Racism in Canada is a fact. No one is denying that or
arguing about it with the possible exception of Rex Murphy. Link https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-canada-is-not-a-racist-country-despite-what-the-liberals-say. I believe that it is also a fact that open prejudice is less overt in Canada
than it is in the United States. We are a politer people, for one thing. Instead
of calling Michelle Obama ‘an ape in heels’, she gets the label ‘callipygian’.
Conrad Black was the perp in this case and I have despised the man ever since I
read that column. Link https://themsmysentiments.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-than-just.html
I am white, middle class, well educated, in my 57th
year of a solid marriage and damn lucky to be Canadian with roots here that go
back some generations. I am also lucky to have grown up in a community that
was, to an extent, mixed race. I went to school with black kids, socialized
with black kids and was unsurprised that my parents socialized with black
professionals. And I got my education about racial epithets in Grade 3, when I
repeated a comment my teacher had made to a classmate, calling him ‘her little
chocolate drop’, and the classmate pushed me down a set of stairs. I liked
chocolate and I liked George. He neither apologised or explained, but his hurt
was clear. The lesson stuck.
All my life I have believed that all the kids of
whatever race and religion got the same schooling in my home community, with
the exception of the Catholics who had a separate school system. As they still
do, in Ontario today. The black kids were more heavily represented in a couple
of the high schools, but as far as I knew, got exactly the same courses and
calibre of teachers. I was smug, in fact, about how my community handled race.
After writing that, I wondered just how good my recollection
was. I have been looking at photos from a Windsor History website and it hit me
that almost all the photos, elementary and secondary, were of white kids
only. And so, I did a quick literature
check. Guess what! Link https://www.tvo.org/article/the-story-of-ontarios-last-segregated-black-school?fbclid=IwAR2D9ptY035ZrBaTvvDkuaQNDFgJG5vDMwH-7PILtdOUXEKG7K57J-pijZE. I also found a nicely structured timeline of blackhistory in my community. Descriptions of actions in the 1940’s and 1950’s
reveal a mixed bag of prejudice and fight against prejudice. See https://www.publicboard.ca/Programs/K-12/africancanadians/Documents/Roads%20to%20Freedom%20Sec_Feb%202011.pdf
I left my city to go to university and have never lived
there again. Looking back at that time (and the yearbooks) I realize that there
were very few black students. At the time I was oblivious. I recall going to a
movie with a black male classmate and being puzzled at the glare I received in
the lobby from a friend. I was engaged to be married to a guy who was not at
the university and if I thought anything, it was that she believed I should not
be with another male.
I tried to teach our daughters not to let race get in
the way of friendship and fellowship. I probably overdid it. My younger
daughter tells me that racial prejudice and epithets were a factor in her
schooling. If she told me that at the time, I probably told her to ignore the
perpetrators as not worthy of attention. If I thought anything, it was that
these creeps were too few to matter. I followed with interest the efforts to
overcome racism in the USA, but I was a young mother with money to earn, kids
to raise and a house to manage, and it did not appear to me to be my fight.
After all, I thought, overt prejudice is illegal in Canada and those
experiencing it could have recourse to the courts. Police beating up African
Americans for no reason? Only in the States. Even a stint on the city’s Board
of Education did not teach me much. Kids of all races were in trouble for
various reasons. A few years working in the Board’s Personnel department did not
cause me to count the number of blacks in positions of responsibility either.
We had black teachers. So, no problem.
I am white, middle class, and, I have come to realize,
a stupid person. Over the last few years, I have learned more and more about
the ‘racialized’ experience. And it just makes me sick. The fact that I don’t
think I contributed to it is pretty lame. By not noticing, yeah, I have been on
the wrong side. What was I thinking? Well, that the LGTBQ community needed some
support. That agism needed fixing. That women are second class citizens (both
of these latter from personal experience). But that Canadian blacks were
routinely being subjected to hassle and worse from the police just went under
my radar. I read about what I assumed were isolated incidents and also assumed
that this would be dealt with. That the First Nations people were also hassled
and worse is something I knew from reading but also assumed that the assurances
from our politicians that this was being remedied were true.
What I have just had shoved down my throat is that we
cannot trust the police force not to use force when it is not needed. That
police seem to be allowed to act on biases without penalty. That quite a few of
our institutions are systemically unfair and that nothing has been done to
change them. And that all this has happened and is continuing to happen because
people like me, and including me, have not been paying attention and have not
been enforcing change.
Demanding change is not the same as getting change. I
learned this in a very minor political position, on a Board of Education in
fact, where, once elected, I quickly found out that as an elected official I was
doing the equivalent of riding on an elephant with no reins. If you whacked the
animal hard enough with a goad, you could get a minor change in direction, but
the minute you stopped whacking, the change stopped happening. Why did this
occur? Because the majority of the people in positions of responsibility were content
with things as they were. Most of them, like me I suppose, were people of good
will who thought that the bad stuff was aberrant and could be dealt with case
by case. Bullying in the school yard was normal, always had been, and was
relatively innocuous and besides, the kids would grow out of it. Or toughen up.
Or you put a program in place and your elected official bogs off, happy. And
never stops back to ask if the program is working or still in effect, even.
Someone should ask if the school yard bully has grown
up to be a person who will kneel on someone’s neck for eight minutes, ignoring
pleas for air. Has the kid who teased someone about skin colour turned into an
adult who blocks access to medical care at a reasonable price for ‘those’ people
because they don’t look after themselves and don’t deserve it? Have the ‘elite’
groups of middle school madness become adult NIMBYs? And, equally frightening,
what are some kids learning at home and internalizing. Because, don’t believe
that little kids are innocent and are taught bias. Kids are inherently biased,
like chickens pecking the one that looks different, and have to be taught, carefully
taught, that all people are equal. When they see adults literally getting away
with murder, what do they learn?
I am convinced that any of this is not going to be
changed by a top down fix. That there are laws on the books and a Charter of
Rights is nice, but not good enough. The elephant just keeps clomping along and
here we are still sawing at the reins. Any change will only begin when a
majority of people demand it and keep demanding it. Starting with sorting out
the police, ditching politicians with tin ears and being aware, on every
street, in every office, classroom and store, of prejudice in all its many
subtle and overt forms. And calling it out, then and there, as it happens. In
fact, by stopping being stupid and complacent and enabling. Yes, all lives matter,
but the priority for our ‘racialized’ brothers and sisters, sons and daughters,
matters more.
Note to readers: I am trying out 'New Blogger' and not getting the links to work. I have therefore included the URLs.
