Race-based Discrimination in Bomb Girls

Fans of the television series the Bomb Girls believe that one of its great strengths is the historical perspective it provides on the lives of Canadian working women on the home front during World War II. In their protests against the show’s cancellation, some fans note in particular the show’s willingness to tackle “provocative” themes such as racial and sexual discrimination.1 One of my goals here is to explain that despite its wide popular appeal, from the perspective of academic historians, the show obscures more than it reveals about the experiences of racialized minority group members in wartime Canada. My second goal is to suggest why, as professional historians, we should publicize the discrepancy between the popular views conveyed by the show and the conclusions of scholarly reconstructions of the fate of minority workers in wartime. The main representative of groups subject to racist prejudice and discrimination in Bomb Girls is Marco Moretti, an Italian Canadian worker at Victory Munitions, the show’s fictitious bomb factory. Marco, we are told, was two years old when his family immigrated to Canada. He identifies himself as a Canadian. Nevertheless, others, including many of his co-workers, view him with suspicion, as a “foreigner,” an Italian with loyalties to fascist Italy that jeopardize Canadian security. Marco’s father is interned in Petawawa, according to Marco, for no other reason than that he is Italian. It makes good cinematic sense to use a worker with origins in an enemy territory to represent the hardships experienced by so-called foreign workers in Canada during the war. The fate of enemy aliens, especially those among them who were unjustly interned during the two world wars, is the most dramatic manifestation of the difficulties that minority group members experienced in wartime. Canadian audiences, moreover, are likely to respond to the incarceration of Italians during World War II because by now most have some familiarity with wartime internment in Canada. The popular media have paid considerable attention to this subject thanks to lobbying for apology and redress for Japanese, Ukrainian, and Italian Canadians interned during the two world wars. This focus on fears of the threat that “enemy aliens” posed to Canada’s war effort, however, distorts the reality of the wartime experience of minority group members. In contrast to Japanese-Canadians, only a small fraction of “enemy aliens” of European origin were interned. The most pervasive form of discrimination against those of eastern and southern European origin was employment discrimination. As far as immigrants from eastern and southern

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