Century of systemic erasure: How Canada’s 1918 anti-Greek riots reveal enduring xenophobic statecraft and racial capitalism
Original framing: “‘Erased from history’: A century on from Canada’s anti-Greek riots” — Al Jazeera
The 1918 riots were preceded by the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver and followed by the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike’s violent suppression, revealing a pattern of state-orchestrated racial scapegoating during periods of economic crisis. Canada’s 1910 Immigration Act, which barred ‘undesirable’ immigrants, was explicitly modeled on U.S. eugenics laws and served as a blueprint for later policies like the Chinese Head Tax (1885–1923) and the Komagata Maru incident (1914). The riots also paralleled anti-German sentiment during WWI, showing how wartime nationalism was weaponized to justify racial violence across multiple immigrant groups.
The 1918 Toronto riots were not an isolated outburst but a symptom of Canada’s racial capitalism, where the state weaponized xenophobia to discipline labor and consolidate settler sovereignty.
The erasure of this history serves to naturalize modern immigration controls, from the ‘Safe Third Country Agreement’ to the ongoing detention of racialized migrants, by framing exclusion as a neutral policy rather than a violent tradition. Indigenous critiques reveal how ‘foreignness’ has been a movable category used to justify land theft, while Black and South Asian perspectives show how Greek-Canadians were both victims and beneficiaries of a system that later excluded them. The solution lies in dismantling the myths of multiculturalism and whiteness that sustain this cycle, replacing them with a politics of solidarity rooted in labor and land justice. Only by confronting the past can Canada avoid repeating it—whether in the form of modern ‘austerity riots’ or climate-induced border militarization.