When I say I dislike a Canadian, I dislike a Canadian. And it’s a particular kind of Canadian: affluent, elderly, and prone to coming to live in my area of Southern California during the winter, only to abandon us to our fiery fates a few weeks before temperatures blast past 100° F. That isn’t to say I hate their country and most of the people in it, though. I just hate those damn Canuk geezers, and pray every night for the angel of death to swoop down and take them all en masse.
But when assholes in the South say they hate Canadians, it apparently means they hate black people, making them not just any old assholes, but racist assholes. The road from term describing America’s neighbors to the North to secret racial slur is murky but Canadian (no, actual Canadian) fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia Stefan Dollinger postulates:
“This ‘code’ word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious,” he said. “What’s left? Right, the guys to the north.”
Nativists are probably so used to using the word “Canadians” by now, they’ve forgotten that the word has any other meaning. So when they’re told about “Canadian universal health care” of course they’re going to oppose it. They want better medical treatment than the downtrodden poor minorities of our country are given access to. If you explained to them slowly – as you would a harebrained, hate-filled child – that it only meant “free doctors for mostly white people”, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that many of them would change their mind.
Is it possible, then, that other nationalities are being used as code as well? When radio demagogues rail against the French, do they really mean Mexicans? (Although that would seem redundant, since they rail against Mexicans as well. Unless “Mexicans” is racist jive for “The French”.) What are their derogatory terms for homosexuality? Does anyone in the South talk in a way the rest of us can understand? Why does Cajun food taste so delicious?
