Chinese And Black Canadian Soldiers

Chinese And Black Canadian Soldiers

Chinese and Black Canadian Military Participation

This image is a graphical representation I created of formal WW1 and WW2 military participation from Chinese and African-descended Canadians, using data collected by J.L. Granastein and Michael O’Hagan. Here, I decided to model this data using the symbolic image of remembrance, poppies, each of which represents 100 soldiers. The exact numbers of these soldiers are disputed so the amounts depicted are not definite or absolutely certain, especially the 3,000 African-Descended soldiers figure (interpreted from a statement by O’Hagan describing how “thousands” of this diaspora were soldiers in WW2), so it is better to view these amounts in terms of relative size rather than exact amount (a few poppies as ‘hundreds’ and dozens as ‘thousands’). The use of the poppy, and the overall purpose of this model, is to emphasize the idea of cost, how hundreds of these diasporas served as soldiers for Canada in order to obtain even a baseline respect for their ethnicity in Canadian Society.

William Henry

The graph is based on the following data:

Granatstein, J.L. “Ethnic and Religious Enlistment in Canada During the Second World War.” Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes 21, (2013): 174-180. Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.

O’Hagan, Michael. “Duty and Discrimination: Black Canadians in the Veterans Guard.” February 19, 2025,
https://powsincanada.ca/2025/02/19/duty-and-discrimination-black-canadians-in-the-veterans-guard/.

William Henry

November 25, 2025

CC BY-SA 4.0

.JPG file

English

Still Image