Those People are _____________!!

Looking down on the world, eh?

When the seven days were nearly over, some Jews from the province of Asia saw Paul at the temple. They stirred up the whole crowd and seized him, shouting, “Fellow Israelites, help us! This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and this place. And besides, he has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place.” (Acts 21:27-8, NIV)

Charges of “you're a racist” were being made in Alberta's political discourse the other week. Again, I might add. I hate to repeat myself . . . again . . . but there's a difference between “What you said was racist” and “You are a racist.” The former is a rebuke for a statement, the latter is an ad hominem, personal attack. There is certainly scope enough for someone to be so fundamentally convinced that race determines worth that the label of racist can be justified, but to use it easily and often as a knee-jerk criticism is simply not right.

Take an example. Suppose that in a school playground, a vast majority of children are of white, Western ancestry. When a refugee crisis in an Oriental country sees an influx of children in the school who clump together on the playground for language, custom and feeling-of-safety reasons, an “us and them” scenario is almost unavoidable. Racist assumptions are bound to set in, particularly when events of conflict occur. “Asians are __________.” (fill in the blank.) This doesn't mean that the children associating a characteristic with one group or the other are racist, it simply means that they've participated in a racist act and need correction, and if not corrected, racist acts may become habitual.

Racism simply refers to the practice of assigning characteristics to persons not based on them individually, but on their race. In a society where racist attitudes persist, minorities and individuals are subjected to prejudice (being pre-judged) and discrimination (denial of fair and equal opportunity). Parallels are easily drawn to sexism, ageism or any other ism that denies people the benefit of a fair, unbiased chance in the community and the marketplace.

I don't think Canada is racist. If we apply that label, then surely every other country in the world is racist and the word becomes meaningless. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find pure racists in Canada without some effort although they probably exist. To varying degrees, though, racist actions and rhetoric crop up, are not hard to find and have to be challenged when they occur.

By and large, Canadians lose their prejudicial assumptions about individuals when they get to know them. True, residual prejudices hang around and prove to be real barriers for persons of colour particularly, but as a nation, we recognize that and seek to mitigate against it. Compared to the apartheid regimes prevailing in South Africa years ago or the subjugation of Palestinian populations by Israel, Canada is probably as wholesome a democracy as exists regarding tolerance and human rights.

That's not to say we're home free. The prejudices under which our indigenous populations still suffer is proving difficult to overcome. An Alberta lawyer recently said in a speech that the swastika, the hammer and sickle and the rainbow flag were all symbols of movements bent on trampling on individual freedom. (One supposes he meant that gay rights activism seeks to throttle the free speech of the heterosexual community.) Meanwhile, Canada has granted asylum to gay men facing persecution in foreign countries. When it comes to discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Canada is doing “not bad,” but the calling out of the traces of racist, sexist, ageist behaviour that persist as habits among us, that has to be priority for us.

People I know who have traveled and worked in other countries routinely report that they learned there what it's like to be a struggling minority. I've grown up as an individual member of a dominant majority here in Canada, and so walking through a store in Panama, hoping to buy pyjamas, not knowing the Spanish word, seeing the almost-smirk on the face of the sales associate trying to figure out what this ignorant gringo wants . . . well, that served as an eye-opener. Fumbling with an unfamiliar currency in Paris and having a helpful Frenchman cheat me out of fifty-bucks-worth of Francs was another lesson about life for the looked-down-upon.

So was the Calgary lawyer who let his prejudice against queer persons slip out in a heated moment a racist? Or was he one of us Canadians who still desperately need both factual knowledge and sensitivity training? To say that Alberta, or lawyers, or Canadians generally are racist is to make the same error that true racism makes, namely to lump individuals together and assign them a characteristic that is never, not ever, justified.