VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – “Better get out of Canada. Take your mom with you.”

That’s what a Vancouver city councillor was told in an e-mail this week. Pete Fry tweeted a screenshot of the e-mail to highlight that racism still exists.

"get your ass away from the people that built this fine city and get out of vancouver . better yet get out of canada.take your mom with you" Been getting a lot of these types of messages today – know that this stuff doesn't intimidate me, just increases my resolve. pic.twitter.com/EoE7Y6vRfF — Pete Fry (@PtFry) March 6, 2019

“I’m a pretty light-skinned pass kind of guy,” Fry said. “I think if that kind of stuff gets directed at me, then it should be noted that it’s even worse if I was more visibly a person of colour or a person of different abilities.”

He received the message following his proposal to explore rental-only zoning along West Broadway.

“I think this is part for the course for political culture, in this day and age. I think we see a lot of it south of the border and I hate to see it coming up here because I don’t think it has a place in Canadian society.”

He says he doesn’t generally make it a habit to share emails sent to him, but “I chose to highlight this particular one because we have been having conversations about race, equity, and racism in the city.”

“I thought it was just important to highlight that [racism] still exists and it can be a kind of normalized thing in a lot of context.”

Fry came to Canada as a child. “I’m an immigrant, but I did grow up here. This is my home. I’m a Canadian. This is the only home I know.”

He says while it doesn’t happen often, this isn’t the first time he’s received a racially charged message. “Most of them aren’t especially racially charged or anything like that. They’re just typically angry ‘I don’t want to pay more taxes,’ ‘You guys are out of touch’ kind of stuff … It does cross a line when they tell you to go back to your country.”

“I want to just air it and own it, and say ‘Hey, this kind of stuff does happen. Be aware.’ And recognize that when we talk about equity and we talk about reconciliation and we talk about racism in this country and this city, it is real. It’s grounded in reality. We need to acknowledge that and move beyond it.”

Expressing bias has been ‘normalized’ in recent years, says expert

We’ve gotten better at concealing our bias, but not removing or reducing it, according to an associate psychology professor at UBC.

“There’s a lot of research showing that we have unconscious bias — that is inescapable. Children have it within the first year of life and we see evidence of it throughout all of childhood, into adulthood. It’s really hard to change. When people get very emotional, you start seeing the expression of those,” Andrew Baron told NEWS 1130.

He says he’s not surprised to see it in politics. “There’s a reverse in course. It used to be — over the last maybe 15, 20 years — becoming less and less acceptable to express bias openly. And certainly, in the last few years … we’ve seen in other politicians on both sides of this border more openly expressing bias. That’s normalizing, and making people more comfortable expressing their true feelings.”

Baron says although some people may be surprised to see comments like the one Fry shared, but being in B.C. doesn’t make us immune to being biased.

“I think it’s a natural part of our human psychology that we tend to see the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We start this way of thinking very early in our life and there’s little thwart that way of thinking about the world.”

He does feel in our province, there are strong norms against expressing bias, “but all that does is make us good at controlling what we say. It doesn’t fundamentally change how we feel.”

– With files from Marcella Bernardo