15 Feb 2017
In a court case decided very recently, a judge sided with the plaintiffs against the government of Canada in a law suit concerning the so-call "60's Scoop" so-called "survivors." The so-called "scoop" was a federal children's aid program. Young aboriginal children were taken from their homes and reserves and placed in foster care with white families in affluent Canada, where they were raised. The "survivors" feel aggrieved that they had had their aboriginal language and culture stolen from them, and demanded financial compensation for the loss. The total demanded runs to $1.3 billion, according to news reports.
This program was another one of those progressivist do-good programs that sought to, as a minimum, preserve aboriginal genetic material, and better, provide the aboriginal community with people sympathetic to them who could better fight the aboriginal battle because they had been raised and educated in white society, i.e. the enemy camp. It was not uncommon before the white man reached North America for aboriginals themselves to take children or save children of other tribes that they had annihilated in order add to their own stock of acculturated fellow tribesmen, of different genetic makeup.
The decision was based on racism and a painfully obvious flaw in logic, which required a lot of reverse-racism on the part of the judge to overlook, as explained below:
In siding with the so-called 60’s scoop “survivors”, the
judge reached a decision founded upon racism and the theory of white
guilt. A bad high school student would not have made his error in logic:
you cannot lose what you do not have.
The racism lies in the belief that a person is born with a
culture or "belongs" to a culture, unless you are white. What is the culture of a white baby?
Is it British, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Azeri, Greek? It
could be any, or none of these, because a person is not born possessing a
language or a culture. A person born genetically “aboriginal” no more possesses aboriginal culture and language than a white person is born possessing a "white" culture, whatever that is. It is racist to say that an person "belongs" to a culture. It is plain wrong to say that a person is supposed
to possess at birth an “aboriginal” culture and language, and that these
possessions at birth can be wrongfully taken from them by substituting another
culture and language.
How racist is it to hold that a person born with a certain genetics is supposed to possess certain cultural characteristics? Let's explore: If a person is born with a culture, what cultural
traits would be associated with a person genetically an Arab or a Jew?
What cultural trait would you associate with an Indian? (A tendency to drunkenness, perhaps?) Would it be
racist to think that, or not?
If a young Polish girl comes to Canada and is assimilated
into Canadian culture, has her language and culture been taken from her?
We would say no, because, being Polish, she is white.
The salve for this guilt is a hefty dose of money – over a
billion in compensation for the pain of having been raised in Oakville instead
of Attawapiskat. White guilt is inexpiable, but it can be priced.
And “surviving” with greater opportunity in life and in better living
conditions form no part of the compensation. (Maybe the adoptive parents
should counter-sue for expenses and emotional trauma.)
The irony of all this is that the 60’s scoop was the
progressive thing in its day. It began under the Liberal government of
Lester Pearson, and continued under the aegis of Pierre Trudeau. You have
to have a heart of stone not to sympathize with the aim of the 60’s scoop, and
perhaps if done over it could be done better. But that isn’t the
point. The aim is to milk the theory of white guilt for all it is worth –
at the expense of the Canadian taxpayers of today, not those of thirty and
fifty years ago.
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