Contrast

Publisher:  Contrast Publications, Canada
Year Published:  1977  
Pages:  16pp  
Inactive Serial

Resource Type:  Serial Publication (Periodical)
Cx Number:  CX357

Contrast is a weekly newspaper "serving Canada's black community" since 1969.

Abstract:  Contrast is a weekly newspaper "serving Canada's black community" since 1969. It is published in Toronto and this is its major focus. However, there are also national and international news and bits of interest. It is a commercial paper with a fair amount of advertising. This issue contains a public statement by the Black Community Central Administration of Quebec outlining its position with regard to the Quebec Language Bill.
The BCCAQ is a federation of 8 service delivery agencies in the black community. In the past they note that they have encouraged "an attitude of optimism among people in the Black Community in relation to the inevitability of language adjustment." However, they feel that a silence about the Language Bill cannot be maintained in face of the ethno-centrism of the Bill. And they fear the first scapegoats of this kind of development will be, as it has been historically, the black people. The BCCAQ does not believe culture and language can be identified totally, as black experience proves, nor that national identity is served by a pattern of development that recognises only the needs and interests of "charter groups". They feel a unilingual Quebec will mean a violation of human rights in the black community, and they feel that the immigration restrictions for Quebec will hit the black community especially hard.

Periodical profile published 1977