Myth # 7 "Canada has to make up for its
racist past"
What racist past is that? The very idea that all men are created equal
did not arise in Asia, India or Africa. In a viper's nest of resentments,
Canada's history has been rewritten without the inconvenient intrusion
of facts. Europeans came here and built a nation. That used to be something
to live up to.
When did it become something 'we must try to live down'? If anyone
cares to remember, Canadians did not wage war on aboriginal peoples. Indeed,
the discovery of Kennewick Man and a half dozen other pre-Columbian Caucasian
skeletons in North America, has lead some scientists to (very carefully)
speculate that a very different kind of genocide may have taken place here
before the European voyages of discovery brought Europeans back to North
America. Again, not that it's of any real interest, but Canada served as
the terminus of the Underground
Railway. Coolies may have died in the construction of the CPR.
Will we be permitted to know how many European bones are laid along the
same track? They say there is an Irish body buried along every mile of
the Erie
Canal.
Canada's record is a couple of notches above the model familiar to
some of our most outspoken critics, many of whom have arrived from nations
where female children are routinely murdered or circumcised; or where surviving
children may have their limbs bound for a period of adjustment to make
more effective beggars of them. Last year, Saudi Arabia sent scores of
children home after they were abandoned to their fates during the Haj.
The buying and selling of human beings is still routine stuff throughout
much of sub-Saharan Africa and China's new wealth has contributed to a
resurgence in the same practice. An Asian brothel-slave operation was recently
broken in Toronto, as was the grotesque exploitation of deaf Mexican nationals
by their own countrymen in the U.S. Widows may be tossed on their husbands
funeral pyre after a lifetime shut away in purdah, but, by all means, remember
one thing: while it's unthinkable to criticize other races and peoples
for their cultural values, it's always open season on Canadians.
Our so-called racist past has been seamlessly replaced by a virulently
racist present. In the Ontario school system, under a new program, children
are encouraged to 'analyze a body of work for the percentage of white men
portrayed in power positions compared with the number of women and racial
minorities' and to 'check story lines to see whether all problems are resolved
by male or white heroes acting as sort of "benevolent masters".
In other words, the achievements of Canadians (which made all this
possible) are the bones on which immigrant children are expected to sharpen
their teeth. Today's Canada is indeed a cauldron of racism and hatred.
Anti-white rhetoric charges that traditional Canadian societal norms are
ethnocentric where they are not Eurocentric, but once again, noticing this
phenomenon is called racist, xenophobic proof of white-supremacist tendencies.
Some people get all the breaks. Some people are above reproach and
beyond criticism, and other people had better shut up if they know what's
good for them. In other words, "As long as we both hate me, everything's
fine." All this begs the question: was anti-racisim such a big deal
'back home' - or is this a recently acquired "tool"?
If Canada is unbearably 'racist', why would anyone deprive themselves
of the genocidal tribal hatreds innate to the enlightened African or Asian
experience? If fighting racism is a priority, by all means let's learn
from the experts.