The not so Great Racism in Canada Thread

[dleung]

Originally Posted by someone123

Francophone doesn't mean bilingual. There are lots of unilingual Francophones, just as there are unilingual Anglophones. If you only speak English in Canada, you have much better economic prospects than if you only speak French.

Of course this doesn't mean that Francophones represent a hard done by victim group in modern Canada. But I am not sure anybody has asserted that. I do think that Francophones in Canada may sometimes have personal insight into what it's like to be a minority.

Just so I'm understanding this correctly... we've gone from "black-on-black crime", to statues/pancake mix, to Asian exceptionalism, to language obstacles for unilingual Francophones outside Quebec (not even the kind that Quebec proudly imposes on its anglophones), as the latest filibuster to water down efforts to give black/indigenous people equal treatment in the justice system?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Because language discrimination is not racism? Prove me wrong once a Francophone is physically assaulted for merely existing in an Anglophone realm.
Or when they're brutalized by the RCMP at higher than normal rates.

This line of discussion is so utterly tone deaf I'm surprised that it hasn't been picked up by some left-leaning website and ridiculed. Perhaps you should change this to "The not so great language discrimination in Canada thread" to nip it in the bud.

Are those highlighted essential criteria that a group needs to meet in order to claim that discrimination against them exists?

Do Jews in North America routinely get assaulted just for being Jewish in a mainly non-Jewish society? Do Jews get brutalized by the police in disproportionate numbers?

The answer to both is no.

Does this means that anti-semitism no longer exists in North America, then?

[someone123]

Originally Posted by dleung

Just so I'm understanding this correctly... we've gone from "black-on-black crime", to statues/pancake mix, to Asian exceptionalism, to language obstacles for unilingual Francophones outside Quebec (not even the kind that Quebec proudly imposes on its anglophones), as the latest filibuster to water down efforts to give black/indigenous people equal treatment in the justice system?

There is no filibustering here. Filibustering is when there's a political process and speakers delay the outcome. This is just a thread and anybody is free to post.

When I respond to some post about Francophone stuff it has no implied hidden meaning about black or indigenous people per se except as far as I connect it back to an argument like the one about unknowable experiences. But even that is just a narrow context; a dispute about a line of reasoning doesn't necessarily prove or disprove the conclusion.

Part of what's going on is, SSP being SSP, people tend to skim posts, make snap judgements about which of two sides the poster falls in, and then post in agreement or disagreement. You just have to wade through those poor quality posts on here.

[CivicBlues]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Are those highlighted essential criteria that a group needs to meet in order to claim that discrimination against them exists?

Do Jews in North America routinely get assaulted just for being Jewish in a mainly non-Jewish society? Do Jews get brutalized by the police in disproportionate numbers?

The answer to both is no.

Does this means that anti-semitism no longer exists in North America, then?

Umm...Yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_Jewish_institutions_in_the_United_States

Can't find one for Canada, but I don't think that'll get you to a point.


Are Francophone Canadians discriminated in Canada? Perhaps. Is it called "Racism" when it occurs? Emphatic No.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

He was not offended and you are comparing it to issues and situations where people are genuinely offended.

Originally Posted by Acajack

But the thing is that there *are* francophones who are offended by these things.

Just because Lio doesn't care doesn't mean they don't. Or that their feelings are less valid than his.

Again, that's basically "Schrödinger's Racism: you have to wait until the reaction of the 'victim' is observed before you can know whether or not it's racism." It makes zero sense.

The fact that I happen to be a super thick-skinned individual shouldn't have any bearing on what's considered (by societal consensus) offensive and what isn't.

If I were black, I could shrug off being called the N-word. If I were indigenous, I could dodge a trailer hitch thrown at me.

Are those things now okay?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

I don't get the sense that anybody suggested that Francophones are particularly hard done by, but rather that we have different standards for what counts as discrimination or historical injustice against different groups in popular culture.

It's interesting to me because it's an area I am familiar with and I can weigh it against the abstract idea that we should base our sense of the level of discrimination against groups on subjective experience or the subjective impact of history on the modern collective psyche.

Francophones are absolutely a historically aggrieved party in Canada; they were conquered by the British. Yet this needs to be put in the context of objective measures of where Francophones are relative to other Canadians, not just how loudly Francophones complain. And frankly a lot of the loudest Francophone complainers are, in my opinion, out to lunch about what will actually be good for Francophones.

There are people who demand reparations for the Acadian explusion, or want to call it genocide. Queen Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation in 2003 to apologize. This is not a manufactured or fictional issue.

I am also skeptical of the claim that we should think of prejudice and its impacts as solipsistic (or some identity-group-level variant). I think a lot of people can relate to the struggles of others, even if they are not all exactly the same. The hypothetical Perfectly Advantaged individual of 2020, the attractive and well-off straight cisgender white and culturally-native male, makes up but a tiny percentage of the Canadian population. And chances are that even people in that group know what it's like to be on the wrong end of a power dynamic within some context. Nobody's in control all the time.

I agree with the highlighted, but that is not consistent with our zeitgeist.

Which is to say that if you're part of an out-group it's strictly verboten to tell an in-group that the way the feel might be unreasonable. What constitutes discrimination is self-defined - by the in-group (majority).

A priori, this is actually a good thing as there has been too much dismissal of legitimate gripes from groups in society for far too long.

A few years ago for some reason the CTV station in Montreal and the Montreal Gazette were all over cases of anglophones who were refused service in English, sometimes rudely and sometimes not so rudely (though not apologetically), everywhere from métro ticket windows to Tim Hortons drive-thrus. The implication was that these were cases of discrimination.

Think about this in the contect of the current climate, where the simple presence of people of too many people of a specific skin colour is problematic, and we are supposed to accept it as such, "just because", who are we to judge?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...ack-woman-shouts-space-people-color.html

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by someone123

I'm not an incel and I have no skin in the straight dating game. You like to engage in ad hominem attacks but you don't have a good track record in identifying what the people you think you have no common ground with opinion-wise are like. You debate more like a prosecutor in a court room than somebody who's open to having a conversation.

My point is that divisiveness or 🞵🞵🞵/gender wars are not necessarily even that helpful for most women since they would like to have good male partners. Excesses in the #metoo movement can easily backfire.

The dynamic with anti-racism isn't all that dissimilar. We all need to get along, and in our day to day lives we mostly interact as individuals one on one in mundane situations. The George Floyd scenario, while tragic, is not a norm of interaction. I think there is something to be said for bringing the temperature of interaction down. It is not even clear that making people obsess about racial or other prejudice helps them in interacting with members of other groups. I believe that engagement with others as individuals is better for fairness than identity group based thinking. This has been demonstrated in some of the studies on implicit biases and anti-prejudice messaging.

Your argument that modern women won't have men to date is neanderthalish and similar to the kind of idiotic things incels say, believing women are to blame for them lacking dates. If you're not familiar with incels, well look it up.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by dleung

Just so I'm understanding this correctly... we've gone from "black-on-black crime", to statues/pancake mix, to Asian exceptionalism, to language obstacles for unilingual Francophones outside Quebec (not even the kind that Quebec proudly imposes on its anglophones), as the latest filibuster to water down efforts to give black/indigenous people equal treatment in the justice system?

It's an endless stream of 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 to be quite honest. Attempts to honestly engage with it are pointless. And that is why BLM exists. That is part of why they decided action and aggression over the usual bargaining and pleas was the only option, because there is a normative element of society that won't listen no matter what.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Unilingual Francophones discriminated against with respect to job prospects? Oh no what ever can they do to alleviate this gross injustice besides oh, I don't know, learning English?

Much easier than say, a POC changing their skin colour, donchathink?

You know, that's easy to say in theory, but in practice, I'm willing to bet that you have an approximately zero chance of not dying of old age before achieving either of "attaining perfect French fluency" and "stopping being ethnically Asian".

[someone123]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

Your argument that modern women won't have men to date is neanderthalish and similar to the kind of idiotic things incels say, believing women are to blame for them lacking dates. If you're not familiar with incels, well look it up.

I am familiar with incels. Incel means involuntary celibate and the group tends to be heterosexual males who complain about their lack of partners.

This is actually the opposite of what I was talking about; I was posting from the perspective of women.

I also didn't say that women won't have dating partners. I said that some heterosexual men seem to be leaving the dating pool or have diminishing economic prospects. The dating market is one of match-making; any diminishment of the pool will tend to reduce the average quality of the match that is made. So outcomes for heterosexual men have an impact on heterosexual women too.

Here is some data:


Source

I make no assertion about the reasons why fewer men are having 🞵🞵🞵 or working (one example of a suspected factor in the article above is that more young people are living with parents). I merely observe that this has an impact on heterosexual women looking for partners. So it does not make sense to view men and women, on the whole, as completely disparate groups that have separate unrelated social trajectories, and to pit them against each other as "teams".

Sorry I set off your incel detector.. you might need to recalibrate it.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

It's an endless stream of 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 to be quite honest. Attempts to honestly engage with it are pointless. And that is why BLM exists. That is part of why they decided action and aggression over the usual bargaining and pleas was the only option, because there is a normative element of society that won't listen no matter what.

Great idea. Can't convince us because your arguments are too weak? Throw a tantrum. That'll convince us, if logic didn't work!

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Are Francophone Canadians discriminated in Canada? Perhaps. Is it called "Racism" when it occurs? Emphatic No.

I am not the one who is playing fast and loose with the definitions of racism.

Just trying to be a man of my time, and following this to its logical conclusion.

As a society we seem to be enlarging the scope of what racism is and what is racist.

Like any paradiggum :-) change, there can be unintended consequences to this.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

It's an endless stream of 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 to be quite honest. Attempts to honestly engage with it are pointless. And that is why BLM exists. That is part of why they decided action and aggression over the usual bargaining and pleas was the only option, because there is a normative element of society that won't listen no matter what.

You sound like someone who isn't pleased about the effects and true impacts of what they've unleashed.

Brace yourself. WASP people haven't really started complaining about discrimination against them yet.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by dleung

Anti-Quebec sentiment is well known, and that's almost entirely rooted in the threat of separation and the country's affirmative action for QC's self-imposed economic disadvantages. .

This is too priceless not to quote.

Sure, there is sometimes hate against this specific group, but you know what? It's all their fault!

Now replace "Quebec" with some other place (since Quebec is a code word for "French Canadians") or identifiable group, and then throw in a couple of examples of things that group does that the majority does not agree with or bugs people... and see how that sounds?

[savevp]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

That is part of why they decided action and aggression over the usual bargaining and pleas was the only option, because there is a normative element of society that won't listen no matter what.

It may well be that I'm just missing something, but I don't understand the endgame. It would seem pretty evident that by reading and engaging with yourself and other posters, there is quite a bit of listening going on within this forum. Ditto for BLM, who's not listening? Maybe the fraction of society that constitutes the racist right, white supremacists, or some group like that. But the claim BLM is being ignored is a strange one indeed.

The media coverage of BLM is intense in just about every western nation on earth. And based on how frequently BLM manifestos and demands are cited by both 'sides' within and beyond this forum, it would seem clear that society's listening to BLM isn't the issue.

Unless by listening you mean unreservedly acceding to every demand or argument advanced by BLM or their sympathisers, without challenging them critically. Unless listening means agreeing, I can't see how there is any shortage of listening going on.

Does arguing against defunding the police or suggesting systemic racism doesn't exist, if you so chose to, constitute a lack of listening?

[Xelebes]

I have a Webster unabridged dictionary from 1947 that has an appendix that tries to explain the differences between the races. It goes a step further, trying to explain that within what we call the "Caucusoids" are the English and the French. The biggest differences between them are not the skin colour but the shapes of their heads. Let this be a reminder that there can be racist animosity against the French and Francophones in Canada.

Also note that we can commit genocide, an indicator of racial animus, on the basis of language alone. We can also commit cultural genocide by insisting that those who speak a language must go through an education cut off from their family and tribe, as what the English did to the Irish. So I suggest we be very careful about the prescriptions here.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by savevp

It may well be that I'm just missing something, but I don't understand the endgame. It would seem pretty evident that by reading and engaging with yourself and other posters, there is quite a bit of listening going on within this forum. Ditto for BLM, who's not listening? Maybe the fraction of society that constitutes the racist right, white supremacists, or some group like that. But the claim BLM is being ignored is a strange one indeed.

The media coverage of BLM is intense in just about every western nation on earth. And based on how frequently BLM manifestos and demands are cited by both 'sides' within and beyond this forum, it would seem clear that society's listening to BLM isn't the issue.

Unless by listening you mean unreservedly acceding to every demand or argument advanced by BLM or their sympathisers, without challenging them critically. Unless listening means agreeing, I can't see how there is any shortage of listening going on.

Does arguing against defunding the police or suggesting systemic racism doesn't exist, if you so chose to, constitute a lack of listening?

tl;dr disagreement is racist.

[Pavlov]

Originally Posted by savevp

It may well be that I'm just missing something, but I don't understand the endgame. It would seem pretty evident that by reading and engaging with yourself and other posters, there is quite a bit of listening going on within this forum. Ditto for BLM, who's not listening? Maybe the fraction of society that constitutes the racist right, white supremacists, or some group like that. But the claim BLM is being ignored is a strange one indeed.

The media coverage of BLM is intense in just about every western nation on earth. And based on how frequently BLM manifestos and demands are cited by both 'sides' within and beyond this forum, it would seem clear that society's listening to BLM isn't the issue.

Unless by listening you mean unreservedly acceding to every demand or argument advanced by BLM or their sympathisers, without challenging them critically. Unless listening means agreeing, I can't see how there is any shortage of listening going on.

Does arguing against defunding the police or suggesting systemic racism doesn't exist, if you so chose to, constitute a lack of listening?

Arguing that systemic racism does not exist at all in our society, despite the fact that it is so well accepted that our courts take judicial notice of the fact, is a pretty untenable position. Not sure it amounts to "not listening" but...

[lio45]

I think everyone is aware it not only "exists" but is quite literally written into law in this country - we still have official legal segregation on a purely ethnic/ancestry basis going on in 2020, as extraordinary and mind-blowing as that sounds by typical First World Democracies standards.

Originally Posted by milomilo

It's not useless, if we aren't even allowed to discuss the absurdity of the Indian act, something that is undeniable systemic racism, then how can we ever expect to move to the future we all want where that act doesn't exist? This conversation always gets shut down due to being apparently so tough a problem that it's not even worth discussing the end point. And the status quo of the most racist of laws continues forever. Imagine if Canada had no such laws and America still had a "Black Slave act" guaranteeing them a pittance in exchange for their entrenched pitiful status - how smug and disdainful of the Americans we would be.

Originally Posted by milomilo

And this is the type of comment that is useless and is doing exactly what always happens - shutting down any hope of actually discussing, and potentially solving the most egregious example of systemic racism, probably in any first world country. When examples of true systemic racism are asked to be cited, it is hard to actually point to anything concrete. But here in Canada it is quite literally written into law, and yet it's abolition is not allowed to be contemplated.

Now, I'm off to throw a trailer hitch at someone, being the racist 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 that I am.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by CivicBlues

Because language discrimination is not racism? Prove me wrong once a Francophone is physically assaulted for merely existing in an Anglophone realm.

FYI, this was very common as recently as in the late 1990s (when my ex was in high school) at the Massey-Vanier High (a half-Franco, half-Anglo high school) in Cowansville, Eastern Townships, Quebec.

Went both ways, of course. You could get beat up for being an Anglo too.

I wish everyone in Anglo-Canada was as reasonable as you though - if it had been the case, we'd have never heard the so oft-seen completely idiotic "Quebec is racist!!!!" due to stuff like Bill 101 and Bill 21.

Intellectually honest people like CivicBlues and lio45 are well aware that we're actually lingu-ist and religion-ist, not race-ist.


(On that topic, I've always wondered if the British press labeled intolerant Northern Irish "racist" when covering Irish-on-Irish hate incidents over there, or if they instead used a more apt word. Maybe someone knows?)