Les Armstrong's racist FB post

[ijmorlan]

Everyone who lives in a racist society holds racist points of view. Black people can perform anti-Black racism. Canada is a racist society. All Canadians are racist.

When Singh accused the Bloc member of being racist, he meant racist … in a way that is different from the way in which everyone is racist.

As an aside, I don’t think it is true that everyone is racist, and I think it devalues the meaning of the word to say so. At the same time, I acknowledge that I’m not perfect and I probably do unconsciously include a person’s skin colour or other attributes into judgements; although in many cases I think I’ve actually reversed that, so that I view minorities sufficiently positively that I’m probably more likely to unconsciously discriminate against WASPs than against other groups.

That being said, in the context of this discussion, when I talk about somebody being racist, I mean that they are measurably worse than the people around them. It is indisputable that this is also what Singh meant; he said the one member was racist, not that all the MPs including himself were racist (and in that view, repeating it wouldn’t be adding any new information).

If I understand correctly, he also later clarified that it was specifically because the MP refused unanimous consent on a motion. As I said above, Parliament is named for the fact that is the place where issues are discussed as part of making law and policy. As others have pointed out, the motion seemed to be pre-determining the outcome of a committee investigation; it is completely reasonable to oppose the motion on those grounds. So unless Singh had some other reason to consider that Bloc member especially racist, I consider his comment entirely inappropriate and I am now starting to consider that my opinion of him may need to drop.

As a final aside, while the fact that minorities have lived experience does mean they speak with a certain authority that comes from direct knowledge, it doesn’t override science and logic. So I feel comfortable asserting that Singh’s logic is wrong in this case; there is no conceivable lived experience he could have that means that opposing a single motion is by itself evidence of racism.

This comes up in other areas too. For example, I believe that the indigenous occupants of an area of land will almost certainly know details of the biology of that area that are unknown to the worldwide scientific enterprise; but it is still a fact that those species evolved over millions of years and were not individually created. And while I actually appreciate the mythic understanding of North America as being Turtle Island, it is a fact that the continent arose as a result of geologic forces, also over millions of years.