Last week’s cover story in Maclean’s magazine is bound to cause a stir, especially the tag that Canada has a bigger race problem than America.
Canadians have a long, smug history of racism. First they looked south and saw the Jim Crow laws that segregated African-Americans in the deep south, and proudly proclaimed that we didn’t have that sort of thing here. They would point to a lack of segregated lunch counters and the fact that all Canadians could sit anywhere on a bus.
We assumed we were so morally superior.
When the apartheid regime ruled South Africa, Canadians treated that country as the pariah that it was and shook their heads in disgust, never once looking over their shoulder at the racial divide in Canada.
Racism in Canada was largely ignored for years by the mainstream. First Nations were a small population located in rural communities. For the first half of the 20th century, we were considered a vanishing race. Boarding schools and the 1960s scoop came to light years after the fact.
Things have changed today. We are no longer a vanishing race, and for many we constitute a serious threat.
While the Maclean’s article focuses on Winnipeg, racism persists across the country and in particular in the prairie cities.
Western Canada has a form of it known as settler racism, a combination of fear and guilt, based on the fact that the land acquired for settlement came at a price. The continuing presence of all those Indians continues to reinforce it.
Settler racism is a type of superiority where the settlers assume that they are smarter and better-equipped to occupy the country once inhabited by the indigenous peoples. How many times have you heard that the land was empty and going to waste before the settlers came? Even the Canadian myth of two founding nations — British and French — is steeped in settler racism.
Canadian history treats the First Nations as onlookers rather than participants. Yet who provided the supply chain for the fur trade? Our treaties are considered terms of surrender, instead of living documents that call for the sharing of the land and its resources.
Stereotypes continue to exist. Indian women are still pejoratively referred to as “squaws”; usually, the word is preceded by an adjective such as dirty or stupid. This term should be as socially unacceptable as the “N” word. Canadians have some catching up to do.
When it comes to Indian men, we are assumed to be on probation, recently released from jail or planning our next crime.
People fear the unknown, and Indian people are feared for the same reason.
And while there are more aboriginal people employed than ever, we are still labelled as welfare bums and lazy so and so’s.
In fact, it is our competition in the workplace that has thrown the fear of God into racists who don’t want an Indian carpenter working on their house or an Indian police officer placing them under arrest.
The current federal government would rather play games than get down to work and seriously address aboriginal issues. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s dismissive rejection of a commission of inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women is an example of this attitude.
The Reform party that begat today’s federal Conservative party had a rich heritage of settler racism, and it appears that much of its outdated philosophy still lives on. The reluctance to increase funding to First Nations, and the failure to seriously address the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women are a product of this attitude.
So, does Canada have a greater race problem than America? It doesn’t matter, because any racism is too much.
Canada doesn’t need to look elsewhere to justify its degree of racism. Instead of pointing fingers, Canadians need to look at themselves and realize that our society is based on racism, and that one race keeping another one down is wrong.
I’m sure there will be a lot of knee-jerk reaction to the accusations levelled by Maclean’s, but I hope that it has the effect of creating an open discussion about racism in Canada.
This is an issue that we cannot hope will just go away, nor should it. A healthy society has to examine itself with a critical eye and do what must be done to make the necessary changes.
Doug Cuthand writes for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
