Mark Twain knew what white supremacy was worth.

Twain certainly was not an unmixed champion of the white race, like so many of his contemporaries and ours. He made this clear in his landmark novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

During Twain’s youth in Missouri he had seen how slaves were treated. Then he travelled the world and saw more. It made him ashamed of his own race. And caused him to say this:

 “In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death. In  more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mothers  with dogs and guns through the swamps for an afternoon’s sport. In many country’s we have taken the savage’s land from him and made him our slave and lashed  him every day and broken his pride and made death his only friend and overworked him until he dropped in his tracks. There are many humorous things in the world among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Actually white supremacy is not  as humorous as it is absurd. This is equally applicable to the early Canadians’ and Americans’ treatment of indigenous people. Blinded by their sense of white superiority, they claimed to be civilizing the savages. How blind could they be?  But how much better are we today?