Don’t Boo. Vote

racism, Revolution

 

In 2016 Barack Obama during the 2016 American presidential election urged people “Don’t boo. Vote.” That’s often good advice.

Yet, as The Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik suggested, this is a familiar approach that the established interests will not lose sleep over. They know they can handle that approach. It won’t often bring about big changes, because as Trump truthfully said, but not in the sense he was suggesting, “the game is rigged.” The entrenched interests, particularly in the United States have for decades made sure that the votes of resisters are not fairly counted. As Malik in a subsequent Guardian article said,

‘It is a familiar reproach. If you’re angry, don’t boo, don’t protest, don’t take matters into your own hands. Vote, lobby, report to the authorities, trust the process. It’s the appeal of reasonable liberals and the rebuke of rightwingers. It is the refrain that rings out when demands for justice “go too far.”

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this year, entrenched interests quickly turned the attention of the public from the issues being protested to the manner of the protests. The public was widely persuaded that the issues were vandalism, destruction of property, and anarchy, not racial injustice. That was precisely the agenda of law and order of the president Donald Trump. As Malik said about the United Kingdom, but as could just as easily be said of the US,

“it’s easier to talk about the lawless mobs tearing down statues than the crimes these monuments commemorate… But this is nothing new. What we rarely hear about all the great revolutions of the past is that they too looked at first like spontaneous uprisings against the existing order – and they too were subject to charges of anarchy, reckless violence, puritanical revenge. So much so that the economist Albert Hirschman described the demand to “follow the process” as “the first reaction” whenever the threat of real change is on the horizon.”

 

Many people fear revolutions, not entirely without justification of course. As Marx reminded, revolutions are not conducted like Sunday schools . They are scary and the American president is an expert at magnifying the fears of the American electorate. As a result many felt he over-reacted to what were largely peaceful protests. As the mayor of Portland said, “he poured fuel on the flames.”

Ever since the French Revolution it has become easy to trigger fears at the mere suggestion of revolution. Yet, it must never be forgotten that revolutions have also brought about radical change for the good. We must remember the good and the bad. Few Americans would want to reverse anything about the American Revolution. The French celebrate the French Revolution. And both of those revolutions were unruly and even violent. As Malik said,

“The first accounts of the French revolution made no distinction between its positive and negative aspects – collapsing its moral position and its violent manifestations into one. The result was that, for a long time, it was defined and smeared by its excesses. It was only the passage of time that transformed it into “a riot blessed by history”, as Gary Younge puts it.”

Sometime you gotta boo.

Orchids of Brokenhead

Orchids of Manitoba

Many people are surprised to learn that Manitoba has many good places for orchids. I have seen them as far north as Churchill, the polar bear capital of the world.

The best place to see them in the southern part of Manitoba is no doubt the Brokenhead Wetland Ecological Reserve. The organization of which I am a part, Native Orchid Conservation Inc. was very instrumental in having this area established as an ecological reserve. 37 species of orchids have been identified in Manitoba and 28 of those can be found in the Brokenhead Wetland Ecological Reserve. That’s why it is so special. I am one of the authors of Orchids of Manitoba and made some modest contributions to it. As that book said, introducing the trail we helped to establish in the Reserve, “A walk through the enchanted cedar forest and the flower-filled fen will relax your mind, re-energize your body, and refresh your spirit.”

 

 

One of my favorites is Grass Pink (Calopogon Tuberosus), certainly one of the more beautiful of our orchids. As far as I am concerned it is unmatched for beauty by orchids from anywhere else in the world. How can you not refresh your spirit when contemplating such beauty?

 

 

This year because of bad luck and pressing manservant duties, I largely missed the regal show Lady”s-slipper (Reginae Cypripedium).  But  I spotted this one slightly past its prime which made me feel kinship to it.

Pursuing orchids and pursuing truth. It’s all a wonder.

 

Be a real Neighbour

racism

 

Let me be clear: in this post, first and foremost I criticize myself.

I have noticed, probably just like you, that for the last few weeks there has been a lot of noise about changing racial attitudes. That is all fine and good. But I have not seen as much change in things people do.

As one of my favourite political commentators, Nesrine Malik of The Guardian Weekly said,

“Much of the change accelerated by the past few weeks has been centred on optics—corporations making statements about changes to their boards, brands, posting squares on Instagram. We may discover the only thing more detrimental to a cause than doing nothing is dong a tiny bit and thinking that’s enough.”

Summer Lee State Democratic Representative for the 34th District in the US said,

“We have to talk about what is a community partner. Community partners contribute, they participate, they are active in your community, basically they’re a neighbour. If they’re not doing all that they’re your colonizer.”

I have some friends who are different. They are community partners. And they do it quietly without a lot of fanfare.  They are, as the Good Book says, “neighbours.” One of them quietly participates in an organization that helps—actually helps—homeless people, most of whom are Indigenous people in Winnipeg. Another friend works helping immigrant people from Central and South America, who come legally across the southern US  border, claiming asylum, by providing them with assistance with things like food and clothing when their detention centres are deliberately kept near freezing by the authorities. These people do real things. They are both entitled to the honorary designation of mensch.

I wish I could be more like them.

Health of Children in Indian Residential Schools of Canada

Indigenous Issues, racism

Two faithful readers have asked me to comment on issues relating to the health of indigenous children in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (as they were called). (See my post “Manitoba makes New York City  look good” The issues are incredibly important and reflect very poorly on Canada so I have chosen to respond in a separate post.

According to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (‘TRC Report ), “The Death rates for Aboriginal children in residential schools were far higher than those experienced by members of the general Canadian population.” It must be remembered and emphasized that indigenous children were taken out of their homes and communities against their will presumably to be educated for their benefit. To then learn that while under the custody and control of the national government and its agencies, such as various churches, children were dying at staggering rates is incredibly disturbing. I will be blogging about this again in the future.

Tuberculosis was a particular problem for indigenous children. According to that TRC Report,

 

“The tuberculosis health crisis in the schools was part of a broader Aboriginal health crisis that was set in motion by colonial policies that separated Aboriginal people from their land, thereby disrupting their economies and their food supplies. This crisis was particularly intense on the Canadian Prairies. Numerous government policies contributed to the undermining of Aboriginal health. During a period of starvation, rations were withheld from bands in an effort to force them to abandon the lands that they had initially selected for their reserves. In making the Treaties, the government had promised to provide assistance to First Nations to allow them to make a transition from hunting to farming. This aid was slow in coming and inadequate on arrival. Restrictions in the Indian Act made it difficult for First Nations farmers to sell their produce or borrow money to invest in technology. Reserve land was often agriculturally unproductive. Reserve housing was poor and crowded, sanitation was inadequate, and access to clean water was limited. Under those conditions tuberculosis flourished. Those people it did not kill were often severely weakened and likely to succumb to measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases.

For aboriginal children, the relocation to residential schools was generally no healthier than their homes had been on the reserves…”

 

In April 2007, Bill Curry and Karen Howlett reported in the Globe and Mail as follows:

“As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of o medical care created a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of disease.”

Think about that. Half the children died from TB!

Anthony Hall in his book Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism referred to the schools as “death traps.”

Dr. P.H. Bryce prepared astonishing reports to the federal government about the schools in 1907 and 1909 in which he drew to the government’s attention the shocking death rates of children and that these death rates could be drastically reduced by the implementation of simple and inexpensive changes such as improved ventilation and sanitation, filtering entering students for contagious illness, and isolating sick individuals away from crowded dormitories. He called Canada’s administration of the Indian residential schools  a “national crime.” That is precisely what it was.

The government responded that it was “too expensive”. After all why spend so much money to save the lives of Indian children?

 

Is Racism in our DNA?

racism

 

President Obama in 2015, the last full year of his presidency, finally started to buck up the courage to speak about racism. He pointed out how the United States had ““the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination” was “still part of our DNA” as Americans.” Remember I am not pointing my finger at Americans from the perspective of us here in Canada being clean. We have the same problem here. Both countries have the same original sin namely racism and male supremacy. This is what Condoleezza  Rice called a birth defect.

 

Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Dubois both understood this as well. As Todd May and George Yancy explained in their New York Times article,

“Both men emphasized how the word is part of the institutional fabric of black oppression, that individual racist acts are not aberrations but the products of a larger systemic set of practices that, as the feminist scholar Barbara Applebaum argues, “hold structural injustice in place.” Central to those practices is policing, and the “bad apple” framing fails to confront its role in structural injustice.

 

If you just look at bad apples you fail to see or do anything about the tree, the structure, that holds them in place. People who are part of an unjust system may be good people, they may not appear to be exploiters or bad, but if they are part of a system that oppresses they are part of the problem. The philosopher Iris Marion Young wrote this:

Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individual and institutions acting in pursuit of their particular goals and interests, within given institutional rules and accepted norms. All the persons who participated by their actions in the ongoing schemes of cooperation that constitute these structures are responsible for them, in the sense that they are part of the process that causes them. They are not responsible, however, in the sense of having directed the process or intended its outcomes.”

That does not mean that everyone who participates in the system is a racist. But, everyone who is part of an unjust system—including me and you—have an obligation to dissent. We must voice our objections to that system or we are part of the oppression. If we acquiesce in the injustice we are racists. There is no way around this uncomfortable fact. The least we can do—we should do more—is to voice our objections. If we don’t do at least that we are complicit—we are aiding and abetting—and in law that makes us just as guilty as the perpetrator.

In 1987 in the Stanford Law Review, Charles Lawrence wrote this way about the bad-apple metaphor: “the bad-apple metaphor suggests a “perpetrator” model that fails to give an account of just how systemic racism is “transmitted by tacit understandings” and “collective unconscious.”

The philosopher Charles Mills argued, “the perpetrator [of racist actions or beliefs] perspective presupposes a world composed of atomic individuals whose actions are outside of and apart from the social fabric and without historical continuity.”

The police—just like all of us—are part of a system for which we are partly responsible. We know that system harms a lot of people. Let’s face it for once. We all know that system harms a lot of people. It is time for all of us who benefit from that system to object to that system or we are culpable too.

Michael Eric Dyson, in his influential book, The Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” explained it well:

“That metaphor of a few bad apples doesn’t begin to get at the root of the problem. Police violence may be more like a poisoned water stream that pollutes the entire system. To argue that only a few bad cops cause police terror is like relegating racism to a few bigots. Bigots are surely a problem, but they are sustained by systems of belief and perception, by widely held stereotypes and social practice.”

So what do we do about it? It is important for all of us to understand this. As Todd and Yancy said,

“To truly confront problems of racist violence in our society, let’s not once again begin with the question of how to reform the police. Let’s instead start with the question of how to build healthy and safe communities of mutual respect and see which institutions we need to reach that goal. If anything that is to be called policing emerges from that inquiry, it should be at its end rather than assumed at the outset.’

Only such an approach can possibly lead to deep reform. That is the reform we need.

 

Manitoba Makes New York City Look Good

Indigenous Issues, racism

 

I recently posted about children in care in Manitoba about some amazing statistics. The statistics were pretty grim. (See Children in Care https://themeanderer.ca/children-in-care ) Manitoba has more children in care than any other province of Manitoba. In fact it has about 25% of all the children in care in Canada. About 90% of those are aboriginal children. And Manitoba is far from the largest province. Why is that?

A friend of mine then commented that this was worse than New York City. I want to repeat this so it sinks in. Things are worse—much worse—than New York City. This is what he said,

 

“for purposes of comparison……
new york city – population 8.5 million, foster care population 8,300.
manitoba – population 1.3+ million, foster care population 11,000.

in other words manitoba total population adjusted for comparison to total nyc population would mean an “equivalent” foster care population in sunny manitoba of 75,000+, or a stunningly increased rate in comparison.”

no doubt, as 1st nation peoples throughout the humane country of canada have said repeatedly, this stinks and reflects ongoing racism ala the residential school debacle among many other things.”

Manitoba with less than 20% of the population has more children in care than New York City! And most of those children are Indigenous Children. To have the same percentage of children in care compared to its population , New York City would have to increase is population of children in care 10 times. What is up with that?

How can anyone deny that we have systemic racism in Manitoba?

The Good/bad Binary

racism

 

Barbara Trepagnier talked about what she called the “good/bad binary,” in her book Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. She argued that by focusing on such a sharp divide, white people actually made it harder to interrupt racism.

Just before the dramatic incident that happened recently in Minneapolis to George Lloyd,  Robin Diangelo in her book called White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for White People to Talk About Racism, took up this concept. The book was a gift from my half Indigenous daughter in-law. I hope she was not trying to tell me something. The book did alert me to much more subtle forms of racism that are all the more pernicious on account of the subtlety.

Diangelo pointed out that before the Civil Rights Movement it was socially acceptable for white people to openly express their belief that white people were superior to other races. When white people noticed after the Civil Rights movement how many viciously many people from the northern US and Canada treated black people —even children—the luster came off racism. As Diangelo said, “After the civil rights movement, to be a good moral person and to be complicit with racism became mutually exclusive.” Only bad people were racists. Because of that attitude “racism first needed to be reduced to simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice.” A person who kills a black man lying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back by pressing his knee into the man’s neck clearly qualifies as a bad man. Such a man is a racist. None of us want to be a racist like that. Looking at racism this way limits racists to intentional, malicious, acts of violence or animosity based on dislike of members of another race. And those are clearly racists. The problem is that there are other racists. Racists that are much more subtle than that and hence able to actually inflict much greater harm, but harm that is not immediately as obvious.

After the civil rights movement most of us saw racists as white people, often from the southern States, who were mean, ignorant, old, usually uneducated, and malicious. Who would want to be part of that group? No one of course. In fact, as Diangelo pointed out, “Nice people, well-intended people, open-minded middle-class people, people raised in the ‘enlightened north,’ could not be racist.”

The problem with this attitude is that is makes the racist ‘the other.’ We cannot be racists. We can never admit that we are racists. That would be to admit that we are horrible people. And that just can’t be true. At least, no one can admit it. There must be some other explanation. There must always be some other explanation.

Of course, saying racism is bad was an improvement over openly acknowledging feelings of racial superiority. But if we accept the paradigm we cannot acknowledge ever that we are or have been racist. That would require us to condemn ourselves. And that is never easy to do. If I am called a racist I must defend myself. In fact if it is even suggested that I was racist I will concentrate all of my resources on my own defence. I cannot allow that to stand. And this prevents me from taking a close look at myself. And that is a bad thing. Diangelo explains the consequence of this attitude this way:

In this way, the good/bad binary makes it nearly impossible to talk to white people about racism, what it is, how it shapes all of us and the inevitable that we are conditioned to participate in racism. The good/bad binary made it effectively impossible for the average white person to understand—much less—interrupt racism.

Since whites are still the powerful majority in the US and in Canada that attitudes makes it very difficult to interrupt racism. And that is the problem. If we want to do better, we must ditch this attitude.

The point is that racism comes in many colours. Not just black and white. It is never that simple.

 

The Crime of Birdwatching While Black

racism

 

 

By now we have all heard about the case of the black birder and white woman of privilege in Central Park in New York City. Why do I call her a woman of privilege when I don’t really know her or her circumstances? It is because she automatically has a privilege solely by virtue of the colour of her skin, while the black man has a disadvantage solely on account of the different colour of his skin. That is what systemic racism is all about—conferring automatic unearned advantage to people of one colour and at the same time automatically conferring an undeserved disadvantage on people of another colour of skin. It was a perfect example of what I have been blogging about.

 

In that case Christian Cooper asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, with an unleashed dog, to please put the dog on a leash as the rules of the park required. As Christian Cooper explained in his short but fascinating piece on the incident in the Washington Post, “She refused — and, as shown in a video that went viral, she was soon calling the police and telling them an “African American man” was “threatening” her.”

This article is interesting for 2 very important reasons. First, it shows exactly how systemic racism works. Amy Cooper quickly and automatically reached for her phone while trying to hold on to her unleashed dog and quickly started to phone the police even though it was obvious to us watching the video that she was in no danger from this polite black man. Yet, presumably, she thought she was in danger. Why? It made no sense, but the fact is that white women are quick to sense danger around black men when they are alone. Even when the white women are the real danger to the black men! Just like the white woman in To Kill a Mockingbird. She feared and then blamed the innocent black man. As well, she automatically assumed she as a white woman would be believed and the black man would not be believed. That is because that is how it usually works in the United States (or Canada for that matter).

Both of these are excellent examples of how systemic racism works. White women should fear black men and white women will be believed when they make accusations against black men, even if they are entirely without foundation. A system of racism makes that happen.

In this case it did not work to the woman’s advantage, only because of the fact that the video showing clearly what happened went viral. Had it not been for the video this might have ended very differently. It would not be unreasonable to expect that the police on hearing that a white woman was threatened by a black man would come charging in with guns blazing to protect the innocent white woman from the black thug. That is exactly what you would expect.

Christian Cooper had some interesting things to say about the case in his article in the Washington Post. First, he said,

“…it’s a mistake to focus on this one individual. The important thing the incident highlights is the long-standing, deep-seated racial bias against us black and brown folk that permeates the United States — bias that can bring horrific consequences, as with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis later the same day I encountered Amy Cooper, or just small daily cuts.”

 

Christian Cooper got it right. Examine the system; not just the individual racist. That is the enemy you won’t see as easily. The important racism is not the racism of individuals, at least in comparison to the racism of the system. That is much more heinous because the system is always more powerful than the individual and because it is much harder to see. The system is usually invisible. The individual—the white woman with a dog and phone in this case—are highly visible and so is her venality.

Christian Cooper highlighted the important issue in this case:

“Why did Cooper so easily tap into that toxic racial bias in the heat of the moment when she was looking for a leg up in our confrontation? Why is it surprising to no one that the police might come charging to her aid with special vengeance on hearing that an African American was involved? And most important of all, how do we fix policing so that scenarios such as this are replaced by a criminal justice system that is truly just and equitable to black people?

Focusing on charging Amy Cooper lets white people off the hook from all that. They can scream for her head while leaving their own prejudices unexamined. They can push for her prosecution and pat themselves on the back for having done something about racism, when they’ve actually done nothing, and their own Amy Cooper remains only one purse-clutch in the presence of a black man away.”

 

Finally, I found one more thing important about Christian Cooper. He was a man without resentment. He recognized that it was “important to uphold the principle of law, and that those who try to turn racism to their advantage by filing false claims against a person of colour should be held accountable”, but he chose instead to “err on the side of compassion” on the theory that his attacker had suffered enough by losing her job while he had suffered no harm. I found that attitude remarkably inspiring. I wish I could err on the side of compassion more often. Christian Cooper showed me the way.