Race Hustling in the Hammer

Vincent J. Crutis

22 May 23

RE: Hamilton hate demands robust community response.  Op-ed by Kojo Damptey. The Hamilton Spectator 20 May 23

The only way to describe Kojo Damptey’s column concisely is to say that it’s incoherent.  For starters, if Hamilton is this city of hate as he describes, where are the people going to come from to end the hate?  And how do you end hate by doing hateful things to the haters?  His argument doesn’t stand scrutiny.

Damptey engages in racism even as he condemns it “white supremacy is the root cause of the hatred…” So, yellow jackets confronting a Pride event in Gage Park in 2019 is motivated by white supremacism?  When everyone involved is white?  The animosity between Shia and Sunni is due to white supremacy?  If a Muslim pants a swastika on a synagogue, that’s caused by white supremacy?

Anti-indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism occurs even though “race is made up?”  Howzzat possible?  And these races don’t have hatreds of their own?  By implication only whites are guilty of racism, says the anti-racist Black man.  Nevertheless, “the reality is that race is socially constructed and has been the bedrock of how our society is built.”  It used to be that a man can be a woman by thinking it, but a white man couldn’t be a Chinese woman.  But now that “race is a social construction” like gender allegedly is, that white man now can be a Chinese woman by thinking it. (If only you could be aboriginal by wishing it, and a few academics in North America could have spared themselves some embarrassment!)

Damptey then raises “scientific race scholars,” one of whom, Carl Linnaeus, in 1758 divided humanity into four races: white, black, yellow, and red.  But instead of denying the validty of this 18^th century classification and analysis, Damptey objects to the characteristics assigned to the non-white groups!  Race is either socially constructed or there’s something based on a perceptible difference, and Damptey falls again into incoherence.

Damptey then indulges his own penchant for race hatred – of whites – in this remarkable passage: “The manifestations of white supremacy take many forms, and we must be vigilant.  It could be KKK members marching down James Street, carding residents, white supremacists running for mayor, flying confederate flags, teachers using racial slurs, anti-LGBTQ protesters using homophobic epithets, or microaggressions in the workplace, hospitals, schools, etc.  It’s essential to track all of the above, to refute their ideas, and know the impact on our community.”  If you’re white and straight, he’s talking to you.  And never mind any Charter rights you think you might have to hold your own opinions, and to express them in words.  They're cancelled.

Race is socially constructed?  Yet this social construction “has been the bedrock of how our society is built.”  Kamptey has no conception of the first hundred years of Canada’s existence.  If race is socially constructed, his condemnation of the Indian Act is incoherent, since it relies on a real distinction between aboriginal and British – which isn’t “a race.”

Quo Vadis?  Who benefits from the belief that Hamilton is a steaming caldron of hate?  Why, the Hamilton Center for Civic Inclusion, the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre, and, well, race hustlers like Kojo Damptey himself, who nearly won Ward 14 in the last election on the basis of his race creds.  He’s pumping a new organization called “We Support Hamilton” and I suspect he’s looking for a job, like the one he had at HCCI.

Hamilton isn’t perfect – yet; but adopting Damptey’s world view and nostrums would make it worse – far worse for hatred and resentment.

Incoherent is as chartable as I can be.

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Kojo Damptey works at McMaster University.  No word on his opinions on MacDivest or the installation of gas turbines on campus.