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.

Old Whitey's got something to say.

PREFACE:

Thirty five years on into my life and I'm still working out how I feel about freedom of speech.

I used to be an ardent defender, someone would would willingly allow all manner of offensive chatter on the grounds that censorship bestows undeserved power. My honest belief was that people such as Ernst Zundel should be allowed to spew their filth, the better to brand themselves as fools.
As I got older, though, my faith in my fellow man became increasingly tenuous as I began to realize just how many people in any given audience were fools themselves and would believe and repeat anything they heard. Then I saw a movie called The Aristocrats...an utterly depraved journey through filth beyond anything I'd ever imagined...which disillusioned me further. As I said then, some things shouldn't be said. Hell, some things shouldn't be thought.

But I've regained some of my former conviction over the past week or two.

Having lived a sheltered life, I can't say I'm entirely interested in the antics of so-called "shock jocks" like Howard Stern....or Don Imus. To be honest, I had no idea who the latter was until I heard his commentary excerpted on my own local radio station. As the now-infamous words spilled out, my jaw spilled open. My wife and I regarded each other, both thinking well, that guy can kiss his job goodbye.
If you've been off the planet for the last couple of weeks, Imus referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos".
He apologized, of course. Profusely, repeatedly, and with what seemed (at least to me) like sincere remorse, at least until it became clear his apologies were falling on deaf ears. Little good it did him. I learned long ago that there are certain things considered so evil, so utterly beyond redemption, that no amount of apology can ever mitigate them.
Such things vary from time and time, place to place and context to context. You don't have to go far to hear things much worse than "nappy-headed hos" directed at women: just turn on some so-called "urban" music and brace yourself. The women so described don't seem to mind overmuch (indeed, they almost seem to take pride in it!) while the men who spew such filth are revered by their millions of fans, many of them too young to really understand what they're hearing.
As an aside, most words considered rude, obscene, or profane nowadays weren't always such. The Toronto Star ran an interesting article yesterday detailing a startling array of consumer goods whose colours were described as "nigger brown", "nigger black", or "nigger pink". Apparently you can still see this in places like Hong Kong.
Or consider an even nastier word than "nigger". Ask any woman what she considers to be the most vulgar word in the English language and there's a better-than-even chance she'll cite a word she hesitates to even say aloud: "the c-word", she'll say instead. Everyone knows the c-word, right? But nobody says it, ever. Nobody decent, at any rate. Suppose I told you that word was once the common, accepted term for female genitalia, no more offensive than "vagina" is now. Would you believe me? Doesn't matter: it's the truth. Even then, I'm sure it was offensive to call the entire woman by the name for her genitals--but have you noticed how many men shrug off being called "dicks" these days?
Not that I'm excusing Don Imus, precisely, because what he really ought to have known better. In the United States of America, the First Amendment doesn't mean what it used to...and most people understand and accept that. Archie Bunker would never fly on network TV today, even as shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood don't just push envelopes, but rip them open and spill their contents.

"You can't call them 'nappy-headed hos'", goes the argument, "that's racist!"
Is it? Is it really?
Look up "nappy-headed" on Wikipedia and you're redirected to "natural hair"...the standard hairstyling of many 'people of African descent' the world over. Also called "woolly", "hard", and "kinky". These are pure adjectives, descriptors, with no emotional attachment implied.
A couple of points here. One: there has simply got to be some simpler term for 'people of African descent'...preferably one word...but every such thing I've ever heard is considered racist by some group somewhere for some reason. At one point, "Black" was the preferred term. At another, "Negro" was correct. Now there's no single word to safely denote the racial group we're discussing here.
A second thing I find of interest: it seems as though most of the outrage centered around "nappy-headed" when, to my way of thinking at least, "hos" is at least as offensive. And yet, as noted above, "hos" is common as bling in rap music.
Why is it, exactly, that rappers--who are predominantly "melatonin-enhanced" (yes, I've actually seen that monstrosity in print!)--are allowed to denigrate and degrade women at every opportunity through their lives lived and their music, while one old honky gets fired for one off-the-cuff remark? I grant you it wasn't exactly a nice thing to say, but is that our bounden duty now? To protect everyone from every "not nice" thing that might be said about them? One wonders how the Rutgers ladies' basketball team managed to get the age they are now without suffering multiple nervous breakdowns.

Look, I don't like racism any more than the next guy. I consider us all part of a single race called Human, and divisions based on silly things like skin colour do little to augment our humanity. Perhaps Imus did go too far. But the response went so much further.

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