Premier Kathleen Wynne of Ontario set up a new Ministry of Anti-racism. The Minister was in Hamilton, and submitted to an interview by my home town newspaper. The story opened with the Minister's conclusion, after a day's inspection, was that there was a lot of work to be done in Hamilton.
Below is my response.
Let’s set aside for the moment the natural inclination of a
government minister to justify his new appointment with the line: “A lot
of work here.” But when you are explicitly an “anti-racism” minister,
saying there is a lot of work here in Hamilton is tantamount to saying that
Hamilton is full of racism and racists.
I regard such statements, and the appointment of such a
minister, as acts of political oppression, as divisive, and as a poison-pill
intended to politically delegitimize Premier Wynne’s non-Liberal successor.
I remember as a boy the Spectator headlines of 1963 -
screaming about the KKK and the real racial upheavals going on in the American
Deep South. I remember the March on Washington. I remember Malcom
X. I remember the long, hot summer of 1967 when numerous American cities
exploded in race riots. I remember the assassination of Martin Luther
King. I remember real racism, and was young enough to be impressed by its
evils. I also remember that Canada was spared much of that.
Since the 1960s, my generation and two more that followed
were raised with the example of real racism and the evil of social
division. If human culture is educatable, then the unwisdom of racism –
of discrimination based on race alone - is surely implanted in the culture of
Ontario, and Canada, after three generations of propagandizing.
You would think. Yet it wasn’t until Premier Kathleen
Wynne and 2016 came along, that racism became such a problem in Ontario that a
Minister whose mandate it is to combat it was appointed. How stupid we
must all be. Stupid, as in being duped.
There is a lot of political mileage to be gained by being
seen as ‘combatting racism.’ After all, racism is evil, and so combatting
it must be the good fight. But is it? In order to fight the good
fight, there have to be villains; there have to be racists, otherwise the
Minister would have precious little fighting to do. Otherwise, he would
be reduced to being a spouter of platitudes, like “chew your food properly,”
and “brush your teeth twice daily.” And so racism must be discovered
where it really doesn’t exist. Or exists in a degree that amounts to a
highly refined matter of taste, not the robust racism that tears civic life
apart.
So how must this new ministry operate? Well, you have
old, white guys like me who are the natural bearers of racism, with our white
privilege and all. Then you have twenty-something minorities who have
been told their entire lives that they are victims of oppression by people like
me. Then you have a Minister, a black guy, who is twenty years my junior
who says he knows what’s in my mind better than I do myself. And he has
the weight of the government behind him. He says that people like me are
racist and don’t know it, and are oppressing all these young minorities.
That’s how you accentuate civil discord, and only the government of today, i.e.
the progressive Kathleen Wynne, is able to combat that civil unrest that her government
fomented for political gain.
And then we must fear a Trumpian upheaval among the
less-educated older whites who will vote in mass for someone who will sweep
away this foolishness. Sound familiar? It should, look at the
political reception Mike Harris received – after he won a majority. He is
still regarded as illegitimate.
Let me address myself directly to our Lesbian premier and
particularly to our black minister of anti-racism. Your very election is
proof that your accusations of racism and intolerance are false. So blow
your accusations out the wazzoo. Mr. Minister, I know your mind better
than you know mine. Mine has been shaped not only by greater life
experience, but by thirty years of the study of philosophy of Aristotle, St.
Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Mortimer J. Adler, and by
self-reflection. Your mind has been filled with progressivist platitudes,
which you very quickly run out of justifications for. Then you are left
with “might makes right.” When you feign superior wisdom, I’m not sure if
you are that stupid, or you think I am.
How stupid are you? You know Islam is a religion and
not a race. You know that Islam is not coterminous with a race. Yet
you lump Islamophobia as a kind of racism. You mention mosques getting
attacked. Has it not occurred to you that maybe government policies that
change the demographics of society are changing things too fast? You call
on Canadians to “share our values” and “embrace those people and look for ways
to make sure they are set up for success” but why should newcomers want to
accept Canadian values that are shot through with racism and other evils?
Why should Canadians embrace newcomers and set them up for success - ahead of
our own? Please explain these painfully obvious contradictions. Is
it racist for Canadians to place the success of our own ahead of success of
newcomers? Is it racism for Canadians to embrace our own ahead of
embracing newcomers? If you think so, then you don’t understand human
nature at all. Give up your charge, Mr. Minister. You are a danger
to the civil peace.
I pity you, Mr. Minister. You have been given a charge
by Premier Wynne that is illegitimate. As a good soldier, you have to
carry Premier Wynne’s poisonous and divisive message, that racism is rampant in
Ontario and only she and her government can stamp it out. Neither you nor
she is likely to suffer the consequences of her outrageous accusations of
rampant racism in Ontario. You haven’t got a clue what real racism looks
like.
Appointing an anti-racism minister is an attempt by our
Lesbian premier to foment a political crisis that can only be solved by her
re-election. Disturbing the civil peace in such a way in order to gain
re-election is a most vicious way to operate.
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