Smarter than you

On Multiculturalism

ndnsurgency:

sofriel:

I see so many Canadians on Tumblr pronouncing how much more forward-thinking Canada is because its history of racism is simply different than that of the United States. Canada has not solved the racism problem nor has it even come close to doing so. We in the United States may be more open about talking about racism but because the discussion is slightly different in Canada does not mean these problems simply do not exist. Get talking, my Canadian friends.

(via mohandasgandhi)

(As a sidenote, I find this interesting, because something like 95% of my Canadian friends are POC, and a good 80% are Aboriginal, and I am always curious to learn of the racial divisions in Canada.)

Canada is a totally fucked up, racist, settler colonial state. However, since Canada’s history is a little different in terms of how we were colonized vs. the USA, our racial discourse reflects that currently. “Canadians” (the very few who are actually ‘allowed’ to identify as such without question, READ: White) seem to be under the romantic notion that slavery didn’t exist here and that they were ‘nicer’ to Indigenous folks. This, of course, is bullshit. “Canadians” enslaved and murdered black folks and performed genocidal acts upon Indigenous populations. I think the difference is that a lot of “Canadians” just want to talk about race in “polite terms” (READ: NO DIALOGUE). So the general thoughts are, “THEY (POC and Indigenous folks) should have THEIR culture” but not if it actually means anything substantial. Gross.

Also, I’m interested to know what other Indigenous folks (not just First Nations) think of term ‘POC’? I’m asking because I know a lot of Indigenous folks that do not identify with the term ‘POC’ for a variety of reasons. Thoughts?

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days.

Over the last year I’ve found myself, as a white guy, talking up the Canadian idea of Multiculturalism. I’ve tried to qualify it a lot—especially regarding Canada’s indigenous people because obviously there are a lot of things wrong.

But it’s because of living in the UK this year. I strongly feel that there are some specific things that Canada does better. Specifically, I think that for all of its flaws I’m drawn to defend multiculturalism because in the press over here, under the current conservative government, the phrase “multiculturalism has failed” is becoming a code-phrase for “there are too many muslims ruining our country”. Which is an idea that I have a strong resistance to.

I think that ultimately there is essentially no solution to the problems of racist colonial nations with lots of recent immigration that isn’t in some way problematic, because there’s so much history that’s already been built up, and so much resistance to change all around. I think Canada has come with some pretty good ideas. But we haven’t managed to get rid of the bad ones, let alone get to dealing with their legacies.

I hope that people should be exposed to all kinds of stuff so that they can’t think of one thing as normal—that’s the ultimate promise of multiculturalism to me. I think the biggest hope for breaking racism is a slow demographic shift that seems to be terrifying the fascists already: the way that every generation makes it harder and harder to imagine white people as the norm, because of growing mixed-heritage populations. But it’s awfully slow.

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    - I know that I will raise my kids as best I can with no conception of skin color. If they ask why people look...