Quebec documentary prompts undue panic and fear-mongering about ‘anti-white racism’

In a Montreal high school, where there aren’t any French students, the administration decides to organize a series of songs and skits to showcase the diversity of cultures, as part of intercultural days. 

One afternoon, the entire school is invited to watch professional folk dancing troupes where different dances from different countries are performed. A Chinese dragon dance, a Haitian dance, a Greek dance, and so on. The final dance is a traditional Quebec gigue.

“The room was spontaneously invaded with boos,” shares the narrator. “The dancers, probably all from Quebec, and certainly energized by the curiosity of other cultures to put on such a show, froze before the cold reaction, and eventually, after a few seconds, when calm returned, began the first hesitant steps, under the catcalls of the teenagers who left the room despite the intervention of their teachers. I might have been one of them.”

The incident described isn’t recent. It took place over four decades ago, sometime in the early ’80s. The person narrating this story, the teen who walked out that day when it was time for a Quebec traditional dance to be showcased, is author Akos Verboczy, who emigrated to Quebec at the age of 11 from Hungary. I had the pleasure of writing the preface for Verboczy’s autobiographical book, Rhapsodie québécoise : Itinéraire d’un enfant de la loi 101, when it was translated into English in 2017. 

While I didn’t and still don’t agree with many of Verboczy’s conclusions in the book, that didn’t stop me from appreciating much about a memoir that was written with candor, a biting sense of humour and insight about the Quebec immigrant experience. I believed then, and still do today, that immigrants can become true-blue Quebecers in many different ways — including the author’s way.

That teen who, like many other non-francophone students at his school that day, so rudely and nonchalantly disrespected a part of Quebec culture, wouldn’t end up becoming a failure of integration. On the contrary; he would go on to spend years supporting interculturalism and francisation in Quebec schools and would even serve as political attaché to PQ Immigration Minister Diane De Courcy, as a fervent supporter of Quebec sovereignty. While Verboczy might be considered an ideal, fully integrated immigrant by many Quebecers, he clearly didn’t start off as one.

Much has been said recently about a documentary showcasing a highly charged incident at Pierre-Laporte school in Montreal. When high-school students from Quebec’s region of Matane visited the multi-ethnic high school last year, they were received in an unbecoming manner. In the documentary, a student from Matane recounts being insulted and called derogatory, misogynistic names while she and her classmates were visiting the school.

After that isolated clip from the documentary Garçons, un film de genre made the rounds on social media last week, it was shared extensively and brandished by several internet users as proof of pervasive “anti-white racism” in Montreal’s multi-ethnic schools. 

The dissemination of that specific clip and its political commodification was not incidental. It’s part of a recent tendency by certain conservative nationalists, many of them fiercely anti-immigration, to terrify Quebecers into believing the province’s demographic shift is leaving French-speaking Quebecers a vulnerable minority in a sea of “foreign” immigrant students who neither care to nor are able to properly integrate and value Quebec culture and the French language. Even worse, these “anti-white” teens disdain everything about “les Kebs.” It’s all hyperbole, of course. 

Incidents like these are often completely blown out of proportion by the usual culprits yelling about “Quebec-bashing” and an “anti-Quebec identity” in an attempt to convince some Quebecers into believing they are being “invaded” by people who not only don’t care for Quebec culture but openly mock it, and who, given the chance, will actively contribute to its demise. In other words, Quebec’s increasing plurality worries them because it’s seen as a hindrance to desired assimilation and homogeneity. 

The truth is far more boring. If you ask anyone who went to a Quebec school in a multicultural, diverse environment, they’ll tell you that misunderstandings, clashes and conflicts happened then and still happen today, between all ethnic groups, and yes, often between French speakers and non-French speakers. Teens will always rebel and occasionally defy the status quo and the powers that be. Despite constant talk of fragility, the fact remains that the French language and culture, the CAQ’s French-first government rhetoric, language legislation and policies that enforce French only in Quebec schools ensure that Quebec’s French culture is socially dominant and very much the status quo in Quebec schools. It therefore stands that teens will occasionally resist it like they resist the “establishment” and all forms of authority. Sometimes that defiance can unfortunately manifest in ugly, inappropriate ways.

In addition, kids and teens can often be tribal, content to be in their cliques that they’re comfortable with. Thankfully, most adults grow out of that phase as their world expands. 

There are always growing pains and occasionally even deep-seated tension involved when groups from different cultures, languages and sometimes values and priorities come together to form a new whole. Especially when homogeneity (both from immigrant groups and locals) clashes with diversity. It’s nothing new. Ever since Bill 101 was legislated, Quebec has had “welcome classes” and Montreal schools where large — even dominant — percentages of the student population were from immigrant backgrounds, yet some would have you believe this is a recent phenomenon caused by alarming rates of immigration. 

There’s nothing terrifying about the fact that first-generation immigrants may identify more with their country of origin than they do Quebec or Canada. By the second and third generation, their foreign-born parents can barely recognize these new Quebecers who have now transformed into something very different, and who have seamlessly become part of the majority group in their own unique way.

Transitioning into a new culture comes with many social, personal and academic hardships, but newly arrived immigrant children almost always manage to integrate successfully, adapting to Quebec’s distinct cultural and linguistic status as part of their own identity. It’s unfair to pretend otherwise. 

The clip that was shared on social media caused so much misplaced outrage that the documentary’s director, Manuel Foglia, was forced to publicly denounce the fact that it was deliberately presented out of context. It got to the point, he said, that it conveyed a message contrary to the one he wanted to convey with his film.

While the scene did take place (and absolutely no one is condoning the behaviour), both the director and the school’s principal stated in a La Presse article that the reaction was “really more excitement and a way of being obnoxious with young people from elsewhere.” 

“I don’t think what you see in the film is a reaction to the fact that they’re white,” said principal Philippe Lamoureux. “It’s a reaction to the fact that they’re strangers.”

In other excerpts from the documentary, which were of course not shared on social media, several Pierre-Laporte students denounced the behavior of some of their classmates, disappointed that a few bad apples made their school look bad. Other students spoke positively about the experience, concluding that despite their differences, they were all teenagers. Most importantly, some Arab students of Maghreb background expressed how they learned to accept sexual diversity after coming to Quebec, demonstrating how cultural prejudices can slowly disappear as integration takes place. 

The most non-serious comment on this incident came compliments of conservative sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté, who claimed on social media after the director denounced those who shared that clip as proof of “anti-white racism” that “Foglia would have preferred that we would have not seen the scene, but we did. And we won’t pretend to have misunderstood.”He’s literally the director. If he had preferred that we didn’t see the scene, he wouldn’t have included it in his film. He would have edited it out. But, as with all things in life, Foglia understood that seeing the complete picture only benefits understanding this situation. ■

This article was originally published in the Oct. 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

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Read more weekly editorial columns by Toula Drimonis.