I think Bowling for Columbine was so on target. There is something in U.S. American history which laced "us" with a stream of fear and alarmism but somehow bypassed Canada. And it's something older than 9/11. My guess is that alot of it is wrapped up with slavery. Nat Turner, the Haitian Revolution, etc. The fear of the black/brown mass rising up. And so today, fear becomes an easy button for politicians to push.
Al-Jazeera: Canada allows Sikh knives in school
2 comments:
Believe me, in the process of making his point about the U.S., Moore has ended up "idealizing" Canada in a way that is totally inaccurate and problematic.
Another thing to note is that Canada uses this "we didn't have slavery" rhetoric to contruct it's "we're not racist and don't systematically discriminate/we are a multicultural happy land" discourse - which is an integral part of Canadian nationhood building project over the centuries. This discourse is what I would call the the Great Canadian Myth (or Bullshit).
But you are absolutely right in terms of fear being a part of the nationhood building process of the U.S. (with slavery being a HUGE part of that) - I'm not sure if fear is part of the Canadian nationalist rhetoric...but it's definitely not absent.
thanks for the post!
PQ
Yeah, no place is going to be ideal and perfect and every place is going to have problems.
But there were still differences. I had a previous entry on black loyalists (to Britain) in the context of the American Revolution.
And so pretty clearly, conditions on the ground for Black folks in Canada were certainly different for Black folks in the heart of the Confederacy, for instance. That doesn't mean Canada is the perfect anti-racist wonderland.
But in a relative sense, we can say there is more of this and less of that.
Thanks for the reply. Now you've made me more curious. Where does fear show up in Canadian society? What do you think are the worst manifestations/examples of racism in Canada? (school system inequities? police brutality? glass ceiling? other problems in the workplace?) I've only been to Canada once (to a Japanese-Jewish inter-racial wedding?) so I really don't have a sense of what things really look like on a day to day basis.
Actually that reminds me... when I went to the wedding reception I had a really good conversation with this French-Canadian woman and it was surprising/ educational/ thought-provoking to hear a white person speak so emotionally and sincerely about being discriminated against.
In the US, white-on-white racism seems very anachronistic... Italians, Irish, Poles, etc. and other white ethnics (many from Catholic countries in Europe) have basically come into the melting pot and have become just white.
Perhaps slavery in the US "required" or encouraged whites to unite among themselves, while Canadian history "allowed" white people to still have a sense of their ethnicity (in this case, French-based language and culture).
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