On Racism

I'm racist.
I suspect most of us--probably close to all of us--are. As the musical Avenue Q so trenchantly points out,

Everyone's a little bit racist, sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes.
Look around and you will find
no one's really color-blind.
Maybe it's a fact we all should face:
Everyone makes judgments based on race.
Not big judgments, like who to hire or who to buy a newspaper from...
No, just little judgments like thinking that Mexican busboys should learn to speak goddamn English!

I got to thinking about this early this morning as my wife was doing her monthly Snopes run....checking out all the various hoaxes and urban legends that have cropped up lately, the better to debunk all those people who go around believing everything they see on the Internet.
Anyway, she found a reference to the Jena Six.
If you're American, I imagine you've heard all about this incident. I'm Canadian: this was the first I'd ever heard of it.

A rough and dirty synopsis: a black student asked permission from the high school principal to sit under "the white tree"--a place at Jena High School unofficially reserved for whites--which was granted. The next morning, three nooses were found hanging from the tree. The white students who had placed the nooses there were recommended for expulsion, but received three days' suspension instead. Needless to say, this inflamed an already delicate situation. Racial tensions mounted, culminating in several fights.
In one of these, a gun was apparently pulled by a white student. He was immediately disarmed by several black youths, who refused to return the gun; one was charged with theft, robbery, and disturbing the peace. No charges were laid against the white youth.

Three days later (December 1, 2006), a white student was heard 'bragging' about the previous Friday's events. Five or six black youths converged on him, punching him, throwing him to the ground, and kicking him repeatedly. The white student suffered a mild concussion but was able to attend a school function that evening. Six black youths were arrested. Their charges started out as aggravated assault, were subsequently elevated to attempted second-degree murder. So far, three of the six accused have had their charges reduced to aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. In American law, this charge requires the use of a deadly weapon. The prosecution argued that tennis shoes fit that bill.
As of today, one of the youths has been found guilty and faces up to 22 years in prison. This despite conflicting eyewitness testimony as to whether he was even involved. Also, his public defender didn't call a single witness in his defense.

I meant to keep that short. But it's hard when nearly every sentence exposes such sickening, vicious racism.

Like I said, I'm racist. I have a racist streak in me that's been known to mutter to itself whenever it's confronted with stuff I find foreign. Urban music. People yammering away in front of me in languages that aren't English or French. That cloying curry scent in Pakistani grocery stores. Anything can trigger it, really.
But mutter is all it does, and never aloud.
Most of us here in Canada are similar, I think. Immigrants will tell you racism exists here in spades, but it's covert, rarely in-your-face. The kind of virulent racism that, judging from the Jena Six fiasco, still seems to be endemic in certain parts of the United States, is almost unheard of here. (Almost: Montreal has a recurring problem with anti-Semitism that occasionally flares up into violence.)
By and large racism in Canada has been socially engineered down to manageable levels. I'm not sure it can be weeded out entirely; it's almost as if there's a gene that reacts unfavourably to foreign people and practices. But I'd like to think that pretty much every Canadian would read that account of the Jena Six and recoil in disgust. Certainly I'd imagine our justice system would deal with this case entirely differently.

In some ways, it might be argued we've gone too far: any attempt to quantify, let alone control, the crime wave in certain predominantly black areas of Toronto is met with accusations of rampant racism. Even mentioning that a suspect is black is cause for concern to some people. I've always felt that crime is crime, whether its perpetrator is black, white or polka-dotted...and I'd go so far as to say that any polka-dotted group of people committing a large number of crimes is doing its fellow polka-dots no service.
For this I'd be castigated as racist in some quarters, which I find ridiculous: I'm not the one committing the crimes, after all.

This whole issue ties into that topmost of Canadian values: tolerance. Christian fundamentalists (we have them here too: thankfully, in much smaller numbers) have been known to say Canadians as a group are tolerant of all but the intolerant. That's not entirely true: we're tolerant even of people who believe we should be dead. If we ever see a successful terrorist attack on Canadian soil, the sense of betrayal from all those uber-tolerant individuals will suffuse the entire country.

What other country besides overly tolerant Canada would accept the Bloc Quebecois forming "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition"? In some places this political party would be hung for high treason.

(I've become convinced over the years that Quebec, aside from a few hard-core sovereigntists, has no intention whatever of actually separating. The threat--at ebb tide now, but it'll return, mark my words--is merely an extraordinarily successful tool for political blackmail. Certain other provinces are beginning to pick up on this. Alberta's known it for a while now; Newfoundland has discovered it over the past few years. None of this bodes well for our Confederation.)

Naw, we're tolerant even of intolerance...to a point. We've made allowances for our petty racisms, homophobias, sexisms, and whatever else might be fogging remote corners of our collective brain. But the minute that intolerance is given official sanction, be it by Church or State, the vast majority of us recognize it and rebel.

We're certainly, as a group, not prepared to tolerate abuses of justice like we're seeing in Jena, Louisiana.