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PREFACE

Books about racial and cultural minorities in Canada tend to focus on barriers, injustices, inequalities, rejections, and frustrations that marginalize these categories of people in Canada. What is often neglected is the fact that many minorities succeed in Canada from the margins of Canadian society. This book contributes to filling this gap by documenting 1) minority successes in the face of systemic marginalization, 2) the strategic resources that work for these minorities, and 3) lessons new immigrants, refugees and international students can learn from these success stories.

The Canadian social structure, like any social structure in contemporary human society, creates and supports unequal opportunity structures. A major dimension of the inequality is against racial and ethnic minority immigrants, refugees and international students. Social inequality tends to block or limit socio-economic mobility of these minoritized peoples. Critical intellectuals and social activists highlight this characteristic of Canadian society, creating the impression that this unequal social structure is a crack-free glass ceiling for minorities. It is the stance of this book that since many racial and ethnic minorities in Canada have succeeded in business, education, politics, and the professions, the Canadian social structure is not crack-free. There are cracks in unequal societies that many minorities have utilized as escape routes to facilitate their social mobility. The wedges these minorities use to widen the cracks for their upward mobility include strategic resources such as appropriate knowledge, relevant skills, abilities, facilities, strategic planning and decisions, mentoring, networking opportunities, and family and community support systems. These strategic resources are the secrets behind the hard work, ingenious application of intelligence, and personal ambitions of successful minorities in Canada. New immigrants, refugees and international students in Canada who become aware of these wedges and are motivated to utilize them would experience social mobility. As more and more minorities move through these cracks, a critical mass of minority business people, politicians, and professionals would form to become a power base to successfully strategize and negotiate for the transformation of the unequal Canadian social structure. The legendary Underground Railway is a relevant analogy for this standpoint of the book. Slavery in America was a big inequality structure that trapped the lives of Blacks. However, there were always cracks in the American slave society and some of the slaves developed wedges and used them to widen the cracks for their escape. One of the major widened cracks was the Underground Railway that became a prominent escape route for American slaves to freedom in Canada. As more and more slaves escaped through the cracks, a critical mass of free slaves was formed to initiate the civil rights movement that provided constitutional rights for Blacks in America and Canada. The main secret behind the success of the Underground Railway was that the slaves received strategic resources such as support network, food, money, compasses, and protective weapons.

This book although does not get into the theories of inequality, equity and diversity, it does acknowledge the structural and cultural barriers to minority success in Canada. That is, it does not blame the failure of individual minorities to make it in Canada on their lack of hard work, individual intelligence and personal ambition.

Rather, like the Underground Railway escape network, it points to strategic resources that new immigrants, refugees and international students can use to help them overcome some of the barriers to success in Canada. With the right and adequate resources, new immigrants, refugees and international students could effectively connect with Canadian society and Canadian academia to facilitate their upward social mobility. Part I of the book addresses minority struggles, successes, and prospects for connecting to the mainstream Canadian society. In Part II the strategic resources that minorities could utilize to successfully connect to the Canadian education system are provided. The main theme running through both parts is that new immigrants, refugees and international students in Canada, although are structurally located in the margins of Canadian society, they can succeed in the mainstream society from these margins when they are connected to strategic resources.

In the context of the book, Immigrants, Refugees and International Students are operationally defined. Immigrants refer to people formally coming to Canada from other countries as settlers. On the other hand, Refugees are people who do not enter Canada through the formal processes of immigration. They come from other countries to seek refuge in Canada because of political, economic, and cultural problems they experience in their countries, and Canadians who seek refuge in post-secondary education because of employment problems. The concept of international students is used to represent Students from countries outside Canada and the United States.

To put the book in a personal context, the following introduces the authors. Francis Adu-Febiri and Everett Ofori were both born and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Both went through the Ghanaian school system before coming to Canada.

Francis Adu-Febiri came to Canada as an international (graduate) student. He later immigrated and became a Canadian citizen. He received his Master’s Degree in Sociology from Simon Fraser University and a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Adu-Febiri is currently Sociology Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Camosun College, British Columbia, Canada. He was the Chair of the Department from June 2002 to May 2005. He is also an Associate of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He has taught as a term faculty at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. He has also supervised a Master’s thesis at Royal Roads University in Victoria. Francis has presented and published extensively on tourism, human factor development, globalization, diversity, racialization, and ethnicity. He is the author of First Nations Students Talk Back: Voices of a Learning People. Dr. Adu-Febiri is the founder and president of Workplace Diversity Consulting Services (WDCS), and serves as the Chair of the Ethnocultural Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, Victoria, British Columbia. He has been the president of the Canadian Chapter of the International Institute for Human Factor Development (IIHFD) since 2000.

Everett Ofori, a Ghanaian-born Canadian writer, has lived in Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. He is the author of Prepare for Greatness: How to Make Your Success Inevitable and The Changing Japanese Woman: From Yamatonadeshiko to Yamatonadegucci (English/Japanese). He worked in the early 1990s as an assistant editor for the Vancouver-based publication Common Ground. In addition to four years of volunteer service as an English teacher with the Intercultural Association of Greater Victoria (British Columbia), Everett has coached hundreds of university and high school students both in Canada and Asia on how to hone their oral and written communication skills. He holds a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) degree from Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) and is now about half-way through his Doctorate program.

Francis Adu-Febiri and Everett Ofori

May 2009