Arthur Webster
Carlsbad, CA
Obviously, this shouldn’t be the case, but often I feel as though people think it is ok. I live North of the border, and while Canadians have a slight tendency to get…shall we say, a bit self-righteous over racism (underground railroad, anyone? Outlawing slavery? We’re the good one’s, right?). I don’t believe any nation in the world, on any reasonably large scale, really understands racism and has succeeded in confronting it. We know that we are not supposed to say bad things about African-Canadians, just as before then we learned that we couldn’t say bad things about Jewish people, and the Irish, etc. etc. We are learning that we can’t be mean to immigrants, people from Asia, and so forth. But it (frustratingly) seems as though thats all it ever is: learning what we can and can’t say.
I was very disheartened to read some (trolls, of course) comments in some media outlets regarding some natural disasters in reserves and areas occupied by Native Canadians. Not that racism against those whose land we share is anything new, but simply the extent to which it wasn’t considered bad. You see any comment thread about a case involving racism against a person of African descent, and any comment with racist content would be lambasted by other commenters. If we are talking about Native Canadians, though, not so much. One such comment read that the ‘culture of dependency of the {Native’s} knows no bounds’ (paraphrase), referencing the governments supply of emergency provisions to the area. This coming shortly after major floods in Calgary and southern Alberta (that’s a city and it’s province in Canada’s west, for those not familiar with Canadian geography). I’m sure I don’t need to explain my frustration with this. In any case, it simply seems to me that our gradual overcoming of racism seems to be solely a consecutive stream of learned political correct sayings, and we need to be constantly told what is or isn’t ok.
Let’s grow up a bit, shall we?
*Note: I do apologize if anyone was offended by the 6 card…it was for effect, though I am open to criticism if it was too much.
