It's Good to Be BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Female

 Hollywood and advertising are not the only art forms that have lost their audience through DEI. The poetry world is probably worse, as a Vancouver poet has recently demonstrated.

The result, predictably, has been poetry nobody wants to read.

A White Elephant?

 

It’s time to address an elephant in the room. Something nobody dares to say.

I have pointed out recently in this space (“Narcissism Is Not Depression”) that people with low self-esteem will compensate by “working hard at whatever they are asked to do, to prove themselves. They will be scrupulously moral, and always want the structure of rules. Rules will reassure them they are doing all right.”

This means that someone with low self-esteem is primed for accomplishment in life. Someone with high self-esteem will avoid what is difficult. They may enjoy life more, but will never accomplish much.

It follows that a culture that fosters low self-esteem, especially in its children, will, over time, develop faster and become more advanced than a culture that fosters high self-esteem. It will also be more orderly and have less crime and violence; and this in turn allows for faster development.

And this can easily explain, in turn, why some cultures “dominate” others. Why Jews are always so successful. Why “whites” do better than “blacks.” Why the British managed to manage one quarter of the world. Why indigenous cultures never invented the wheel, while Europe and Asia had printing and firearms and ocean-going vessels.

In fact, there is no other adequate explanation. The common one, that whites or Jews or Asians are simply racist and violent, while Africans and aboriginals were always peaceful and loving, is not just nonsense on the evidence, but nonsense on the internal logic. Simply being mean does not give you power over others.

Different cultures are simply better than others. And the key is in child-rearing. Child-rearing is really what a culture is all about: culture is what we pass on to our children. Some cultures instill low self-esteem. Their children suffer, but succeed, and the culture succeeds. Other cultures instill high self-esteem. Their children have a great childhood, but accomplish little in life, and the culture does not progress. They will also suffer more in later life; because the culture around them will be less orderly, less developed, and more violent.

The British upper class has long understood this. It was all about “breeding.” For countless generations, they sent their young away to spartan, rigorous boarding schools, where they were commonly bullied, and expected to fend for themselves. This was the key to the continued dominance of that class. 

Do the same with Canadian aboriginal children, and they call it “genocide.”

I tutor many Chinese and Korean students. They barely have a childhood. For them, it is a grind from morning to night. What is their favourite free-time activity? The usual response is “sleep.”

And you wonder why they do so well at academics? It is not discrimination in their favour. They are systematically discriminated against.

“Jewish guilt” is similarly notorious. You are never good enough.

African-Americans, by contrast, freely boast about themselves. They spike the ball in the end zone. They trash talk. A current ad for Hamilton Ontario tourism features a local football player paid to talk up the city. But he also inserts that he is the best football player ever seen—just in case you didn’t know. One cannot picture a ‘white” athlete saying such a thing. One cannot imagine a Chinese athlete saying such a thing. It is perhaps the most obvious cultural difference between the two groups.

A further irony is that those with low self-esteem are unlikely to complain. They will feel they do not deserve more than they have; and if they are genuinely discriminated against, they will fear drawing attention to themselves. It is likely to cause them trouble.

Those with high self-esteem, and those accustomed to getting what they want, on the other hand, will complain loudly if they do not get it. 

So if some group is complaining loudly of discrimination and injustice, they are almost certainly already privileged. 

This includes women. Boys are traditionally treated roughly and held to account as children. Little girls are traditionally treated as “princesses.” Young women are fawned over. And so they grow bitter when privilege is not acknowledged.

This includes African-Americans. If not privileged by the wider society until recently, they almost always grow up privileged. African-American mothers are famously indulgent. African-American fathers are often absent. And they currently have systematic privilege, and complain the louder for it.

This includes Canadian “First Nations.” Contrary to the myth, they have always been given every consideration by the government and the wider culture, as advised by the best experts of the day. As a result, they remain mired in poverty and a sense of grievance. Again, fathers are often absent; and mothers are indulgent. 

The current popular push for “self-esteem” is increasingly making a disastrous mistake. Our growing lack of interest in child-rearing is making a disastrous mistake.  A civilization-ending mistake, unless we correct it at this late date.

No Irish Need Apply

 

The racial discrimination in Canada—and the US and Britain too—has become more egregious now than it ever was in the days of the Civil Rights marches. Today I note this line in a communication from the League of Canadian Poets about an upcoming contest:

“Each submission much be accompanied by an entry fee of $20. Discounted entry fees ($5) are available to Black, Indigenous, racialized, and LGBTQI2S+ poets.”

Such statements are  common now. They are blatant violations of both the US Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Which shows the sad truth that such charters in the end only protect already-favoured groups. What is needed is a change in hearts. They are in open violation of the principles of Martin Luther King Jr., that we must judge one another not by the colour of our skins, but by the content of our character—the same moral Jesus gives us in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  They are open violations of the principle on which the US, and modern liberal democracy, was founded, that “all men are created equal,” and have the right to equal protection under the law. But that is another example of how such high-sounding principles end up protecting only already-favoured groups. Somehow the US, demanding equality for themselves vis a vis England’s ruling classes, saw no immediate need to free their slaves. 

We thought we had gotten beyond all this in the 1960s; it has all come raging back. It leads to the conclusion from such bitter experience that all people are inherently racist and xenophobic. This is a tendency we must all consciously fight against, as we must always fight against aspects of our animal nature. We are herd animals. Small children will often show a bad reaction to an unfamiliar skin colour; as a dog will. It is a survival instinct to be suspicious of the outsider, the stranger. Couple to that the universal need for scapegoats.

If we forget it, or, yet more stupidly, start claiming that only one particular racial group is subject to racist feelings, we end up doing horrible things to one another. We end up in Holocausts.

The State of Young White Males

 

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1773879171728691395?s=20

Posted by Elon Musk on Twitter with the simple comment "yup!"

The Real Victims of Prejudice.

 

I am a big fan of the Coen brothers. And MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare play. But I have never bothered to see Joel Coen’s 2021 MacBeth. I dislike resettings and modernizations of Shakespeare plays. At best, it seems a gimmick. And messing with the Shakespeare original is like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Coen’s MacBeth made MacBeth a black man—an absurdity in 11th century Scotland.

Why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, must C0oen choose this one in particular to do in blackface? Shakespeare sets most of his plays either in England, or in the romantic Mediterranean. At least in the latter case,  there are more legitimate places to plausibly put a sub-Saharan African character. Othello comes to mind—although of course a Moor is not a sub-Saharan African, the miscasting would not be so jarring. There is, by contrast,  only one Shakespeare play set ijn Scotland, and its uncanny Scottishness is integral to it. It is often referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”

So it seems pretty in-your-face and up-yours to Scotland to culturally appropriate its main character. 

I suspect this is an example of a larger and longstanding effort in the English-speaking world to devalue and to efface the Scottish and Irish and their cultures. 

Others have noticed what seems to be a recent prejudice against characters who are “ginger”: Green Gables is now being partly converted into a display of aboriginal culture. Disney recently turned the Littlest Mermaid black. There is a common wisecrack in England: “do gingers have souls?”

Red hair is especially characteristic of the Irish and Scottish. It is far less common almost everywhere else.

And the Irish and Scottish are insulted regularly. Although “the n-word” cannot be spoken, nor even the innocuous Eskimo or “redskin.” Yet the terms “hillbilly” and “redneck” sare in common use, and are unambiguously pejorative.

I recently read that the term “hillbilly” was originally a term for the Scots-Irish: “billies” because they supported William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. So, reputedly, is “redneck”: Scots-Irish Presbyterians wore red scarves to show their resistance to the imposed Anglican faith. 

And, of course, the actual people usually referred to as “rednecks” and “hillbillies” in the US are the Scots-Irish. Whose ancestors usually came to these shores as indentured servants, as term-limited slaves, driven out of Ireland and Scotland by clearances.

While blackface is prohibited in polite society, nobody objects to whiteface: the traditional clown makeup, supposed to show an ignorant yokel. Clowns also usually also have red hair. They are a parody of an Irishman or Scot. And you laugh at them, not with them.

The English, and the Anglosphere, always had a benevolent attitude to darker-skinned people: subSaharan Africans, East or South Asians, or Native Americans. As an island people, they could afford to; they had no natural enemies there. Yes, they used Africans as slaves; but they had convinced themselves they were doing this in the best interests of these poor primitives. They were like children; do adults usually hate their children?

Even Jews were little known in the British Isles, and so little thought of. The ancient enemy, and the ancestral hatreds, are reserved for the Scots and the Irish. They represented rival cultures in the home islands. Worst of all, they were Catholic. Or Presbyterians, who were also an ideological threat.

The old prejudices are stronger then ever now, and growing. Extravagant favours now granted to blacks, aboriginals, immigrants, can perhaps best be understood not as some newfound  tolerance, but a way to humiliate, efface, and keep down poor “whites”—that is, disproportionately, the Scots and the Irish.

Arguably, so, in its day, was slavery. 

The Ghettoes of Avonlea

 

Parks Canada has a new ten-year plan to revamp Green Gables to present “cultures not currently presented at the site, e.g., Acadian, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) … and new narratives, perspectives and voices.”

This is an example of real cultural appropriation. Anne of Green Gables, a cornerstone of Canadian culture, is being hijacked to present instead random ethnic subcultures not relevant to the story, that do not appear in the books.

This is as offensive as if, say, the recreated Huron village at Ste.-Marie-Among-the-Hurons were staffed by interpreters dressed as Anne, and the longhouses featured tableaux from Avonlea. It is disrespectful of this aspect of our shared Canadian culture, and seems to want to detract from it. It seems to want to make it something foreign to our own experience.

Anne seems still to be shunned because of her red hair. Gingers are still discriminated against; probably more than ever.

The Real World of Discrimination

 

A typical caricature of the "eternal Jew." Always thinking, God forbid.

The image of Harvard’s black female president refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews—and yet, everyone expects, able to retain her job, despite revelations that she plagiarized parts of her doctoral thesis-- is a neat visual representation of an important truth. Although we falsely conflate them, discrimination against Jews and discrimination against blacks (or women) are fundamentally opposite phenomena.

One never or rarely hears of anyone ever calling for the extermination of blacks or women. If anyone did, the outcry against them would be monumental. If there are occasional claims that someone somewhere once did, if traced back, they turn out to be false claims. The same could be said for aboriginals. If anyone ever called for their extermination, they would be hated more than Simon Legree. (And nobody apparently ever said “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” That was a slander used against US General Sheridan precisely because it would destroy his reputation if believed.)

But one hears often of calls or sees actual attempts to wipe out Jews. Also, men, Irish, and East Asians. This is not just so in recent “woke” times, either. This is a historical constant.

Society as a whole readily sees fit to give blacks, or women, or aboriginals, special advantages: scholarships, affirmative action programs, easier sentencing in court, extra government benefits.

Society never considers giving Jews, men, Irish, or East Asians any such special advantages. The suggestion would be met with scorn or rage.

These two lists are not exhaustive; but "minority" groups always fall into one or the other decisively: the Jewish side, or the black side.

Antisemitism is fuelled by envy and malice: Jews are hated because they seem superior to the rest of us. So too, if to a lesser extent, men, East Asians, or the Irish. Discrimination “against” women, blacks, or indigenous people, in precise contrast, is almost always done out of good intentions, and is meant to be for their benefit. These groups are loved because they are looked down on as inferior. Nobody hates another for being less then they are; they hate for being better.

Not that this discrimination has ever been good for blacks or women or Indians. It is a deprivation of moral agency, and fosters passivity. People do not thrive as pets. But it also prompts them to complain the loudest about discrimination. Once one ha become accustomed to special treatment, one feels a deep injustice whenever it is not forthcoming. When, by contrast, one is accustomed to being discriminated against, one tends to learn to take it silently as one’s fate.

Opposite motives, opposite actions--and opposite results. The Jews manifestly do unusually well despite severe persecution; such as a widespread and systematic attempt to wipe every last one of them out within living memory. The Japanese have recovered from total defeat and Hiroshima within the same time period. The Irish have recovered from the holocaust of the Great Hunger a hundred and fifty years ago, civil war as recently as the 1990s, and are now the richest nation in Europe. Yet blacks are supposed to have never been able to recover from slavery a hundred and fifty years ago—a custodianship justified at the time as for their own benefit. Women cannot recover from a wolf whistle. And indigenous people have supposedly never recovered from the trauma of first contact.

We need to make the clear distinction between malicious persecution, and misguided charity.

Why Canada Is Broken?

 

This article makes an interesting case that affirmative action is why systems no longer seem to work as well as they used to; why you can't get a passport, a doctor, a decent book or movie, or an affordable house, any longer.

And why wouldn't it be so?

Where's My Cheque?

 

The US Supreme Court decision that “affirmative action” programs for university admission are unconstitutional racial discrimination also makes a case that a great number of whites are entitled to reparations.

The left has long demanded reparations be paid out to blacks for slavery. San Francisco’s city government recently proposed giving each black citizen of the city $5 million. Yet nobody who suffered under slavery is still alive. Nobody who perpetrated the peculiar institution is still alive. Almost all American blacks have some European blood, quite possibly from slaveholders taking advantage of their position. Fewer than one percent of the US population, even during slave times, owned slaves. Most white Americans probably descend from more recent immigrants. Accordingly, the average black American is the individual most likely to owe himself or herself reparations, if anyone does; not the innocent general public who just happen to have the wrong colour of skin.

One might argue that, aside rom slavery, reparations are due for Jim Crow laws, for segregation in the US South. But the last of that was overturned by the civil rights acts in 1964-65. To have been personally subject to it, you would have to be over 65 or so now. And it would have affected you only for a brief period at that. To have been discriminated against in college admissions or for a job, you would have to be about 75.

By contrast, affirmative action in college admissions, systemically discriminating against whites and Asians, was introduced in the mid-Sixties and has continued until today. This means that every white native-born American alive today has suffered from systemic discrimination for most or all of their lives, and is justly entitled to reparations, if there is any argument for reparations at all.

Affirmative Action in College Admissions Ruled Illegal in US

 

Great news. Let's hope that, as usual, little brother follows big brother's example.

https://youtu.be/5LK0GoZf5LU

The Pink Tax

 

Ben Shapiro has come across a feminist on TikTok complaining about the “pink tax.” The problem, she says, is that identical items marketed to men or women coast ten percent more for the women’s version. This is discrimination against women.

But here’s a comparison. Identical food items cost more at Sobey’s than at No Frills.

Clearly, this is discrimination against those living in wealthier neighborhoods.

Or maybe, the free market being what it is, items are priced in part for how much the customer can or is prepared to pay. And the higher price for women’s goods is evidence that women have more money to spend than men.

They do. Women spend 80% of the consumer dollar. Men may make more money on average, or used to, but they don’t get to spend it.

If you think this is a case of oppression of women, here’s a simple test: if the male and female items are identical, why don’t women just buy the male item? That would end the practice immediately.

They don’t because women have enough money to be picky and not care about the cost. They will actually spend 10% more to get a pink razor instead of a blue one.

The same TikTokker notes that new drugs are always tested on men, not women. And this too is discrimination against women.

But by the same logic, it is more discriminatory against white laboratory rats and guinea pigs.

The eternal truth is that society considers men more expendable than women. If there is anything risky that needs doing, they use men.

Like trying experimental drugs.

Why do women insist that they are ill-treated? Because people will always listen and they get results.

Those who really are ill-treated are more likely to keep quiet about it and keep their head down. Because nobody will listen, and, if they do, it will just mean another blow of the lash.

Black History Month

 

Glooscap celebrates black history month

Friend Xerxes has written in praise of Black History Month, and suggests we should also have an Aboriginal History Month.

As a fan of history, I am not a fan of “black history month.”

Black history, or aboriginal history, has not been neglected in the past. There simply isn’t much of it.

History relies on written documents, as science relies on experimentation. That is why we call the time before the invention of writing “prehistoric.” If we are relying instead on oral traditions or personal recollections, that is folklore. If we are relying on physical artifacts, that is archaeology. Both no doubt interesting fields, but not history. History is traditionally studied in the public schools, and folklore and archaeology are not.

Because African American slaves were preliterate or illiterate, and the First Nations had no writing, they had no history until contact. After contact, what records we have are scanty, and mostly written by Europeans. Their accounts are inevitably superficial.

One might want to argue that folklore or archaeology ought to be taught in the schools, as well as history. Perhaps; but then you cannot argue that the folklore of these two groups has been ignored in comparison to that of other groups. Collections of Indian and African tales, songs and poems, have been popular for generations. You probably grew up, as I did, gentle reader, playing cowboys and Indians, camping in fake teepees, watching Western movies, reading tales of Glooscap or of Br’er Rabbit, listening to rock and roll, rhythm and blues, jazz, soul, blues and gospel.

If we are going to have a “black folklore month,” or “aboriginal folklore month,” this is giving preference to these two groups; and not because their folklore has been previously neglected. It is not “reverse discrimination.” It is just discrimination.

You might want to argue that, folklore aside, blacks and indigenous people deserve special consideration in general, on this and on everything, because their ancestors were poorly treated and underwent suffering. But then what about other groups in Canada or North America whose ancestors were treated as badly or worse, and in many cases more recently: the Jews, the gypsies, the Ukrainians, the Cambodians, the Irish, the Polish, the Chinese, the Armenians, the Koreans, and so forth?

Discrimination now cannot fix discrimination in the past. You cannot go back and change the past. The actual people discriminated against are almost all dead now, as are the people who discriminated against them. All you are doing is creating more discrimination and injustice, which in turn can never be compensated for.

There is value in knowing and understanding the sufferings of our ancestors. We ought to study slavery, the Holocaust, the Great Famine, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, and the Highland Clearances, such conflicts as there were between European settlers and First Nations, in Canada and elsewhere, and so forth. But not just one or two, and ignore the others.

The reason we study history is to learn the lessons of the past. And this is certainly one. 

Because such events are past, they are, in theory, less influenced by current politics and vested interests. This is why we study history in the schools, and why we should. We thus see human decisions and their results writ large, and learn lessons about human psychology and behaviour. We can avoid the mistakes of our ancestors. Like discrimination. We are not supposed to repeat it.

For this reason, history is all about cause and effect. What were the causes of the First World War? Of the rise of Hitler? What were the effects of the Treaty of Versailles? Of the Danegeld? And so forth. Because if a certain course results in human suffering, we do not want to do it again.

In doing history, we must rely on the written evidence. The same issues of evidence pertain as might in a court trial: hearsay is too easily falsified and cannot be examined. 

This means history is mostly about socially important people; their decisions and the results of their decisions are those for which we have documentation. This may look like bias, but it is necessity.

The Politics of Poetry

 

Pauline Johnson in recital

Scouting publishers to whom to submit a poetry manuscript, I note that almost all, in their submission guidelines, include a phrase similar to the following:

“[we] also encourage poets from the LGBT community, Indigenous and racialized poets, as well as poets with disabilities.”

This almost looks like boilerplate.

Properly, this is against the law. And it is immoral. This is discrimination on prohibited grounds of unalterable characteristics. Unfortunately, as Jordan Peterson has said recently, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has become a bitter joke. Governments and courts in Canada treat it with contempt.

The official justification for this discrimination is that these groups are “historically underrepresented communities,” to quote from one other example of boilerplate.

If these groups are historically underrepresented, they are obviously being overrepresented now. Everyone wants their manuscripts. 

Producing a rather boring sameness for readers. So much for diversity.

Is it even true that they have been “historically” underrepresented? 

As to “racialized” poets, that is, poets with skin colours other than pink, until the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and indeed until some years after that, there would have been rather few “racialized” folk who spoke English fluently. Were they really underrepresented in the English literature and publishing of the 19th and 20th centuries in proportion to their actual numbers? That is not obvious. That case must be made. Rabindranath Tagore, writing in English, took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The US had the Harlem Renaissance. 

There is an automatic reader interest in the exotic. Contrary to what leftists insist, people do not want to read about their own boring lives, but about lives different from their own. Witness Star Wars, or Gulliver’s Travels. As a result, anything purportedly written by someone from another culture has always had an advantage in getting published. In the 19th century, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam made quite a splash even in translation.

As to indigenous poets, again, there has always been an advantage, that of exoticism. There is reason to believe they have been historically overrepresented, not underrepresented, in proportion to their population. Pauline Johnson made a splash in her day by reciting in supposedly Indian costume, and claiming to be an Indian princess. I have found imitators, less well remembered, on Internet Archive. Archie Belaney called himself “Grey Owl” and pretended to be aboriginal in order to have a literary career.

And were the LGBT community ever underrepresented? We cannot really know, because few would have been out of the closet back when sodomy was a crime; but gays themselves regularly claim that almost every prominent author of the past was actually gay. That’s impressive, given that they were only 1-3% of the population.

Perhaps the issue is that specifically gay concerns were not aired. That may be so; but necessarily, specifically gay concerns are only of much interest to about 1-3% of the population. So there’s that. 

Were those with disabilities underrepresented until recently?

Like, say, Milton, who was blind? Cervantes, who had lost the use of one arm? 

Does depression count? Almost every decent poet suffers from depression, according to surveys done at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At a minimum, those suffering from mental illness are certainly overrepresented among successful poets; and always have been. After all, Aristotle comments on this over two thousand years ago.

Another group that used to be favoured in the same way in publishers’ calls for submissions, but from whom favour has recently been withdrawn, is white women. It certainly used to be claimed that they were historically underrepresented. 

This too was probably wrong. Female poets were common in the 19th century. Like homosexuals, women had the advantage over men, in the old days, of not having to support a family. As a result, they were more often able to turn their attention to less lucrative pursuits, like poetry.

So what’s behind this fiction that these groups are underrepresented? Indeed, that historically overrepresented groups are underrepresented?

Is it ignorance, or conscious prejudice? Does everyone else hate straight white men just as everyone used to hate the Jews? Indeed, used to hate the Jews as “overrepresented.” 

The one group that actually is historically underrepresented in poetry is Canadians. That is, in the sense that Canada, as a young country, has not had enough of its geography and culture consecrated by poetry. As a result, we all live drabber and uglier lives than we should.

If we publish poets who focus only on LGBT issues, or black issues, or Asian issues, or issues faced by aboriginals, or the disabled, we are, at the same time, withholding poetry from the majority of Canadians.

It is a philistine move.

It also explains why poetry is far less popular than it used to be in Canada. It has deliberately stopped speaking to Canadians.

Racial Prejudice in Canada

Racism is a relatively modern problem, since the concept of race has only emerged in the last few centuries. But fear and suspicion of strangers, xenophobia, is instinctive; we are herd animals. It should therefore be no surprise to encounter it anywhere, including Canada.

I have certainly witnessed discrimination in Canada against East Asians; and against Jews. And I have experienced it myself—prejudice against “whites” is particularly common.

But I have also experienced prejudice on the basis of ethnicity in most other countries in which I have lived. Prejudice and discrimination against non-Chinese is quite overt, for example, in China. In the Middle East, there is a rigid racial hierarchy: Arabs at the top, Europeans (“whites”) below, but above Filipinos, who are above South Asians.

 On the whole, Canada has to be one of the least prejudiced countries in the world. The multi-ethnicity you encounter on a typical city street or in the subway suggests this. Most countries are ethnically based, and if you do not have the requisite physical characteristics and pedigree, you are forever an outsider. Not so Canada.

Friend Xerxes persists in asserting that “only the person experiencing prejudice knows it.” This is exactly wrong. Prejudice is an attitude in the mind. Unless motive is stated, only the prejudiced person can know for certain they are prejudiced. For anyone else it requires mind-reading. 

Granted that people can often not know, or not accept, that they are prejudiced. I had a discussion just yesterday with a man who insisted he was not anti-Semitic; it is just that Jews really are all like that. He had a good argument, too; he claimed that the principles of dishonest business dealing were Jewish values. I might have had to buy it, had I not read the Old Testament and much of the Talmud.

Given this uncertainty, the only sensible way to detect and root out prejudice is in laws, statutes, contracts and government policies. And, that, of course, is also the place it really matters. Rudeness you shall have always with you. 

And the statutes and laws in Canada, when they are not, as they should be, race neutral, actually always favour designated “non-white” ethnicities over “whites.”

As for social prejudice, the concept of “white privilege” is a fine example. It is impossible for anyone to know, by looking at the colour of someone’s skin, whether they have experienced a privileged or underprivileged life to that point. It is impossible to know either whether their ancestors have. The concept of “white privilege,” or any actions taken based on this assumption, is or are a classic example of prejudice. One must, as Martin Luther King said, judge not by the colour of someone’s skin, but the content of their character.

Racism in the Toronto Police Force

 

The Toronto Police have released a report that “Toronto police officers use more force against Black people, more often.” 

“Our own analysis of our data from 2020 discloses that there is systemic discrimination in our policing,” [Acting Chief of Police] Ramer said. “That is, there is a disproportionate impact experienced by racialized people, particularly those of Black communities.”

Acting Chief Ramer has issued a public apology, which predictably has not been accepted by any of the spokespeople for the local black community interviewed by the media.

In fact, the statistics do not prove discrimination. An important variable has been omitted: do blacks commit crimes in disproportionate numbers? Are they disproportionately likely to be violent? If so, they would of course have more dealings with the police. Yet nobody even mentions this possibility.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that such a question is out of bounds. It must be accepted as an article of faith, on grounds of human equality, that specific demographic groups cannot possibly be committing crimes at higher rates. To suppose so would be racist.

Very well. Then we have a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks. Police are overwhelmingly more likely to confront and to use force against men than against women. 

How can we ignore this? How can we compound the offense by apologizing only to blacks, and not to men?

Or, if you insist, let’s admit that different groups might offend at different rates. If so, the evidence in the present report does not support the racism interpretation. If the problem is “white” officers being prejudiced against other races, why would the problem be for blacks specifically? Why wouldn’t they be equally or at least similarly prejudiced against other visible minorities?

The report does say other groups were also overrepresented in the statistics:

“If you are Indigenous, you were more likely to be subjected to a strip search, a highly invasive police practice; and members of the Latino, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian communities were also more likely to have force used against them.”

But what about the Chinese? What about the Japanese? What about East Indians, aka South Asians? They are visibly not “white,” more visibly so than Middle Easterners or Latinos. And yet they do not seem to have been disproportionately harassed by police.

“Southeast Asian” presumably means Vietnamese; possibly Filipino or Thai. Are they really visibly more distinct from the “white” majority than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Canadians? Having lived in Korea, China, and the Philippines, I can attest that the typical East Asian cannot themselves consistently tell the difference among these groups by physical appearance. How can the racist police?

I also doubt that a typical racist cop could consistently tell the difference in a brief encounter or an emergency situation between a Hispanic or Middle Easterner and someone from Bangladesh or North India; or between a black and someone from South India. If they did, it would be on the basis of speech and behavior, not on any racial characteristic.

This leaves greater levels of crime based on culture as the obvious explanation. Some cultures are more inclined to crime, and violence, than others. We all know, for example, of the Italian Mafia. So too ISIS and Al Qaeda, the Mexican drug cartels, the Vietnamese Triads.

Is the police chief, and are those in authority generally, too stupid to see this? One would hope not. 

But then, why are they deliberately promoting this slander against their own police department?

It has to do with class prejudice. This report and apology will make policing harder and more expensive, and increase the rate of crime. It will particularly be harmful to the working class, including the “racialized” poor, who must live in high-crime areas.

But it has one great advantage: it increases the power of the bureaucracy over the ordinary police officer, who is scapegoated. It increases the power of the ruling class over the working class.

Divide and conquer. 

God help the fools who fall for it.

Is Preferring White Meat Prejudiced?

 

“Friend Xerxes writes”—this has become the usual start to my Sunday sermons.

This week, friend Xerxes writes that “prejudice – racial or otherwise – can be defined only those on the receiving end.”

And he cites as example an incident that proves the opposite. He had three Jamaican guests to Christmas dinner, and asked if they wanted white or dark meat. They all chose dark meat, thinking he was referring to their skin colour.

In fact, prejudice can never be reliably defined by those on the “receiving” end; because prejudice speaks to motive, and none of us can read minds.

Only the person accused of prejudice knows for certain whether the charge is true. 

Xerxes goes on to say “I can never know if I’m expressing unrecognized prejudices unless someone points them out to me.”

Yet I do think we all must know when we are being prejudiced. Prejudice violates the essence of morality, which is the awareness of human equality (“do unto others”); we are all capable of understanding this simple principle, and we all have a conscience. 

It is close to a perfect contradiction to suggest we can be unaware of our own prejudices—that we can think a thought without knowing we are thinking it.

Of course, there is real prejudice in the world—lots of it. One good example is the claim that only “white” people can be prejudiced. Another is that certain groups are “indigenous.” Or that only “black lives matter.” Or that “men” cause violence. Or that this ethnic group owes reparations to that ethnic group. Or that fetuses are not human.

And so it goes, generation to generation.

Is Quebec Racist?

 

Yves-Francois Blanchet has shrewdly exploited his wedge issue from the recent English-language debate: the charge that Quebec is discriminatory because of its support for Bill 21. 

To be clear, Blanchet is right, and the charge of discrimination is itself reckless and prejudiced. I find myself cheering him on, because there is a wider issue here: the growing misuse of the term “racism” to describe anything you disagree with. 

Also to be clear, the moderator did not use the term “racist.” She said “discriminatory.” I think the term “racist” came from Annamie Paul; but it is the term now being used to refer to the exchange.

Quebec’s Bill 21 prohibits public servants, including teachers, police officers, and judges, from wearing any visible religious symbols while on duty.

It is obviously not racist. It addresses religion, not race. What one thinks—one’s religion—is not decided by one’s race. To suggest so is deeply racist. 

Nor is it discriminatory towards any one religion. The law applies equally to all.

Presumably the argument is that it is discriminatory based on “disparate impact”: Sikhs or Muslims wear clothing suggesting their religious beliefs; Christians do not. So it excludes Sikhs, and not Christians, from the public service.

This argument is historically ignorant. The idea of laicization, of no religious symbols in the public service, dates back to the 19th century in France. Before then, Christians did wear clothing suggesting their religious beliefs. Franciscan friars would go about in sandals and brown robes; cardinals would wear red robes; Jesuits wore black. And these members of religious fraternities were the core of the “clerisy,” the class that ran the civil service. Christians were then compelled to stop advertising their religion when acting on behalf of the state, to emphasize the separation between the two. Christians have adjusted. Like many Catholics, I wear a scapular hidden under my collar. It is meant to represent a monk’s robes. To be discrete, it has been reduced to a small square of rough cloth that nobody can see.

Jews have similarly adapted. Required to cover their heads, they wear ordinary hats, like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan do; or tiny yarmulkes in their hair colour. Or just drop the practice.

The law is only requiring the same of other religions.

One might argue that the law is discriminatory towards religion in general. I sympathize with that argument. To banish religion from the public square is to discriminate against the religious. Blanchet’s own comments betray a prejudice against religion. He said “religion has never advanced human equality,” or something to that effect.

By all means, let’s have that discussion.

What Equality Does and Does Not Mean

 

Here's a great explanation from To Kill a Mockingbird of what the phrase "all men are created equal," in the Declaration of Independence, is supposed to mean. 

"One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. 

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."

We seem to have lost this understanding--or have deliberately falsified it. Just as we have lost or falsified Martin Luther King Jr.s dream that children be judged "not byh the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character."

The Real World of Discrimination

 

The much-despised Tree of Life, in Kabbalistic symbolism: a representation of the attributes of God.

Caitlin Press in Tofino is calling for poems for an anthology about trees: ideally poems that “dispel the myth of hazardous and inconvenient trees.”

This is striking, because there are no such myths. In every known culture, trees are venerated. Which is why there is a market for an anthology of poems about trees. People love trees.

The much-despised Christian Tree of Life

This points to a common phenomenon. There is a persistent tendency to declare things or groups that are especially favoured to be or to have been discriminated against. Conversely, things or groups that have genuinely experienced discrimination get no love. In fact, this almost goes without saying: you are automatically not discriminating against any group you lament as being discriminated against.

For example, we are told endlessly that women have faced discrimination throughout history. Yet demonstrably, current laws discriminate in their favour in myriad ways. This is also true historically: women have always been put on pedestals. In many cultures, women were exempt from prosecution for any crimes; they were protected in times of war, rather than being sent to the front; and on and on. The exalted status of women has always been, in a phrase, a “motherhood issue.” And this is biologically hard-wired. Men are expendable, but women are not: they are needed to ensure the survival of the tribe.

We in Canada are told incessantly, and have always been told, that Indians have been discriminated against. Yet they are demonstrably given more rights than other Canadians: special treaty rights, a wide range of benefits not available to other Canadians. Any history of the Indian in literature reveals an unrealistic reverence for the “noble savage.” Everyone has always wanted to be an Indian, in Canada and in the US. And no, their land was never taken or stolen from them—a subject that might take us, for the moment, too far afield.

What about African Americans? Everybody agrees they have been discriminated against; and surely they have a legitimate grievance? After all, they were enslaved. But compare the Irish; the Irish too were enslaved in the New World, if not perhaps to a comparable extent. Indentured servitude. Moreover, the Irish, unlike the blacks, have been systematically oppressed wherever they lived for about five hundred years, including a mass starvation in the middle of the last century. About the same time slavery was abolished—after it was abolished throughout the British Empire. On balance, then, the Irish have arguably had a tougher time of it for longer. Yet there is little or no sympathy for the Irish. Current laws discriminate in favour of African Americans; and against Irish Americans.

It may be disturbing to accept it, but chattel slavery was thought throughout its existence to be of benefit to the African American slaves. They were understood to be unable to look after themselves properly, whether due to genetic incapacity or lack of civilization, and, like children, were to be taken care of. They were not hated or despised, any more than children are.

The Irish, by contrast, were hated and despised.

Who has authentically been persecuted and discriminated against, in recent times? The Jews. Within living memory, there has been a systematic and international attempt to exterminate the Jews. Compare African American slavery—never meant to harm, and abolished a hundred and fifty years ago. Anti-Semitic attacks are still the most common hate crime in Canada, and are on a rapid upswing across North America and Europe. Yet there is little public attention to it; if anything, it seems to be encouraged by some public figures.

The Poles. As many Poles as Jews were executed by Hitler in his camps; their country was carved up and enslaved in turn by Germany, Austria, Russia, and the Soviets. Yet Poles remain one ethnic group it is still acceptable to lampoon. Polish jokes are more or less okay in polite company.

There was something like an attempt to wipe out the Ukrainians within living memory. Yet Ukrainians remain another ethnic group it is still acceptable to lampoon. 

There was a concerted attempt to wipe out the Armenians barely a hundred years ago. It may not be fashionable to mock Armenians, but there is also no sympathy for them.

Who else has known great suffering in recent decades? The Koreans suffered a brutal occupation and something like a genocide under the Japanese, from 1911 to 1945, after which they lived through a devastating war. The Filipinos suffered more under Japanese occupation, reputedly, than any other occupied nation during the Second World War. It was not a matter of discrimination, but the Chinese and the Cambodians suffered holocausts of historic proportions within the lifetimes of many, and the Vietnamese lived through perhaps thirty years of scorched-earth war. Yet these groups are given no consideration in North America; instead, they are systematically discriminated against.

To be fair, African Americans, Indians, and perhaps women have a legitimate grievance, that they have not thriven despite the special help they have been given throughout recent history. Conversely, the Irish, the Jews, the Armenians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, have been successful, even notably successful, despite persecution.

But that is neither here nor there. Being coddled is not necessarily to one’s long-term benefit, because it strips you of self-reliance. It gives you unrealistic expectations, and, when they are not met, leaves you capable of doing little but complaining loudly.

These two unlucky fates, being genuinely discriminated against and being coddled, correspond to two common fates within a dysfunctional family. One child will be spoiled into arrested development, and will grow up to be a narcissist. The next child will be tormented, but, if they survive and survive without being permanently crippled, may even be stronger for the experience. They may grow up to be a hero.

Racism in Canada

 

I am pleased to see that some farmers in the US are filing suit against the federal government for racial discrimination.

The problem is worse in Canada. The Trudeau government is blatantly setting tax funds aside for female-run and black-run businesses.

Unfortunately, while racial and sexual discrimination is ultimately illegal in the US, it is legal in Canada. The Canadian Constitution has a carve-out:

“Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

As well as a separate carve-out for “aboriginal people.”

Any government can therefore discriminate against any group so long as they declare their intent to be to balance out some supposed advantage.

Hitler insisted that ethnic Germans were disadvantaged by the Jews in 1930s Germany. Mussolini insisted that Italians were disadvantaged as a nation in the 1920s. Jim Crow began in the US South because white Southerners saw themselves as disadvantaged by the North.

And so it goes.