winter, 2014; Pyke, 2010; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 22. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 23. Ibid. 24. King, 2019. 25. King, 2019. 26. Haque, 2014, 121.

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27. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 28. Ibid. 29. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 30. Walsh, Brigham, and Wang, 2011, 662. 31. Atak, Hudson, and Nakache, 2018. 32. Berry, 2013, 663. 33. Foster, 2009, 135. 34. Foster, 2009. 35. Man, 2004. 36. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 37. Stefanek, Strohmeier, Fandrem, and Spiel, 2012. 38. Ibid. 39. McBrien, 2011; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 40. McBrien, 2011. 41. Orellana, Dorner, and Pulido, 2003. 42. Kuo and Roysircar, 2004; Suárez‐Orozco and Qin, 2006; Field observation/ personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 43. Hilario, Vo, Johnson, and Saewyc, 2014. 44. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 45. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 46. Orellana, 2009, 54; Orellana, Dorner, and Pulido, 2003, 507; Field observation/ personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 47. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 48. Orellana, 2009. 49. Orellana, Dorner, and Pulido, 2003. 50. Kaida, 2013. 51. Orellana, 2009; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 52. Kuo and Roysircar, 2004. 53. Rhee, 2019. 54. Manuela and Anae, 2017; Kukaswadia et al., 2016. 55. Booth, Huerta, and Thomas, 2021. 56. Helvie, 2011; Participant 4 in discussion with the author June 19, 2019, and Participant 10 in discussion with the author November 1, 2018. 57. Hall, 1996, 504. 58. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 59. Arora, Inose, Yeh, Okubo, Li, and Greene, 2003. 60. Deng, 2016. 61. Ibid; Kuo and Roysircar, 2004, 144.

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62. Gupta, Leong, and Valentine, 2013; Hilario, Vo Johnson, and Saewyc, 2014; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 63. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 64. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 65. Kim, 2020. 66. Hersi, Willing, Woodward, and Skrbiš, 2020; Participants 5, 22, 26, and 27 in discussion with the author, January 14 and 28, April 29 and August 21, 2019. 67. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 68. Al-Natour, 2017. 69. Cabaniss and Cameron, 2017. 70. Berry et al., 2010, 323; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 71. Bucerius and Tonry, 2014. 72. Ibid, 511; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 73. Chan, 2013, 9. 74. Lesko and Talburt, 2012. 75. Ibid. 76. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 77. Bakali, 2016. 78. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 79. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019.

Chapter One

Immigration Youths Living with Aggression, Isolation, and Unhomeliness

They always say, “It’s not personal. It’s about your color.” So, I tell them, “I don’t personally hate you. I hate institutions you created.” And they get mad. You have to remember that people have experienced intergenerational trauma. I mean, my mom, my grandma, and my great, great, great grandparents all have the same thing to share about White people.1

Similar to other adolescents, minority immigrant youths encounter societal discrimination due to their age, but they are also affected by other discriminatory factors in relation to their migration and racial minority status. Based on the series of one-on-one interviews, this chapter demonstrates the unhomeliness and isolation that first- and second-generation young immigrants experience in Canada. Families, peers, teachers, and school authorities neglected, tormented, and abused these young individuals, yet responsibilities beyond their abilities overburdened them. Some of these young immigrants confronted serious consequences, such as addiction, overdose, and periodic homelessness—however, almost all experienced covert repercussions, such as long-term trauma and mental health disorders. This chapter questions Canada’s widely advertised notion of multiculturalism. Through the promise of multiculturalism, Canada attracts minority immigrants searching for a host country where they can settle and call home. However, new minority immigrants learn that the multiculturalism of Canada is neither accurate nor possible. The new immigrants from the global South and East and their future generations encounter the democratic racism of their host country in silence. This chapter explores the immigrant youth’s experience with democratic racism while they deal with their social positionality 13

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within their family and the broader society. Democratic racism holds two conflicting political standards simultaneously. One political standard is liberal and in support of minorities, immigrants, and people of color. The second standard negates liberal beliefs and stands for conservative ideas regarding the same matters.2 This chapter studies the experience of young minority immigrants with isolation, racialization, and antagonization. Minority immigrant youths are trapped in a never-ending state of unhomeliness, where they have no sense of belonging to their home or host country.3 This chapter elaborates on the issue of the mother tongue versus the dominant language of the host nation. It discusses the topic of accent for minority immigrants and how accent affects these individuals’ everyday lives. Further, this chapter problematizes the role of media in normalizing racism against minority immigrants under the guise of joking remarks. This chapter questions the effects of the negative stereotypical portrayal of the othered immigrants in the West. Many immigrant youths do not have the vocabulary to express the gravity and authentic picture of their experiences in their new host country.4 These young individuals do not consider bullying a suitable terminology for their experiences5; therefore, this chapter introduces the concept of xeno-bullying as an alternative term to bullying. Dan Olweus, the “father of bullying research,” began this field of study by exploring the experience of White young males in a White European population. Therefore, xeno-bullying can fulfill the shortcomings of bullying concerning minority immigrants. JUVENILE, MINORITY YOUTHS, AND MIGRATION Adolescence is a transforming stage between childhood and adulthood since the youths are neither children nor adults.6 The youths are constrained to a period of life filled with emotional uncertainty, social powerlessness, and physical transformation. At the same time, this young population must deal with the stigma of othering that their surrounding society attaches to them. The justice system and the public have reserved both the labels of innocent and threatening for young adults and apply the labels interchangeably for self-serving reasons.7 Similarly, society views youths as docile bodies needing observation and supervision while at the same time treating youths as “dangerous others” who require constant surveillance and immediate discipline.8 Society has assigned the education system to scrutinize the youths’ activities within and beyond school hours to maintain surveillance.9 Additionally, media, especially mass media, validate and legitimize the societal and judicial view of youths by portraying young individuals as hostile and antagonistic to others.10

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Minority Immigrant Youths Ethnic and racial minority youths experience the sense of othering that every youth experiences more intensely due to their minority status.11 The already complicated transition between childhood and adulthood becomes even more convoluted for immigrant youths since the state of migration is a transitional state itself. Moreover, the members of their communities, their parents included, and the members of their new host nation alienate minority immigrant youths. The process of alienation for first-generation immigrant children starts before they even enter their new host countries. On the other hand, second-generation minority immigrant youths whose parents migrated from the global East and South automatically inherit their parents’ immigrant status. While some of these young individuals have never lived in their ancestral countries and never learned how to speak their parents’ language, they become affected by their parents’ minority accent, appearance, status, and social hierarchy of power.12 The prospective immigrant youths involuntarily enter a lengthy and demanding migration process as dependents on their migrating parents and families. However, these young individuals in this significant, life-changing event are silenced and ignored.13 Many young minority immigrant women narrated that their parents neither consulted them nor informed them about the critical decision of their future lives.14 The lack of consulting the children was not solely the parents’ fault since some of these parents were unaware of their fate themselves. Many immigrant families did not have enough time to prepare their children emotionally and psychologically before departing from their home country. Some immigrant youths still carry the trauma of unexpectedly leaving their loved ones behind.15 A young woman whose family refuged to Turkey from Syria before migrating to Canada spent years with her grandmother in Turkey. Turkey’s government withdrew their plea for a humanitarian third-country refugee application because her family could not find a secure job.16 At the last second, before Turkey could deport her family back to Syria, Canada accepted their refugee status and relocated them to Canada immediately. While these constant conundrums were overbearing for an adult, these events would create long-lasting childhood trauma. Not only this young child had to deal with the traumatic events of a political migration, but also, she would have carried the emotional burden of sudden goodbyes to her loved ones, such as her grandmother and playmates.17 She must once more break down the communication bridge in yet another country, migrate to a third country, and start over. The analysis does not condemn immigrant parents, labeling them as abusive toward their children for limiting the sources of their communication. Many immigrant parents do not willingly deprive their children of participating

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actively in migration decision-making. The immigrant youths are the victims of the intersectionality of systematic flaws, including migratory, economic, sociological, linguistic, familial, and status quo, without consenting to be involved. The migration procedure to Canada is lengthy and based on the competitive Canadian point system, which attempts to select the most skilled and educated immigrants.18 The politics behind the point system is among the main reasons that hinder the application process and the migration from the global East and South. The applicants wait months or even years before receiving their migration permits based on this system. During this period, the anticipating families continue with their mundane lives. Upon the arrival of the migration permission, the family must move immediately, and the children are, once again, their dependents. At this point, parents disconnect their children and youths from their current and forming social and cultural roots and relocate them to a culturally and socially different setting.19 Neither the parents nor the immigration system considers the biopsychosocial growth of immigrant children and youths, which abruptly stops and restarts. A Western Asian-origin woman described how migration to Canada affected her educational success, her emotional well-being, and her socialization. She spoke about her life and success pre-migration as a lost desire.20 She described how close she was to her friends because her neighborhood was friendly. She immediately compared her home and the host country’s neighborhoods and complained about the “coldness” of Western people.21 The immigrant youths reach for a sense of nostalgia. They crave to be liked by people. They blame the dominant culture’s callousness toward them on their undesirability. For instance, an Indian-origin young woman described her experience as an immigrant as being “very unwanted.”22 Before their migration, these children and youths began socializing with other culturally and linguistically compatible children and youths. However, they are uprooted and dislocated after migration into an unfamiliar and incompatible environment.23 Society and parents expect the migrating children to continue their social growth and progress without lapse upon arriving in the settling country. Despite the parents’ expectations, the newly migrated youths usually have difficulties adopting the new culture and lifestyle. The sudden separation from families and friends usually significantly affects children’s and youths’ development. Some young individuals might never recuperate from their halted socialization.24 Consequently, foreign-born youths face a higher chance of failing academically, and some terminate their education before finishing high school.25 The dominant culture of the host country excludes the newly migrated youths, whose homogeneous countries of origin recognized them before migration. The dominant culture considers these new immigrants undesirables, usually based on one or more personal traits such as race, social class,

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or ethnicity.26 A young woman who migrated from Cameroon narrated her first memories of Canada tearfully years after her migration. She described how her peers ridiculed her and her siblings for their accents and clothing style because “they were different.”27 Another young Black woman described her confusion about receiving a derogatory label in her first year of school in Canada. While she was a second-generation immigrant, this young woman’s mother came from a majority-Black populated community.28 She and her sister rode a school bus, where another student called them the N-word repeatedly. She, who had never heard this derogatory term, memorized the word to ask her uncle about the meaning of it. She remembered the excitement she felt when asking her uncle about the new word, but to her shock, she did not get an answer to her question. Instead, her uncle interrogated her about where she heard the word and punished her about why she was saying such a phrase.29 Eventually, this young child realized the term was “wrong” when she saw how sad her mother became after hearing the word.30 In some cases, the dominant culture’s rejection of the youths forces the parents to intervene and save their children. Some immigrant parents retreat to the enclaved areas occupied by immigrants from similar cultural backgrounds.31 Common among Eastern and Middle Eastern immigrant parents, this practice protects these parents and their children from the mainstream’s lack of acceptability and discrimination.32 In other cases, the immigrant parents relocate their parents (their children’s grandparents) to Canada to take care of their children away from their dominant culture peer group to create a supportive environment for them at home.33 These immigrant parents take these extra precautions to momentarily secure themselves and their children from the new host countries’ unpleasant integration process. However, these protective steps hinder immigrant children and youths from getting familiarized with the new host country’s culture.34 The immigrant youths need a safe space between sudden acculturation and complete separation from the host country’s culture. These young immigrants need a place to form their hybrid identity.35 An African-origin young woman explained that the new immigrant youth need a space to decide which aspects of the new culture she would like to adapt to and to what degree. This young woman, who has lived most of her life in Canada, mentioned that “the Western culture cannot expect you to stay within that constraint because immigrants come here from different atmospheres. . . . Sometimes, we want not to fit in but adapt to new life. And that is ok.”36

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LINGUISTIC DISSONANCE FOR THE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN The young immigrants dwell in an unstable and uprooted space between the two cultures’ linguistic properties. The first language is their mother tongue, which is the language of their country of origin. These young immigrants of any generation usually learn and practice it at home and with their families. The second language is the language of the country where they migrated to or were born in it. Many young immigrants learn and speak this second language after they start schooling for the first time—mainly first- and second-generation immigrants.37 Once again, the immigrant youth have no space to explore and find their hybrid voice and find themselves in a linguistic confusion between their home and school languages. While these new immigrants’ schools and parents force them to become proficient in the host country’s dominant language, their families expect them to maintain fluency in their mother tongue, as well. Simultaneously, the family and the school system choose punishment to control the immigrant youths’ linguistic properties.38 However, neither the parents nor the school acknowledges these youths’ fragile state of identity formation as new immigrants with linguistic roles in this identity formation. While the immigrant youths’ parents expect them to succeed academically in Canada, for which they need to improve their English, their parents would discipline them for speaking English at home.39 The young first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths in Canada share their experiences about how their parents forced them to use their mother tongues with their siblings since their parents feared they would forget their cultural language.40 For example, a young woman whose mother tongue was Arabic described how if she said a word in English in the middle of a sentence while speaking with her family, her parent forced her to reiterate everything back in Arabic from the beginning. This young woman called this a “constant struggle” since she came to Canada as a young girl.41 Her parents were worried that she would forget Arabic if they were not strict with the “in-home” language. Similarly, immigrant youths constantly fear punishment if they deviate from the social setting and use inappropriate language. At the same time, these bilingual (sometimes multilingual) minority young women faced persecution and humiliation if the school personnel and their peers caught them speaking in their mother tongues at school. The school regulations reprimanded speaking languages except for English or French since these two languages were Canada’s official languages.42 When other students and school authorities caught young minority students speaking their native languages,

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they reminded them that talking in a language other than the official Canadian language was unacceptable. In one instance, a classmate from the dominant culture scolded a young Middle Eastern-origin woman when she spoke with her friends in her mother tongue during school hours. The European-origin peer lectured that they must speak in a language that she could understand their conversation. She told them the languages that she did not understand were “not acceptable” at school.43 Code Switching The immigrant children and youths become the masters of code-switching between their mother tongue and their host county’s language without hesitation.44 Code-switching is to shift between the words of two languages in the same discourse simultaneously. These children learn to switch from the host country’s language to communicate with their friends and younger siblings to their mother tongues to communicate with their parents, grandparents, older siblings, and diasporic relatives instantly. One Indian-origin young woman demonstrated how she spoke English with everyone except her parents and grandparents. They demanded that she talk Punjabi with them, and “that was just fine.”45 Another Arabic-origin woman spoke English with her best friend, with whom she spent most of her time; however, she communicated in Arabic with her family and older siblings. In her case, her older brother was strict in an “Arabic-only” home, even though he was only a few years older than her.46 She recounted how her brother held on to his home county’s culture and language and “resisted” the new one.47 Contrary to the systematic shortcomings, children and youths tend to acculturate and adapt to the host country’s culture faster than their parents. The children’s acculturation and fluency in the host country’s dominant language, compared to their parents’ lack of accessibility to the dominant language, separate the immigrant children and their parents verbally, emotionally, psychologically, and ultimately, spatially. This separation creates a hierarchical shift in the relationship between immigrant children and their parents. For example, while fluency in English assumes a series of responsibilities on immigrant children and youths in Canada, such as being their parents’ translators and social communicators, these responsibilities place the children in a conflicting position within their families, as the child and the guardian simultaneously.48

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THE UNDESIRABILITY OF THE ACCENT IN THE HOST NATION The accent is another social factor that affects young minority immigrants negatively. Immigrants from the global South and East expressed how the dominant culture imposed a sense of otherness early in their lives.49 The feeling of otherness could be affected by their or their parents’ accents. The majority culture disregards and humiliates first- and second-generation immigrants from the global South and East as a direct consequence of these accents. These young individuals learn to speak with hesitation and inarticulacy to hide their “undesirable” accent of the global South and East.50 Many minority youths blame their immigrant parents for their shortcomings and hindrances instead of systematic racism. These young minority individuals delegate the responsibilities to their parents’ linguistic deficiency and accent, which they believe hindered their progress.51 One young Indian-origin woman expressed embarrassment about her parents’ inability to speak English correctly.52 Another Indian-origin woman apologetically explained how she, as a second-generation Canadian, “picked up on [her] parents’ accent, weirdly enough.”53 A young Middle Eastern-origin woman recalled her memories of the parent-teacher meetings. This woman explained how she dreaded how her teachers raised the volume of their voices communicating with her parents, who had thick Arabic accents, compared to the English-speaking parents of other students.54 This display of accommodation to her parents’ language barrier embarrassed her in front of other students. In this scenario, the teachers chose the wrong method of communication to overcome a linguistic barrier; these teachers treated the person with English as their second language as a person with a hearing disability. They tried to repair the problem using the same ineffective remedy for that broken communicative channel. Another young Arab-origin woman recounted her parents-teacher communication experience as a standup comedian. She described how her teachers would speak out loud to her parents as if the teachers thought her parents could not hear them. She further explained that because her parents had an accent, they would accept the humiliation and did not react.55 She separated herself from her parents completely and added while she would not understand it fully, she felt “that was the immigrant experience.”56

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UNHOMELINESS AND STATE OF BELONGING Minority youths will always maintain their immigrant status in their new home countries. In addition to the extended and unconsented responsibilities with which the process of displacement burdens the immigrant children, the dominant culture scrutinizes the new immigrant youths as outsiders. “Where are you really from” is a familiar question for every minority-displaced individual; this phrase is a constant reminder of these immigrants’ state of “unhomeliness.”57 One second-generation, young South Asian-origin woman described her high school as years of enduring abuse by a “White Canadian” male classmate. She further explained, “In Canada, it doesn’t matter if you are born here. People care where your parents are from.”58 This young woman recognized the roots of her victimization in her cultural background. She stopped speaking in her ancestral language to distance herself from what she observed as an obstruction in building her sense of belonging. However, she explained that she felt no sense of belonging to Canadian society.59 To belong to Western society, in this case Canada, the individual must look, sound, smell, and act in a certain way, and immigrants from the global East and South do not fit in these presumed characteristics. As Creese60 states, the particular method for being Canadian is to be “white.” A young African-origin woman described how her parents bought a house in an elite area of Hamilton for their daughters to access high-quality education. Still, her family lacked acceptability in the new neighborhood. She recalled how one of her neighbors told her mother that when their family had just moved into the area that “everyone was mad [because they were the] first Black people moving to the neighborhood.”61 This young woman explained that the neighbors were worried that their Black family would diminish the aesthetic and value of the neighborhood.62 Canada proudly proclaimed that Canadian citizens might have dual citizenship, which means they may keep their “foreign citizenship” while attaining Canadian citizenship.63 However, in many instances, Canada has used dual citizenship against immigrants of color, especially male minority youths. Until recent years, in cases where a minority individual with dual citizenship committed misconduct against Canadian laws, Canada could rescind their Canadian citizenship and deport them to the country of their first citizenship.64 While this chapter does not condone the crime, revoking citizenship from dual citizens—in some cases, second-generation immigrants of color— created the mentality that citizenship is a temporary privilege. Trudeau’s government changed this law in 2017, and all Canadian citizens would be prosecuted and penalized in Canada. However, this law perfectly represents the positionality of minority immigrants in Canada.

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The insecure symbolic location of immigrant youths in Canada allocates an uncertain status to these othered bodies.65 One young, Black, African-origin woman exclaimed, “No matter how many years we lived in Canada, we were never happy.”66She described how people questioned her nationality while living in Windsor and Toronto for most of her life. The dominant culture asked this young woman about her positionality and social status in Canada numerous times since she did not match what a Canadian looked like.67 The hierarchy of desirability and acceptability among the immigrant bodies alters these individuals’ migration experiences, depending on their places of origin and physical characteristics. In Eurocentric Canada, while minority immigrants experience unhappiness, lack of belonging, and unhomeliness, European-origin immigrants—especially those from Western Europe—feel they belong to Canada as native-born Canadians.68 In some cases, these first-generation White European immigrants feel more accepted in Canada than the members of the second, third, or multigeneration minority immigrant populations would ever feel as content or accepted.69 Even some critics scrutinize how concepts such as “illegal” or “undocumented immigrants” are reserved only for people of color and to identify “non-European-origin immigrants.”70 The trauma minority that immigrant youths experience negatively affects their physical and psychological well-being.71 The sense of unhomeliness and projected racism creates anger, frustration, and suffering in the displaced youths, which makes them more susceptible to risky lifestyles.72 One second-generation, Iranian-origin young woman spoke about her struggle with drugs for an extended period. She experimented with various illegal substances, such as MDMA, Cocaine, Oxycontin, and Percocet, and she suffered overdoses from different drugs a few times before quitting them altogether. This young woman stated that the use of drugs was to compensate for her generational lack of belonging in Canada.73 While immigrant youths must deal with their direct lack of belonging and mental health, they become the targets of their relatives’ projected anger due to the same lack of belonging in the host nation. This chapter echoes the voices of the minority immigrant women who recalled their traumas in Canada.74 Young immigrant women spoke about post-migration domestic turmoil, which disturbed peaceful familial relationships. In some cases, these domestic fights happened among all members of immigrant families. For example, an African-origin young woman described how she and her sister’s relationship became chaotic after they migrated to Canada. She explained that they fought with each other because they were under attack from the dominant population of the host country, such as their neighbors and classmates.75 In other cases, the male immigrants, who feel insecure and experience a reduced sense of control, reclaim their agency—they may abuse their female

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household members. A young Western Asian-origin woman, who was the subject of her father’s and brother’s abusive outbursts, blamed their vicious assaults on systematic racism.76 In other words, she explained how these men did not feel they belonged to their host country either, and in their limited sphere of power, projected their anger and frustration upon her. The multidirectional traumas that young women like this young woman experience become long-lasting emotional instability that follows these individuals throughout their adult lives.77 The systematic and domestic oppression and violence against minority immigrant youths and women keep these populations as second-class citizens in Canada. The distorted sense of identity and belonging is another form of mental trauma that minority immigrant youths experience due to the host nation’s stigmatization of their minority status. Irving Goffman78 explores the concept of stigma and how the action of the society surrounding an individual creates social hierarchy and social injustice. To be born and raised as “an immigrant” is a perfect example of this theory. A young Iraqi-origin woman, born in a first-generation immigrant family, was introduced to Canadian culture when she started elementary school.79 She described the word immigrant as “being in a bubble” while speaking about her lack of belonging to her home or host countries.80 This young woman talked about the treatment she received from her classmate after enrolling in school for the first time. She blamed this treatment on the negative connotation that the dominant culture attributed to the immigrants from the Muslim regions. This young woman exclaimed her frustration while reiterating how her classmates told her that her country was unsuitable for living and that she was an “unworthy” person in association with that country.81 THE MEDIA AND THE RETURN TO THE DIASPORIC COMMUNITIES The negative portrayal of immigrants in media has damaging consequences on the general treatment of minority immigrants in their new host countries.82 In addition to the internal and external conflicts that affect the immigrant youths’ quality of life, they become silent observers of their negative representations in media, which portray them as unsophisticated and “distant ‘others.’”83 Minority comedians like Russell Peters got their fame and fortune at their diasporic communities’ expense. These comedians offered the dominant culture a linguistic tool for normalizing their sense of White superiority and expressing their racism: the application of comedy to their benefit. An Indian-origin second-generation woman described her experiences with overt racism under cover of joking remarks. In the following passage, she

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explained, “so [people] stereotyping me, but in a way, it was a joke. So, it was like, ‘aww, you smell different today. What were they cooking at your house.”84 This young woman could not even protest against this racist insult because the media permitted this hurtful behavior disguised as a simple justification: It was just a joke.85 If she denounced these jokes, the dominant culture would shun her as someone who “could not take a joke.”86 An African-origin young woman spoke about her experience while rewatching the romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding a few years after it was initially released.87 Like many other romantic comedies, this movie, plotted on immigrant life, stereotyped and humiliated the diasporic communities to create a box-office-friendly movie. This young woman described how she started crying while rewatching this movie. Her tears were not due to the movie’s sentimental values; she cried because of the traumatic memories the film brought back to life. Romantic comedies and standup comedians find humor in the traumatic experiences of racism against minority immigrants in their Western settlement countries. However, this woman still felt the trauma when she remembered being called the “Goat Girl” in high school over a pretend miscommunication.88 She further explained how a classmate asked about the cultural food she was eating, which contained goat meat. This interaction attained her the label of the Goat Girl. This trauma resurfaced when the protagonist of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Toula) faced a similar vicious remark over food. Similarly, in the movie, Toula told someone she was eating Moussaka, a traditional Greek food. The person thought she was saying, “moose caca.” In response, she asked, “Are you eating moose sh*t?”89 This movie pictured this interaction as a humorous moment at the expense of the awkward minority individuals. Not only did the mean girls not receive punishment for their behavior, but the audience also heard the protagonist’s voice praising the physical beauty of her perpetrators.90 The entire picture disregards the gravity of this traumatic experience and makes a joke out of an insulting experience. The media’s racial attack on minority immigrants does not limit to jokes and comedies. In some cases, media representation of White saviors is as disturbing and harmful for minority immigrants. A young, African-origin man described his frustration about the UNICEF commercials asking for donations and broadcasting African people and children in a stereotypical light.91 These commercials and the media advertisement of White saviors for the hungry Black children are the new waves of the symbolic representation of Western colonization of the global East and South. This young man talked about how his schoolmates labeled him UNICEF as a joke since they believed he resembled the children in the advertisement. One afternoon, one of his classmates called him UNICEF when he played soccer with other students and a few teachers. Other students were shocked that the aggressor used the

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derogatory label in front of the teachers, which led to a collective exclamation of disbelief from the audience. The teachers did not get involved and ignored the harassment; their inaction led to years of name-calling for this young man.92 This young man blamed the media for his years of suffering due to the defamation he experienced at high school. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the Western media’s representation of the Middle Eastern populations as terrorists have become exacerbated. Under the guise of criticism, the playfulness of jokes, or innuendos, the dominant culture distributes racist ideas about Muslim populations or anyone resembling a Muslim person from MENA. The Twin Tower attacks became the plot of movies, TV shows, and other programs that assumed a stereotypical hostile attitude toward Middle Eastern and North African immigrants while representing them as terrorists and dangerous. This representation burdened—and continues to burden—Middle Eastern and North African immigrant youths with great hardships due to their stereotypical characterization of Muslim terrorists.93 A young Middle Eastern-origin woman shared the same last name as one of the suicide bombers in the 9/11 operation. This woman relayed how children in the playground told her that she and her parents were terrorists because they “had the same last name as a terrorist.”94 This Middle Eastern-origin young woman, who was, in fact, Christian, was forced to repeatedly identify her religious background to others to spare herself from receiving the label of terrorist. However, it was difficult for most people to “wrap their head around the fact that [she] was Christian.”95 Years later, when her high school boyfriend introduced her to his family, his grandfather asked her “if [she] had ever learned how to make bombs.” She thought he was joking and responded accordingly. She replied, “Oh yeah, as my car outside has like a couple of bombs inside.” At this point, his bedazzled look told her that he was not kidding in the first place.96 A Persian-origin young woman recalled her interaction with her high school aggressor on a bus full of peers.97 She recalled how this White individual laughingly told others, “Hopefully, **** is not blowing up the bus [today].”98 This profiling comment insinuated her stereotypical Muslim identity as a terrorist. She did nothing to retaliate against such a hateful comment; she “just looked at her.”99 The combination of different minority statuses puts minority youths in a shakier situation to be rejected. A first-generation Muslim African-origin woman spoke about losing her residential privileges in one of the Northern Ontarian universities. This young Black woman explained that she was “kicked out” of her dorm after her White roommates complained about her defiant activities.100 She explained that the real aggressors were her White roommates. The aggressive attacks targeted her Muslim style of prayer but soon turned toward the color of her skin. These roommates forced her to study

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outside her dormitory while she paid for her room. She explained how a quarrel between the three teenagers turned into a race war. The school authorities ignored and overlooked this young Black woman’s complaints regarding her roommates’ aggressive behavior for months. Yet, when she spoke against her roommates’ behavior and insisted on having some rights, the school recognized her as “a dangerous person” who “created a toxic environment for the two girls and their mental health.”101 The university ousted this young woman from her residence while giving her “15 minutes to pack” under the supervision of the residence’s security and the Don.102 In addition to her inequitable and prejudicial treatment, the dormitory Don told her she should not take this case personally. Don told her that the people of that area were unfamiliar with people of color, especially Black people. The Don concluded, off the record, that she should not consider this a personal attack since her roommates “simply” were not comfortable with the color of her skin.103 This young woman received this statement bitterly. She added, “But it’s so hard to tell people how it feels. Because people tell you it’s not personal. It’s just your color. But they don’t know that my color is personal. It’s me.”104 While the Middle Eastern and North African Muslim Black immigrant youths witness negative stereotypes through mass and social media, they reflect these overtly negative stereotypes through the dominant culture’s behavior. The mass media usually offset racial profiling by portraying some decent immigrants, separating them from the terrorists from similar racial backgrounds, and showing their neutral position. However, based on these two representations, the immigrants are either “good” or “bad.”105 Alsultany106 refers to this portrayal as the “simplified complex representation.” This strategy allows the mass media to simplify a sociofanatic-theological issue, a complex intersectional topic, and present it to people as essential geographically bound characteristics of a group of people.107 Unfortunately, this simplified attempt has been successful. Immigrants and refugees from Muslim backgrounds—or individuals with similar characteristics which associate them with “Muslimness”—face more significant racism in Canada.108 Due to the dominant culture’s ignorance and the media’s simplistic representation of good or bad immigrants, the misinformed dominant culture categorizes every Middle Eastern or North African immigrant as Muslim Arab and every Muslim Arab as a terrorist. The overgeneralization allows the dominant culture to classify the diverse populations of immigrants from Eastern, Middle Eastern, and some African backgrounds into one general category and then dichotomize them into the obedient “friends” or the malevolent “enemies.”109 Media representation of the immigrants from the global East and South factualizes the othering and objectification of Eastern and Middle Eastern minority immigrants, especially Muslims. Subsequently, the media act as

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a constant reminder for these young immigrants that they are undesirable. The new immigrant youths pursue the dominant culture’s approval by acquiring tangible and earthly possessions. Consequently, many immigrant children choose programs of study that prepare them for high-earning vocations.110 These individuals seek an equitable life through economic and financial gains, free of discrimination.111 Instead of blaming systematic racism and injustice, the young minority immigrants blame their parents and their poverty for their unequal treatment in their new host countries.112 A young, East African-origin woman blamed the minority youths’ anger and poverty for the aggression against and among the immigrant minority individuals in high schools. This young woman explained that minority youths come from “predominantly poor areas” occupied by immigrants and people with access to no resources.113 This young minority woman believed these socioeconomic issues would be grounds for aggressive behavior in othered minority immigrant youths. Based on her account, socioeconomic pressure would negatively affect the family’s youngsters. Consequently, they would project their anxiety and oppression onto other students through anger and aggression. Since the dominant culture and media exaggerate and over-represent the immigrant youths as vile and unruly individuals, these children and youths internalize the image the media created of them in their psyches.114 The exaggerated image that the press embodies of immigrants becomes a self-image for young immigrants for the rest of their lives. Blaming poverty as the strongest factor for the lack of success in Canada turned the minority youths into consumers of expensive products to show their social status.115 PEER AGGRESSION AMONG CANADIAN IMMIGRANTS Aggression against minority immigrant youths, considering the minorities’ characteristics and the target of the attacks, needs population-specific research. According to Max Weber’s ideal type, the bullying phenomenon and its victimology started based on a perfect kind of research: White culture. To this day, the bullying research, the research’s language, the victims, and the advertisement outreaching out to the victims of this issue are all toward White European characteristics.116 This topic’s visual advertisements portray victims of bullying as individuals with light skin complexion and light hair and eyes who succumbed to the sorrow their bullies brought them.117 Therefore, the concept of bullying is not inclusive, especially since immigrant youths do not experience peer aggression in the same manner as their White counterparts.

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Immigrant children usually do not use the concept of bullying to describe their experiences with peer aggression for three main reasons. First, immigrant youths are different from the ideal type of victims of bullying. Second, the sociocultural differences between immigrant children with the dominant culture alter their experiences with peer aggression. Third, in every case of aggression against ethnic minority immigrant youths, there is an undeniable element of xenophobia.118 The sociocultural view on violence is an important factor that plays a role in changing the minority immigrants’ point of view regarding this matter. For example, while inflicting physical harm to cause pain is considered bullying in White culture, it would be regarded as a display of friendship or affection for the Indian youths.119 Young immigrants from the global South and East, especially the first-generation immigrants, who experienced different forms of aggression and violence in high school, refused to refer to their experiences as bullying.120 An Arab-Canadian woman described her adolescent features as “tall, lanky, with a big Arab nose” and recalled how her peers persisted that her skin color was yellow.121 This woman’s White peers collectively defined the color of her skin as yellow. She said, “My skin is white, but they would call me yellow all the time.”122 The label of yellow skin became the derogatory term this young woman endured during high school from her classmates as a symbol of her ethnicity. This young woman did not see this harassment as bullying but as a xenophobic and racially motivated hate crime. Furthermore, her classmates verbally abused this woman through this symbolic physical characteristic to abuse, isolate, and stigmatize her. While bullying is a western generated description of mostly peer-on-peer aggression, it is not relatable to what minority youths experience. The concept of bullying requires alteration to be inclusive based on the needs of immigrants and minority youths. The tailored vocabulary offers immigrant children a means to express their experiences to the full extent of the matter. It would also symbolically represent how they belong to their Western host nation. An inclusive term that includes minority youths and their experiences would indicate that their suffering matters. One Iranian-origin young woman who dealt with acute cases of peer aggression throughout her elementary, middle, and high school was frustrated with the limited scope of bullying. She recounted how “every case of bullying is different,” just as every bullying victim is different; however, the school system has been following a set of outdated bullying characteristics that only apply to a small population of students.123 For this tailored vocabulary, this book suggests the concept of xeno-bullying, constructed from the two terminologies of xenophobia and bullying. Xenophobia is the fear of strangers and outsiders, which is one of the Western responses to multiculturalism.124 Xenophobia is a collective fear

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among the members of the dominant culture in response to the myths against the strange minority groups from the global South and East125. Bullying is the act of verbal, physical, relational, and cyber aggression between/among peers or colleagues.126 The bullying victim must be in a lower position of biopsycho-socioeconomic power than their aggressors. Also, bullying is when the aggressors violate the victim repetitively, during a period, and with the purpose of hurting them. Xeno-bullying is a form of peer aggression that the dominant culture directs toward minority individuals in response to their fear and insecurity caused by minority cultures. Xeno-bullying happens when a minority of immigrant youths becomes the subject of aggression and violence precisely due to their biological, cultural, ethnic, religious, and geographic characteristics. Xeno-bullying is relatable to people with features that classify them as others or outsiders/immigrants. While all young minority women spoke about their experiences with insults, humiliation, and physical assault to what would be considered part of their identities, they did not have an appropriate term to express their experiences. For example, on one occasion, a first-generation African immigrant woman was eating a store-bought hamburger, which she took to school in her lunchbox. One of her classmates assumed that she had brought her food from home. While the food’s smell and look were familiar to this classmate since the food was as North American as possible, the classmate asked this young woman if she was eating “sh*t.”127 This woman stopped eating at school, leading to her prolonged eating disorder. Another young Sikh woman was humiliated for her oily hair even after she discontinued applying oil to her hair. This young woman explained that she neurotically checked her hair to see if it was oily. She shared her confusion regarding this hypocrisy since her European-origin female classmates used coconut oil in their hair (both smelly and oily), and no one ridiculed them.128 WHY IS HAVING A SPECIFIC CONCEPT IMPORTANT? To have the specific term of xeno-bullying is beneficial on both micro and macro levels. First, at the micro-level, the novel concept of xeno-bullying would offer minority youths a new vocabulary to describe their experiences with peer aggression. Having a specific term to provide immigrant youths with the language to express their distress and hardship empowers these populations. Young immigrant women referred to their experiences with different forms of violence under various labels, such as micro-aggression, aggression, violence, anger, hate, isolation, war, discrimination, racism, xenophobia, feeling left out, and so on. Still, they did not have a concrete and reliable term

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to completely capture their experiences.129 Young immigrant youths argued openly about their views regarding the exclusivity of the term bullying and how they did not believe this term defined their experiences.130 These immigrant youths cannot express their experiences with peer aggression through the concept of bullying and its characteristics. The White-oriented term “bullying” ostracizes the ethnic minority victims of violence. One size does not fit all. Dan Olweus initiated bullying prevention programs based on the White Norwegian population in the 1980s, which has not changed since.131 Second, on the macro level, the term xeno-bullying would draw the attention of responsible authorities to the issue of minority youth with peer aggression. First- and second-generation minority immigrant women described their experiences with the ethnic intimidation they endured from their peers, teachers, counselors, and members of other ethnic minorities. Yet, they had no vocabulary to report those experiences, and the school authorities accepted the victims’ silence.132 This silence is a problem that needs the attention of the responsible authorities in educational institutions. However, when a problem does not have a name, it is much easier to ignore or deny it. While this book does not attempt to disregard the gravity of bullying against the White population, the dominant culture tends to neglect and dismiss the aggression against people from minority populations. Furthermore, xeno-bullying would give a new vocabulary to the academics to address the aggression and bullying among minority immigrant youths. This term would open a new dialogue on peer aggression among predominantly minority immigrant children. Rehtaeh Parsons133 and Amanda Todd’s134 cases received national and international attention. The two young women’s untimely deaths became important awareness-raising events for bullying in Canada. On the other hand, Ashley Cardona135 and Kiranjit Nijjar136 did not receive national or international recognition for their suicide and murder, respectively. The former victims received attention from the authorities, the media, and to some point, from the justice system because these young women committed suicide as a result of a defined antagonistic action. The latter victims did not receive the same attention. On the contrary, the justice system disregarded these two young minority women’s untimely demise, and the media interpreted them liberally. The care that White victims received—and the minority victims did not— was due to the dissimilarities among these victims’ origins, their degrees of belonging to the dominant culture, and the common sense regarding their victimhood to bullying. When minority youths suffer from peer aggression, the authorities never investigate their cases for bullying characteristics. Furthermore, due to the unique cultural differences between the victims and the perpetrators, these aggression cases do not match bullying characteristics perfectly. A new term to modify the partial term for a disturbing social issue,

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such as bullying, might oblige the authorities to validate the experiences of minority immigrant youths and their peers from the dominant culture. Reena Virk’s murder is a critical case to mention here. Virk was a young South Asian woman tortured and killed by a group of her peers and acquaintances. Mythili Rajiva and Sheila Batacharya137 state, “while events such as the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado have become part of the lexicon of bullying-related violence in North American culture, the fanfare over [Reena] Virk’s murder has quietly faded.” Rajiva and Batacharya138 plead for authorities to recognize Virk’s murder as an act of bullying and peer aggression. Every display of violence against minority immigrant youths needs attention similar to their White peers. The term xeno-bullying will reproduce an old immigrant problem under a new and specified terminology, the deep-rooted problem that many responsible authorities, academics included, either did not know existed or did not pay any attention. CASES OF XENO-BULLYING The term “xeno-bullying” offers the youths a language to use in everyday interactions when they are treated aggressively because of their ethnic characteristics. It is a common practice for minority youths to be the victims of their peers’ aggression and the public’s outrage. This term applies to any racial or ethnic-oriented circumstance in which minority youths become victimized regardless of the perpetrators’ characteristics, such as age or gender. For example, a European-origin woman reprimanded a hijabed woman in a restaurant’s bathroom, creating a perfect scenario for xeno-bullying. This incident happened after the young hijabed woman helped this woman find a hand dryer. The woman criticized her choice of clothing instead of thanking her for her guidance. The hijabed woman recounted her experience: “she then stared at me for a while and then told me, ‘Why are you wearing [that]? You’re in Canada. It’s like you can’t dress like us and then wear that on top of it. You’re trying to stand out.’”139 This young woman was shocked because the woman attacked her in response to her goodwill. She mentioned that she did not know how to describe this experience since it did not seem sensible, yet she could easily explain her experience through xeno-bullying. A young Middle Eastern-origin woman spoke about her experience in high school. After deciding to wear a scarf at the beginning of grade nine, she became the subject of humiliation from other students. She relayed that her classmates stared at her as if they questioned her belonging to the school.140 A first-generation, African-origin young woman mentioned that a Tim Horton’s White female employee told her that her “attitude stank.”141 The employee verbally assaulted this young woman with this comment after she asked the

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employee to correct her wrong order. The young woman commented that “the customer is always right” only applied to some people, and she believed she was not one of “those people.”142 Finally, when the global East and South residents migrate to North America, their culture travels with them. Among their culture is their view on aggression and peer aggression. Some young women from the global South and East spoke at length about their parents’ outlook on bullying as a myth or regular childhood interaction. Some women talked about how they “did not have bullying back home like here”143 and how their “parents did not even accept their peer-abuse cases as serious.”144 An African-origin first-generation woman compared bullying to depression in Africa. As someone who suffered from depression, she mentioned that neither of these issues is tangible for her parents. She explained that culturally, her parents viewed bullying as “teasing, child play, and kids will be kids.”145 A scientific term tailored for minority immigrant youths would bring youths’ aggression into the limelight and give it new importance. CONCLUSION Upon their arrival to Canada, young immigrants, especially those from the global East and South, face two options: to integrate with the new culture and its values or to suffer discrimination that the dominant culture enforces.146 As the first step of the migration, the immigrant parents and the systematic bureaucracy rob the first-generation diasporic youths of their agency as voting members in the migration process. The lack of involvement in decision-making, the pressure of adjusting to the host country’s novel lifestyle, and the new responsibilities toward their parents interrupt firstgeneration youths’ progress in their new host countries. A multidirectional and multilayered set of familial, social, and economic factors force these young immigrants into never-ending labor of love during the post-migration adjustment period. Minority immigrant youths experience diverse forms of aggression in their new host country due to their ethnic and cultural background. Many young minority women spoke about their experiences with aggression; except for one young woman, all others denied that the term bullying would relate to their experience. For this reason, this chapter introduced the term xeno-bullying, a combination of xenophobia and bullying. This term focuses explicitly on the aggression against minority immigrant populations, particularly youths.

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NOTES 1. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 2. Henry and Tator, 2010. 3. Bhabha, 1994. 4. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 5. Ibid. 6. Lesko and Talburt, 2012. 7. Ibid. 8. Visano, 2016, 5. 9. Lesko and Taburt, 2012. 10. Visano, 2016, 57. 11. Constantine, Erickson, Banks, and Timberlake, 1998. 12. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019; Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 13. Boyd, 2013; Man, 2004. 14. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 15. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 16. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 17. Ibid. 18. Boyd, 2013. 19. Sime and Fox, 2015. 20. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 21. Ibid. 22. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 23. Ibid. 24. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 25. Fry, 2005. 26. Sime and Fox, 2015. 27. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 28. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Kumar, Seay, and Karabenick, 2015. 32. Ibid. 33. Bragg and Wong, 2016. 34. Sabatier and Berry, 2008. 35. Hall, 1992. 36. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019.

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37. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 38. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 39. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 40. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 41. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 42. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 43. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 44. Yow, Tan, and Flynn, 2018. 45. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 46. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 47. Ibid. 48. Orellana, 2009. 49. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 50. Man, 2019. 51. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 52. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 53. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 54. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 55. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 56. Ibid. 57. Creese, 2019, 1486; Bhabha, 1994, 13. 58. Participant 15 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 59. Ibid. 60. Creese, 2019, 1477. 61. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 62. Ibid. 63. Government of Canada, 2022. 64. Pillai and Williams, 2018. 65. Bhabha, 1994; Patler and Pirtle, 2018. 66. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 67. Ibid. 68. Na and Hample, 2016. 69. Creese, 2019; Chariandy, 2007. 70. Glenn, 2011, 9. 71. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 72. Dunn, Paradies, Atie, and Priest, 2016; Kwak, 2018. 73. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018.

the author, the author, the author, the author, the author,

the author, the author,

the author,

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74. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 75. Participant 4 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 76. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 77. Ibid. 78. Goffman, 1963. 79. Participant 6 in discussion with the author, June 19, 2019. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Chan, 2013. 83. Ibid, 8. 84. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 85. Aliefendioglu and Arslan, 2011. 86. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 87. Participant 24 in discussion with the author, February 24, 2019; Zwick, 2002. 88. Participant 24 in discussion with the author, February 24, 2019. 89. Ibid. 90. Zwick, 2002. 91. Participant 23 in discussion with the author, June 19, 2019. 92. Ibid. 93. Alsultany, 2013. 94. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Alsultany, 2013, 31. 106. Ibid, 163. 107. Alsultany, 2013. 108. Bakali, 2016, 127; Chapekis and Moore, 2019. 109. Alsultany, 2013, 161; Chan, 2013. 110. Boyd and Tian, 2016. 111. Boyd and Tian, 2016. 112. Bucerius and Tonry, 2014. 113. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 114. Piaget, 1974. 115. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 116. Forsberg, 2011.

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117. Khayambashi, 2015. 118. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 119. Ibid. 120. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 121. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 122. Ibid. 123. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 124. Tafira, 2011. 125. Ibid. 126. Olweus, Limber, and Breivik, 2019. 127. Participant 5 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 128. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 129. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 130. Ibid. 131. Limber, 2011. 132. Sawyer, Bradshaw, and O’Brennan, 2008. 133. Gallman and Gast, August 9, 2013. 134. Nguyen and Tepper, April 17, 2014. 135. Mitchell and Joseph, April 29, 2014. 136. DiManno, September 18, 2011. 137. Rajiva and Batacharya, 2010, 1. 138. Ibid. 139. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 140. Ibid. 141. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 142. Ibid. 143. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 144. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 145. Participant 4 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 146. Berry, Phinney, Sam, and Vedder, 2010.

Chapter Two

“I Hated High School” The Experiences of the Young Minority Immigrant Women in Canadian High Schools

“It was a sh*t show in high school. It was dreadful.”1 “High school was a disaster. I didn’t like high school at all.”2 “I don’t wanna victimize myself, but we went through shit.”3 “It was crazy. I hate thinking about it.”4

First- and second-generation immigrant girls and young women who attended high school in Canada experienced a variety of covert and overt forms of aggression, ranging from isolation to physical assault. Multilevel social agents could enforce these acts of hatred-driven violence against minority immigrant youths: young members of their community, the young members of other minority groups, young members of the dominant culture, their teachers and principals, their parents, and their guidance counselors. One East African-origin woman compared her high school experience to the prison system. She elaborated by indicating the similarity between her high school and the representation of the prison system in popular media, such as OZ5 or Orange Is the New Black.6 She explained how students would challenge other students—especially the newcomers—to fight. If they accepted the challenge, they would prove their toughness, and others would not bother them. She added, “I feel like my whole life was leading up to [my first] fight.”7 Immigrant youths perceive their encounters with aggression differently, depending on the aggressors and their sociocultural affiliations. Many 37

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first- and second-generation immigrant women from the global South and East openly spoke about the ingroup acts of violence. Still, they mentioned their aggressors as their friends in these scenarios. On the other hand, these young women spoke harshly about the other minority groups’ aggressive behaviors and were vengeful toward the outgroup aggressors. Contradictory to the last two groups, when young immigrant women discussed their experiences with peer aggressors from the dominant culture, they described minor detail, sounded defeated, and mostly described the aggressor’s demeanor instead of their actions. This chapter discusses the relationship between the minority and dominant culture’s aggression against minority immigrant youths. Why do young immigrant women keep friendships with their ethnically homogeneous aggressors? How do young immigrant women react to aggression directed by the dominant culture and the other minority populations? This chapter explores the different types of peer aggression for young minority immigrant women in high school. It examines their reactions to these aggressive behaviors based on their narratives. INGROUP MEMBERSHIP AGAINST THE OUTGROUP HOSTILITY Many first- and second-generation young immigrant women recalled high schools bitterly. These young women described the hardship of their everyday communications with their peers. They explained how they protected themselves from these difficulties among their peers of similar diasporic communities, whom they described as their friends. These young immigrant women, especially the new immigrants, relied on these friends to support and protect them from outgroup attacks, give them emotional support, and provide them with a haven from isolation. While the ingroup members were mainly from a homogeneous cultural and demographic background, this was not always the case. In some cases, having a few demographic similarities sufficed. For example, a new immigrant African-origin woman’s minority status became the bonding point between her and her first “all-born and raised Canadian” Arab-origin ingroup in high school.8 She, the only self-identified Black at her high school, joined the only other minority group in her high school. This established group secured her from feeling like an “outsider.”9 The ingroup members become the immigrant young women’s allies and supporters against the hostilities and the aggression of the outside world. This newly found ingroup protects the young woman from unhomely isolation. The ingroup allies give minority individual members of their groups the strength, self-esteem, and space to integrate into the new culture gradually.

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These individuals do not see the necessity to assimilate with the dominant culture or other minority groups’ cultures. These minority individuals find the freedom to act as they wish by relying on their supporting peers. One young woman spoke of her newly found confidence in her ingroup. She explained how being a member of an ingroup removed the pressure of pleading for validation from the dominant culture and the outside world. She said, “it is necessary to say that it was a group of people that I could be myself again when I was with them.”10 AGGRESSION WITHIN MINORITY INGROUP The ingroup gives minority immigrant women a supportive environment to flourish. However, sometimes, the ingroups become hostile, and group members become aggressive against the other members of their group. Many young minority immigrant women complained passively about severe acts of violence among the members of their ingroups. Some women complained about how they became victims of abuse by their group members. Yet, since the ingroup is the lifeline for many immigrant youths, these young minority members legitimize the abusive behaviors of the ingroup’s aggressor, forgive their behaviors, and maintain the group dynamic intact. Young women from the global South and East commonly discussed their willingness to accept the abuse inflicted by their ingroup members to maintain their status in the ingroup. One young South Asian-origin woman, who joined a minority ingroup through her friend, spoke about her emotional devastation when her friends stopped hanging out with her. Finding herself “left out,” this young woman approached her friend and asked her why their group made “excuses” to hang out with her and if she was “not good enough for the other friends.”11 By asking such direct questions, she exposed her vulnerable self-esteem and self-worth to her friends and, consequently, other ingroup members. These questions also put her in a position where her ingroup friends could further reject and demean her. A Pakistani-origin woman, who could secure an ingroup connection with great difficulties, spoke about her ingroup members’ “negative thoughts.”12 She explained that the ingroup members specifically targeted their groupmates’ “insecurities” and fragile characteristics since they were aware of each others’ psychological weaknesses.13 She demonstrated further that she always had a problem with her weight, and her groupmates made hurtful comments about her size to attack her self-esteem. In some circumstances, young minority women would change their utmost personal habits so that the ingroup members would accept and appreciate them. A young, Saudi Arabian-origin woman, who experienced years of

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isolation and peer aggression throughout elementary and middle school, explained how she managed her behavior to be agreeable around her ingroup allies.14 She continued, “I was trying hard to be accepted and be more convenient. . . . I reached out to people, I pushed [myself] more than what my nature was.”15 This young woman changed her habits and disregarded her comfort zone to belong. A Pakistani-origin young woman described her sibling as a “yes person.”16 This young woman elaborated on this matter: “Even if someone says bad things [about them or to them], they will not just stop being friends with them. They would try to, like, still force their way to the group.”17 However, when discussing the issue, she blamed her sibling for their role in accepting the abuse and aggression. By blaming the victim, this young woman downplayed the role of the abuser and the gravity of their aggressive behavior. When this young woman spoke about her ingroup’s interpersonal conflicts, she was more lenient when talking about her ingroup relationship. While she confessed that her ingroup aggressions were the worst experiences of her life, she blamed these actions on the attackers’ lack of control over the stage of their lives, such as anxiety and the pressure of the last years of high school.18 When it comes to ingroup aggression, young minority immigrants never blame the ingroup clan, even if they have to downplay the aggressive actions or blame the victim. One Middle Eastern-origin young woman described the aggressive interactions she received from her ingroup peers at school: “I got teased a lot, especially over my accent.”19 She, who endured years of harassment from her friends and ingroup members, repeatedly mentioned that what her “friends” did was a simple joke because she was “very friendly and . . . very social.”20 This young woman even blames herself for her victimization. However, later this minority woman confessed how these “teasing” behaviors affected her emotional well-being and self-esteem. She explained, “I worked hard. Like, I was conscious over my language and communication barriers, so I worked hard to ensure I didn’t have an accent moving forward.”21 This young woman could neither explain her inactivity toward the aggressive behaviors of people she considered friends nor justify why she stayed friends with such aggressive people. However, other young minority women said they would prefer having a vicious friend who spoke their language than being isolated and alone.22 For minority immigrant women, the fear of loneliness overshadows other psychological and physical difficulties. One young Syrian-origin woman got the label of unibrow in high school because her eyebrows were attached together. Due to her family’s cultural beliefs, her mother did not approve of the grooming of her eyebrows. One of her ingroup’s “guy friends” labeled her with the nickname unibrow, and everyone began calling her by this label. Soon unibrow circulated as her nickname within her ingroup and then among

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the people of other groups. Her inaction against this label led to other derogatory terms directed toward her, such as “ugly.” When the members of her ingroup became the aggressors, this young woman felt a sense of dissonance because “her friends made [her] feel bad about [her]self.”23 Despite the psychological and emotional burden, she did not abandon them since she “didn’t want to be alone.”24 Although, she explained that their relationship became “weird” and put her in an uncomfortable situation since she “didn’t know how far [she] could take it.”25 A young Sikh woman described a similar experience with the members of her ingroup. She recounted how members of her ingroup called her FOB (fresh off the boat) because her mother nourished and styled her hair with coconut oil, which is a common practice among Sikh religious community. Similar to the last narrative, this label, which her friends assigned her, became this young woman’s nickname throughout high school and has tormented her since. In many cases, the aggression among the minority ingroups went beyond name-calling and turned into other forms of assaults and harassment.26 Yet, the ingroup members usually dealt with aggression and violence understandingly. The aggressor usually apologized and explained that they “didn’t mean to.”27 These ingroup allies attributed the aggressor’s aggressive behaviors to their social, familial, psychological, and academic setting at the time of the event.28 A young Iranian-origin woman excused her ingroup attacker’s violent actions to her bully’s past experiences with bullying in middle school.29 Therefore, the aggressive attacks within the ingroups remained unreported, and the groups remained cohesive. One young Middle Eastern-origin woman talked about how her ingroup abuser once kicked her in the groin, and “it hurt really bad.”30 However, she immediately justified this action by adding, “well, her boyfriend was abusive to the point of leaving marks on her body.”31 A Western Asian-origin young woman described her experience as a bystander to ingroup aggression. On one occasion, the same aggressor threw the book at another girl as a prank and accidentally broke her forehead. She explained how the aggressive ingroup member destroyed other members’ food during lunchtime as pranks and for fun. Yet, right away, the narrating minority woman voluntarily explained that the hostile young woman had an eating disorder. She believed the mental health issues would justify the aggressor’s actions. Her description of the events went as follows: So, if **** bought Rice Crispy, S would steal it, okay? It was a joke. She wouldn’t even eat it. She would throw it away. Once she grabbed someone’s chips, she just played with it until it became powder. Then she said, “Okay, now it is garbage. I should throw it away.” S was the person who had an eating disorder, and she ended up going to the hospital.32

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Another young Western Asian-origin woman attributed her ingroup member’s physically aggressive behaviors to her past bullying incidents, mental disorder, and other socio-familial factors. Later, this young woman explained that she shared the same biopsychosocial demographic with her aggressor. She, who had ADHD, experienced bullying in middle school. While she still justified her bully’s aggressive action toward her due to these shared biopsychosocial issues, she could not explain why she did not show any of those aggressive behaviors.33 This young woman vigorously attempted to justify her aggressor’s behavior toward herself without being asked to do so. The following passage is her recount of her aggressor’s behaviors toward her. “She would torture and torment me. Block [my path] to hit me. She called me fat, ugly, and stupid. She was a bully. I think because she was bullied in school. She was brown. Again, this isn’t an excuse, but when you have ADHD and are a minority, you just look crazy. You do.”34 An African-origin young woman, who experienced racism in different stages of her life, explained that condemning the ingroup aggressors’ actions usually means losing the ingroup’s membership.35 Another first-generation African-origin woman explained that she never complained about her peers’ aggressive treatment in fear of rejection or isolation. She explained that she was worried that her peers might observe her complaint as an act of defiance and consequently see her as disagreeable and unsuitable for friendship. She clarified by indicating that if a member of the ingroup speaks against the ingroup aggression, the group members would have labeled her “super sensitive,” and other members would “back away” from her.36 This young immigrant woman continued, “The problem that we immigrants have is that we try to make friends.”37 Defiance against ingroup members leads to the undesirable result of becoming isolated. She expressed, “The worst thing to be in, as a person in a new country and environment, is isolation. Nobody wants to be alone.” In such circumstances, the dissenting person becomes shunned by their ingroup members and left alone to fend for themselves. These lone students, whom this book calls the outliers, become the subject of the other ingroups’ abuse. The Outliers Outliers are minority immigrant individuals who fail or refuse to secure an ingroup for themselves, and they would become the subject of harassment from the other groups’ members.38 The outliers experience high school more harshly than many others. The outliers do not have allies to support, protect, and defend them. They are the invisible members of their high school whose invisibility made them perfect prey for the high school perpetrators and aggressors. Many outliers identified themselves as survivors of neglect

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and sexual, verbal, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse.39 They feel isolated and unfit. Based on Charles Cooley’s40 looking-glass self, these individuals’ peers construct the undesirable representation for them, which links to the person’s self-perception accordingly. Therefore, these individuals perceive themselves through the assumed perception of their peers. As Cooley explains, the looking-glass self is the “passive internalization” of one’s imagination about what their social surrounding think about them. However, when these social surroundings and peers actively attack minority immigrant youths, looking-glass self theory loses its imaginative element. The immigrant minority individuals experience the act of aggression, which further justifies the negative imaginative self-perception. While the high school peers abuse the outliers, they ignore and overlook these individuals simultaneously. One first-generation Western Asian-origin young woman reiterated her experience with her inconspicuousness in her high school end-of-year peer recognition. This young woman explained that she was neglected during high school events. She, who was self-proclaimed quiet, explained while there was a “most quiet student” category among her high school’s peer recognition, she was not even nominated among her peers, as if no one saw her.41 The severity of harassment forced some outliers to desire ingroup membership desperately. A young Pakistani-origin woman subjected to physical bullying and aggression throughout high school explained the importance of cliques and groups. She was new in her neighborhood and attended the high school after the students “already had their cliques and groups.”42 This young woman became a stranger among the other students, an “outsider.”43 She described how she experienced pressure to join a group and felt devastated when the groups rejected her. She explained her frustrating desire to become a member of an ingroup. She explained how difficult it was to join an already formed and established group or even more difficult to create a new one. Another first-generation Western Asian-origin woman recalled that a group rejected her request to join them since she was considered unfavorable. “They told me you couldn’t chill with us. Because their clan, like, they had sex with these many guys. You’ve got to be the sexy, hot, skinny girl who gets all the guys. If you don’t, you are a loser.”44 A first-generation African-origin woman discussed how her continuous peer rejections during high school bruised her self-esteem and self-perception.45 An Iranian-origin young woman described how she hung about the popular student groups to save herself from loneliness, but instead of friendship, she experienced humiliation, insult, and marginalization. She recalled how she sat next to the popular students who congregated in the Atrium, an adjacent area to their school.46 She described this gathering as “hanging out” while these popular students “call the joking insults” at her.47 This young woman

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bore an endless number of racial slurs and racial jokes during these high school “hanging outs,” such as “sand N-word,” “bruised banana,” and “how long did it take you to climb the fence to get over here?”48 She explained that she learned to build tolerance for these racist jokes. As a form of managing these verbal aggression and racial insults, this young woman reassured herself that her aggressors did not “know any better.”49 A second-generation Middle Eastern-origin immigrant whose parents migrated to Canada from Lebanon shared her experiences from high school to university. This young woman who chose the path of self-isolation during high school suddenly blossomed after she entered university. She described how she transformed from a girl who separated herself from the crowd to a woman who involved herself in group activities with strangers. She defined the reason for her attitude modification from an “introvert” into an “extrovert” as “being treated like a human.”50 This young woman added, “[I] realized I wasn’t shy. I was just silenced.”51 The young women whose peers outcasted them saw themselves responsible for their loneliness. A second-generation, Indian-origin woman expressed how another minority woman subjected her to constant physical aggression during high school.52 She did not report the abuse; she downplayed the reality of the attacks and still blamed her traits, such as shyness, for her victimization. The isolated immigrant youths learn to accept their position as unaccepted members of society. As a young Iranian-origin woman explained, she internalized this subjective reality that she was undesirable. Then, she added, “What’s even sadder is that, like, I thought [this treatment] was normal.”53 Another young Iranian-origin woman who experienced isolation during high school described how she became the target of other students’ aggression, humiliation, and shunning on many occasions. She was friendly toward her aggressors to put an end to the aggression and seclusion. In return, her aggressors dismissed her attempts every time. One of her aggressors, who shopped at a popular clothing brand, became angry when she saw her wearing a top from the same clothing store. This young woman described how her aggressor looked her up and down and uttered angrily. Then she walked away without acknowledging her question when she asked if everything was fine.54 Similarly, two young, first- and second-generation African-origin women, who became friends in university, spoke about their experiences of isolation and segregation in Canadian high schools. The first-generation immigrant woman, frustrated with years of abuse and isolation, reminded her second-generation friend of her privilege of not being a member of a minority group. She concluded her thoughts by saying, “But you never felt like ‘Oh, I’m Black and different. So, I deserve to be lonely.’”55 While the second-generation immigrant woman accepted her privilege, she shared her own experiences of segregation and isolation.56

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Sometimes these outlier individuals form their groups. The outlier groups do not have the ingroup social powers, and the aggressors usually treat them like the outlier individuals. These groups tend to be small, and even their members observe themselves as a congregation of lonely people.57 One Lebanese-origin young woman talked about her high school as years of isolation stuck in an Arabic triad clique “who were lonely together.”58 This woman described how she, her other Lebanese friend, and her Jordanian friend experienced years of stigmatization in a White high school in Whitby, Ontario. While these young women chose the most secluded areas of the school to “hang out,” the other students would still “stigmatize” them due to their ethnic background.59 She humorously explained how the entire school isolated and categorized her friend group as “those three.”60 She remembered that her Jordanian friend with the darkest skin usually was the one who received the harshest attitudes from others, despite being the most accommodating. The other students reprimanded the trio, mainly when they spoke Arabic among themselves. “I remember we were speaking in Arabic at school during lunch, and a girl came up to us and said, ‘Canada has two official languages, English and French. So, why are you speaking another language? That’s not okay. . . . If I can’t understand you, then that’s not acceptable.’”61 Minority individual ingroup members are more likely to become members of the outliers after their ingroups dissolve due to various reasons, such as members’ different graduating years, romantic disputes, or other disagreements among the members.62 Becoming an outlier after being an ingroup is a traumatic experience for many minority immigrant youths in high school.63 For example, an Iranian-origin young woman lost her ingroup in grade 11 since her ingroup members were two years ahead of her and graduated when she completed grade 10.64 She spoke about her devastating time at school when she suddenly became an outlier. She mentioned how she could not fit into other groups and consequently had no friends. The pressure of loneliness and isolation pushed her to skip classes, hang out with the “wrong crowd,” and smoke behind the school library.65 The pressure of being a member of outliers was noticeable among young minority immigrant women, who considered themselves members of this strata. The sting of rejection was why a young Indian-origin woman saw the cliques and the ingroup connections as the reason for all high school peer aggression scenes. She, who could never secure an ingroup for herself in high school, named her experience with peer aggression as “targeting.”66 She believed the answer to ending peer aggression is to “create a positive environment [through] . . . breaking all the groups up.”67 This young woman was exhausted from being an outsider and being rejected. Therefore, she wanted to dissolve all high school connections that separated the ingroups from the outliers.

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AGGRESSION BETWEEN DIVERSE MINORITY OUTGROUPS Outgroups refer to other minority individuals outside the individual’s ingroup’s clique. Outgroup aggression among minority youths was the most reported act of aggression to school authorities.68 Young minority women commonly discussed aggression between two or more diverse outgroup members.69 At first glance, these outgroup fights seemed the most harmful, needing immediate intervention. While these hostile interactions need attention, they might not be considered the most damaging forms of harassment female immigrant students encounter.70 These young women spoke freely about their aggressors and their behaviors since their words would not have any consequences. The young minority immigrant women observed the other minority female aggressors as their equals, yet enemies. Therefore, they spoke about them with anger and hatred. One Palestinian-origin young woman even labeled the members of her rival outgroup as traitors. She explained that while these minority individuals were in a “multicultural [country], they conformed to White culture. If anyone had to pick on anyone, they would pick on the other cultures.”71 This young woman viewed the aggressor’s actions against her homogeneous minority ingroup or other diverse minority outgroups as a Western phenomenon and a “Westernized attitude.”72 Many minority immigrant women commented mercilessly about the aggressive homogeneous minority outgroups.73 These women defined their ethnic minority assailants’ aggressive behaviors as inadequate impulse control and lack of influence over their surrounding environment.74 While these women were angry at their aggressors, the quality of their anger gave their narration a sense of wittiness at some points. One young East African-origin woman sarcastically related her opponent’s sudden outburst of rage to having “a bad day.”75 A Sikh woman blamed her abusers’ actions on their lack of maturity, seeking popularity, and being stuck in a state of arrested development.76 A Pakistani-origin Muslim young woman, whose ingroup was in a constant quarrel with both Sikhs and Hindus outgroups, jokingly explained that her peers blamed her ingroup for the two countries’ political problems.77 An East African-origin young woman spoke about the members of an outgroup clique calling her profanities. While she commiserated with her young self, she laughed, saying, “they would call me names. I think kids knew a lot of terrible words [that] they should not know at that age.”78

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Outgroup Aggression One common source of aggression among minority outgroups is shadeism or colorism. Colorism is the source of racism against populations with darker skin color in the Western World.79 This phenomenon is the root of many undesirable socioeconomic and political setbacks that minority individuals confront with them daily.80 Based on this arbitrary racialized characteristic, minority youths construct a power hierarchy among their peers. Those with lighter skin color would be on a higher hierarchical social status and closer to their White counterparts. The uncontrollable human element makes vicious, hurtful, toxic, and damaging competition among minority youths. Sometimes, these hypothetical social statuses become sources of aggression and humiliation for some minority women. Some immigrant women apply whitening products to make themselves representable to the dominant culture.81 The whitening products dangerously bleach their skin into a lighter shade. A young South Asian-origin woman who considered her darker shade of skin undesirable confessed that she tried these products to be respected.82 This young woman explained how the verbal pressure from other minority women forced her to seek a solution through the cosmetic industry. She asked her older cousin to purchase a skin-lightening cream for her. Her cousin advised against her request since her skin was not dark and she was too young for the cream. Yet, the same cousin still bought her the lightning cream. The cream containing bleach damaged this teenager’s face tremendously, and she had to discontinue its application. She continued, “I came to the self-realization that if you don’t like me, then just don’t like me.”83 One of the most dangerous forms of outgroup aggression surfaces when an ingroup member leaves her ingroup to join an outgroup. One young Western Asian-origin woman recalled how her best friend of ten years, who knew the most confidential secrets of her life, turned against her in high school after she joined the rival group. This young woman described her trouble after her best friend became her aggressor. Her former friend/aggressor became friendly with this young woman’s mother. She even revealed some of this young woman’s private matters, her dating life, and her intimate partner to her mother. The former friend divulged the young woman’s secretive romantic life to her parent. Considering her Western Asian cultural background, this personal vendetta against this young woman caused her “so much trouble.”84 Before anything, her mother disciplined her like a little girl, which questioned her independence and self-worth. This woman paid an excessive price for this incident. Consequently, this woman lost her freedom and her parent’s trust. “My mom was like nothing. Like, she couldn’t trust me for two years. She wouldn’t trust me anymore.”85 While it was a high price, it could have been

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worse. Considering the importance of girls’ purity and virginity in some Middle Eastern families, spreading such news might result in deadly consequences, whether the report is factual or fictional.86 AGGRESSIVE WHITE PEERS Aggressive White peers is a traumatic experience that many young immigrant women endure, yet they are uncomfortable speaking about it.87 These experiences are common among first-generation minority women from the global South and East. When minority immigrant women talked about their aggressors from other minority groups, they would refer to them directly as “attacker,” “abuser,” “racist,” and other subjective labels. On the other hand, when they spoke about European-origin aggressors, they would talk about their aggressor’s actions and mannerisms toward them. For example, they used words such as “rude” or “bossy,” which defined the peculiarities of the person.88 While the democratic racism instigated their European-origin peers’ aggressive attitudes, these young minority women responded to these aggressive behaviors based on learned social cues. The engulfing dominant Canadian discourse encouraged minority individuals to accept democratic racism, and young immigrant women reacted to their peers’ various forms of aggression accordingly.89 These young minority women emphasized their European-origin aggressors’ higher popularity and social level during their discussions. Consequently, European-origin aggressors usually applied two methods toward their minority prey: shunning and verbal humiliation.90 A young Saudi Arabian-origin woman described her isolation and loneliness during high school due to being outcast by White peers.91 This young woman, who attended a high school of primarily European origin and a few minority students, depicted the outcast position of minority students in her high school. Her dominant culture peers did not include her and her minority peers in school projects, presentations, birthday parties, or after-school gatherings. She talked about her insecurity and lack of belonging due to isolation.92 One young Sikh woman described her experience with democratic racism. She expressed her shame and pain as the consequences of her White peers’ aggressive actions. She used phrases like “teasing you” to explain the isolation and alienation she encountered for years.93 She complemented her European-origin cohorts for being “nice” because they “teased her behind her back” rather than humiliate her face-to-face.94 This young woman accepted her diversity as a reason for segregation and “not fitting in.”95 Yet she claimed she suffered from a persisting sense of alienation and lack of trust in people due to this treatment. An Iranian-origin young woman recounted her experience in

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drama class in high school. Her British-origin peer ignored her “as if she did not exist whenever she didn’t feel like speaking with [her].”96 She mentioned how the young woman under discussion “did not consider the immigrant students as people.”97 This young woman exaggerated her aggressor’s position of power and popularity while describing how she “huffed” at her rudely as an expression that she did not have time to speak with her.98 A Western Asian-origin woman described how her European-origin classmates shunned her in high school as they “just pretended [she] didn’t exist.”99 She explained that while these “[White] girls gave opportunities to some [immigrant] girls,” they never spoke with her or acknowledged her.100 She located these White aggressors in a position of power who could help the young immigrant women enter the elite circle. These European-origin women’s attitude to accept or shun a minority person not only located them in a superior position compared to their minority immigrant peers, but their behaviors also established a subordinated sense of selfhood for minority women who wanted to belong. A squad is a trendy label for a high school ingroup clique. However, these young minority women mentioned that their White peers used the term squad to separate themselves from minority student bodies.101 A Saudi Arabian-origin woman called “White” students “the popular kids” and described this group of students as the most influential group in school.102 She stated, “It was very common that these popular kids create rumors about you.”103 A young, South Asian-origin woman demonstrated how a “squad” used their popularity to abuse, isolate, and virtually shun her and her two best friends from minority backgrounds and “made [their] lives to be a living hell” during their last years of high school.104 An Indian-origin young woman described the Europeanorigin bullies in her school as the Blonde Squad.105 While she portrayed these individuals like Mean Girls,106 this young woman almost idolized them. She explained how everyone wanted to be friends with them, be close to them, and be a part of their group in her school. She added that “[the Blonde Squad] were feared” openly.107 Unapologetically, these young European-origin women were permitted to separate themselves from minority others, and school personnel and students praised them for their actions by loving and fearing them.108 The socially accepted racial inequality initiated this separatist attitude in these young individuals’ mundane lives. The “Mean Girls” attitude was acceptable for these young women as these young women acted superior to other students in high school.109 These “blonde girls” did not allow other students to sit in their “zone,” speak with them, or even look at them. They were condescending and rude toward other students, and students were afraid of them, yet they had never harmed anyone physically.110

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These separatist behaviors were not limited to one high school. A Western Asian-origin woman, who attended a high school in a different geographic location in Toronto, recounted an almost identical communication between European-origin and minority students. This young woman described European-origin students at their school demanding that other students follow their rules. One of their most known demands, which they yelled at others, was “do not touch me.”111 While this is understandable that one does not want to be touched, minority individuals had no plan to make physical contact with these dominant ingroup members.112 This domineering clique demonstrated their social power, dislike against minority individuals, and the segregation between them and us by loudly annunciating these few words.113 Another young Western Asian-origin woman, who attended a different high school in Toronto, described the “White clique” in her school in a similar manner. She mentioned how the members of this clique were “good” to each other and “rude” to others.114 She enviously reminisced about the clique’s members’ emotional bond with each other while they were aggressive toward others.115 A second-generation Indian immigrant woman reiterated the number of racial slurs and jokes that White students aggressively, yet jokingly, directed at her. However, when she retaliated against their racist insults by hurling a racially insensitive joke toward White culture, the racism was not tolerated.116 White students showed their disapproval, but they also complained to the school principal.117 An East African-origin young woman recalled how her European-origin classmate led the science class discussion down to the topic of the invention of the light bulb to make a joke about her dark skin. This young woman became the subject of her classmates’ jokes. Her White classmate made a joke regarding her dark skin and how if the light went off, no one could see this young Black woman because she was too dark.118 The young Black woman added that even her teachers laughed at this joke, and she felt like an outsider. Later, she explained that she felt hurt and embarrassed simultaneously. However, this young minority woman did not complain about this incident for fear of being isolated. This victim feared that her aggressor, as well as her followers’ vengeance if she complained.119 One Middle Eastern-origin young woman narrated her experience as a bystander of an aggressive attack on a group of Black Rwandan and Congolese students. These immigrant women organized a dance event to celebrate their cultural heritage in their new host country. However, their White schoolmates were not receptive to this expression of inclusivity.120 White schoolmates attacked the dancers verbally with racial slurs and mocking comments. While this minority bystander still carried the heavy burden of guilt and shame for not supporting her fellow immigrants, it was out of the question for her to actively defend her fellow minority peers against the mob

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of opponents. She could not risk putting herself in the position of getting outcasted and isolated by her school’s dominant group.121 On occasions that European-origin peers allowed minority immigrant students to join their ingroup or cliques, their remarks would constantly remind these minority individuals of their lack of belonging. One second-generation, Indian-origin woman described her sense of inferiority when her “White friends” asked her if any “brown kids” in the school were her cousins.122 She clarified and said, “Not any brown person who walked in the school was my family because it wasn’t.”123 Despite the unpleasant feeling this friendship triggered in this young woman, she kept her relationship with these White friends. This friendship carried years of emotional and verbal abuse and humiliation for her. Yet, based on her account, the friendship with the members of the dominant culture had a social status quo for the minority youths, and she did not want to lose the company and the status. In some cases, White peers attributed derogatory terms to the token minority members of their groups. The terms, such as “coconut” and “Oreo,” were a sign of the White peers’ approval of these minorities’ Westernized attitudes.124 These terms indicated that the person “was black on the outside but White on the inside.”125 These terms colonize these individuals’ bodies and minds and label the minority individuals as Whites’ allies and trustees.126 Unfortunately, some minority individuals accept these derogatory labels like badges of honor since the title becomes their ticket to White peers’ circles.127 On some occasions, White students and their parents limited their social interaction with White and non-White students. For instance, White students’ parents did not allow their children to communicate with immigrant youths.128 While neither White students nor their parents experienced any consequences regarding these racially motivated acts of communication segregation, minority students carried the long-lasting trauma.129 A Western Asian-origin woman described how European-origin schoolmates isolated her and her older brother from communicating with other students during and after high school hours. At the same time, some European-origin peers altered these Western Asian-origin immigrants’ last names to resemble a word meaning scabs. Other students from the dominant culture told these minority individuals that their parents did not allow them to communicate with this sibling. This young woman narrated the days she and her brother sat separately from everyone. Later, the isolation would turn these two young individuals into perfect targets for the school’s more violent aggressors and bullies. This young woman blamed herself and called herself unfit since her classmates’ parents did not allow them to hang out with her. She remembered her high school years as “hurtful and terrible.”130 She described how this treatment led to her sudden outburst of anger, which she called “being tired of

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people.”131 Her mental health deteriorated; she experienced addiction and had several stints in various rehabs in Canada and the United States.132 A young Black woman described her racial segregation in the early years of high school when her White friend, with whom she created a tight bond, expressed why she could no longer hang out with her. The European-origin friend told the African-origin woman that her mother prohibited her from being friendly with her after seeing them hanging out in the schoolyard. After more interrogation, her European-origin friend nonchalantly told the African-origin woman that she “couldn’t hang out with her because she was Black.”133 This sentence haunted this young woman for years. While this friend isolated and shunned her, she blamed her skin color for ceasing the friendship. This White friend and her mother used the Black skin color as a synonym for an established shortcoming that this young woman must have understood. She described how she felt at fault for her broken friendship. She blamed herself and her blackness for losing a friend rather than being angry at her friend’s mother.134 In this category, minority individuals observe European-origin aggressors from higher social and hierarchical status; consequently, the minority young women did not label them negatively. In this classification of outgroup aggression, the violated individuals felt powerless and dominated. A few young minority women complained about being ignored or directly rejected by European-origin students. European-origin students viewed themselves at a higher level of hierarchical power; therefore, they found it reasonable to ignore, belittle, humiliate, and segregate minority youths.135 AGGRESSION TOWARD THE IMMIGRANT MINORITY WOMEN BY THEIR MALE COUNTERPARTS Minority men are another group of aggressors who attack young minority immigrant women.136 The young men, whom these women trust as supporters, friends, or romantic partners, are among the most dangerous aggressors for the young new immigrant women since they are often among their ingroup members. The aggression of these male friends is commonly physical. Contrary to female ingroup counterparts, who masked their physical assaults under the label of pranks or jokes, these male aggressors usually justify their physical aggression as masculine urges and romantic expressions.137 One of the most unfortunate and publicized examples of this display of aggression was the murder of Kiranjit Nijjar.138 Akash Wadhwa, Nijjar’s long-time friend and suitor, stabbed Nijjar to death before jumping from an overpass into a highway next to their high school. The newspapers blamed this horrible incident on Wadhwa’s depression.139 News media also romanticized

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the event while Rosie DiManno wrote, “Nijjar is being mourned as a girl allegedly loved to death by a boy for whom she cared deeply.”140 While the media romanticized this aggression, the surrounding community and friends humanized Wadhwa’s actions. Wadhwa’s ingroup members created a Facebook page disrespectfully honoring both Wadhwa and Nijjar, even though Wadhwa was the perpetrator and Nijjar was the victim.141 In this shared memorial Facebook page, Wadhwa’s ingroup members named Nijjar as the second victim of this incident, repeatedly exaggerated Wadhwa’s mental health and suffering and downplayed his role in murdering Nijjar.142 The page admin even refused the requests of Nijjar’s family members to respect her family’s wishes and to delete the Facebook page.143,144 Meanwhile, the media representation and community support for the aggressor exacerbate this tragedy’s affected young minority women.145 Two young South Asian women were in the same high school as Nijjar and Wadhwa as juniors at the time of this tragedy. These young women were affected deeply by this murder, its media portrayal, the justice system’s response, and the public handling of the issue.146 They spoke about how the press, social media, their community, and Wadha’s ingroup members romanticized his action and treated him as a victim. These young women recalled that after the dominant culture and their diasporic community treated Wadhwa as a victim of love, their high school’s young men began treating their female counterparts more demandingly and with disrespect and aggression.147 Further, Wadhwa’s positive attention as a hopeless romantic started a trend of unreported successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts among the male students at that high school.148 Two years after Nijjar’s murder, another male student whose girlfriend ended their relationship decided to jump from the same overpass and end his life. The school personnel did not allow him to follow through with his threat; nevertheless, he caused trauma to his ex-girlfriend. The Middle South Asian-origin woman familiar with the ex-girlfriend described his actions’ influences on his victim as a “threat” and “psychological abuse.” She explained how these young minority men demonstrated to their female counterparts that they were “their properties,” and they treated them in a manner that supported that point.149 Another first-generation Iranian-origin woman spoke about how she witnessed her female friend’s physical abuse at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. She explained that her friend always had a dark mark of abuse on her face or body. However, her friend did not want to make a complaint since “she loved [her boyfriend].”150 When the couple finally separated, the ex-boyfriend poured sugar into the gas tank of his ex-partner’s car. He thought sugar in gas tanks would cause an explosion. He confessed to this matter later after her uncle confronted him. Still, the victim’s family did not file a complaint, they did not lay any charges, and legal authorities did not arrest the

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perpetrator.151 Physical abuse under the label of love is common among young minority couples. However, the abuse usually stays unnoticed and unreported when both individuals in the relationship are members of the same minority group or with ingroup cohesion. In this case, the group would not allow the conflict to become official to secure the ingroup’s unity. While the male community members do not respect their female counterparts, the women still try to excuse their bad attitudes. Like other ingroup trends, these women strive to keep the peace and cohesion intact even though they do so by sacrificing their self-worth. This trend is more visible if the male aggressor is a member of the minority woman’s immediate high school ingroup. A Western Asian-origin young woman’s male ex-companion was verbally aggressive toward her in the presence of other group members and her friends. However, she justified his abusive nature by explaining the reasons behind his violent behavior.152 Although she experienced different forms of abuse during their relationship, she decided to volunteer her abuser’s motives for harassing her instead of narrating her side of the story. This young woman described how her ex-partner intrusively forced himself on her and her girlfriends’ “spa girl day” and stayed uninvited despite their discomfort.153 This young woman believed her ex-partner “broke boundaries,” but she did not force him to leave, and he never apologized.154 She described the months of aggressive behavior to which her ex-boyfriend subjected her; the abusive behavior worried her family. Yet, she repeatedly explained that these abusive behaviors were not entirely his fault since she blamed his behaviors on his cultural and familial background.155 She excused her ex-partner’s behavior by saying, “I think he has lots of insecurity that also fuels things, you know? Your background, what you believe in, what you don’t believe in, and how you’ve been raised. These are all problematic.”156 This young woman established that her ex-partner’s aggressive behavior should be considered the by-product of his psycho-social environment; she was adamant about portraying a good image of him. Although she separated from her ex-partner due to his extraordinarily abusive and controlling behavior, the ingroup mentality obligated this young woman to consider her ex-partner as a member of her immediate ingroup and support him and his action, even after their relationship was over. Another form of aggression that young minority men, especially those from patriarchal cultural backgrounds, apply to control young minority women is spreading rumors. These men spread lies and gossip to hurt women’s reputations. The young men’s romantic involvement with young women sometimes stands against the cultural values of their diasporic communities. These diasporic communities still hold patriarchal cultural values, such as girls’ purity and the virginity myth.157 The rumors relating to these patriarchal values can lead to harsh consequences for minority women from

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these communities. In extreme cases, these rumors can lead to honor-killing instances.158 Honor killing is an underreported form of crime when male relatives kill their female relatives under the label of honor and the restoration of dignity to the family.159 CONCLUSION High school is a difficult stage of life for many young individuals. Many youths carry emotional and physical trauma from this unavoidable stage of their lives. Unfortunately, this stage is harsher for first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths, predominantly minority immigrant women. When young minority immigrant women spoke about their high school experiences, they rarely showed any signs of happiness.160 Their faces and body postures became tense and rigid while discussing their high school experiences. Their stories and words narrate the hardships they experienced in their younger days. Immigrant youths do not experience high school as an essential stage of their lives. For minority immigrant youths, high school is a place of aggression, humiliation, and isolation. Many minorities young women from the global South and East remember high school as a stage of conflict. Many first- and second-generation minority immigrant women described how they endured verbal, physical, and emotional aggression from their peers. These aggressors could be among these young women’s immediate circle of friends, distance acquaintances, well-liked enemies, or romantic partners. As one young Western Asian-origin woman elaborated, “High school is like a jungle for a new immigrant kid.”161 The new immigrant youths need to establish a group in high school to support them against aggressive others. In many cases, these young minority individuals stayed silent in response to different forms of abuse they received from their immediate group (ingroup) to avoid rejection and keep the group cohesive.162 If the minority individuals could not secure an ingroup, they would become outliers. High school peers would subject the outliers to isolation and other forms of aggression. Isolation is one of the most common forms of aggression that minority immigrant women experience. Many ethnic minority women spoke about how European-origin background peers ignored them and refused to answer their most basic interactions. Next to democratic racism, the dominant culture practices isolation and shunning as the favored methods of attack toward minority individuals.163 Isolation and shunning are some of the most damaging forms of aggression since harassment occurs without any action; therefore, it stays silenced and unpunished.

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NOTES 1. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 2. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 3. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 4. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 5. Fantana, 1997. 6. Kohan, 2013. 7. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 8. Participant 24 in discussion with the author, February 24, 2019. 9. Ibid. 10. Participant 12 in discussion with the author, November 23, 2018. 11. Participant 15 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 12. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 13. Ibid. 14. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 15. Ibid. 16. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 20. Ibid. 21. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 22. Participants 8, 15, 17, 20, and 27 in discussion with the author, December 17, 5, 2018, January 14, 28, and August 21 2019. 23. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 27. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 28. Ibid. 29. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 30. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 31. Ibid. 32. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 33. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 34. Ibid. 35. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 36. Participant 4 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 37. Ibid. 38. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 39. Ibid. 40. Cooley, 1998, 22.

“I Hated High School”

41. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 42. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 43. Ibid. 44. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 45. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 46. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 51. Ibid. 52. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 53. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 54. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 55. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 56. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 57. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 58. Participant 21 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 63. Ibid. 64. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 65. Ibid. 66. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 67. Ibid. 68. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 69. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 70. Ibid. 71. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 72. Ibid. 73. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 74. Ibid. 75. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 76. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 77. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 78. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 79. Veenstra, 2011. 80. Ibid.

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the author,

the author, the author,

the author,

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81. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 82. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 83. Ibid. 84. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 85. Ibid. 86. Government of Canada, “Preliminary Examination of So-Called ‘Honour Killings’ in Canada.” 87. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 88. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 92. Ibid. 93. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 100. Ibid. 101. Participants 3, 5 and 7 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018, January 28, 2019, and October 22, 2018. 102. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 103. Ibid. 104. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 105. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 106. Waters, 2004. 107. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 115. Ibid. 116. Participant 12 in discussion with the author, November 23, 2018. 117. Ibid. 118. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 119. Ibid. 120. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019.

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121. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 122. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 123. Ibid. 124. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019, and Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 128. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018, and Participant 21 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 129. Ibid. 130. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 134. Ibid. 135. Participants 5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 19, 20, and 27 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019, December 17, 2018, August 19, 2019, November 23, 2018, January 11, 28, and August 21, 2019. 136. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 137. Ibid. 138. DiManno, September 18, 2011. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid. 141. Facebook, “RIP Aksan Wadhwa and Kiranjit Nijjar.” 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 144. The page has become private since then. 145. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018, and participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 146. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid. 150. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 151. Ibid. 152. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 157. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 158. Aujla and Gill, 2014. 159. Ibid.

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160. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 161. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 162. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 163. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019.

Chapter Three

Minority Immigrant Youths and Adults Aggression

The last chapter explored peer aggression, but minority youths also have to confront various forms of aggression from the adults in their lives. These adults are from both minority and dominant cultures, and they take advantage of their position of authority to abuse or neglect immigrant youths. The toxic relationship between adults and immigrant youth has long-lasting traumatic consequences for these young victims. School administrators, teachers, and parents are expected to help children thrive, but in this case, many of these responsible adults act otherwise. This chapter examines instances of the hostile interactions between minority immigrant youths and the adults and authority figures in their lives. SCHOOL SYSTEM AND AGGRESSION The disciplinary environment of the education system allows school personnel and teachers to take the punitive and segregative approach to manage first- and second-generation immigrant youths, especially those from the global South and East.1 Teachers from both the dominant culture and minority backgrounds choose stricter punishment for minority youths than their White peers.2 However, these minority youths cannot complain against the obvious discriminatory treatment due to the bureaucratic justification of their behavior.3 If these young students complain, Canadian democratic values that are tainted with racism simply deny their experiences with discriminatory punitive treatment. Tator and Frances refer to this denial of someone’s experience with discrimination as an example of democratic racism. These teachers and school personnel appeal to the liberal values and attitudes of democratic racism to show themselves in a favorable light.4 Democratic racism would turn the table against the minority victims. 61

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High school personnel and teachers and their curricula are more likely to create a sense of segregation for minority immigrants. While witnessing the special treatment of European-origin peers, minority immigrant youths notice how they are the targets of high schools’ arbitrary disciplinary practices, exclusive curricula, and unnecessary ESL classes.5 These overt and covert acts of hostility against minority youths inflict outward segregation, damage their self-esteem, and lead to their eventual academic regression.6 Many young first- and second-generation immigrant youths spoke about a nonvocalized yet established segregation between the dominant culture and minority students. These haunting memories made them feel inadequate in other aspects of their high school performances.7 In some cases, these acts of segregation deprived the young minority Canadians of the resources available to their European-origin peers. A second-generation Indian Canadian young woman directly associated the segregation of minority students in one of her classrooms with the lack of attention received from the teacher.8 This teacher did not allow the minority students to vocalize their thoughts and opinions while actively engaging the dominant culture students in the class discussion and activities. This treatment created a visible gap between the majority and minority students by making a clear statement regarding who belongs and who does not. This young woman recounted her experience of this teacher’s classes as she drew a sketch. There was I. There was another boy of African descent, two Asians—one Asian boy and one Asian girl. And I still remember all their names. I remember exactly the layout of the table. We were at one end of the table, and everyone else was at the other end. And I remember the teacher was not aggressive but condescending and brushed us aside.9

In many cases, the teachers urged minority students to work with other minority students regardless of their compatibilities. One Saudi Arabian-origin woman complained about how her teacher matched her with another male student since “he was the only other Pakistani guy,” and they “had to work together” despite their incompatibilities.10 While these choices of action seemed only ignorant, they hindered the progress of many minority immigrant youths in high school.11 FIRST-GENERATION IMMIGRANT STUDENTS AND THE STIGMA OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE Many young minority first-generation immigrants, especially women, experience disrespect and impatience from their teachers and school personnel due

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to their lack of fluency in English. An African-origin young woman referred to herself as a “burden” on her teachers because she was an ESL student.12 Soon after, she explained that the teacher told her that “she did not know what to do with her,” which created a sense of inferiority in this young woman. Her interaction with her teacher forced her into isolation, as she recalled how she took refuge in the library to strengthen her English by reading books. Another method of segregating first-generation immigrant youths in high schools is in the mandatory nature of ESL classes. Canadian education system expects first-generation minority immigrant youths to attend ESL classes, regardless of these young immigrants’ fluency in English, the length of their residency in Canada, or their age when they settled in Canada. The minority immigrant women from the global South and East recounted their ESL experiences, as the regular teachers were neither sensitive nor helpful in accommodating their mental anguish. A Palestinian-origin woman who came to Canada at age one explained that she and her two sisters, who were six years apart, attended the same ESL class.13 She mentioned that she, her sisters, and other minority students would leave their regularly scheduled classes to attend the ESL class every day at a particular time. According to this young woman, the constant movement between her usual and the ESL classes prevented her from learning the grade-specific materials. The moves between the ESL and the regular programs also stigmatized ESL students among the mainstream population, which subjected them to peer aggression. This young woman elaborated that while these ESL classes were entertaining initially, due to their elementary subject matter, the lack of assimilation made her dread attending them.14 It was more beneficial for her to follow her regular classes since she missed the necessary course materials while attending ESL classes. When school personnel pulled minority students from their regular curricula to attend ESL classes, the scheduled courses continued for their peers in their absence, which caused significant setbacks for the ESL students.15 One Pakistani-origin woman who migrated to Canada at three described how the school system automatically enrolled her in ESL classes based on her last name.16 She explained, “sometimes I felt like I was not ESL, but they still put me as ESL just because they needed an excuse to bundle groups of people up.”17 Similar to the previous young woman, she spoke about the trauma she experienced from the constant movement between her school’s usual subject matters and her ESL classes. She explained how she found the process “weird” and how falling behind in her grade-specific classes made her feel “dumb.”18 She elaborated on how she thought “there was something wrong with [her]” and that she needed to correct herself.19 This young woman described her struggle to separate herself from the ESL class’s stigma. She explained how she “worked harder to get on the others’ level because . . . they

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were much more prestigious and much higher than me. I was just an ESL [student].”20 However, her effort to become a mainstream student was fruitless since the school enrolled her as an ESL student year after year. Gradually, ambivalence inclined this young woman to separate herself from the other ESL students. She indicated, “no offense, I can see why the others get this [treatment], but I always felt like I was not ESL.”21 Besides peers’ stigmatization, new immigrant parents disapproved of their children attending ESL classes. A first-generation Western Asian-origin woman spoke about her parents’ disappointment in her lack of fluency in English.22 She “didn’t let her parents know” about her ESL status at school since she was the translator for her parents during the parent/teacher meetings and conferences.23 Similarly, the first-generation South Asian-origin woman from the above paragraph clarified that her parents never knew she was an ESL student. Otherwise, they would not tolerate her attending a sub-standard level of education. She managed to keep her ESL status a secret from her parents since they did not communicate with the school about her academic details due to their lack of fluency in English.24 TEACHERS, THE AUTHORITIES WHO CAN CONSTRUCT OR DESTROY Besides the stigma of being a second language speaker, many young minority immigrants described different forms of aggression received from their teachers.25 Based on the young minority women’s accounts, the teachers usually expressed their violence through verbal humiliation, conspicuous displays of dissatisfaction, condescending behavior, and shunning. One Western Asian-origin woman, who was diagnosed with ADHD after starting university, exclaimed, “I was considered dumb [by the teachers]. I didn’t realize I had intelligence until I got into university.”26 She explained how she was labelled as a “bad kid,” while neither her parents nor teachers tried to understand the reason behind her inability to focus in classes during school hours. She expressed her frustration with the lack of support from her teachers. This young woman elaborated on how her teachers offered guidance to other students while overlooking her need for support. She witnessed these unfair treatments among students and confessed that she questioned her worth rather than her teachers’ ethics. She explained, “I’ve always been like, ‘I guess I’m not good enough, or I guess I am stupid.’ Because I would get yelled at, I would get kicked out of the class. I would get detention.”27 Feeling “stupid” was not unique to this individual since another young woman vocalized the same feeling.

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A first-generation Iranian-origin woman recalled how her teacher embarrassed her every time she showed her homework to the class and said to the students, “This is what you should not do.”28 This young woman described how “stupid” she felt every time this scenario happened. She felt devastated that her teacher exemplified her without explaining how to fix the problem.29 She received little to no academic support at home, as her parents were new immigrants. Since her parents could not help her and her siblings academically, her parents expected her to provide support to her younger siblings.30 This woman described the deterioration of her mental health during high school when she cried every day as she was barely passing her classes. Another second-generation South Asian woman described her high school teachers’ lack of attention while performing the “bare minimum.”31 She referred to her teachers as “unhelpful” people who “were there to give their lessons and go on.”32 However, this young woman explained that the same teachers spent time and energy “helping” students from the dominant culture in private sessions.33 Favoritism was not just about the White majority; the majority group in any school would be favored by their racially similar teachers. A young Syrian woman attending a high school with a predominantly South Asian-origin demographic demonstrated how “beside Whites, the teachers favored the students from the same backgrounds as them more than they favored me.”34 This woman explained that when she came to class a few minutes late, the teacher forced her to wait at the class doorway in a humiliating posture until the end of the national anthem. However, teachers tend to make an exception when South Asian-origin peers come late by allowing them to sit in their assigned spots.35 In this case, the teachers’ South Asian backgrounds were presented in blatant acts of favoritism toward European and South Asian-origin students. Some high school teachers withheld compassion from their minority students as a question of deserving.36 An Iranian-origin young woman described her interaction with her grade 12 teacher regarding an assignment. This woman was a newly migrated first-generation immigrant in Canada at that time. She described how her high school teacher told her that her “work was really sh*t, and it was garbage.”37 When the minority student started crying in response to her teacher’s verbal aggression, the teacher showed no remorse. The young woman recalled, “[the teacher] just sat in front of me motionless, and I was bawling my eyes out.”38 Another first-generation, Western Asian-origin woman described her teacher’s red pen all over her test, correcting her grammatical mistakes in a hostile manner.39 She explained that due to the limited time, this young woman wrote her test in a rush and had many grammatical errors, but the red crossing of every word on her paper was excessive; it was not a grammar test.

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When asked for more guidance, the teacher yelled at this young woman and told her she had difficulty reading her paper. Under stress, the student began crying, but the teacher remained indifferent to this young woman’s tears.40 Such punitive and demeaning reactions do not allow immigrant students to correct their mistakes in a healthy and sympathetic environment. The education system must be a place for learning and correction, not punishment and humiliation. Such punitive reactions to students’ mistakes do not encourage immigrant students to correct their mistakes in a healthy and sympathetic environment. A Syrian-origin young woman shared her experience in grade 12 math. This young woman did not have an accent, and her appearance was white-passing. She explained that her mother could not attend the parent-teacher meetings due to the long hours of multiple jobs. However, the school and her teachers were understanding of her socioeconomic status and never requested an emergency parent-teacher meeting. However, everything changed when this young woman’s mother managed to attend the mid-semester parents-teachers evaluation meeting.41 This meeting became the turning point in the relationship between this young woman and her teacher. This young woman explained that due to the same long hours of labor, her mother could not improve her English, and she had a thick Middle Eastern accent. She saw her mother’s accent as the reason for the unexpected change in her teacher’s attitude since she had never had any problem with this teacher before that night.42 The teacher spoke negatively about her study habits and attitudes during this meeting. The teacher told her mother that the young woman’s performance was below average and was doing poorly. Her teacher’s sudden attitude change was unexpected for this young woman since she finished a great semester with the teacher.43 After the meeting, the young woman received a completely altered form of attention from her teacher. Every time this young woman answered something correctly or solved a mathematical problem in the class, the teacher “gave [her] a chocolate” as a reinforcement, like when “a trainer raises a puppy.”44 This reinforcement method degraded her as a human and a student of color.45 Further, with the change in her teacher’s attitude, this student experienced relationship difficulties with her mother. In this parent-child relationship, the child’s trust in her parent became damaged beyond repair. This child blamed her mother and her imperfect English for her downfall and humiliation.46 In some instances, minority youths become overwhelmed with the mistreatment of their school authorities and peers, which changes their academic demeanor. One East African-origin woman who was an excellent student before and immediately after migration described how she lost interest in school accomplishments after dealing with migration difficulties, racial

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intolerance at school, and peer aggression.47 She began fighting, skipping classes, and disrespecting the school authorities. Consequently, she received many hours of detention, which she did not care to complete. Fortunately, this young woman excelled in her courses with the assistance of the appropriate people. However, if she did not find suitable people to help her find the way, she could be among the many other Black youths who come to Canada for a better life and get lost in the crowd. So, I just switched my whole demeanor, you know? . . . I became very assertive, and people started becoming scared of me. “Fight me. I’m down.” I just flipped. I used to come into [class] late every day. . . . [Or] skip classes. . . . I had 120 detentions by the end of that year, and I did not serve any of them. I just turned loose. And when people talked in class, I would yell at them. I just became very daring. . . . I just became, like, very rude . . . very mean . . . to people.48

One first-generation Black immigrant from a working-class background expressed her frustration with the high school teachers’ biases after they moved to an “affluent neighborhood” in Mississauga, ON.49 She explained her high school teachers maintained a hierarchy of popularity and congeniality by favoring European-origin students from affluent families.50 On the other hand, these teachers paid the slightest attention to the poor and minority immigrant students. This lack of acknowledgment led to this young woman skipping and failing her classes. While she was an accomplished student before attending the mentioned high school, she had to repeat that academic year. After her sudden educational decline from an excellent to a failing student, her school threatened her with expulsion.51 If expelled, this young woman, who continued her education and became a successful university student, would turn into a “high school dropout.”52 This high school neither searched for the roots of this student’s problems nor took responsibility for the academic failure; instead, it decided to delegate full responsibility to the student.53 One Western Asian-origin woman with an exceptionally challenging experience with her teachers spoke about her invisibility in high school. She described herself and her experience in high school as “those who didn’t matter.”54 When this young woman spoke about the positive attention she received from her male math teacher, she expressed how the attention was not the kind of attention an underage student should receive. While she was an excellent student in her math class, she never received compliments on math-related categories. Instead, her male math teacher called her CoverGirl and praised her beauty. On the contrary, this math teacher would praise others for their grades, correct solutions, and well-done homework. She explained

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that not only did the nickname CoverGirl segregate her from her classmates, but the label also made her feel like her high grades were for her appearance instead of her academic effort.55 Another young Western Asian-origin woman remembered how her teacher and school authorities dismissed her complaint regarding a classmate’s sexual harassment. This woman narrated that a young Arab male student abused her verbally, physically, and emotionally. She shared many classes with this young man, and he repeatedly sat next to her. Meanwhile, every time he passed her, he barked at her, shoved her, and screamed vulgar words. She reported the stalking and aggressive activities to the school authorities. She said the barking meant, “you look like a dog.”56 Yet, the school authorities dismissed her complaints since they believed these actions were indicators of the male student’s “crush” on her.57 These school authorities asked her to ignore her classmate until he “passes this phase.”58 In one instance, this young man’s best friend and his ingroup member drew a picture of this young woman and gave it to her as a form of unsolicited observation during a class. When this young woman took the drawing to the attending teacher, he was more impressed with the artistry than concerned about the student’s lack of attention in the class and his unconsented attention toward a female peer.59 The young woman still remembered how betrayed she felt when the teacher said, “Oh, he did such a nice job,” and to see her teacher “completely disregarded how [she] felt.”60 Significantly, it was the first time she could find something tangible for the school authorities to believe her allegations of abuse and harassment.61 Post 9/11 terrorist attack, the dominant Western discourse stereotypes the Muslim population as the derogatory image of terrorists based on the actions of a limited number of believers of the faith. These stereotypes have endangered the lives of many innocent Muslim people.62 Many young minority women who migrated from the global South and East had experienced instances of Islamophobia when their teachers took an active racist or xenophobic stand against them without facing any consequences.63 One first-generation, Arab-origin woman disapproved of her former high school teacher’s unapologetic sentiment regarding these stereotypes. This young woman explained that her civics teacher claimed: “these stereotypes had some truth to them.”64 Occasionally, this teacher, who habitually referred to the minority students by wrong nationalities, indicated a Lebanese-origin student was Iranian. When this student corrected her, this teacher did not apologize; instead, she began a hostile verbal exchange with the insulted student. This racially charged conversation led to a claim regarding the teacher’s nationality, for which the teacher took offense. While the mentioned teacher referred to Middle Eastern as terrorists, she detained a few students who

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contested this stereotype and debated by saying, “Not all Italians are involved with Mafia.”65 The same high school still employs the mentioned teacher, and according to her current students, she still follows her racist beliefs and prejudicial mindsets.66 The younger siblings of the young minority women whom this teacher discriminated against still suffer from her unjust treatment. This teacher sent a young Black woman home because she wore a t-shirt with a Black Lives Matter message. “She told her . . . you need to take off your shirt because that’s a terrorist organization.”67 PRINCIPALS, THE SILENCING AGENTS FOR THE MINORITY STUDENTS While teachers were in direct relationship with the minority students, the principals held the power to help these students in case of imminent danger or aggression. However, when these minority students sought help from their principal, they received no positive responses. Three young women spoke about their cases of bullying and forced after-school fights and their principals’ reactions to these incidents.68 While these principals worked in three geographically separated areas of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) treated these cases almost identically. These treatments of these students demonstrate how the school principals follow the same guideline to manage minority students, which leads to the unfair treatment of young women of color. In the first case, a group of students attacked a young Cameroonian-origin woman, leaving her with scratches and bruises all over her body and face. When she complained to her high school principal, she received the same suspension as her attackers. While her bruised and scarred face was physical evidence of an assault, her principal did not allow her to speak or defend herself.69 Based on the perpetrators’ statements, the principal decided that both sides of the conflict were responsible and suspended the entire party for two weeks.70 Similarly, another African-origin young woman described how a group of European-origin aggressors challenged her to an after-school fight. Shortly before this incident, this young woman lost her ingroup due to disagreements with some members and became an outlier. She did not want to fight because two factors petrified her: first, fighting, and second, her mother’s hearing about her fighting. Consequently, she left the school without getting into a fight. However, she was called to the principal office the following day to confront the two crying girls who claimed to be “victimized.”71 Even though this young woman avoided violence, she was in a compromising situation. Her aggressors claimed that she threatened them, and they were afraid of her. Therefore, the principal expected an apology for an action she did not

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commit. She wanted to explain herself, but the principal yelled back, shut her down, and suspended her for ten days. Ultimately, this young Black woman had to apologize for an action she did not commit.72 When describing the event, she compellingly associated her experiences of racial aggression with rape. While she demonstrated her frustration with the democratic racism in the education system, she explained how school authorities shut down complaints regarding racial attacks. She elaborated, “like rape [that people do not want to believe it happens], if I come up to them and say that my neighbors just called me the N-word, they don’t believe me.”73 In another case, a young Western Asian-origin woman’s principal silenced and reprimanded her after she retaliated against her classmates’ verbal aggression. Her classmates repeatedly called her the sand N-word, a racist slur for the Middle Eastern population.74 This racial slur is still commonly used for any Eastern individual with a darker skin color. For the entire hour of each class, her classmates, in turn, called her the slur, and she kept quiet since her previous attempts to complain to the teachers and the principal was unsuccessful. The students continued their verbal assaults until this young woman reacted one day and swore back. Her classmates filed a complaint against her, and she got detention.75 The students portrayed this young woman as an unpredictable person who swore at them without reason, and the school principal accepted their words against hers.76 Like other cases, the principal silenced her voice and ignored her side of the story and how she was violated first.77 The lack of credibility of minority students’ words is a reoccurring encounter. These three women spoke about how their principals shut their voices down, ignored their sides of the story, and provided them with unfair judgements solely based on their rival’s accounts.78 The maltreatment caused doubt in these young women regarding their characteristics and behaviors. As a result, they all asked the same question: Why were they mistreated? By silencing the minority victims, the school authorities directed orders at them and prevented future complaints. While the school authorities, such as teachers and principals, must provide support and guidance for students, many teachers and principals knowingly or unknowingly deprive the minority immigrant youths of this support system. The teachers and principals targeted these young women with isolation, segregation, labeling, and silence while responding to their cry for help with the partiality of justice based on the existing racial hierarchy.79 These multifaceted targetings negatively affect young minority immigrant women’s emotional, psychological, academic, and, consequently, economic well-being.

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COUNSELORS AND THE NEW IMMIGRANT YOUTHS’ MENTAL HEALTH The guidance counselors are responsible for guiding high school students toward a successful future. However, these counselors’ duties are not limited to advising students on academic subjects. Toronto District School Board has listed “emotional and mental health support” as one of the guidance counselors’ responsibilities toward the students under their care.80 Therefore, these counselors have a demanding role in high school. Many minority women from the global South and East who attended a Canadian high school were familiar with the concept of the guidance counselor.81 However, the minority women did not have a positive outlook on the idea of a guidance counselor. They defined guidance counselors as individuals “who were just for educational purposes” and who instructed students regarding the course selection for each year, which ultimately helped them to apply for colleges or universities.82 While offering emotional support is one of the responsibilities of guidance counselors, minority students do not get any direction to approach these resources. Nevertheless, in one instance, when a young Western Asian-origin woman sought her high school guidance counselor’s assistance, the counselor rejected her request.83 This first-generation immigrant woman reached out to her counselor after a series of racially driven incidents of verbal harassment. In return, her guidance counselor responded that she could not do anything to help her. The counselor advised her that if she wanted to save herself from the aggression, she needed to “just do well at school to go to the university of [her] choice” and escape the abuse.84 These school personnel not only do not offer emotional support to minority students as per their responsibility, but they also refuse to guide them toward a successful future. Some young minority women confessed to avoiding the school guidance counselors since they did not provide them with any necessary tools or support. A first-generation, South Indian-origin woman passionately exclaimed, “I’ll say this until I take my last breath: counselors don’t do anything. Waste of time, waste of resources! They give you a cliche answer. That’s all. ‘Try going to these links,’ or ‘have you tried talking to your friends?’”85 Disturbingly, many high school guidance counselors have directed young minority immigrant women, especially those with English as their second language or an accent, to take general courses that lead to college admission rather than university admission.86 High school students must take advanced curricula to satisfy university entrance requirements.87 This persuasion was regardless of students’ grades or their future desired majors and topics of

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study.88 The school guidance counselors persistently advised almost every young minority immigrant woman to attend general courses in high school. These general courses would prevent these students from entering university after high school. These academic advisors intimidated these young individuals and told them they could not succeed in university. These young students must argue with their guidance counselors for permission to enrol in their desired advanced courses. While guidance counselors must support and lead high school students to achieve their best potential, these paid resources were another obstacle for minority youths toward their future goals. Many minority immigrant women from the global South and East, whose guidance counselors attempted to convince them that university was not an achievable goal for them, successfully received their undergraduate degrees. A few of these young minority women even enrolled in postgraduate programs.89 While high school is a difficult stage for immigrant youths, these young minority individuals have to deal with constant bilateral pressure. These pressures were from the guidance counselor directing them toward general courses and their parents expecting them to enter one of the country’s most prestigious universities.90 One young Middle Eastern-origin woman, who attended ESL classes, mentioned that her counselor spoke slower with her during their meetings while he was trying to force her to take general math. This guidance counselor attempted to convince her that “colleges were good.”91 An Iranian-origin young woman had to take a drama class one semester to take the advanced math class during the summer semester with the permission of another guidance counselor.92 This young woman had to fight back against the guidance counselor’s pressure. She finally shut the idea of college down by saying she was “Iranian. All [her] family and friends went to university.”93 Guidance counselors are among the education system’s most essential resources to satisfy high school students’ academic and emotional needs. However, this governmental resource has not been responsive to the needs of one of their most vulnerable clientele groups. The minority immigrant youths did not observe these counselors as the assets who would help them succeed but viewed their counselors as obstacles to their accomplishment and happiness.94 IMMIGRANT PARENTS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEIR CHILDREN’S SUCCESS High school is a stage of education in which children develop physically and academically. In high school, many young individuals plan their future

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education. Many of these plans contradict the objectives that their parents dreamt for them. Minority immigrant youths and their parents are not different from this scenario. When immigrant parents arrive in the host countries, they have planned goals for their children’s future, some of which are too exaggerated to accomplish. High school is a crucial stage for an elaborated plan immigrant parents have designed for their children. Meanwhile, these immigrant parents frequently remind their children about the endless sacrifices they made to bring them to their new host countries for a bright future.95 In some instances, the new immigrant parents try to satisfy their shortcomings in the new host country through their children’s success.96 This extensive, success-oriented parental pressure puts minority immigrant youths in a demanding and traumatic situation. A first-generation, Western Asian-origin young woman described how her dad constantly reminded her that he “brought her to Canada, so she could achieve what [he] could not and more.”97 A first-generation, Middle Eastern-origin woman spoke about her serious car accident. She—who was under severe familial stress to excel in her unrealistic course load—“wished [she] had died” when the car hit her.98 However, she stood up when she remembered that she had a biology test the next day. While her family called her “The Doctor” at fourteen, she was carrying the burden of actualizing this label for them with her hard work.99 Her parents registered her in a prestigious high school far away from their home, and she had to take two buses to get to school. While she was an ESL student, her parents wanted her to learn French simultaneously. The heavy burden of unrealistic academic expectations caused her not to find time to seek medical help regarding her injured knee until two weeks after the accident. She confessed that she did not tell her parents about the accident since it would not change anything.100 Some minority immigrant parents applied “the guilt trip.”101 They repeatedly reminded their children that the sole intention of their migration to Canada was to provide better lives for their children. These young immigrants felt obligated to accept excessive hardships, losses, and setbacks in the host countries to satisfy their parents’ desires. Additionally, their parents constantly reminded them of their sacrifices before, during, and after migration. The constant reminder of this sacrificial act became emotional anguish for these young individuals.102 Despite the constant reminder of parental sacrifices, many immigrant parents neglected to consult the nature and the steps of their migration with their children. A young East African-origin woman recounted that her mother reminded her and her sisters how she “wasted [her] whole life saving for [them] to come here (Canada).”103 Yet, her mother did not communicate any aspect of their migration with her or her sisters. This young woman described how their family’s vacation to England suddenly extended into immigrant life in

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Canada.104 She was shocked and scared when their flight landed in Canada instead of Cameroon. Since their mother did not tell her or her siblings that they were coming to Canada to stay, they did not have a chance to prepare themselves or say goodbye to their friends.105 Despite the difficulties that young immigrants experience post-migration, many parents expect their children to appreciate the unconsented move. A Western Asian-origin woman’s parents reminded her that she “should be happy that [she was] in this country [Canada].”106 She recalled how much this made her “[feel] worse” since she did not actively decide to migrate to Canada.107 This parental decision-making turns the complex migration process even more demanding for migrant children and youths. Some immigrant parents’ expectations exceed their children’s abilities since these parents believe their children owe them to gain back what these parents lost in the process of migration. These parents are unaware of the hardships that their children experience at school, and they do not respond positively to their children’s failures and misbehaviors. When a group of minority women physically attacked a young, East African-origin woman, her mother disapproved of her daughter’s involvement in a fierce quarrel.108 One of the aggressors threw a metal cafeteria garbage container directly toward this young woman’s head in this incident. This action could have caused severe bodily harm to this young woman if she were not agile and did not move quickly. The act of aggression led to a fight between the two groups of women. While it was apparent who initiated the conflict, where the battle began, and who the victim was, the school principal suspended both groups, including the aggressor and the victim. During this unjustified ruling, the victim’s mother sided with her school principal regarding the punishment. Furthermore, the young woman’s mother suggested to the school principal that she was sure her daughter was to blame and that he “should have suspended her more than two weeks.”109 This young woman felt victimized, violated, and betrayed by her school and mother.110 Some immigrant parents increase their control over their female children under the label of protection and care after puberty. One young South Asian-origin woman described how her parents did not allow her to commute to school alone even though she had other classmates living in the same neighborhood. Due to lacking trust in the new host country, her parents drove her back and forth to school, sometimes even for lunchtime.111 Consequently, this caused conflicts between this young woman and her peers since her schoolmates observed this sheltered parental attitude as a point of privilege.112 Accordingly, this peer conflict exacerbated this young woman’s physical and sexual abuse during school hours. During high school, based on their stage of development, youths want to spend more time outside the home with their peers. Some immigrant parents

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retaliate by insisting on constantly knowing their children’s whereabouts. A young South Asian-origin woman explained that her parents called her every fifteen minutes during a Halloween party to confirm her safety.113 In answer to her complaints, her parents told her that “they trusted [her], they didn’t trust the people around [her].”114 She explained that there was no threat of danger at that party, while five of her closest friends surrounded her.115 The overbearing control, in some cases, would drive the immigrant youths to rebel back. A young Western Asian-origin woman described how she retaliated against her father’s controlling attitude by skipping classes to have sex.116 Since her father did not allow her to go to parties or “hang out” with people her age, she sought revenge by having sex with older men during school hours.117 In this case, neither the parents nor the school noticed that this young woman did not attend classes since the school did not keep a record and her parents put their trust in the school system.118 The young minority women who complained about their controlling, abusive, and aggressive parents, or were bystanders of such parenting styles, became more susceptible to their peers’ aggressive treatment in high school.119 A young, Middle Eastern-origin woman spoke about an ingroup peer’s experience with high school bullying. The bullied student’s family subjected her to verbal and emotional abuse at home. Consequently, this learned behavior toward abuse made her a perfect victim of aggressive classmates to target her during school hours.120 In some cases, parental aggression, intersecting with other bio-psycho-social challenges in immigrant youths’ lives, drives them toward extreme life choices. A young first-generation Black woman took grades 11 and 12 simultaneously in night and day classes to finish high school faster. She justified this ultimate self-challenging goal setting as an answer to “having a serious problem with [her] dad.”121 She mentioned that she was not in a “good time in [her] life, and [she] felt like [she] was compensating by doing too much.”122 She explained that she actively chose to attend the night school. The students who populated night school were aggressive toward her. The ultimate self-discipline, the choice of night school, and the unreasonable idealistic goal became the self-harm that this woman inflicted upon herself to respond to her abusive parent.123 An Iranian-origin woman whose father and brother were verbally, physically, and emotionally abusive toward her became dependent on illegal substances. Like the last young woman who hid behind excessive schoolwork and self-discipline, this individual drowned herself in self-medication and abuse of prescribed and illicit drugs.124 Some minority young women discussed parental physical abuse. Those whose parents were physically aggressive were among the most vulnerable since they tried to justify the mistreatment through various means. An African-origin woman’s father broke her brother’s arm during an act

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of aggressive fatherly corporal discipline. She and her siblings lied to their mother about the incident and the reason for the broken arm since this young woman’s aunt asked them to “obey their father.”125 Her mother did not allow people to abuse her children under the guise of discipline, but she was kept in the dark. The mother was unaware of these events, as she could not spend any time at home with her children due to the long hours of work. This young woman’s aunt, who provided the family with childcare, told the mother that her son fell and broke his arm. Meanwhile, this young woman blamed different factors for her father’s abusive behaviors, such as her father’s cultural background and naivety, her aunt’s constant support, and her father’s lack of fatherly experience.126 Some immigrant parents take a laissez-faire attitude concerning their children’s trouble at school, even when their children approach them for assistance. A young Iranian-origin woman relayed her tearful conversation with her mother after a substantially challenging day at school. She asked her mother to change her school since she could not stand the humiliation and racism she received from her peers and teachers. In response to this literal cry for help, her mother responded, “Don’t you have anything better to do? Finish it and get out.”127 This conversation happened when this first-generation young woman was in grade 10. She experienced two more years of lonely harassment without the support of any friends or family. She could understand that her mother might not have had the possibility of changing her school, but she believed that her mother could have reacted to her plea for help constructively rather than dismissively. Her mother could have helped her make high school more tolerable.128 Of course, parental neglect cannot be mistaken for the lack of resources available to new immigrant parents in their host countries. Due to the new host country’s political, social, or economic factors, the most attentive parents sometimes can not satisfy their children’s needs for sufficient supervision, stable housing, and an appropriate school. The extensive hours of non-skilled labor often separate immigrant parents and children upon migrating to Canada. Young minority immigrants know how it feels when their parents “spend much time at work. Because [Canadian] life [is] expensive.”129 Many minority women experienced the hardship of sudden moves between residences and schools within a few months of migration. The constant moves had various reasons. These reasons included the new immigrant families needing cheaper places, overstaying their welcome with their hosting friends and families, or the neighborhood they initially resided in was not receptive to them.130 These factors can force immigrant parents to move their newly migrated families several times. Post-migration moves negatively affect the immigrant youths’ newly forming relationships and friendships, hindering their integration into their new host country. While the parents are not

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to blame for these movements affecting their children’s relationships, the children blame their parents for losing their newly found friendships and connections.131 Intergenerational Conflict in Immigrant Families Many families from the global South and East overprotect their girls in the new country of settlement. These parents attempt to protect their girls from Western influences because they fear their daughters dishonor the families.132 However, the protective and conservative mindset conflicts with the newly found sense of freedom and independence that young minority immigrant women experience133—these young girls, who experience the hardship of migration and post-migration, rebel against intergenerational hypocrisy. However, there is a difference between the first- and second-generation minority immigrant women’s attachment to their ethnic, cultural, and familial backgrounds.134 Second-generation minority immigrant girls are more likely to separate themselves from their immigrant parents compared to their firstgeneration counterparts.135 Yet, various psychosocial, economic, religious, and ethnic factors affect first-generation minority female immigrants’ reliance on their ethnic background and their intergenerational bonds. These factors include but are not limited to the length of the first-generation immigrants’ residency in the host country, the immigrant parental disciplinary methods and control on their children, the age of the children at the time of the migration, the frequency of communication between the immigrant children and the host nation, and host nation’s acceptance and tolerance of the minority immigrant children.136 Many first-generation and most second-generation minority immigrant children attain friends from other ethnic and racial identities. These interracial friendships create strong bonds between these young immigrants with the new host nation while deteriorating their intergenerational relationships.137 THE AFTERMATH OF HIGH SCHOOL The young Western Asian-origin woman, addicted to different drugs and spent time in several rehabs in a few countries, explained how the abuse she experienced during high school forced her to seek men’s attention through unhealthy relationships with older men.138 She described how, at age fifteen, she met a twenty-four-year-old man who introduced himself as an eighteen-year-old. Unbeknownst to her, this woman, who experienced acute physical and psychological abuse at home and school, sought shelter in another abusive relationship founded on deception and power imbalance.139

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When the young minority immigrant women spoke about their experiences of past incidents of aggression, they referred to them as if they had just happened recently. These young women reviewed these incidents as if they were still looking for solutions. A young, Indian-origin woman whose teachers decided she was not ready to move to the next grade in high school remembered the shame of being held back. She became the subject of ridicule for her classmates due to her failure.140 The decision to fail this young woman for a year was controversial, and eventually, her parents changed her school to spare her from being tormented. She—a university student at the time of the interview—still felt ashamed and embarrassed for her failure in high school.141 One young Iranian-origin woman, who experienced different forms of bullying, mentioned she could not leave a specific incident to rest. She imagined a new way to handle the aggressor or respond to his insult.142 While there were a few years since these aggressive incidents, the trauma was still fresh for this young woman. An African-origin woman whose schoolmate called her by a so-called joking derogatory term in high school narrated how she did not know what the word meant at the time. She said, “I still remember it. It’s still fresh in my memory because I always think about him.”143 She was still upset for not responding to the verbal aggressors accordingly—“I wish I knew [what it meant] then because I would react [to] it. It hurts every time I think about it.”144 Later, this young woman explains that her lack of reaction was partly due to the lack of support from the school personnel and the teachers, who stood aside and witnessed the incident as silent bystanders. Years after this verbally aggressive incident, she still remembered the positions of every individual involved. Many young minority women cried, sobbed, yelled, sighed, and gasped for air in reminiscing about their high school years. These young immigrant women’s psychological incumbrances are still weighing them down. High school should be a fleeting stage of life, filled with joyous memories of friendships and new experiences. However, high school for these young women had been nothing but a reminder of their lack of belonging to their host countries and a collection of memories of abuse, rejection, isolation, neglect, and racial profiling, to name a few. CONCLUSION: THE LINGERING NIGHTMARES The young minority immigrant women experienced isolation, humiliation, and injustice from their school authorities, such as teachers, principals, and counselors. In contrast, these school authorities must provide support and attention for these young people to succeed and develop psychologically

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and academically. The teachers favored European-origin students or similar ethnic backgrounds over minority students. The principals shut the minority immigrant students’ voices and complaints down. Moreover, the guidance counselors forcefully directed immigrant students toward colleges while devaluing these students’ intellectual abilities. These are examples of a so-called multicultural Canada’s discriminatory and biased education system. Similarly, minority immigrant parents usually trust the authorities and the school system and expect their children to achieve beyond their capabilities. These parental controlling behaviors damage the parent-child trusting relationship and divert a sense of insecurity and loneliness to the immigrant child. Due to these factors, these young immigrants either choose a blasé attitude or get involved in extreme self-harm activities. NOTES 1. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Henry and Tator, 1994. 5. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 6. Ibid. 7. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 8. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 9. Ibid. 10. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 11. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 12. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 13. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 23. Ibid. 24. Participant 17 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019.

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25. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 26. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 27. Ibid. 28. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 35. Ibid 36. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019, and participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 37. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 38. Ibid. 39. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 40. Ibid. 41. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 48. Ibid. 49. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 55. Ibid. 56. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Khayambashi, July 7, 2021. 63. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 64. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.

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67. Ibid. 68. Participants 16, 19, and 20 in discussion with the author, January 16, 11, 28 2019. 69. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 70. Ibid. 71. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Participants 16, 19, and 20 in discussion with the author, January 16, 11, 28 2019. 79. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 80. TDSB, 2014. 81. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 82. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 83. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 84. Ibid. 85. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 86. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 87. Watt et al., 2012. 88. Ibid. 89. Post research follow-up, author's personal notes, 2020. 90. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 91. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 92. Ibid. 93. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 94. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 95. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 96. Somerville and Robinson, 2016; Taylor and Krahn, 2013. 97. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 98. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid.

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101. Participants 2, 7, 15, 16, 19, 22, and 27 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019, October 22, 2018, December 5, 2018, January 16, 11, April 29, August 21, 2019. 102. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 103. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 107. Ibid. 108. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 112. Ibid. 113. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 120. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 121. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 125. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 126. Ibid. 127. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 128. Ibid. 129. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019, and participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 130. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 131. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019, and participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 132. Somerville 2019, 95. 133. Ibid. 134. Harris and Chen, 2022. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 137. Gielen, Chuang, Moodley, and Talbot, 2021.

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138. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 139. Ibid. 140. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 141. Ibid. 142. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 143. Participant 24 in discussion with the author, February 24, 2019. 144. Ibid.

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The Good, the Bad, the Repulsive

Many minority immigrant women from the global South and East experience systematic and societal violence, ostracization, and cultural racism in the first few months of their arrival in Canada. Regardless of their age or socioeconomic and religious background, the host nation reminds impressionable young immigrants of their cultural stereotypes and their cultural unacceptability in their host country. Social and mass media echo society’s sentiments against these minority individuals through the conspicuity of their stereotypical representation. The racist jokes in television series and talk shows at the expense of minority immigrants under the guise of freedom of speech deteriorate the already shaken relationship between the dominant culture and immigrant groups. These jokes create a subtle yet damaging attitude against minority immigrants in North America, and more specifically, Canada. In a democratic racist culture like Canada, explicitly disrespecting someone’s culture is unacceptable. Therefore, people find other channels to direct their intolerance toward their targeted population. In such societies, the majority population applies different methods of passive aggression, such as reserved reminders, unconsented lessons, condescending advice, or joking insults, to mask their prejudicial attitude toward minority populations. Criticizing and condescending advice and joking insults are the most common methods of prejudice that bombard minority youths and their characteristics.1 Many young minority immigrant women experience unconsented and abusive comments, criticism, or remarks from their teachers and peers regarding their physical characteristics. The young women, whose biological differences from their Western peers awarded them nicknames such as “hairy armpit,” become preoccupied with these differences.2 The dominant culture criticizes every aspect of minority immigrant women’s biological and ethical bodies that violates their sense of belonging and emotional well-being. However, immigrant women cannot defend themselves since the dominant culture has always tiptoed around the edges of democratic values. Especially in Canada, multicultural narratives have been careful not 85

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to bother the sociocultural and racial equilibrium. Canadians avoid discussing taboo subjects, such as criticizing the immigrant populations’ countries of origin, disapproving of their cultural backgrounds, and disrespecting their language. However, by attacking minority bodies, forbidding their language in public, and ridiculing other aspects of minorities’ physical selfhood, the dominant discourse satisfies their need to segregate minority immigrants without being reprimanded for their actions. By criticizing minority individuals based on their physical characteristics—many of which are imaginary, age-related, or genetically modified—White culture avoids the label of racism. However, on more critical observation, the aggression over physical characteristics has a racial undertone since this type of aggression always occurs in a unidirectional manner from the dominant culture toward minority groups.3 One indirect channel through which the majority population attacks young minority women is their smell. Without explicitly racially offensive language, the dominant culture targets, insults, and inferiorizes minority individuals based on the stereotypical smell of their foods, bodies, and cultures. Canadian dominant White culture turned the youthful minority women’s scent, real or imaginary, into the most criticized aspect of their minority selfhood. Smell shaming has been a repeated theme among young minority immigrant women. Besides the scent of their bodies, their choice of clothes, physical characteristics, or the smell of their food are other factors that make the young African and Asian-origin immigrant women vulnerable to their peers and teachers’ isolation and disdain.4 The dominant culture delivered abusive behavior to these minority youths under different labels, such as pure observation, concern, or teasing. White culture joked and pranked the girls from the global South and East for their feminine traits because of the more visible indicators of puberty in these girls, both in size and hair color.5 The jokes, pranks, or advice separating young immigrant youths from their majority high school peers are absolute and robust forms of racist expressions. While the dominant culture defends racially charged humor, these democratic attacks are xenophobic in nature, affecting many young women’s self-esteem, both when the attack happens and years after. This chapter questions how the dominant culture’s micro-aggression toward the young minority women’s physical characteristics, such as the smell of their body or the amount of their facial and body hair, affects these individuals in a multidirectional manner. Furthermore, this chapter investigates how this democratic racism affects these young women’s identity formation in their new host country, in this case, Canada.

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WHAT IS THE SMELL OF YOUR CULTURE? European-origin high school students taunt young minority immigrant women over the smell of their bodies, food, or clothes, and their teachers silently observe these aggressive behaviors. Sometimes the teachers become the direct aggressors, making the experience more damaging for these minority individuals. The members of the majority population stereotype and segregate these minority women based on their cultural practices and ethnic background. The dominant culture observes these minority individuals based on what they eat and how the smell of their food affects the scent of their bodies.6 Many minority women have been ridiculed, blamed, and ostracized for the imaginary lingering smell of the spices on their clothes. These minority individuals share a sense of anger, embarrassment, and helplessness years after these experiences.7 These young women tried innovative methods to mask the imaginary odors and ensure their clothes were scent-free. One Indian-origin woman described her painstaking task of keeping her clothes “odor-free.”8 She explained how the “smell joke” to her was to convey a message. Therefore, she strove to eliminate the possibility of a lingering smell on her or her clothes. She put perfume on her clothes to conceal the undesirable smell of their house. She obsessively tried to hide the imaginary “smell of the food lingering on [her] clothes.”9 She described how she separated herself from her Indian household to keep her body away from Indian food and its smell for the sake of her “Canadian friends.”10 Finally, while her mother was cooking, she closed her room’s door and put “dryer sheets in front of [her] door and rubbed them on [herself] to smell fresh because [she] didn’t want to smell bad like [their] food. [She] didn’t want to feel ashamed of what was happening from the cooking.”11 A Western Asian-origin woman described how her peers called her homemade food “stinky.”12 She explained how it made her feel different from other schoolmates. Consequently, she started eating food in the school’s bathrooms to avoid other students’ “teasing.”13 Sometimes the dominant cultural stereotypes the minority individuals with similar characteristics under the same category. In such circumstances, the racially biased dominant culture attributes similar racial elements to the minority individuals from different cultural backgrounds ignorantly. A second-generation, Arab-origin woman described how her peers told her she smelled like curry, a known spice for Indian food. This young woman did not question the nature of verbal aggression; however, the culturally uneducated people offended her.14 She was amazed how the dominant culture did not know the difference between Arabic and Indian people. She complained about the “uneducated” people when multiple classmates hung on to the idea

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of the smell of curry on her clothes. She clarified that Arabic food does not incorporate curry.15 An Iranian-origin young woman was also unhappy that her former peers stereotyped her under the wrong cultural background. “I got curry jokes a lot. Ummm. Black jokes, curry jokes. Everything but Iranian. Because . . . people wouldn’t even know my background.”16 These young women misplaced their sense of anger considering their maltreatment; they were offended at the culturally incorrect stereotypes rather than the experience of aggression bestowed upon them. These young women did not question the irrelevance of ostracizing a person based on the smell of their cultural food or spices, but rather they experienced frustration for their misrepresentation. Sometimes the dominant culture promotes and praises a minority individual by separating them from their cultural stereotypes. These racially motivated comments elevate the dominant culture to a superior level and cause dissonance for the involved minority individuals. An Indian-origin woman described her pride when her European-origin ex-boyfriend validated her cleanliness by separating her from the stink of her culture.17 He reassured her that, unlike other Indians, she did not smell like curry. The young woman blamed her cultural food and its smell for her embarrassment and victimization. She recalled how her ex-boyfriend openly spoke about his locker room conversation with his male peers about her body’s smell. He proudly told her that he confirmed to them that “No, she didn’t smell,” “though the other ones [Indians] do.”18 She confessed that while the cultural inappropriateness made her uncomfortable, she felt overjoyed when she received her ex-boyfriend’s and his peers’ approval. She said her desire to “fit in” encouraged her to distance herself from the existing stereotypes. She did not “want to be an outcast.”19 This young woman experienced cognitive dissonance during one of the most impressionable stages of her life as her sense of belonging conflicted between her host nation and her cultural background. This young woman’s sole incentive to accept the dominant culture’s humiliation, tolerate the inner dilemma, and proactively maintain a scent-free physique was to fit in among her peers. On the one hand, she felt happy to fit in with the majority culture and attain their approval for not having the stereotypical Indian scent. On the other hand, she experienced shame whenever she allowed the dominant discourse to disrespect her culture, people, and family.20 Minority immigrants’ dishes and cultural characteristics were irrelevant to the criticism that the foods received from the dominant culture because the food handlers were the target of the objections. In other words, the association of the food, immigrant bodies, and minority cultures would locate minority immigrant youths as the targets of their peers’ aggressive behavior.21 One young East African-origin woman recalled how her food was ridiculed and disgraced without any grounds of smell, taste, or texture. This young woman had a hamburger for lunch, which she described as “the most Canadian” food

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possible.22 Nevertheless, a European-origin classmate approached and told her food “looked disgusting” and inquired if she was eating “sh*t.”23 This young woman described how she lost her appetite and hated her food at once. Ridiculing someone’s food is a symbolic attack on their identity. The food’s smell or appearance is not the actual subject of the aggression. The real challenge is the association of food with the immigrant identity and indicating their lack of belonging based on the consumed food. Many young immigrant women confessed that they usually “resisted” eating their food in school.24 The lack of appetite or refusal to eat at school was a shared behavior among the young minority immigrant women from the global South and East who experienced humiliation for their homemade foods. A few women professed about dealing with an eating disorder after experiencing shame associated with their food.25 The next most undesirable and embarrassing smell for young immigrant women from the global South and East is their bodies’ natural scent. While the popular culture celebrates the Western woman’s scent—Perfume26; Scent of a Woman27—the dominant culture shames young immigrant women for their bodies’ aroma.28 For the Western culture, the Eastern woman’s natural aroma is a shameful, intolerable odor. One first-generation African-origin woman recalled an incident with her European-origin classmates, accusing her of having an “African” smell because she did not “use deodorant spray.”29 She mentioned that she had “never even heard of deodorant before [she] came to Canada.”30 Soon after, her European-origin teacher cornered her, smelled her closely, and spoke with her about this “sensitive” matter. While this young woman had never experienced any problem with her body odor back in her home country, her teacher singled out and humiliated her, reminding her that her body smelled unpleasant. This young woman’s teacher asked her if she used deodorant since she had a “powerful body odor. Like, the smell of body.”31 She mentioned that she became overtly conscious of her bodily smell, primarily since she had never known her body smelt differently from others.32 The peculiar point was the over-representation of the dominant culture among those who found her physical smell offensive. Similarly, one Saudi Arabian-origin woman discussed how her classmates from the dominant culture would “pinch their nose passing [her] in the hallways” at school as if she smelled foul. This action made her feel degenerate and undesirable.33 Sometimes majority culture passes their controversial and racially biased messages through humor at the expense of vulnerable minority individuals. While still studying, one young Western Asian-origin woman, who worked as a salesperson, recalled her managers complimenting her for smiling under any circumstances. Her manager always said, “She always smiles,” and other sales representatives repeated this phrase and laughed. She was “one

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of the best ones.”34 Finally, one of the sales representatives told her why her coworkers were laughing. Her coworkers jokingly mentioned that other sales representatives played with the words by saying “she always smells” behind her back.35 These coworkers replaced smell with a smile. When she complained to the management, the management asked her to have a sense of humor. They told her she must take this as a compliment because she might smell as she sold many items on the floor, and the job required much movement.36 She later added that this experience made her overtly self-conscious about her smell, and she became obsessed with buying perfumes and taking showers before and after each shift. BODY, HAIR, AND TRAIT-SHAME The dominant culture criticizes the young immigrants’ body identity and shatters the young individuals’ spirit and self-esteem. By condemning the physical characteristics of immigrant youths, the majority culture segregates the minority youths and avoids the undesirable label of racism. These criticisms remind the immigrant children that the new host nation does not accept their differences. This rejection of the physical attributes of these immigrant youths is a revelation that indicates their lack of belonging. One of the most criticized properties of young minority immigrant women in Canada is the amount and shape of their hair. One second-generation Indian-origin woman described how her teacher ridiculed her in front of her art class based on the volume of her hair. This young woman mentioned how she was very proud of her hair until that day.37 During an art activity, she described how she drew a picture of her family in class. She proudly drew herself with long black hair and presented the drawing to the teacher. When the teacher showed her drawing to the class, she made fun of how “huge” her hair was.38 She recalled how this encouraged everyone to laugh at her and her hair. She did not know why they found her hair funny.39 In another instance, a young Sikh woman cut her hair, despite her religious and cultural beliefs, due to the constant ridicule she endured from her peers.40 This young woman’s peers made her self-conscious about her facial hair and her head full of long black hair. She remembered her hair as thick, long, and combed back since her mother used coconut oil to nurture her hair based on traditional practices. However, her appearance, which represented natural beauty and parental love, instigated her peers’ harassment. This young woman explained how her peers, especially young men, labelled her FOB (fresh off the boat) and laughed at her long black ponytail.41 She, however, blamed the media as the most crucial factor for her victimization. She mentioned that popular culture portrayed her cultural image

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as an unsophisticated style. This media representation gave the dominant culture a language to tease her. She admitted that because of the same media, she always wanted short hair to fit in with her peers.42 This young woman explained that in TV shows, characters change themselves to be accepted and fit within the cool crowd. She transformed herself gradually to be accepted, but she “miss[ed her] long hair.”43 While long hair was a point of labelling and segregation for this young Sikh woman, short hair became a cause of harassment for a young Western Asian-origin woman. This Iranian-origin woman’s peers would consistently assign her the “father’s role” during their playtime as a reminder that she did not attain the desirable characteristics of a woman.44 Although her peers offended her through the passive attack on her features, she did not defend herself for fear of losing her few friends and, consequently, encountering isolation. This young woman who recalled her friends as “mean” and “judgey” excused their abusive behaviors since they were “indirect.”45 Another Western Asian-origin woman spoke about following the fashion trend and dying her hair green. Her high school allowed students to dye their hair as long as the hair dye was temporary. However, when she tried to show her green hair to her teacher and peers, her teacher told her that her hair transferred green to her white shirt. She recalled her teacher’s disgusted facial gesture as she informed her that her shirt was full of green hair dye and looked awful.46 This young woman’s excitement and glee turned into embarrassment and humiliation. She ran home without checking her shirt and missed a test she had the next period. However, when she checked her blouse at home, to her disbelief, it was not green.47 Years after this incident, this woman still battled anger and confusion toward her teacher’s reaction to her fashion statement. She believed, “even if [her] shirt were green, it was just a shirt, right?”48 The humiliation that minority students experience is diverse, and, in some cases, this trait-shaming relates to their biological growth. A young Iranian-origin woman spoke about the shame she experienced when her peers joked about her hairy arms. While hairy arms are an inevitable part of puberty for almost everyone, many young Eastern and Middle Eastern women become targeted for this physical development. One woman even gained the nickname “hairy knuckles.”49 This young woman’s peers ridiculed her as if she were a furry creature over the most natural stage of pubescent for young adults. This young woman observed her hairy arms as a shortcoming that gave her peers leverage to humiliate and segregate her.50 Years after these episodes of harassment, she blamed her arms and the amount of their hair for her difficult experience in high school.51 Similarly, an Arabic-origin woman recounted her experience of being shamed for her body hair, in this case, underarm hair. This young woman spoke about her newly grown pubescent underarm hair as if she were

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recounting a mythical creature. Her hatred toward her underarm hair was deeply rooted in a cruel trick that a group of her peers played on her during a school trip. The trauma of this “teasing” still haunted her years after the school trip.52 During this getaway, a classmate maliciously forced this young woman to dance, so she could show her other peers that she had dark underarm hair. The classmate opened and raised this young woman’s arms for everyone to see her underarm and started the chant of the hairy armpit, and she carried that nickname for an entire year as a developing young adult. Dark body hair is typical among Middle Eastern pubescent girls. Furthermore, unlike the average European-origin girls, Middle Eastern parents are more likely to forbid their daughters to eliminate their unwanted hair. While women from the global South and East have darker and thicker body hair, they use traditional methods to eradicate their hair, such as sugaring and threading. However, most young Middle Eastern girls must wait until they finish high school.53 Like other Middle Eastern-origin parents, this young woman’s mother did not tolerate her eliminating her body hair despite the number of times she requested it. That night, she found a razor and shaved her underarms and legs. In the following passage, she reiterated the memory of that school trip night with her peers. So, I was so hairy for most of my high school career. My armpit hair would be like hanging. . . . [During a] trip, behind my back, [a female classmate] told everyone, “I’m gonna make **** dance.” I wasn’t there to hear her . . . she lifted my arms to show everyone I hadn’t shaved my armpits yet. . . . They chanted hairy armpit. . . . It was an overnight trip. So, I went back to the hotel, bought myself a razor, and tried to shave. Blood was everywhere. . . . I was just, like, “I’m going to show her,” but I showed myself.54

In the same way, a Sikh woman’s classmates, especially male peers, shamed her for her puberty-related facial hair. During the years, this young woman had experienced every method of facial hair removal, from waxing to laser treatments. While in grade nine, this young woman began having facial hair, but her parents did not allow her to use any hair removal treatments. The unwanted hair gave her peers an excuse for calling her a man and asking her if she wanted to grow a beard.55 A Middle Eastern-origin woman was labeled “unibrow” among her peers because her thick eyebrows were attached above her nose. She remembered the constant torment she experienced during high school. This young woman’s peers verbally abused, belittled, and ridiculed her facial features.56 To avoid their peers’ criticism, dislike, and ultimately isolation, young minority women begged their parents to allow them “fix their flaws” and eliminate their body hair.57 Meanwhile, they would willingly permit people to

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verbally abuse them in the form of derogatory terms attributed to their facial and body features. One woman admitted that her “friends made fun of her face” and “called her ugly,” but still, she “would always hang out with them during recess” to avoid “being alone.”58 Later, this woman spoke about her dissonance and inner conflict about keeping the friendship with her abusers. She felt conflicted about her friends’ attitudes and behavior toward her, juxtaposing her social display of tolerating verbal aggression during recess. This woman expressed her conflicting emotions as “weird.”59 She explained that while she was satisfied to have friends, the same “friends” jeopardized her emotional well-being and made her uncomfortable. She confessed that she constantly questioned “how far [she] could take [their abuse].”60 ISLAMOPHOBIA AND XENOPHOBIA: TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN Islamophobia is having adverse actions, attitudes, and thoughts toward Islam and Muslim populations. Based on Runnymede’s report, Islamophobia violates Muslim populations in various methods: It excludes, discriminates, harasses, and isolates Muslim people in diverse social, political, and academic settings.61 Similarly, xenophobia refers to having prejudicial negative thoughts, beliefs, and behavior toward immigrants. These two concepts are closely related and feed from each other. This section elaborated on these two concepts from the young immigrant women’s perspectives.62 Islamophobia The controversial topic of the hijab has made young immigrant women vulnerable in their Western host nation, particularly during the past few decades. The Western world observes Muslim women through an infantilized and victimized lens. The savior complex of the West attempts to free Muslim women from the shackles of hijab. The Western culture perceives Eastern women as being captured under their male counterparts’ control. This mindset attempts to salvage Muslim women through further victimization, segregation, and condemnation.63 The governmental policies and laws disrespect Muslim women’s freedom of choice. For example, Quebec’s Bill 21 banned hijab for women in positions of authority64 who are acting as public servants.65 While this bill argues that it affects all religious symbols, banning hijab limits Muslim women’s daily social interactions. While women in Canada have been fighting for their freedom to choose, some minority Muslim women have lost their fundamental right to decide what to wear.66

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While Quebec politically established this act of oppression, many Canadians attempted to get involved in this forced form of liberation for hijabed Muslim women. In Toronto, Ontario, a young, hijabed Middle Eastern-origin woman decided to denounce her hijab due to her peers’ harassment. In this case, although she chose to remove her hijab, this choice was due to the acute sense of isolation and verbal abuse.67 When an individual rejects their cultural attire or religious symbols, the decision does not entirely depend on the person. This young woman spoke about how her hijab segregated her from many school activities, such as playing soccer. She found her scarf “an obstacle” in the way of “connecting with the other players.”68 She mentioned how the other players “left her out” and “chatted amongst themselves.”69 This attitude made this young woman feel “neglected.”70 Therefore, removing her hijab was the only way to solve the problem. The shared cultural symbol, such as the wearing of hijab in Canada, post 9/11, might strengthen intergenerational connections, but the same factor can deteriorate these connections.71 In this case, some first- and second-generation immigrant hijabed women seek their identities in their intergenerational roots and find strength in fighting systematic injustice.72 However, the same systematic racism, Islamophobia, in this case, causes some minority Muslim young women to renounce their Muslim identity—at least publicly.73 The rejection of their cultural, religious, or ethnic identities creates intergenerational conflict for these young individuals.74 Correspondingly, a Syrian-origin woman who wore a hijab described her high school experience as “pure isolation.”75 This young woman explained how her hijab separated her and the rest of the high school population. She even considered removing her headscarf. This decision, which collided with her religious and cultural background, enraged her mother.76 While she had no say during her migration to Canada, she experienced years of lonely struggles in the aftermath of this familial decision. Her hijab made her a convenient target for the dominant culture and other minority groups to harass her emotionally and verbally. Yet, removing her hijab would cost her familial tension and conflict. Donning hijab is a challenging choice for young Muslim women, as their peers isolate and neglect them for donning it, and their family and culture label them as shallow if they remove it. Some young Muslim girls find other platforms to satisfy their need to communicate with their peers. A young woman, who typically wore a headscarf, created a Facebook page with her profile picture without a headscarf. She changed her name to anonymize her identity and create a haven for herself in the cyber world. The anonymization and security measures she took to conceal her identity could not hide her from her high school aggressors and soon instigated the torture of her physical self. A young Middle Eastern-origin woman who harassed her for her headscarf

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recognized her profile picture and interrogated her about her new Facebook account. The aggressor asked if she were the owner of the fake Facebook account, calling her by the Facebook username. The victimized Muslim woman, whose secret identity was jeopardized, denied having a Facebook account. She knew her aggressor had malicious intentions. Soon after, the aggressor started spreading rumors and gossip regarding this young woman’s choice to have a secret Facebook account to access boys. Distributing this rumor is tremendously dangerous, especially for a woman in a Muslim family.77 Spreading stories about girls and sexual subject matters could have fatal consequences for some Muslim girls and women. This young Muslim woman was not safe even under a false identity in the anonymity of the cyber world. To gain the dominant culture’s acceptance and avoid loneliness, she removed her hijab, changed her foreign name, and built herself a safe space. Unfortunately, a cyber identity alteration created a new crisis for her as her peers labeled her “fake,” “double-faced,” and “player,” which, in return, heightened the abuse.78 The crisis surrounding the hijab, either wearing or removing it, has been an ongoing issue for Muslim minority youths in Canada. To stop peer aggression and isolation, a Muslim, Middle Eastern-origin woman removed her hijab in high school. She desired to be “normal” and “like others.” In return, her teachers and peers celebrated her action and villainized her religion, referring to her act as “courageous.”79 One of her teachers even applauded her, commenting, “‘You look much prettier without that black scarf’ with a disgusted look on her face.”80 At this point, this young woman witnessed how the dominant culture of Canada rejected and disapproved of her culture. She felt embarrassed that the dominant culture of Canada viewed her culture adversely. Especially since her teacher celebrating her beauty without hijab would clash with her mother’s choice of religion and religious attire. This young woman experienced years of cognitive dissonance since her teacher, her authority figure from the dominant culture, rejected her religion, culture, and entire Muslim family and background in the association.81 The rejection of the Muslim hijab or veil is deeply xenophobic since many North American and European cultural practices embrace the idea of hijab or hair covering for women.82 Christianity and Judaism have similar practices regarding head or hair covering for both women and men.83 However, the dominant culture perceives Muslim immigrant girls who choose to wear hijabs as oppressed and in need of liberation.84 This Western view of victimized Eastern women under the hijab ignores these women’s choices and the cultural background of the hijab among their communities. Muslim girls and women become accustomed to the hijab from a young age, and the hijab becomes a part of their identity, attire, and sense of empowerment.85 Nevertheless, multiculturalism’s façade

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utilizes the concept of oppression to force insecurity upon these young women and girls and lower their social status and power. Xenophobia While the Western culture preaches for the liberation and empowerment of young Eastern women from the hijab, the same dominant culture limits these immigrant populations from acting according to their age and preferences.86 One young Indian-origin woman competed in her college’s heritage dance. She recalled how an after-hours security guard called the police because she refused to lower her music volume in the dance studio. This young woman, seventeen at the time of this incident, was practicing her dance moves to an Indian song, and school dance studios allowed loud music to create a ballroom ambiance. She stated that people even danced to loud hip-hop songs in these studios, but “it was clear that the White security guard had a problem with [her] personally.”87 After one notice, the security guard called the police on this teenage girl because her music was described as a public disturbance. When the police arrived, the security guard accused the young woman of trespassing. The police officers left soon after the security guard changed his original complaint, and the trespassing complaint was false. However, she decided to leave since she felt unwelcome. Based on Canadian standards, criticizing someone’s cultural music is legally unacceptable; therefore, the security guard attacked the minority woman’s music volume, and consequently, her permission to be physically present in the educational facility. In this incident, this security guard invited the police officers as an act of intimidation and isolation of the young woman practicing her culture within the limits of her host country’s rights and freedoms. Furthermore, the school authorities never disciplined or even questioned the security guard in question for xenophobic behavior directed toward an immigrant minor. Acts of xenophobia can be practiced in various forms of stereotyping. The following case reflects on the association of twerking with Black identity. Twerking is “a sexually provocative manner [of dance] involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.”88 The dominant culture refers to twerking as a symbol of sexuality and promiscuity.89 Western dominant culture also stereotypes Black women as hypersexual, lustful, and indecent.90 While this book does not criticize the hypersexuality or promiscuity of women, White culture stereotypes Black women with Jezebel characteristics and expects them to act accordingly.91 A Muslim, South African-origin Black woman narrated how her European-origin White schoolmates aggressively asked her to teach them how to twerk.92 This young Muslim woman felt offended by how the dominant culture automatically related her skin color

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to twerking. She did not fathom how her peers categorized her under one of her Western-attributed stereotypes—that is, being an expert in twerking—and ignored her other characteristics, such as her Muslimness.93 In the case of another young, first-generation South African-origin woman, her peers did not ask her to teach them twerking; in fact, her peers rejected her for her lack of fashion. This young woman stated there was always something that the dominant culture would reject regarding immigrant women; in her case, it was her “off-season” clothing style.94 Consequently, this minority immigrant woman dressed fashionably to avoid embarrassment and isolation. Like other young minority women, years after these incidents, this young woman was still traumatized from the xenophobic attacks that her peers subjected her during high school. Whether hijab or fashion, there is always a reason for immigrant women’s ostracization, humiliation, and verbal and physical aggression. CONCLUSION The young immigrant women have learned to observe themselves through the dominant culture’s lens and modify themselves to accommodate the European-origin cultural requirements and beauty standards. The dominant culture stereotypes, restricts, abuses, and rejects young minority individuals without considering these young women’s needs. The dominant culture materializes these women’s bodies, cultures, and well-being. The dominant culture shames young women from the global South and East for their bodies, smells, hair, religion, food, language, accents, and parents and ancestors. The constant shaming shatters these growing minds and bodies’ sense of self and keeps them in a vulnerable position. These young Canadian populations observe themselves as rejected, labeled, and ridiculed. The inequitable treatment toward these newly migrated individuals replaces the sense of pride, self-esteem, and belonging to their country of settlement with anger, dissonance, and helplessness in them. While many minority women grew out of the stages of oppression and learned to stand up for themselves after years of humiliation and subjugation, these women still remember their abusers and the abuse and harassment they experienced from their aggressors vividly. When recalling those events, these women provided a memorized account of their experience with aggression and discrimination. They recalled the essences, the involved parties, and the utmost emotional suffering they experienced during those incidents.

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NOTES 1. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 2. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 3. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 4. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 5. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 6. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 7. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 8. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 13. Ibid. 14. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 15. Ibid. 16. Participant 8 in discussion with the author, December 17, 2018. 17. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Participants 5, 7, 19, and 27 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019, October 22, 2018, January 11, and August 21, 2019. 22. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 23. Ibid. 24. Participant 19, 22, and 27 in discussion with the author, January 11, April 29, August 21, 2019; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 25. Ibid. 26. Tykwer, Heil, and Klimek, 2006. 27. Brest, 1992. 28. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 29. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid.

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33. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 34. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 45. Ibid. 46. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Participant 7 in discussion with the author, October 22, 2018. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 56. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 57. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 58. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Trust, 1997. 62. Kende, Anna, and Péter Krekó, 2020. 63. Spencer and Chesler, 2007. 64. Coletta, April 20, 2021. 65. Ellsworth, April 20, 2021. 66. Ibid. 67. Participant 13 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Saleh, 2021; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 72. Hirji, 2021. 73. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019.

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74. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 75. Participant 1 in discussion with the author, November 6, 2018. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Heath, 2008. 83. Ibid. 84. Leet-Otley, 2020. 85. Hussain, 2019. 86. Participant 18 in discussion with the author, October 23, 2018. 87. Ibid. 88. Pérez, 2016. 89. Ibid. 90. Donovan and Williams, 2002. 91. Ibid. 92. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 93. Ibid. 94. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019.

Chapter Five

My Accent, My Name, My Identity The Physical World Versus Cyberworld

Canada is the migration hub for people from diverse cultural backgrounds, and therefore, it hosts a variety of accents, skin colors, and international names from around the globe. The collection of cultures and colors sounds thrilling and welcoming at first glance. However, many immigrant women from the global South and East experience assault, exotification, and loss of their identities.1 First- and second-generation minority women and girls face the dominant culture’s criticism of their hybrid identity. The dominant culture scrutinizes these young minority women, judges them, and continuously labels them based on the binary of exotically desirable or undesirable.2 Canadian dominant culture categorizes young minority women with claims such as unpronounceable names, incoherent accents, smelly bodies, and exotic skin color.3 Many of these young women learn to live with these hostilities under their assumed label, while some retreated to their diasporic communities to avoid these labels. The experience with some forms of peer aggression has evolved drastically among minority youths due to the introduction of cybercommunication. Cyber communication has introduced new ways to abuse and humiliate minority women. This chapter discusses the communication and linguistic trauma that minority immigrant youths experience in Canada in the physical world and cyberspace. UNPRONOUNCEABLE NAMES AND INCOHERENT ACCENTS A hybrid identity is a healthy, gradual, and beneficial adjustment for new immigrant children and youths in host countries.4 This gradual adjustment allows immigrant children and youths to find their hybrid culture between the two non-hierarchical cultures of their home and host nations. To develop 101

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a balanced, integrated personality, an individual must go through a slow process of adjustment. However, immigrant children do not have the leisure to build their hybrid identities. These young immigrants usually receive a considerably compressed amount of time to get accustomed to their host society. There is a common practice for visible minority immigrants to relocate to regions populated mainly by visible minorities. These ethnic-minority-populated locations are called ethnic enclaves.5 The visible minority immigrants usually choose an ethnic enclave that matches—or is most similar to—their cultural background or country of origin. Minority individuals would take refuge from the host country’s aggression, such as xenophobia, in these ethnic enclaves.6 Minority immigrant children whose parents choose to live in the ethnic enclave face difficulty starting schooling since they must suddenly integrate into the Canadian education system. Therefore, regardless of how long these children were living in Canada, they faced the dominant culture at school for the first time. Many young minority immigrant women remembered their early interactions with the dominant Canadian culture. These new Canadians never forget the unwelcoming and impatient attitude of the host nation toward their unfamiliar names and struggling accents.7 A second-generation, Indian-origin woman described her first day of junior kindergarten and her first experience with the dominant culture. On the first day of school, she suddenly recognized the segregation between her father and the authorities. This six-year-old girl experienced a lack of belonging when she witnessed how her father struggled to pronounce her name for her White teacher. In return, the teacher repeatedly and aggressively told her father that she could not pronounce his daughter’s name.8 At this moment, this young child noticed her father was not as strong as she thought.9 This young woman described this feeling of not being heard as an unusual and lonely experience. The first day at her school was the first time she witnessed her father communicating with the authorities outside their ethnic enclave. Soon after this interaction, this six-year-old learned to “colonize [her] name so people would know” her.10 One Iranian-origin young woman spoke about her first day of high school in Canada. She—who had just migrated to Canada—experienced loneliness, doubts, and a lack of understanding of her surroundings’ language.11 Standing in the school’s locker area, she was isolated, lost, and out of space. At that moment, a girl approached her and told her something. Due to her “lack of access to the language,” she did not understand what the girl asked her. The English-speaking girl’s “bossy” and unfriendly attitude turned into an aggressive and commanding tone while repeating the exact phrase repeatedly. The aggressor was asking her to move from her locker since the immigrant girl was unknowingly standing in front of her locker. The lack of fluency in English put this young woman in a vulnerable position. Her delayed response made

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her peer angry, and she eventually commanded her to “MOVE,”12 which she understood. While she remembered this incident as if her aggressor yelled at her and humiliated her in front of the entire school, she was confident that her peer merely spoke to her in a demeaning and degrading manner.13 An Iranian-origin young woman imitated her drama teacher’s tone when the teacher blamed her accent for rejecting her for any roles in the school play. This drama teacher rationalized their selection based on the young minority woman’s accent in a Canadian school system, which is expected to abide by multicultural values. The drama teacher said her accent “came out” during the audition for the roles.14 This young woman, who became a successful advocate for human rights, spoke about how an educator blamed a young minority immigrant’s accent as the sole reason for her rejection. The broken communication is not always related to the lack of accessibility to the language. In some cases, minorities who migrated from the host country’s colonies tend to be fluent in the host nation’s language, but this does not prevent them from linguistic aggression. Many of them encounter censorship that leaves them unheard. A young woman, who migrated from Cameroon to Canada as a teenager, experienced years of anguish due to her accent in high school.15 She had to repeat her sentences a few times in every social interaction and communication attempt with her peers. Sometimes, her peers imitated her accent while using gibberish instead of trying to understand and communicate with her. Although English was her first and only language, her migration to Canada made her feel inadequate in expressing herself in English. Consequently, she became silenced. The dominant culture did not attempt to communicate with her, and the communication became an unappreciated struggle for this young woman. The battle put her in a “frustrating” situation.16 The frustration forced her to adopt the Canadian accent and eliminate her cultural accent. However, she soon decided against this resolution. At this point, she questioned her self-worth, and as she put it, she asked herself, “what the hell am I doing?”17 Another first-generation African-origin woman described her devastation with the constant mimicry of her accent. This young woman, who migrated to Canada as a refugee after losing her parents, encountered many obstacles for years. She described her defense mechanisms to manage peer aggression as a post-migration plan. She explained how her peers “made fun” of her accent.18 She elaborated on how her peers reacted even worse if they knew their humiliation bothered her, and therefore, their “jokes” would become more aggressive.19 She “accepted it,” “smiled or laughed at it,” and “just let it go.”20 However, this young woman’s peers never stopped their remarks regarding her accent, and she suffered from this verbal aggression for years.21

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An Iranian-origin young woman described her agony when her classmate laughed at her wrong pronunciation of a word while reading from the text during their ESL class. Meanwhile, the responsible ESL teacher neither stopped nor reprimanded the insulting and mocking action. This young woman still felt traumatized by this embarrassing experience.22 While the ESL classes have corrective and educational purposes for the newcomer students to improve their English in a safe space, the ESL student ridiculed this young woman for her English mistake. Even though the immigrant students—predominantly minority—occupied the ESL classes, there has been a hierarchy of power among the students depending on their fluency in English.23 Usually, the ESL students who resided in Canada for extended periods dominated the ESL classes and tormented their recently migrated peers. The students with more fluency in English (or fully fluent in English) projected the sense of segregation and humiliation they endured from the dominant culture onto their new immigrant peers.24 As mentioned earlier, one common issue that immigrant youths from the global East and South encounter in their new host country is the dilemma of their names’ pronunciation. While the multicultural society celebrates every culture, immigrant youths struggle with the most fundamental element of their cultural identities: their names. Many immigrant youths must simplify their names into pronounceable nicknames for their European-origin teachers and peers since the dominant culture is not enthusiastic about learning these pronunciations. One young South Asian-origin woman described how she was named Bob during her six-month internship. This second-generation immigrant woman inherited the masculine nickname of Bob when she started as an unpaid intern in a “super White people organization” where she felt “different.”25 Her co-op supervisor complained and claimed she could not pronounce this young woman’s Pakistani name. As a joke, one of her coworkers in this co-op program suggested, “If she was looking for an easy name, Bob was a good option?”26 However, this joke became this young woman’s identity for six months of the co-op internship. She became known as Bob, and no one would remember her real name. When she asked for the letter of recommendation at the end of the six months, she had to remind them about her real name.27 The co-op members and management would always remember her as Bob. This young woman recounted the moment she lost her gender and identity to an entitled member of the majority culture who found her name inconvenient. While her other coworkers—members of the dominant culture—dismissed the incident as a simple joke, this young woman assumed the identity of a “White, middle-aged man” to benefit those in the more hierarchically superior levels.28

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COLONIZATION OF THE BODIES AND THE IDENTITIES OF THE WOMEN FROM THE GLOBAL EAST AND SOUTH Sexing the Foreign Bodies The dominant culture perceives the diverse characteristics of minority immigrant youths as shortcomings. Simultaneously, minority immigrant women’s diverse identities and characteristics become the roots of their exotification, domination, and restriction. Some ethnic minority individuals discussed passingly and matter-of-factly about their European-origin male peers who were “into girls of color.”29 In other words, these young men openly fetishized the bodies of women of color for their own sexual gratification. They expected these young minority women to honor and appreciate their exotification. The fetishized minority women learned to observe themselves through the Western gaze. This deluded perspective became normalized to the extent that ethnic women perceived themselves as exotic creatures.30 However, the dominant culture criticizes the ethnic culture as the aggressor in the lives of young immigrant women. The dominant culture considers every immigrant parent’s decision to insert their culturally oriented parental rights as an act of abuse against children’s rights. While some of these parental decisions were strict, the dominant culture’s derogatory and stereotypical view of these young women’s cultural values did not provide a voice to these young ethnic women.31 Western critical reactions degraded these women and affected their self-esteem and perspective on their cultural values. For example, forbidding one’s children from going on overnight trips might be a common practice for any global parents based on parental practices and regardless of cultural beliefs. However, when the Lebanese-origin immigrant parents did not authorize an overnight trip for their teenage daughter, the daughter’s European-origin boyfriend’s family found the behavior unacceptable. The young woman explained that her White ex-boyfriend acted as if he could not fathom the issue when she told him she could not stay out for an “overnight trip” due to familial restrictions.32 He called her cultural practices primitive and unacceptable. White privilege has given young European-origin men the illusionary right to perceive minority young women as their personal property. If these young men crave the “ethnic women, the women owe it to them to date them.”33 A young Iranian-origin woman recalled her traumatic high school days after rejecting her European-origin male peer’s aggressive advances. This young woman was stalked and violated for months after this rejection. She feared leaving her house because the young man appeared everywhere she went.

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While she was not interested in dating this young man, her friends believed she was lucky to find a “White boyfriend.”34 Despite the woman’s lack of interest, the young man continued stalking her while her friends completely disregarded her fear. This group dynamic indicated the complex racial hierarchy, which has internalized disrespect the minority women’s opinions.35 Minority bodies were pure and undiscovered territories to be colonized, and the young immigrant women did not have the volition to decide, accept, or reject. While this young woman strictly explained to her male stalker numerous times the different reasons that she could not date him, the dominant mindset believed that the new immigrant woman was the one who must change, accustom, and integrate. Members of the dominant culture dehumanized minority women’s bodies. An Indian-origin woman’s White boyfriend ridiculed how the smell of Indian cooking lingered on the clothing of their Indian peers. She recalled how humiliated she felt when she heard that he discussed her body and its scent in the boys’ locker room. In this interaction, not only was this woman embarrassed that these boys spoke negatively about her culture and her people but also, she was humiliated that the “boys” materialized her and her body.36 Her boyfriend told her when the other boys asked him if her body smelled like Indian cooking, he responded, “no.” The young man proudly told them that, while Indians always smelled, his personal Indian “smelled different than the other Indians.”37 Men’s locker room chat discussed this young woman’s body as tangible property belonging to her boyfriend. The dominant culture’s men treated her colonized body as a source of an experiment. They did not touch her; instead, they asked questions about her qualities and sensual values from the person who attained the body. These men treated this young minority woman as a project and reduced her to her physical essence. While the dominant discourse humiliated her cultural characteristics, it also praised her for maintaining herself to the White culture’s standards.38 According to young minority women’s narratives, boys chased and fetishized their skin color, their accents, and the smells of their bodies.39 However, the same men criticized the same thing they fetishized about these young women. These White male peers create a sense of dissonance in the young minority immigrants. Consequently, the dissonance instigates these women to hate their culture and experience a sense of othering. The self-hatred might be one reason many young minority women took it as a compliment when the dominant culture told them they did not have their ancestral accents.40

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REAL-LIFE SEXUAL ABUSE ON MINORITY WOMEN Many minority girls suffer from sexual abuse in high school, such as unconsented spanking, grabbing, touching, pinching, and so on. High school male students—from both minority and majority cultural backgrounds—subjected their female counterparts to sexual aggression and abuse on a daily basis.41 One second-generation Indian-origin woman spoke about the constant sexual abuse that she and the other immigrant women silently endured at the hands of their male high school peers.42 This young woman described how their male classmates in high school sexually—emotionally, verbally, and physically—assaulted their female peers.43 Subsequently, these young men’s actions would have no consequences. Unfortunately, many school personnel and teachers observed these actions and decided to ignore them. This young woman felt powerless, recounting her high school experience and exposure to sexual assault. However, the growth of cyber technology exacerbated the sexual violence and harassment of minority women. Cyber technology made minority victims more accessible to anonymous or familiar predators. CYBER VIOLENCE AND CYBER-SEXUAL AGGRESSION AGAINST MINORITY WOMEN For years, technological gadgets have become inseparable extensions of individuals’ bodies, and cyber-identities have gained footprints like every person’s physical body. While in the physical world, people live in a geographic location, limited by borders and walls, they simultaneously live in a borderless and unlimited global community of the cyber world. The borderless nature of the cyber world is astonishing and convenient; however, the unsustainable control over cyberspace attracted predators to this global village. The lack of restrictions and limitations has created a state of lawlessness in the cyber world. Again, the youths are among the most vulnerable citizens whose cyber and physical selves are in grave danger due to this lack of regulations. Cyber-predators, catfishers, cyberbullies, hackers, and other cyber aggressors have targeted many young people in the past few years. The cyber-criminals perpetrated cyber-harassment and aggression, leading to long-term emotional trauma for their victims. Due to the diasporic and communal living arrangements of the ethnic populations in Canada, cyber-attack has not affected the lives of many minority immigrant youths. However, cyber-sexual harassment has been a serious yet ignored issue for young minority immigrant women and their male counterparts.

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The enhancement of cybercommunication technology and devices has turned the cyber world and virtual communication into an alternative reality for many individuals. In some cases, people have treated the cyber world as their primary source of communication, with globalization and the expansion of global employment, the technological dependency of the general public, and the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.44 Technology has intertwined in every human interaction’s utmost personal aspect.45 Some even believe cybercommunication has replaced youths’ physical and face-to-face social interactions.46 This popularity of cybercommunication made cyberviolence and cyber aggression common forms of harassment, especially among youths and children. Cyberbullying is a known side-effect of cybercommunication and an example of cyber aggression. While men from minority and majority cultures commonly practice cyber-sexual violence against minority immigrant women, other forms of cyberviolence are uncommon among immigrant youths living in diasporic communities.47 The main reason for the considerably fewer occurrence of cyber aggression among these young populations lies in their infrastructurally diasporic lifestyle. Cultural and communal living arrangements are the essential factors in fewer cases of cyberaggression. The new immigrant populations usually seek areas populated with other immigrants from their cultural backgrounds.48 Living in areas surrounded by a limited number of people from the same cultural background creates kinship among the adults, which does not relate to their children.49 While the migrating adults communicate and commence with their neighboring culturally familiar individuals,50 their children begin acculturation in the new country and integrate into the new culture. A young Indian-origin man whose family lived in an Indian diasporic area in GTA shared his frustration with encountering the same group of people everywhere he and his family went.51 It felt as if he were always in school. He met the same people in every class and reencountered them at random social gatherings, grocery stores, and restaurants. He exclaimed, “now, imagine if they were your bullies.”52 These young immigrants did not use technological gadgets to harass each other since they were in one another’s proximity, and their parents did not take youth aggression seriously.53 The immigrant parents either ignored their children’s complaints regarding personal violence or expected them to deal with the issue as they did when they were children.54 CYBER-SEXUAL AGGRESSION Cyber-sexual aggression refers to any form of cyber-sexual activity with the intention of harm.55 Sexual predators inflict their damage through diverse forms of cyber-sexual harassment, such as cyberstalking, the unsolicited

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and unconsented sharing of the victim’s pornographic images, and hateful comments about the victim’s sexuality.56 The taboo nature of this form of aggression made the cyber world a more favorable platform for cyber-sexual aggression rather than face-to-face sexual aggression, especially for minority immigrant youths. Cyberworld offers sexual predators what they need: the privacy/anonymity for the initial sexual action, the ease of creating and amplifying the bystanders for the aftermath, and the access to the minor victims with minimal criminal punitive consequences. First, while physical and verbal harassment can happen in the presence of many bystanders, sexual predators usually commit the initial unconsented sexual activity in a more private and isolated place with the least number of bystanders. Despite the physical and verbal harassment, which many parents still consider “child’s play,”57 many immigrant parents from the global South and East view sexuality as taboo.58 These parents value their children’s, especially their daughters,’ purity and do not approve of any expression of sexuality, consensual or otherwise. Immigrant youths prefer to hide their activities of sexual nature from their parents as much as possible,59 even if these activities leave a cyber footprint. Second, real-life sexual harassment ends with physical, sexual action without leaving any bystanders (or has very few bystanders). However, contrary to the lack of bystanders in real-life harassment, the cyber world offers cyber-sexual predators access to unlimited bystanders after their sexual crimes. Sexual crimes are usually about exerting power and control over another individual rather than achieving sexual gratification.60 Therefore, sexual predators appreciate the number of bystanders that the cyber network offers them to display control and power over someone else’s sexual property. Third, not all sexually predatory behaviors begin unconsented. Cyber-sexting is a common practice among young adults. In some cases, young women and girls share their sexual pictures willingly with their sexual partners. If the person who takes and shares the sexual image is under eighteen, they are considered a minor. Suppose the receiving party decides to share this girl’s picture with others. In that case, if proven, the legal consequences for both the production and distribution of sexual images of a minor are grave. These legal penalties would negatively affect both the predator and, unfortunately, the victim. For example, the unconsented sharing of photos of a minor individual’s genitals has the same legal outcomes for the young woman who has produced and shared the image with a sexual/romantic partner as the person who has distributed the picture, as it signifies child pornography.61 These minors are legally responsible for producing and distrusting pornographic photos involving a child.62 While the male recipient of the photograph shared the nude image on social media, he would only be liable for distributing the child’s pornographic

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photos. The legal system places a harsher punishment for the young woman compared to her male counterpart. In reality, the nonconsensual action of the male partner costs this young woman her honor, trust, future well-being, and in some cases, her clean criminal record.63 Therefore, in cyber-sexual criminal cases, both perpetrators and victims rely heavily on the secrecy of the technology. Sometimes, popular apps create features to enhance their users’ safety. These features, mainly for marketing, can benefit the apps’ users. For example, Snapchat, which is a messaging app, gained popularity among younger audiences due to its unique performance safety feature. It is a common belief that Snapchat is an application that allows the receiving parties only ten seconds to view an image after opening the file. The pictures would permanently become unavailable after ten seconds.64 Many young people regularly use the Snapchat application to share nude pictures with their significant others, overestimating the app’s safety feature of the recipients’ limited viewing time.65 However, TechJunkie66 rejects this common belief. A simple screenshot from the mobile phone followed by saving a photo can circumvent this limited viewing time and give the receiving party permanent access to any Snapchat picture.67 Later, the cyber-predators can share the saved pictures virally. These images would follow the original sender (the actual owner) of the cyber images forever, causing her emotional, psychological, sexual, and sometimes even physical trauma. The predators’ use of these pictures as amateur pornography and child pornography has serious consequences for the young women who took the pictures. Sometimes women must deal with these consequences years after they take and share a picture.68 While sharing nudes is a common practice—practiced by all genders—it usually affects women negatively. This social hypocrisy has led to many suicides, homicides, tortures, traumas, and public shaming among women of any cultural background. Young immigrant women from the global South and East are not exempt from women and girls sharing nudes online. In particular, minority girls from more restricted and traditional families depend on cyber-sexual methods to communicate with their significant others. Consequently, some of these young immigrant women’s photos start circulating in high schools.69 These young women trust their boyfriends to share a piece of themselves with them. In return, these boys violate their trust and initiate a troublesome sociolegal battle for these young women. When male partners share young women’s nude pictures on social media, these pictures remain online forever.70 Besides other adverse effects, these nude images in a patriarchal society would affect these women’s future sociopolitical and economic lives. Unlike the common belief, the youths cannot stop what happens online by unplugging, turning their computers off, or stepping away from their cell phones.

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Cybernetworks are an ongoing space separated from their cyber identities. This world and, consequently, the victim’s cyber identity goes on even if the victim is not sitting behind the screen of their technological gadgets.71 In Toronto, sharing nonconsensual nude pictures of minority female high school students is common among high school male students through their social media and friends’ networks. This common practice is called “leaked nudes.”72 A young South Asian-origin man described how these nude pictures “destroyed the girls’ lives when someone randomly got a hold of [these girls’] nudes and decided to send them to their group chat” with a message attached to them: “Look at this.”73 He mentioned that it was “really common” to receive notifications containing unconsented minor immigrant girls and young women’s nudes.74 However, he became traumatized when he realized one of the leaked nudes he received belonged to his close female friend.75 Since the victim of this nude image attended a diasporic community high school, the news of the leaked image traveled through the neighborhood. This young man described how his female friend’s South Asian diasporic community shunned, “shamed and ruined her life” after cyber-sharing her image.76 Based on the Eastern patriarchal culture, a girl or a woman should not partake in any activities of a sexual nature.77 Years later, when she attended university, she still carried the stigma of those leaked images when her male high school peers recognized her on the University campus. “She knew that we all knew, and we’d seen it, but we never brought it up with her because we thought it would create a hostile or awkward situation. Because I knew she was ashamed.”78 Ethnic minority women usually avoid reporting cyber-sexual violent cases. These women do not want to attract any attention to themselves and their sexuality, even though they are the victims.79 The fear of the spotlight on the victim’s sexual life and desires might be partially responsible for the absence of this vital topic in academic research. While a search on sexting and cyber-sexuality in Google Scholar results in hundreds of journals focused on the adverse effects of this communicative channel among youths, only a few of these journals pay any attention to ethnic minority girls and women. Those few journals that include ethnic minority individuals in their studies mention these populations briefly in sexting and cyber-sexing sections.80 The articles focusing on the issues and effects of cybersex overlook minority youths and only focus on the danger that the dominant culture experiences.81 CYBERSTALKING Cyberstalking is a common form of cyber-sexual crime. The act of stalking is much easier and more practical to be conducted online and via technological

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devices. The cyber network allows the perpetrator to contain their anonymity while offering these cyber offenders the freedom and flexibility to attain and share their victims’ sensitive documents and personal materials. These actions not only threaten the virtual safety and the security of the victims, but in some cases, they go beyond the screens and directly affect the victims’ physical lives.82 While the legal system does not take cyberstalking seriously because the perpetrators are not always close to their victims, the cyber perpetrators can harm their victims in various ways. First, the perpetrator can physically harm or even murder their victims while they do not live near each other. The legal battles, such as Michelle Carter’s or William Francis Melchert-Dinkel’s cases, support this claim.83 Second, the threat of physical harm to the victim, in combination with the anonymity of the cyber-stalker, can harm the victims’ mental health to the point that the victims can harm themselves.84 Third, the cyber-stalker can use a third party who lives in the victim’s proximity to apply physical harm.85 Cyberstalking, especially cyber-sexual stalking, causes short- and long-term emotional and psychological trauma to its victims and survivors.86 Their victims succumb to their attackers’ evil cyber advances. Their survivors fight their cyber-assailant for years. A Middle Eastern-origin first-generation immigrant woman shared her three-year-long battle with cyberstalking during high school.87 Her encounter with cyberstalking started in the summer of grade nine as a childish and flirtatious online game. This young woman stated that she first received a Facebook message that sounded like a playful “secret admirer” game.88 However, this childish game quickly elevated to the cyber-sexual stalking of a minor. Her stalker started sending her messages telling her he knew everything about her life. She recalled, “He was telling me, ‘I know what class you have. This is your teacher’s name. These are your friends. I know where you are going now. I know you are in the plaza. . . . Meet me behind the convenience store.’”89 Fortunately, she did not comply. Later, her cyber-stalker started sending her pictures of his genitals and asked for her nude images, which caused her emotional and psychological trauma. In rare circumstances, when minority immigrant girls and women complain to the legal authorities and the justice system, they do not receive the needed support from these responsible legal authorities. A second-generation Pakistani-origin high school girl, who received vulgar nude pictures from an unidentified male via cellphone messages and emails, complained to her school principal and the police on several occasions. While she was an underage victim, the school and the police always dismissed her complaints. Despite her repeated visit to the police station, she did not “even talk to a policeman directly.”90 After many visits, the young woman’s mother insisted that the police take sexting a minor seriously. At this point, the police department

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opened a case regarding the stalking claims. However, law enforcement never contacted this woman or her family for further investigations. This young woman believed the lack of attention from law enforcement for her cyberstalking case was due to her ethnic minority status since she did not receive the basic attention a victim deserved.91 The network offered this victim’s stalker access to her utmost private moments. The lack of support from the authorities led this youth to a life of isolation, depression, paranoia, and despair. She later heard that the same cyber-predator preyed upon other Middle Eastern girls in their school. The other victims, who reported the predatory actions, experienced the same procedure with the police as this young woman.92 She described her encounters with sexual cyberstalking and the legal process following as a “horrible traumatizing experience” in which she felt unheard.93 However, if law enforcement had handled her case more precisely, she might have experienced less emotional burden and might prevent future victimization of others. Authorities must perceive these young women’s cases more precisely since they were minors from minority cultural backgrounds. These women bravely decided to break their silence, even though speaking out might be considered against their diasporic communities’ beliefs and views on sexuality.94 Not all cases of cyberstalking are sexual. One vicious form of cyberstalking, which caused emotional and psychological trauma among minority female high school students in Brampton, Ontario, was a would-you-rathertype cyber game.95 Two women from South Asian backgrounds mentioned that many young South Asian immigrants still played this game.96 The game started as a harmless series of questions, such as “what’s your favorite color?” but took an ominous turn from there.97 Due to this cybergame’s anonymous nature, the ethnic minority young women did not know their interrogators’ identities. As for one young South Asian-origin woman, after the initial questions, the anonymous scrutinizer began asking her more personal questions, such as “do you like [a specific male’s name]” or “have you ever kissed [the same male name].”98 The interrogators were usually the victims’ schoolmates, who hid behind the anonymity cyber-identities. They knew their victims. These interrogators play with their victims to get the information they want.99 This young woman, whose life was exacerbated after playing one of these cybergames, explained that these games “were supposed to be a joke” until the questions redirected toward romance.100 She, who mistook the anonymous cyber questioner for one of her friends, “jokingly” answered “yes” when she asked her if she liked one of her male friends/classmates.101 At this point, the game took on a more insidious nature. The questioner started berating her and calling her names. Although this young woman discontinued answering the questions, she soon faced a cyber smear campaign instigated by playing this game. Later, this young woman discovered that the online interrogator

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was the mentioned male friend’s girlfriend, and the game was an online interrogation to provide proof of possible infidelity. This game began an ongoing cyber-social, psychological, and verbal aggression campaign against this young woman.102 VICTIM BLAMING Many victims of cyberstalking and cyber-sexual attacks do not report on their attackers for fear of further victimization due to victim-blaming.103 Victim-blaming is a common familial, social, and judicial practice that blames the victim for being subjected to sexual or cyber-sexual abuse and stalking.104 Victim-blaming is more common for minority and immigrant women and girls.105 A second-generation Sikh immigrant woman described her high school experience as follows. In school, the boys . . . would smack the [minority] girls’ asses randomly in the hallway, and they would specifically target the girls with bigger breasts, like me, because they developed earlier. . . . It wasn’t hidden. The teachers would see it, but they didn’t do anything about it. . . . I never spoke about that. . . . I figure, like, this is just my position. I felt so uncomfortable. Like, I was crying in the washroom. . . . In one instance, even one guy told me, “Oh, you’re lucky that I’m touching you. You’re so ugly.” He was an a**hole. I cried so hard in the washroom.106

In this scenario, not only did the culprit assaulted this young woman sexually, he degraded her further by humiliating her physical appearance. She felt utterly powerless when the school authorities, such as teachers, ignored the obvious signs of sexual abuse.107 This young woman introduced another sexual assault victim from her high school who did not survive the abuse as well as she did. Based on this young woman’s narrative, her former friend internalized the past sexual abuse. This young woman experienced severe sexual assault in high school, which drove her into a life of drug addiction and a series of abusive relationships. Yet, this woman separated herself from her friend, who was “a very smart girl,” ended her friendship with her, and blamed her for her defeat and downfall.108 A Middle Eastern-origin woman, who befriended a new immigrant Arab-origin young man, found herself in trouble. Soon after this friendship started, the young man felt a sense of entitlement over her body and requested sexual favours. When she refused his advances, he began spreading rumors about having a relationship with her and the sexual acts she performed for him.109

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In many cases, the minority victims of sexual aggression/stalking begin internalizing the victim-blaming and directly blaming themselves.110 Victim-blaming and self-blaming prohibit minority young women from reporting their sexual predators and silence the victims. These women choose silence because their complaints would redirect the responsibility back to them, their families, and their honor. This silence is often not because these women fear the predator will harm them. These young women do not want to disrespect their family’s honor or bring shame to their parents.111 MINORITY PARENTS AND PEER AGGRESSION While cyber aggression leads to severe psychological complications in youths, such as depression and suicidal thoughts, an uninterrupted parent-child relationship can benefit children and youths affected by the cyber-attack.112 However, as mentioned in previous chapters, immigrant parent-child connections have their obstacles, especially when it surrounds the issue of peer aggression. Parental misunderstanding of peer conflict, workrelated exhaustion, and lack of technological literacy are three critical factors affecting how parents deal with their children’s cyber aggression incidents.113 As mentioned before, many immigrant parents assume that peer conflict and bullying are children’s issues and that children must resolve them independently. Many first-generation immigrant youths described how their parents did not consider peer aggression—face-to-face or cyber—a real problem.114 These parents encouraged their children to solve their peer conflicts personally, regardless of their face-to-face or online nature.115 Many young ethnic minority women from the global South and East discussed how their parents were not involved in school-related conflicts.116 In many cases, immigrant parents sided with the school and criticized their children when these young individuals complained about being harassed at school.117 These immigrant parents treated cyber-attacks like other forms of youth aggression: child play. These parents neither considered the unlimited access the cyber world offered the cyber aggressor nor understood the permanency of the materials the cyber aggressor shared against their victims online.118 Sometimes socioeconomic-related factors, such as parental exhaustion caused by overwork and extended hours in low-paying jobs, affect minority immigrant parents and their relationships with their children, especially among first-generation immigrants. Many immigrant youths do not benefit from parent-child support because their parents spend most of their time at work. These immigrant parents must work more than one nonspecialized job to satisfy their families’ expenditures.119 While children with supportive parents experience the least cyberbullying or adverse effects of this

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phenomenon,120 these immigrant parents do not have enough time to communicate with their children and emotionally support them. In some cases, these parents delegate their responsibilities to other authority figures. Many immigrant children observe this delegation as neglect or betrayal.121 Therefore, minority immigrant parents’ socioeconomic status does not permit them to be involved parents in their children’s lives. In addition, virtual interaction is a relatively novel technology, and some parents feel inadequate and unfamiliar with this form of communication. Parents who do not have technological literacy lack the confidence and skills to supervise their children’s online activities.122 On the other hand, children do not voluntarily share cyber activities with their parents, either. Therefore, parents unaware of their children’s cyber activities cannot help them.123 While many parents do not consider their children as the victim or aggressors of online bullying, many youths are, in fact, victims, aggressors, and bystanders of cyberbullying.124 Parental technological literacy and understanding of cybercommunication can be an asset for controlling cyberbullying since youths and children do not voluntarily speak about cyber aggression.125 Additionally, youths are worried that their parental authority would take away their acess to the internet or their other communication devices, such as cell phones or computers if they knew about their online troubles both as perpetrators and victims.126 Fear of losing access is the main reason for children’s lack of transparency about cyber-attacks. CONCLUSION The dominant culture objectifies minority immigrant women by dismissing or fetishizing them. This objectification keeps these women overlooked, unsatisfied, and unequal members of their settlement countries. Simultaneously, perpetrators target these young women through nonconsensual sexualization and stalking online and offline. These young immigrant women do not have a safe space in the physical or cyber worlds. They learn to stay quiet, avoid complaining, and blame themselves for the years of harassment they and other minority women endure.127 Young minority immigrant women encounter sexual assault, cyber-sexual harassment, cyberstalking, and cyber aggression. While the dominant culture dismisses, humiliates, and misrecognizes young minority immigrant women, the minority and majority men fetishize and sexualize these young bodies online and in real life. The Western culture questions and alters these young individuals’ identities under the labels of unpronounceable names and unmemorable last names.128 At the same time, the media, the criminal

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justice system, and even their parents ignore them and expect them to fend for themselves. Minority immigrant youths lack quality time with their parents. The minority parents’ extended hours of labor affect their free time to connect with their children and educate themselves with the fast-growing technologies. These parents’ lack of mastery of social media and communication technology is unfavorable for immigrant youths. Young minority women from the global South and East are most disadvantaged. They deal with additional social and cultural dilemmas that exacerbate their suffering compared to their minority male and European-origin female counterparts. The dominant culture and the minority men violate and target the young minority women’s bodies and boundaries.129 Yet standard practices, such as victim-blaming, or cultural beliefs, such as a sense of honor, make the most accessible prey from these women. Minority young women blame themselves for others’ crimes and suffer in silence. NOTES 1. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 2. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 3. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 4. Bhabha, 1994. 5. Ojo and Shizha, 2018. 6. Ibid. 7. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 8. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Participant 4 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.

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22. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 23. Ibid. 24. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 25. Participant 15 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019; and Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 30. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 31. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 32. Participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 33. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Labidi, 2022; Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 40. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 41. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 42. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 43. Ibid. 44. McDaniel, 2019; Dempsey, Lyons, and McCoy, 2019; Schroeder, 2018; Byrnes, Kiely, Dunne, McDermott, and Coffey, 2021. 45. Patel, Kuhite, Puranik, Khan, Borkar, and Dhande, 2018. 46. Manago, Brown, Lawley, and Anderson, 2020. 47. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 48. Søholt and Lynnebakke, 2015. 49. Participant 14, 16, 20, and 26 in discussion with the author, January 11, 14, 16, and 28, 2019. 50. Søholt and Lynnebakke, 2015. 51. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 52. Ibid. 53. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 54. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 55. Cripps and Stermac, 2018.

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56. Ibid. 57. Participant 4 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 58. Almond, Edlund, and Milligan, 2013. 59. Gigi Durham, 2004. 60. Shortis, 2019. 61. Department of Justice, 2017. 62. Poltash, 2012; Justice Law Website, Definition of Child Pornography, Criminal Code, s 163(1).  63. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019; Poltash, 2012. 64. Vaterlaus, Barnett, Roche, and Young, 2016; Utz, Muscanell, and Khalid, 2015. 65. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 66. TechJunkie, 2020. 67. Ibid. 68. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 69. Ibid. 70. Poltash, 2012. 71. Campbell and Bauman, 2018. 72. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Khan, 2020; Samuel, 2005. 78. Participant 26 in discussion with the author, January 14, 2019. 79. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 80. Winkelman, Smith, Brinkley, and Knox, 2014. 81. Jenkins and Stamp, 2018; Hachiya, 2017. 82. Chang, 2020. 83. Levenson, Henderson, and Sgueglia, January 23, 2020; Prince, August 9, 2014. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Vitak, Chadha, Steiner, and Ashktorab, 2017. 87. Participant 9 in discussion with the author, August 19, 2019. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Participant 15 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Močnik, 2018. 95. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 96. Participants 25 and 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018.

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97. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 98. Ibid. 99. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 100. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Lumsden and Morgan, 2017; Dukes and Gaither, 2017. 104. Starr and Lavis, 2018. 105. Sawrikar and Katz, 2018. 106. Participant 11 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 110. Sawrikar and Katz, 2017. 111. Bannerji, 2020; Močnik, 2018. 112. Helfrich, Doty, Su, Yourell, and Gabrielli, 2020. 113. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 114. Participants 4, 16, 22, and 26 in discussion with the author, January 11, 16, April 29, and January 14, 2019. 115. Ibid. 116. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 117. Participants 16, 22, and 26 in discussion with the author, January 16, April 29, and January 14, 2019. 118. Young, Subramanian, Miles, Hinnant, and Andsager, 2017. 119. Stefanek, Strohmeier, Fandrem, and Spiel, 2012. 120. Cohen-Almagor, 2018. 121. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 122. Caivano, Leduc and Talwar, 2020. 123. Uludasdemir and Kucuk, 2019. 124. Ibid. 125. Cohen-Almagor, 2018. 126. Ibid. 127. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 128. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 129. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019.

Conclusion‌‌ True Meaning of Being an Immigrant in Canada

The concept of immigrant is a socially constructed term that perceives people of an ethnic minority, regardless of their official status, as foreigners.1 The immigrant status is conferred based on an individual’s accent, skin complexion, geographic background, and traditional cultural and religious practice. In many cases, the actual migration status is irrelevant. Pertaining to North American countries, the dominant culture usually allocates the socially constituted concept of the immigrant to individuals from minority backgrounds—originated from the global South and East—and people of color.2 In the same way, the members of the dominant culture circumvent the topic of race and ethnic identity since the White nation believes that ethnic minority individuals are the only people with racial and ethnic identities. White culture sees itself as raceless without ethnicity and culture.3 Similarly, privileged European-origin individuals believe that race and ethnic identity are socially fixed and genetically transferable through generations. Despite the dominant culture’s beliefs, race and ethnicity are socially constructed.4 Ethnicity and ethnic identity might alter across generations depending on marital status, migration, social bonds, and other associations.5 Yet, the dominant culture constantly reminds first- and second-generation minority immigrants of their racial differences and lack of belonging.6 Many first- and second-generation minority immigrants residing in Canada are familiar with the question of “where are you from?” regardless of the number of years they have lived in Canada or if they were born and raised Canadian.7 Due to this mindset, many first- and second-generation immigrant youths experience a lack of belonging, violence, aggression, xenophobia, and isolation in their host country, Canada. This chapter is an overview of the sense of belonging among first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths in their host country, as it revisits the concept of unhomeliness and the effects of xenophobia. Therefore, the chapter questions the location of minority youths, some of whom have never 121

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been to their countries of origin, still consider Canada as a host country and observe themselves as stuck in a state of unhomeliness. MULTICULTURALISM IN A BILINGUAL CANADA When minority immigrants from the global South and East choose Canada as their host country, they decide based on Canadian standards. One of these critical standards is multiculturalism. These new immigrants are in for a rude awakening. Canada’s multiculturalism policy is only a series of empty bureaucratic promises through which Canada abides by the democratic values of a progressive nation. Upon migrating to Canada, immigrant families experience many sociopolitical and economic setbacks, including deskilling, devaluation, poverty, low-paying jobs, racism, and other discriminatory factors in their new host country. The bureaucratic multiculturalism of Canada promises equality and equity to new immigrants. However, recent immigrants in Canada from the global South and East encounter biculturalism, bilingualism, and racial hierarchy, which are directly related to the Canadian immigrants’ social and political status. Based on multicultural values, Canada does not expect new immigrants to abandon their culture, religion, and language upon their migration, with the condition that they practice these cultural souvenirs of their past lives only at home.8 However, ethnic minorities, especially the new minority immigrants, cannot separate themselves from their past lives. Language and accent have become the primary signifiers dividing insiders and immigrants. The insiders may regulate the immigrants to follow the country’s policies and keep their cultural practices private. A young, Indian-origin woman recounted how a member of the dominant culture confronted her while speaking Punjabi with her friends. The intruding woman demanded the young minority women, who carried on a private conversation, to either learn English or “go back” to their country.9 The young Indian-origin woman was born in Canada and was fluent in three languages, Punjabi, English, and French. In multicultural Canada, visible minority immigrants not only must master one of the two official Canadian languages but also have to eliminate their cultural languages and accents.10 The stigma attached to minority accents represents the new immigrants from the global South and East as less competent, less desirable, and less appealing.11 The racial minority immigrants experience constant hardship in every aspect of their lives in Canada due to their language, accent, and pronunciation. This hardship is a continuous reminder for these minority individuals that they stand in an inferior position in the Canadian multicultural hierarchy of power.12

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The first- and second-generation minority immigrants see themselves as outsiders in the country they have lived in for years—some have lived in the host nation for most or their entire lives. When asking minority immigrants where they are from—regardless of their citizenship status or the generation of their migration—they tend to answer with their country of origin since the dominant culture does not accept any other answer.13 The frequency of the question regarding the minority groups’ origins depends on a series of contributing factors. Besides the minority individuals’ mother tongues and accents, these indicators are the ethnic minorities’ shade of skin, the accents of their parents, the quality of their exposure to the dominant culture, and their sense of autonomy and self-esteem.14 The dominant culture constantly subjects minority immigrants whose complexion signifies them as citizens of the global South and East to the persisting question of nationality and inferior treatment. A TTC worker interrogated a young Western Asian-origin woman for two hours and held her against her will in a room when she reported their staff’s mistake in selling her the wrong TTC pass.15 This young woman was a university student, but the TTC employee sold her a student pass for high school students. The TTC worker asked her if she were a student, and she answered, “yes.” Later, she discovered that the worker meant a high school, not a university one. She attempted to fix the mistake and pay the price difference the next day. While she tried to do the right thing and communicate with the TTC employee that she did not know about the TTC services in Canada, the TTC employee talked over her and told her that “it did not matter where she was from. Here in Canada, we pay for what we use.”16 The TTC employee treated this new immigrant’s honest mistake as a felony. The TTC employee held the young woman in a confined space and refused to let her leave. This young woman cried for two hours until the TTC employee “agreed to let her go.”17 Another disqualifier factor for minority individuals to be Canadian is the individual’s parents’ accent.18 Not only must minority youths speak the dominant culture’s language perfectly and without any visible minority accent— European accents are the exceptions—but also their parents/grandparents must speak without any accents to allow these young individuals to succeed. When minority immigrants remain in their diasporic communities in Canada, they separate themselves from the dominant culture and its constant scrutiny. However, this separation from the dominant culture would lead to a sudden shock for many minority children and youths when they start schooling.19 The beginning of schooling is the point that many minority immigrant children observe themselves based on stereotypes and derogatory slurs. Western culture stereotypes women from the global South and East based on a series of characteristics that the West attributed to them, such as oppressed Middle Eastern and Eastern20 and angry and irrational Black women.21 Since

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dominant Western culture expects the Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Western Asian young women to be docile, they dismiss these women’s complaints.22 The same dominant culture ignores Black women’s objections. The dominant culture does not accept Black women as victims because the same culture stereotypes them as loud and aggressive.23 The members of the dominant culture target the outspoken minority immigrant women from the global South and East—regardless of the color of their skin—who complained about them and treated them disrespectfully. An African-origin woman described how she was personally insulted when she politely complained about a coffee shop’s mixed-up order.24 A young Western Asian-origin woman, who wanted to be in the school play, spoke about the condescending attitudes of her drama teacher toward her. The drama teacher insulted this young woman’s accent when she questioned her rejection of an acting role for a school play.25 The school authorities treated a South Asian-origin, second-generation woman as a troublemaker in high school since she spoke out about her teacher’s racist remarks and attitude toward a specific subject matter.26 These three women voiced their concerns for their or others’ rights. A recent unusual response to a customer’s complaint attracted media attention. This is a common practice to get the wrong order in a fast-food restaurant or a drive-thru. A refund or some heated comments would be the most unfavourable outcome of these fast-food disputes. However, on June 17, 2022, a Taco Bell manager in Dallas, Texas, poured boiling water on a Black woman and her teenaged niece after her employees could not get this customer’s order correct after a few attempts.27 The video of this incident shows how the manager stands with the boiling water behind the counter while the customer approaches her to question the items on the receipt.28 While this incident did not happen in Canada, the trend of an exaggerated reaction to a mundane communication and directing a physical attack to a transactional misunderstanding or mistake is comparable to what many immigrant women experienced in Canada dealing with their daily communications. DEMOCRATIC RACISM AND ITS EFFECTS Since Canadian immigration and its multicultural policies are founded on democratic racism, minority immigrant youths cannot defend themselves due to the indirectness of the attack and harassment. The global South and East immigrant youths learn to deal with exotification and humiliation silently. Moreover, the dominant culture has repeatedly reminded these young immigrants that Canada celebrates every culture. The white culture criticizes the immigrants and their unwillingness to integrate into the host country’s culture—a deeply rooted, systematically racist culture that does

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not support cultural integration. Due to these assumptions, immigrant youths assimilate and acculturate faster to avoid the stereotypes that the majority culture attributes to their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Regardless of the immigrant youths’ struggle to adjust, their signifiers label them as newcomers and outsiders in their host country. The label of the outsider positions these immigrants in the place of othered citizens, compared to the accepted insider members of Canadian society. RACIAL MINORITY IMMIGRANTS AND RACISM IN CANADA Frantz Fanon29 refers to racism as an inhumane behavior toward Others since racism eradicates the rights of humans from others. Many visible minority immigrants encounter implicit and explicit racism upon their arrival in their new countries of settlement.30 In Canada, European-origin settlers discriminate against immigrants from the global South and East based on the individuals’ stereotypical signifying traits. European-origin individuals use insults to refer to the visible minorities’ characteristics. One young Black woman spoke about how her classmates referred to her hair and skin color as “disgusting” days after she emigrated to Canada.31 A Cameroonian-origin Black woman described how her classmates’ attitudes toward her physical characteristics “put her through very low self-esteem” and “made her feel very ugly.”32 These young women explained how their classmates abused them verbally and degraded their self-esteem. They began feeling inferior compared to the people around them.33 The Western world regards minority immigrants based on the one-dimensional, stereotypical identities they have contributed to them.34 The Western gaze strips the visible minority immigrants of human characteristics and identity formations. Two young immigrant women, one of Middle Eastern origin and one of Western Asian origin, described their experiences when the members of the dominant culture asked them if they were carrying a bomb or had ever considered suicide bombing.35 Neither the social nor the justice system reprimanded these accusers since these young women’s ethnic backgrounds characterized them as Muslim. While the Muslim extremists committed the 9/11 attacks, the dominant culture did not reserve the label of terrorist only for these extremist groups. Any individual with any ethnicity from the global South and East would satisfy the stereotypical characteristics of the terrorist regardless of their religion or background. To avoid the stereotypes and escape the oppression and toxicity of Canada, visible minority immigrants experienced the necessity to integrate into Canadian culture as soon as possible and at any price. One young African

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new immigrant woman confessed that she unsuccessfully tried to eliminate her accent.36 A few young minority women spoke about enduring disrespectful and humiliating treatment of their ex-boyfriends simply because they were from a European background.37 These young women from the global South and East confessed they tolerated the maltreatment to prolong their association and partnership with the dominant culture. LACK OF BELONGING AND STATE OF UNHOMELINESS First- and second-generation minority immigrant individuals do not feel they belong to their countries of settlement. At the same time, these individuals feel no attachment to their countries of origin, which some never even visited. These visible minority immigrants experience a lack of belonging and an “unhomely” state of being.38 A second-generation, Iranian-origin woman explained that her European-origin customers tormented her regarding her originality until she told them she was Iranian. This young woman had to explain to total strangers that her parents migrated from Iran because the dominant culture of Canada would not accept her response of saying she was a Canadian. Yet, this young woman has no emotional or familial connection to Iran.39 A young, African-origin Black woman who spent most of her life in Canada described how she opened the Google Maps application on her cellphone to show people where in Windsor she was from when they repeatedly asked her “where she was originally from.”40 A second-generation South Asian-origin woman, who recognized her identity as Canadian, reiterated her experience of double rejection in high school. This young woman explained while she was proud of her ethnic background, she did not accept her European-origin peers’ pressuring her into rejecting her Canadian identity. In response, the European-origin female cohorts retaliated against her by giving her best friend honorary membership in the “Whites” group if she publicly denounced her friendship with this “difficult” ethnic individual.41 While Canada invites immigrants with the promise of multiculturalism, equality, and equity for all, the racially biased practices show that minority immigrants suffer from a lack of acceptability and belonging. Even the multigeneration immigrants from the global South and East must always answer the question of “where are you from?” as an indicator of their permanent state of unhomeliness. Many young ethnic bodies attempt to rationalize their lack of belonging through less personal and less emotionally prejudicial explanations. Some immigrants seek the roots of this unhomeliness in the act of migration and partially blame their own actions. A young Western Asian-origin woman

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argued that the immigrants’ lack of belonging is not a Canadian shortcoming. She blamed this lack of belonging on the untimely act of migration and being a stranger in an otherwise cohesive environment.42 The young woman defended her point of view by demonstrating how Canadian children started together from kindergarten and evolved in the education system as an ingroup. She added that these individuals would create a cohesive ingroup by the time they entered the high school stage of their lives. This woman, who was born in Canada but migrated a few times in her young life, rationalized her constant migration as the reason for the members of the dominant culture rejecting her.43 This young woman justified her lack of belonging under less discriminative labels. Yet, she could not relay her logic to the second- and multigeneration minority immigrant youths who spent all their lives in Canada. The lack of belonging and acceptability of visible minority youths requires attention when first-generation European immigrants feel they belong because the dominant Canadian culture recognizes them as equal citizens upon their migration to Canada. On the other hand, multigeneration minority immigrant youths still have to answer the question of where they are from.44 CELEBRATING MULTICULTURALISM AND BELONGING Belonging to a nation separates insiders from outsiders.45 Based on multicultural policies, minority immigrants are more likely to choose Canada as their migration destination because they desire to be insiders. However, Canada displays a racially charged binary notion of citizenship. Many young immigrant women from the global South and East shared similar experiences of being isolated, humiliated, and tormented for standing for their fundamental rights in the country they called home.46 The binary of us versus them is the foundation of the terms such as visible minority and dominant discourse.47 Canadian visible minorities are Canadian immigrants and citizens whose ancestors are unrelated to British or French (or other Western European) backgrounds.48 The sphere of us versus them posits Canadian immigrants, especially those from the global South and East, among the Others; these minority immigrants remain outsiders compared to the Western inner groups.49 Although the mainstream culture denies racial inequality in Western social settings,50 visible minorities experience racism and social injustice in every aspect of their lives. The visible minority Canadians, especially new immigrants, encounter social, economic, academic, and racial injustice in Canada.51

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Many adult immigrants secure themselves within their ethnic enclaves by limiting their communication with their diasporic communities, while their children are exposed to discrimination in every aspect of their lives. While these young immigrants join their cultural enclaves with their parents, they must attend school, communicate with the majority population, and assimilate into the new culture. One’s enclave secures ethnic minorities’ interactions by limiting its ethnic members. But the young immigrants do not benefit from this safe space because they must interact with people outside of their enclave. These interactions with the host country can lead to insults, aggression, and social segregation. Discrimination and various acts of aggression force immigrant youths to assimilate into what the host country expects them to be. These sudden transformations disrupt the gradual process of identity formation for the new immigrants in their host nation. Since the immigrant youths stay as dependents of their immigrant parents, they experience every isolating, distressing, and traumatizing aspect of the migration that their parents experience without getting any credit for their contribution. Moreover, these young immigrants experience these emotions more intensely since most immigrant youths do not have any control or agency in the migration process or social settings. Minority immigrant youths are immersed in their host country’s dominant culture post-migration since the legal authorities and parents expect them to attend school upon their arrival to the host nation. Soon, these young minorities find themselves in another environment without agency and power called schools, where they become the subjects of diverse forms of xeno-bullying. NEW IMMIGRANT YOUTHS IN CANADA On February 8, 2023, thirty-two-year-old Matthew Gordon Paul “allegedly assaulted” a twelve-year-old girl after he began to threaten this girl and some other passengers “unprovoked” on a TTC bus in Toronto, Ontario.52 While the police report mentioned that Paul shouted racial slurs at the young girl and enforced injuries on her, the news article failed to mention the victim’s injuries. If this assault caused injury and bodily harm to a minor, this shows the extent of aggression from the perpetrator. Also, both the police report and the news article neglected to mention the nature of the hate-crime. One of the dominant culture’s most ignorant and dangerous ideas is to assume all minority individuals—individuals from the global South and East—are similar. Therefore, all hate crimes against them are comparable, which is misinformed and damaging to diverse ethnic minority groups. The police and media should not take child abuse against a twelve-year-old girl—of any race—lightly. Additionally, it is essential for the public to know if the assault

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was a case of Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, or post-COVID anti-Chinese racism. The public must know the nature of the hate-crime, especially when the police believe there might be more victims. Awareness can help with prevention, the best tactic to combat aggression and hate crimes. Yet, without transparency, prevention is impossible. Young immigrants usually stand at the most disadvantageous location of their families. Minority immigrant youths are the double-minority population, if not multiple-minority, and their adult authorities overlook the trauma of their experience. The dual minority status of this young population is attributable to their age and social dislocation. The trauma the minority immigrant youths experience becomes emotional turmoil destined to destroy them.53 The repressed trauma subjects the displaced youths to psychological anguish. Minority immigrant youths experience anger, frustration, and sorrow due to the lack of belonging, the sense of unhomeliness, and the projected systematic racism in the host country.54 The lack of involvement in the migration process dissociates the young immigrants from attaching to any culture, environment, or friendship at the most crucial stage of their growth. A young Iranian-origin woman who migrated a few times before settling in Toronto, Ontario, explained how she had a vast experience finding new friends, saying goodbyes, being treated like an outsider, and starting again repeatedly.55 This young woman was born in Canada. Her parents, however, decided to move back to Iran, which was an unsuccessful step. These parents moved back to Canada and soon after migrated to the United States. Then again, they decided to move back to Canada. This young woman talked about different places she lived and compared them with each other as if she were not a part of these memories and experiences. In answer to “which country felt like home?” she only explained how each country functioned daily in a detached manner. She was only an observer of the places she lived.56 Another young Iranian-origin woman who migrated to Canada, then to Switzerland and back to Canada had a different experience.57 This young woman left Iran as a child and moved to Manitoba, Canada, before migrating to Switzerland. After a year in Switzerland, her family relocated to Ontario, Canada. While this young woman did not see herself as belonging to any country, she was furious at her lack of belonging. She cut contact with her Persian parents and blamed them for her lack of belonging.58 Yet she was outspoken against Western culture and claimed she did not want to be associated with Canadian settler culture.59 However, she spoke fondly of the short period of time that her family resided next to an indigenous family in Manitoba, as she described it as “the best and most memorable part of [her] childhood.” She explained how this family allowed her to lower her protective shield and

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become a child again. She and this family’s children communicated through cultural games and traditional celebrations.60 The lack of communication between parents and children in the migration process is a crucial matter that needs special attention. Minority immigrant youths and children, similar to other individuals, need sufficient time to prepare themselves for migration and say their goodbyes. Many minority immigrant individuals complained that they received more information regarding their family trips and vacations than their permanent migration to Canada.61 This insufficient time prevents these young travelers from concluding their lives in their home countries and starting new lives peacefully. Post-migration visible minority immigrant children learn to observe themselves as different and abnormal through the eyes of their European-origin peers, authorities, and other immigrants while growing up. These children learn to adjust their behaviors based on the mainstream’s expectations or accept the label of the troublemaker. A young African-origin woman explained how she had a “difficult time” adjusting to the Canadian culture because the Western world expected its immigrants to “constraint” themselves.62 A successful university student and a second-generation Indian-origin woman relayed how speaking out against verbal, physical, and racial aggression during a game of basketball caused a full-blown brawl among the members of the two teams and the audience.63 The war started when a rival team member referred to one of the players with a racial slur since she was playing a perfect game.64 This young woman explained that the violated athlete did not consider herself a minority until the dominant culture reminded her of her diversity status through racial slurs.65 Minority immigrant youths experience traumas ranging from physical and psychological aggression to systematic xenophobia and racism. In addition to these traumas, life in the new country burdens immigrant youths with additional family responsibilities due to their ability to adapt faster to the host country’s dominant culture and language. The unpaid labor of love and its social, emotional, and physical hardships encumber these young individuals. The immigrant youths become their families’ translators and consultants in various social and economic encounters. These young immigrant youths must learn to consult and describe complex legal jargon, medical advice, and banking processes. They must even explain the difference between day and night anti-wrinkle face creams. These activities distance the new immigrant youths from their gradual growth into adulthood. The time-consuming labor of love does not allow these immigrant youths to mend their de-rooted foundation. In addition to the familial emotional burden, the immigrant children from the global South and East find themselves in an incompatible and unfriendly world filled with unknown and unfamiliar phenomena. Young minority immigrant women from the global South and

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East spoke about their experiences with impatient and dismissive customer service representatives, teachers, and peers who scolded, punished, and criticized them. HIGH SCHOOL AND IMMIGRANT YOUTHS High school is a transitional yet traumatic stage of life for many immigrant youths. For these individuals, a high school is a place of torture, torment, neglect, and even death.66 Many minority individuals dreaded their high school days since memories of segregation, devaluation, and aggression were inseparable parts of those memories. Many systematic and intersectional inequities placed these young immigrants at the bottom of the power hierarchy in their host country. This vertical hierarchy of power separated high school students into segregated members of diverse minority cultures and members of majority cultures.67 This power hierarchy created various group formations among the female high school students of diverse sociocultural and economic strata in the Great Toronto Areas. Based on their positions in this sociopolitical and economic hierarchy, young immigrant women from the global South and East experienced humiliation, segregation, and abuse from their peers, teachers, counselors, school personnel, and parents. Peer Aggression While peer aggression was the negative interaction that minority immigrant youths underwent, these hostilities were diverse in intersectionality, quality, and intensity of the actions. Many young minority immigrant women endured physical, psychological, emotional, verbal, and sexual harassment from the members of their ethnic/racial communities, other minority communities, and the members of the majority populations. As the aggressive interactions intensified, these young women experienced increased loneliness, unhappiness, and lowered self-worth and self-esteem. Many minority immigrant youths abided by the aggression and harassment of their peers from the dominant culture due to the majority culture’s higher social hierarchy among the other students and teachers. Youth members of the dominant culture exerted unidirectional verbal and emotional aggression upon minority immigrant youths. However, bidirectional physical and verbal aggression and fights are most common among members of minority groups. Young minority individuals openly speak about fighting with members of other ethnic minority backgrounds whom they consider equal rivals. Many young minority women tolerated the aggression from the members of their ethnic minority community to avoid isolation.

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The most disadvantaged minority youths in high schools were the lonely students—the outliers. Being isolated during high school exacerbated the aggression and harassment of young minority immigrant women. These groups of young minority individuals became the victims of various forms of hostility. These individuals silently sustained the violence while they sought a group’s approval to join. When an individual became a group member, they accepted any treatments or demands to keep their ingroup status. Many young immigrant women went through this cycle, some more than once. In one case, a young Sikh woman cut her hair short, which her religion and culture prohibited, to prevent her peers’ discriminatory remarks. This young woman’s desire to be accepted by her group members became more significant than her beliefs and cultural values.68 While this appears exaggerated, this was a common experience for many young minority immigrant women. These young women from the global South and East were expected to either consent to receive aggressive behavior or change their most fundamental characteristics to fit in, stay in a group, and avoid isolation. Systematic Aggression Another form of aggression young immigrants experience in high school is systematic racism in the Canadian education system. The minority young women described how their high school teachers neglected, abused, and disparaged them.69 They further spoke about how their high school personnel ignored their complaints, blamed the victim, disregarded their accomplishments, and refused to respect equality and equity among the students.70 They explained that the teachers favored students from the dominant culture over the minority and immigrant students and spent more time and resources on them. Ironically, minority immigrant students are the ones needing more attention from their teachers since some have less access to resources, such as linguistic limitations or lack of parental support. Therefore, this lack of consideration put minority students in a more dire situation. Moreover, high school personnel, such as principals, mistreated minority immigrant youths. The school personnel punished the victims as severely as the aggressors, even if the ethnic minority victims of the aggressive encounters needed the attention of the school authorities. Due to these unjustified punishments, many ethnic minority victims chose not to report when they became victims of aggressive behaviors in high schools.71 Many ethnic minority youths, however, mentioned that the most common yet damaging treatments for minority immigrant youths came from high school counselors, who were supposed to assist the high school students with their current psychosocial dilemmas and future academic success. The immigrant youths recognized the counselors as the school personnel who most frequently

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withheld their future educational advancements. Many young minority immigrant women explained that their high school counselors directed them to take courses that would stream them into colleges rather than universities. In some cases, the high school counselors took a step further. They did not allow minority immigrant students to enroll in courses that prepared them for the university, despite the students’ excellent grade point averages.72 Finally, many new immigrant youths from the global South and East encounter diminished parental support and protection after migrating to the global North. In some cases, immigrant parents made their children’s battles harder against the difficulties of high school in their host country. These newly migrated parents, who had their share of struggles in Canada, used their children as scapegoats. Many immigrant parents blamed their children as the responsible parties for their migration to the global North; these parents tend to claim the sole purpose of their migration was for better lives for their children. These minority immigrant parents held their children accountable for such fundamental familial decisions, but they did not even consult them throughout the migration process. The immigrant parents from the global South and East shamed their children for being involved in confrontations at school—even if their children were the victims. These parents are more likely to request the worst possible punishments for their children from the school personnel. The immigrant parents expected the most from their children without noticing the tremendous amount of biopsychosocial, political, and economic difficulties that their children had already experienced. THE PHYSICAL, CULTURAL, AND LINGUISTIC ATTRIBUTIONS AND INFERIORITY In Canada, minority immigrant youths learned that the dominant culture considered their physical attributes—such as the smell of their bodies, the amount of their hair, and the color of their skin—undesirable. These young immigrant women felt humiliation, inferiority, or dissonance when members of the majority culture praised or criticized their diverse physical characteristics. In some cases, the members of the dominant culture ridiculed the young minority individuals for having an enormous amount of hair on their heads. In other instances, they applauded them for not smelling like their ethnic community. These social commentaries indicated the undesirability of these individuals’ ethnically stereotyped physical traits. Many young, hijabed Muslim women who migrated from the global South and East were criticized for their choice of religious attire. As a result, minority immigrant youths learn to observe themselves through the colonizer’s gaze.73

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One of the most predominant prejudices in high school, which many minority women of color suffer from, has been shadeism or colorism. Having a darker skin color was a critical factor affecting many young ethnic minority women’s well-being in high school and beyond.74 Many young ethnic minority women of color discussed the positive correlation between the light color of the skin and the individual’s attractiveness. A young, Middle Eastern-origin woman explained how the lightness of their skin tone increased their desirability and acceptability among their peers.75 For the same reason, minority women and girls from the global South and East used facial bleaching creams to whiten their skin tone.76 However, the young minority women’s aspirations to lighten their skin color had other purposes besides attractiveness and desirability. Some young minority immigrant women tried any approach to lighten their skin color to avoid the social stigmas and racial slurs related to people with darker skin color.77 Puberty-related hair growth on different parts of young minority women’s bodies was another factor of humiliation for these young individuals since their peers from the dominant culture insulted these unwelcome signs of adolescence. The dominant culture targeted minority immigrant women who had thicker and darker hair on their faces and bodies compared to their Europeanorigin peers. These unwanted darker hairs attracted peers’ isolation, violence, and humiliation of these young immigrant women. These attacks were traumatizing for two main reasons. On the one hand, the attacks demonized these youths’ growth-oriented elements. Young minority women had no opportunity to peacefully cherish and experience their developing bodies. On the other hand, the dominant culture’s hostility toward puberty-related traits also attacked these youths’ sense of belonging to their new host countries. While many minority youths questioned their unestablished sense of belonging, these attacks on characters became evidence of this unhomeliness and lack of belonging. Language, Linguistic Dissonance, and Accent Linguistic communication difficulties were among the first and most notable burdens on minority immigrants’ identity formation. Immigrant children master the dominant language of the host country faster than their parents. Therefore, many young ethnic minority immigrant women became their families’ ambassadors in the new host country. However, they still had difficulties expressing their opinions, thoughts, and emotions through their new linguistic properties. While the dominant culture and their parents expected the minority immigrant youths to be fluent in the host country’s dominant language, their parents demanded that they maintain their mother tongues to function as their family’s translators. This constant push and pull, combined

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with the pressures of social integration and a continuous feeling of inability to belong, created a state of dissonance for minority immigrant youths. Thus, many immigrant children chose to gradually separate themselves from their parents as they strove to attach themselves to the dominant culture in search of stability. These young minority immigrants deny their ethnic culture desiring vertical social mobility. The minority immigrant youths, whose accents were from the global East and South, expressed dissatisfaction with their “undesirable” accents. Immigrant youths described how the dominant culture suppressed, shamed, and disregarded them solely based on their accents. At the same time, they discussed in detail how their accents had been a liability for them in Canada. These young women showed sincere gratitude whenever someone mentioned their English had no “foreign” accent.78 They experienced humiliation due to their parents’ linguistic insufficiency or accent. They did not blame the hypocrisy of multiculturalism, but they rather criticized their parents’ incoherent, unfamiliar, and foreign accents for their degradation. These young individuals learned to accept the identity of a stranger and a foreigner in their host country, even if they were born Canadian to immigrant parents. These minority youths inherit their parents’ lack of belonging, accents, and language deficiencies. Many minority immigrant women complained about how their non-Western-Anglo bilingualism and non-European names and accents posited them as second-class citizens. The new immigrant youths who did not have access to the dominant language had an even harder time. These newly migrated immigrants must have learned the host country’s tongue in a highly hostile high school culture. In a country like Canada, where the dominant culture did not tolerate accents, not being fluent in the country’s dominant language was unforgivable for young minority immigrants. Young minority immigrant women recalled that their peers yelled at or belittled them because they did not understand their peers’ English commands as new immigrants in Canada. The young ethnic minority women recalled their problems with the irregularities of the ESL classes and the humiliation and isolation they endured as ESL students. The school authorities forced the first- and second-generation immigrant youths from the global South and East out of their scheduled high school curricula to attend the ESL classes. The simplicity of the ESL classes had stigmatizing effects on first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths since the students who did not participate in ESL classes treated the young ethnic minorities as less intellectual and competent individuals.79 In return, their peers’ degrading treatments created a sense of lowered self-worth in these individuals.

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CYBER-TECHNOLOGY, IMMIGRANT YOUTHS, AND VIOLENCE Social and mass media have been among the most influential factors behind the stigmatization of minority immigrant youths. The media advertised the global East and South as the second-class world compared to the global West and North. These negative stereotypes initiated hostility toward the new immigrant youths from the global South and East. These constant dismissals affected the first- and second-generation minority immigrant youths’ quality of life in the Western world. Moreover, lacking belonging caused these young immigrants to experience long-lasting traumas that negatively affected their bio-psycho-socioeconomic well-being. The continuous growth of cyber-technology, the constant introduction of novel social media platforms, and the cyber-citizen’s anonymity created a perpetually changing cyber environment. Therefore, law enforcement and the justice system have had difficulties accessing, controlling, and regulating this virtual space. Alternatively, the anonymity of cyberspace allowed individuals who desire to coerce their control and power over others to act freely and relentlessly. The borderless nature of cyberspace gave an international platform to these individuals to exert their negative verbal pressures to harm cyber-citizens emotionally and force cyber individuals to harm themselves physically. Most of these cyber-predators use online anonymity for catfishing their prey. The catfish predators design their cyber identity with favorable characteristics for their target. Therefore, their target would trust their cyber identity and respond to them accordingly. Cyber-harassment follows the victims into their physical lives. Viral hostility may transform into physical and sexual aggression, stalking, and even manslaughter through suicide. Cyber-attackers in some extreme forms have forced their victims into committing suicide. Considering these adverse effects of cybercrimes, some justice system officials still believe that cyber-harassment is not as severe as real-life aggression. There are methods to prevent cyberaggression for young cyber-citizens. However, these preventive methods rely heavily on the young citizens’ parents and their surveillance.80 This condition would be critical for children from minority immigrant and lower-income families whose parents work excessively. The lack of parental spare time would again place these children at a disadvantage position and imminent risk. The North American justice system and law enforcement have been inadequate in controlling illegal activities in the cyber world, including cyberbullying.81 The law enforcers and the justice system have attempted online surveillance, but their attempts aimed to misguide the public to serve

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their own interests. These inspections had two main characteristics: first, these investigations focused on targeting specific groups of people based on their offline features; second, these investigations directly benefited the Canadian justice system and did not profit the public. For example, suppose the Canadian federal government suspects some individuals have been involved in a terrorist act. In that case, the justice system has the full authority to access the suspects’ most private information, disregarding online privacy laws.82 Unfortunately, these investigations usually target people of color, minority immigrants, and individuals with affiliations to specific religions. The justice system and law enforcement were, and still are, incapable of supervising and inspecting the cyber world and its criminal activities, which affect everyday people. Despite cyberspace’s complexity, boundlessness, permanency, and anonymity, the justice system and other authority figures tend to offer exceptionally simplistic advice to the victims of cyber aggression. These authorities advise the victims of online predatory actions to unplug from the cyber world. This remedy has been prescribed mainly for the young victims of cyber-verbal harassment, cyber-sexual harassment, and cyberstalking. The adult authorities ignore the continuum and interchangeability between the online persona and the physical identities of the victims. These authorities overlook that the online identity of each individual is an extension of their biological identity. CONCLUSION To be a Canadian depends neither on the years an individual has lived in Canada nor on the place they were born. To belong to the dominant culture of Canada, an individual must attain a series of physical characteristics to relate them to European ancestry. Canadian dominant discourse would always consider the individuals who migrated from the global South and East as immigrants regardless of their citizenship or the number of generations they lived in Canada. These minority first-, second-, or multigeneration immigrants would always have to answer the question, “Where are you really from?” The inconsistency between the experiences of the immigrants from the global South and East versus those from the global West and North questions the entire notion of multiculturalism in Canada. While Canada introduces itself as a multicultural nation, multiculturalism is only accurate for immigrants of European descent. The young minority immigrants from the global South and East dwell in unhomeliness. These young individuals constantly question their sense of belonging to any nation since they are unfamiliar with their ancestral country and country of settlement.

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Young immigrants from the global South and East stand in the most unfavourable position in the Canadian power hierarchy. Due to migration complications, these young individuals enter the process without previous discussion or communication. This lack of communication would prevent these individuals from getting closure before migration. At the same time, immigrant youths face the direct abuse and aggression of the dominant culture. The pre-migration lack of closure and the consistent experience of segregation and hostility in the host nation destine the minority immigrant in a state of unhomeliness. Even cyberworld surveillance is a method for the dominant culture to target and control the minority individuals in their Western settlement countries. NOTES 1. Man, 2004. 2. Creese, 2019. 3. Bonilla-Silva, 2006. 4. Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Waters, 1996. 5. Waters, 1996. 6. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 7. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 8. Hansen, 2017. 9. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 10. Huot, Cao, Kim, Shajari, and Zimonjic, 2020. 11. Russo, Islam, and Koyuncu, 2017. 12. Henry and Tator, 2010. 13. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 14. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 15. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Participant 2 in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019. 19. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 20. Qutub, 2013. 21. Ashley, 2014. 22. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 23. Ashley, 2014.

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24. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 25. Participant 27 in discussion with the author, August 21, 2019. 26. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018. 27. Butterfield, July 26, 2022; Blitzer, July 26, 2022. 28. Butterfield, July 26, 2022. 29. Fanon, 1952, 69. 30. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 31. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 32. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 33. Ibid. 34. Kazemipur, 2014. 35. Participant 5 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019, and participant 20 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 36. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 37. Participant 3, 20, and 22 in discussion with the author, November28, 2018, January 28, and April 29, 2019. 38. Bhabha, 1996, 54. 39. Participant 5 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 40. Participant 19 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 41. Participant 15 in discussion with the author, December 5, 2018. 42. Participant 5 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 43. Ibid. 44. Creese, 2019; Chariandy, 2007. 45. Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2014. 46. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 47. Winter, 2014. 48. Ogmundson and Doyle, 2002. 49. Kazemipur, 2014, 21. 50. Bonilla-Silva, 2006. 51. Livingstone and Weinfeld, 2018. 52. O’Brien, February 21, 2023. 53. Dunn, Paradies, Atie, and Priest, 2016. 54. Ibid. 55. Participant 5 in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019. 56. Ibid. 57. Participant 14 in discussion with the author, January 11, 2019. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with the author, October 2018–August 2019. 62. Participant 16 in discussion with the author, January 16, 2019. 63. Participant 3 in discussion with the author, November 28, 2018.

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64. Ibid. 65. Participant 22 in discussion with the author, April 29, 2019. 66. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 67. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 68. Participant 10 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 69. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 70. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 71. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 72. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 73. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 74. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 75. Participant 6 in discussion with the author, June 19, 2019. 76. Participant 25 in discussion with the author, November 1, 2018. 77. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 78. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 79. Field observation/personal communication and discussion with October 2018–August 2019. 80. Helfrich, Doty, Su, Yourell, and Gabrielli, 2020. 81. Maurushat and Al-Alosi, 2020; Hancock, 2007. 82. Valiquet, 2011.

the author, the author, the author, the author, the author, the author, the author, the author,

the author, the author, the author,

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Index

9/11, 94; attack, 25, 68, 125; operation, 25 academic, 2, 4, 6, 41, 62, 64–68, 70–73, 93, 111, 127 accent, 3, 14–15, 17, 20, 40, 66, 71, 97, 101–3, 106, 121–24, 126, 134–35 acculturation, 2, 6–8, 17, 19, 108, 125 addiction, 13, 52, 114 adolescent, 14, 134. See also youth aggression, 7, 9, 13, 27–30, 32, 37–41, 43–44, 46–48, 52–55, 61, 64–65, 69, 71, 74–75, 78, 85–86, 88–89, 97, 107, 109, 115, 121, 128–32, 136, 138; cyber, 9, 29, 43, 108–9, 115–16, 136–37; ingroup, 40–42; microaggression, 29, 86; outgroup, 46–47, 52; peer, 27–32, 38, 40–45, 61, 63, 67, 95, 101–3, 115, 131; racial, 70, 130; sexual, 9, 107–9, 115, 136; verbal, 29, 44, 55, 65, 70, 87, 93, 103, 114, 130, 131. See also racism, systematic aggressor. See aggression alone, 1, 40–42, 74, 93 attitudes, 25, 31, 44, 49, 66, 74–75, 79, 85, 94, 102, 124; laissez-faire, 78; Westernized, 46

belonging, 8, 14, 21, 23, 30–31, 85, 88, 97, 106, 121, 127, 129, 134, 137; lack of, 22–23, 48, 51, 78, 89–90, 102, 121, 126–27, 129, 134–36 bilingual, 3, 18, 122, 135 bullying, 14, 27–32, 41–43, 69, 75, 78, 115–16; cyber, 108, 115–16, 136; xeno-bullying, 14, 28–32, 128 bystander, 41, 50, 75, 78, 109, 116 Canada, 2–4, 6, 8–10, 13, 15–19, 21–23, 26–27, 30–32, 37, 44–45, 52, 63, 65, 67, 73–74, 76, 79, 85–86, 89–90, 93–95, 101–3, 107, 121–30, 133, 135, 137 Canadian education system, 63, 102, 132 Canadian point system, 16 citizenship, 21, 123, 127, 137 code-switching, 19 collective fear, 28–29 colonization, 24, 105–6 color: immigrants of, 21; people of, 14, 22, 26, 121, 137 colorism, 47, 134 Columbine massacre, 31 communication barrier, 40 conflict, 54–55, 69, 74, 77, 93–94, 115 Cooley, Charles, 43 153

154

Index

courses: advanced courses, 72; general courses, 72 COVID-19, 108, 129 critical observation, 86 cultural: background, 17, 21, 32, 38, 47, 54, 76–77, 88, 94–95, 101–3, 107–8, 110, 113, 125; beliefs, 40, 88, 105, 117; language, 18, 122 cyber: communication, 101; criminals, 107; harassment, 107; identity, 95, 111, 136; predators, 107, 110, 113, 136; sexting, 109; sexual aggression, 9, 107–9; sexual harassment, 107–9, 116, 137; stalking, 108, 111–16; technology, 107, 136–37; world, 94–95, 107–9, 136–37 derogatory, 68, 105; label, 17, 25, 51; slurs, 123; term, 17, 28, 41, 51, 78, 93 deskilling, 3, 122 diasporic communities, 7, 23–24, 38, 54, 101, 108, 113, 123, 128 discipline, 14, 18, 47, 76, 96; corporal, 76; self, 75 discrimination, 13, 17, 27, 29, 32, 61, 97, 128 displacement, 1, 21 dissonance, 18–19, 41, 88, 93, 95, 97, 106, 133–35 diverse cultural background, 101 diversity, 9, 18, 48, 130 dominant culture, 19–32, 37–39, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 61–62, 65, 85–91, 94–97, 101–6, 111, 116–17, 121–28, 130–35, 137–38 drugs, 22, 75, 77 emotional support, 38, 71 ESL classes, 5, 62–64, 72, 104, 135 ethnic: enclave, 7–8, 102, 128; profiling, 7 ethnicity, 9, 17, 28, 121, 125 exotic, 101, 105

Facebook, 53, 94–95, 112 Fanon, Frantz, 125 fetishize/fetishizing, 105–6, 116 fluency in English, 5, 19, 63–64, 102, 104 foreign, 1, 3–4, 95, 105, 135; born, 16; citizenship, 21; foreigner, 8, 121, 135 fresh off the boat (FOB), 6, 41, 90 Global South and East, 2, 4, 7–9, 13, 20, 25, 28, 32, 38–39, 48, 55, 61, 63, 68, 71–72, 77, 85–86, 89, 92, 97, 101, 109–10, 115, 117, 121–28, 130–38 guidance counselors, 37, 71–72, 79 guilt trip, 73 hair, 27, 29, 41, 85–86, 90–92, 97, 125, 132–34; body, 86, 91–93; covering, 95; facial, 90, 92 Hall, Stuart, 6 harm, 24, 28, 46, 49, 74, 108, 112, 115, 128, 136; self-harm, 75, 79 headscarf. See hijab helplessness, 87, 97 hierarchy, 15, 19, 23, 52, 101, 131; desirability and acceptability, 22; ethnic, 9; popularity, 67; of power, 1, 47, 104, 122, 131, 138; racial, 70, 106, 122; social status, 47, 52 high school, 3–4, 7, 9, 16, 21, 24–25, 28, 31, 37–38, 40–45, 47–55, 62, 65, 67–69, 71–78, 86–87, 91–92, 94–95, 97, 102–3, 105, 107, 111–14, 123–24, 126–27, 131–35 hijab, 93–97 honor killing, 55 host country, 77, 85–86, 104, 121–22, 121, 128–29, 131, 133–35 host nation, 1, 5, 8, 14–15, 20, 22–23, 28, 77, 85, 88, 90, 93, 101–3, 123, 128, 138. See also host country identity, 6, 8, 18, 23, 25, 86, 89–90, 94–96, 101, 102, 104, 111, 121, 125,

Index

155

128, 134–37; cultural, 6; hybrid, 6, 17, 101–3 immigrant, 1–10, 13–32, 37–40, 42–52, 55, 61–67, 70–79, 85–90, 93–97, 101–3, 104–12, 114–17, 121–36, 138; first- and second-generation, 8–10, 13, 18, 20, 30, 37–38, 44, 55, 61–62, 77, 94, 101, 121, 123, 126, 135–36; undocumented, 3, 22 implicit and explicit racism, 125 inequitable treatment, 97 injustice. See justice insecurity, 29, 48, 54, 79, 96 integration, 17, 76, 125, 135; conflict, 23, 40, 74, 77, 94, 115 intersectionality, 2, 16, 131 invisibility, 42, 67 Islamophobia, 9, 68, 93–94, 129 isolation, 9, 13–14, 29, 37–38, 40, 42, 44–45, 48, 51, 55, 63, 70, 78, 86, 91–92, 94–97, 113, 121, 131–32, 134–35

minority, 2, 4–10, 13–15, 18, 20–32, 37–55, 61–79, 85–97, 101–17, 121–38; bodies, 8, 86, 106; ethnic, 1, 7, 28, 30, 46, 55, 102, 105, 111, 113, 115, 121, 128, 131–32; racial, 2, 13, 15, 122, 125; visible, 2, 102, 122–23, 125–27, 130; women, 29, 32, 39–40, 46–49, 52–55, 68–69, 71–72, 74–76, 78, 89, 92, 97, 101, 105–7, 111, 115–17, 122, 126, 131, 134–35 minority immigrant. See minority mother tongue, 14, 18–19 multicultural, 3, 9–10, 46, 79, 85, 103–4, 122, 124, 127, 137; multiculturalism, 3–4, 13, 28, 95, 122, 126, 127, 135, 137; values, 103, 122

joking insults, 43, 85 justice, 8, 14, 30, 53, 70, 112, 125, 136–37

Olweus, Dan, 30 oppression, 23, 27, 94, 96–97, 125 others, 2–3, 8, 14, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 42, 45, 49–50, 55, 63–64, 67, 89, 95, 109–10, 113, 117, 124–25, 127, 136 outliers, 42–43, 45, 55, 132 outsider, 2, 8, 21, 28–29, 38, 43, 45, 50, 123, 125, 127, 129

labor of love, 4, 5, 32, 130 legal authorities, 53, 112, 128 linguistic, 4, 8, 16, 23, 101, 103, 132– 35; barrier, 2, 20; dissonance, 18–19 loneliness, 8, 40, 43–45, 48, 79, 95, 102, 131 looking glass self, 43 “Mean Girls,” 24, 49 media, 6–8, 14, 23–27, 30, 37, 52–53, 85, 90–91, 116, 124, 128; social, 6, 26, 53, 109–11, 117, 136 Mena. See Global South and East mental health, 13, 22, 26, 41, 52–53, 65, 71, 112 migration, 1–10, 13–17, 22, 32, 66, 73–74, 76–77, 94, 101, 103, 121–23, 126–30, 133, 138; permits, 16

name-calling, 25, 41. See also derogatory Nijjar, Kiranjit, 52–53 non-skilled labor, 76

parents, 1–5, 8–9, 13, 15–21, 25, 27, 32, 37, 44, 51, 61, 64–66, 72–79, 92, 93, 102–3, 105, 108–9, 115–17, 123, 126, 128–30, 133–36 patriarchy, 54, 110–11 physical abuse, 53–54, 75 physical characteristics, 22, 85–86, 90, 125, 133, 137 poverty, 1–2, 9, 27, 122 prank, 41, 52, 86 prejudice, 85 privilege, 1, 6, 21, 25, 44, 74, 105, 121

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pronunciation, 104, 122 Quebec’s Bill, 93 race, 16, 26, 121, 128 racial slurs, 44, 50, 128, 130, 134. See also teasing racism, 2–3, 8–9, 14, 22–24, 26, 29, 42, 47, 50, 61, 76, 86, 90, 122, 125, 127, 129–30; cultural, 9, 85; democratic, 13–14, 48, 55, 61, 70, 86, 124; systematic, 4, 7, 9, 20, 23, 27, 94, 129, 132 refugee, 3, 15, 26, 103; scent, 86–89, 106 school authorities, 4–5, 13, 18, 26, 30, 40, 46, 66–68, 70, 78, 96, 122, 124, 132, 135 school system, 18, 28, 61, 63, 75, 79, 103 segregation, 9, 44, 48, 50–52, 62, 70, 91, 93, 102, 104, 128, 131, 138 self-esteem, 38–40, 43, 62, 86, 90, 97, 105, 123, 125, 131 self-hatred, 106 settlement, 125–26, 137–38 sexing, 111–12; cyber, 109 sexual abuse, 74, 107, 114; cyber, 114 shunning, 7, 44, 48, 55, 64 skin color, 28, 47, 52, 70, 96, 101, 106, 125, 134 Snapchat, 110 social: class, 16; interaction, 51, 93, 103, 108; socialization, 16; status, 22, 27, 47, 51, 96 sociocultural, 6, 8, 28, 37, 86, 131; differences, 28 stereotypes, 7, 68, 85, 87–88, 96–97, 123–25; negative, 26, 136 survival jobs, 4 symbolic representation, 24 systematic bureaucracy, 32 taboo, 86, 109

Index

targeted, 25, 39, 70, 85, 91, 107, 134 Tator and Frances, 61 teasing, 32, 40, 48, 86–87, 92 terrorist, 25–26, 68–69, 125, 137 toxic, 26, 47, 61 translator, 4–5, 8, 19, 64, 130, 134 trauma, 9, 13, 15, 22–24, 45, 48, 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 73, 78, 92, 101, 105, 107, 110, 112–13, 129, 131 unconsented, 21, 68, 74, 85, 107, 109, 111 undesirable, 7, 20, 27, 42–44, 47, 87, 89–90, 101, 133, 135 unhomeliness, 9, 13–14, 21–22, 121–22, 126, 129, 134, 137–38 victim-blaming, 114–15, 117 victimization, 21, 40, 44, 88, 90, 93, 113–15 violence, 9, 23, 28–31, 37–39, 41, 64, 69, 108, 121, 132, 134, 136; cyber, 107–8; cyber-sexual, 108; societal, 85; systematic, 85, 153 virginity myth, 54 Virk, Reena, 31 vulnerable, 7, 39, 72, 75, 86, 89, 93, 97, 102, 107; individuals, 7 white culture, 4, 7, 27–28, 46, 50, 86, 96, 121, 124 xenophobia, 28–29, 32, 93, 96–97, 102, 121, 129–30 youth, 1–2, 4–10, 13–23, 25–32, 37–39, 43–47, 51–52, 55, 61–63, 66–67, 70–76, 85–86, 88, 90, 95, 101, 104–5, 107–11, 113, 115–17, 121, 123–25, 127–36, 138

About the Author

Dr. Shila Khayambashi has a PhD in communication and culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Shila focused her doctoral research on minority youths’ experiences with migration and aggression in Southern Ontario and experienced the migratory hardship firsthand. While completing her PhD, Shila received the prestigious Mitacs Globalink Graduate Research Award in 2016. As a part of this research, she spent three months in India to explore youth aggression internationally. Shila believes in community involvement and outreach programs. Therefore, she held several bullying awareness workshops for diverse populations. As a public scholar, she has published in newsletters, such as The Conversation and The National Post, regarding minority immigrant matters. Shila migrated from Iran to Toronto, Ontario, in her youth, and as a result, she has faced her share of interpersonal and systematic violence and injustice in the country she began calling her new home. Upon her migration, similar to many young immigrants, the author became the sole translator for her newly migrated parents since she could learn English faster. She took the responsibility of being her family’s translator, consultant, and surrogate parent for her siblings. These responsibilities dug into the author’s time to study and socialize; instead, she matured suddenly in the span of a few weeks. Shila experienced many incidents of peer aggression at different levels of her education in her country of settlement, while she continuously encountered discouragement from her teachers and mentors at high school and different stages of university, which hindered her progress toward a higher level of education. Despite these negative interactions, the author achieved her doctorate degree. This book is the answer to the author’s question: Do others share her experience with interpersonal and systematic violence as an immigrant in Canada?

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