Just before the World Cup started, I was trying to make small-talk, and mentioned that I have an English background, so that will explain why I may be in a bad mood for the next month. Bringing up that topic, I had assumed that others would chime in with their own reasons for cheering for a particular country. This being KW, I would expect that several people would smugly announce German heritage. Possibly one or two would just burst into tears, and I would assume they are Italian.
But instead, everyone seemed unsure. Rather than proudly state the allegiance, they were non-committal. People would say, yeah, I guess I have English roots so I could shout for them.
To be clear, I wasn’t expecting that everyone would be a fanatic for the source of their DNA. But I did expect that there was an understanding that in sports, particularly out-of-the-ordinary events, you pick someone to cheer for, and put on the die-hard fan act. Getting behind the home of your maternal grandfather for a month fits the bill. But no one I talked to looked at it that way. Having temporary allegiance to a country you have a flimsy connection to is a, well, a foreign concept.
Ethnicity is a weird thing here in Canada. You’ve got some people who are wrapped up in their family’s country of origin. But others have been here for generations, and don’t think of themselves as having any connection to other lands. I first noticed this in school when we were given an assignment to find out about our personal heritage. We had to list an ethnicity for each of our four grandparents. For me, the assignment was trivial: I just wrote “England” four times and handed the paper in.
Of course, I realized that most Canadians have a more diverse background. But I hadn’t realized that it would be much more difficult for others. The teacher had to encourage the students to ask around their families. He also had to explain — like he’d been through this before — that you can’t just write down “Canadian,” however far you have to go back to find something else.
I get the same sense watching all these commercials for genealogy services and genetic testing. They promote it as discovering your roots, with examples of people who have no idea what their heritage is. Sure, I had been shown that young kids were often pretty clueless about their origins, but I had naively assumed that by the time people got to adulthood, they had been filled in on their ethnic background. But apparently it’s enough of a mystery that people will pay good money to find out.
Of course, there’s a flip side to this: many people who take their heritage as a major part of their personal definition, often to the point of displacing their Canadian identity. Again, soccer is a place where we often see this. For years we’ve seen national flags on car windows during every World Cup. This year, I noticed that a kiosk in a mall was also selling hood flags. That is, a flag that wraps across the hood of your car, so you can show your allegiance even more forcefully, with the added benefit of not compromising your aerodynamics. I wasn’t sure if this idea would take off, but I’ve been seeing more of them over the course of the World Cup.
Canada’s national soccer teams — at least on the men’s side — are notorious for having difficulty getting home teams to cheer for them. Fans often cheer for the team of their ethnic origins, rather than the country they’re currently living in. That’s a situation that’s been debated to death in the past, so I won’t do it here. Instead, I’ll just point out how this illustrates Canadians’ diverse ways of dealing with ethnic affiliations. Some of us have completely lost touch with our roots, while others hold onto them no matter what.
I’m not sure what this means, or where it’s going to go in the future. I feel like Canada’s sense of identity is slowly getting stronger, despite the persistence of strong connections to other countries. Clearly it’s more complex than I had assumed.
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