Today's post is a little bit offbeat, and non tech-related. Montréal is a strange place you don't really understand until you leave it. The first time I went to the United States for work, I experienced some culture shock, so to speak.
For lunch I went to the employees' cafeteria, being stuck in the office since I didn't have a driving license. So I bought the not-so-good food there (this wasn't the Commensal), and was amazed at the size of the "medium" soft drinks.
As I walked from the kitchen area to the eating tables, it just occurred to me: For maybe the first time of my life, I noticed something "wrong" about a lack of, well, cultural diversity. Women, Blacks, Latinos: Kitchen, Janitors. Men, White: The "Non-Support" Employees. Of course, out the of 100 or so employees eating, there was one black guy, and maybe a dozen or so women, just enough so that they can convince themselves that they're not racist or sexist.
This isn't directly about racism, but about hermetic social classes. In Montréal, especially having attended an English university, white male is a small minority. Even in Software Engineering, the guy/girl ratio was close to 60/40. In my typical work environment, race and cultural origin is so diverse that's it's the norm. Why? Because here affordable education makes it possible for anybody that's good to succeed. Whereas in the supposedly free USA, racial, gender and religious inequality is institutionalized, because a bunch of old white rich folks said so.
I said it before and I'll say it again: Today's Montréal is the New York of a hundred years ago. Yes, learning French sucks, but compared to the endless ghettos of Toronto, here you can start a life where you won't be limited by your gender, sexuality or race. We're still far from an utopia, and the winters suck, but having seen how bad it is just a little south or west of here I can't think of living anywhere else.
Published on July 10, 2012 at 21:36 EDT
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