The Study of Ethnic Relations

Since so many people are making a desperate effort to understand and modify the relations between peoples, ethnic groups and races, it is appropriate to note some of the biases and false assumptions that vitiate well-intentioned study and discussion of these relations. The relations between French and other Canadians are not one of the desperate cases. Much is to be learned about inter-group relations by probing to the depths of personal experience, by discovering through what experiences the individual learns both the realities and the fictions of his position as a member of an ethnic group. Among the respects in which the two groups are parts of a larger whole may be some of which people are not ordinarily aware and of which, if they are aware of them, they do not ordinarily think in ethnic terms at all.