Friends, writing about racism in the North is like trying to hold on to a slippery fish!
You know what you are looking at and what you have to do, but it’s doing its best to get away from you.
To get a better idea of what exactly is involved we have to go back all the way to the times of Greek philosopher, Aristotle.
What came out of his contribution to the World has to do with the idea of Absolute Knowledge. A Person respected for his take on things says stuff and we go along with it, not knowing any different.
The building blocks for even paradigms, patterns for Knowing, were limited at the time, so the idea of trust was basically it.
Fast forward to the birth of Science, with Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, and we had a way to verify what was there. We could test our building blocks for knowledge, so a different kind of reality set it.
Lately or since the beginning of the 1900’s we started to experience what we now know as Indigenous Knowledge, what the Indians have been saying all along.
We are all related, in one way or another, so if one is raised too high on the shoulders of the rest, we don’t have equality.
Meanwhile, right at this time, with Covid-19 putting a halt to pretty much all we can do, there’s also a great deal of righteous unrest on the streets.
People find themselves up against authority, their fellow citizens, blacks, mainly, being tortured and killed, right on camera for all to see.
Again, back to the fish in hand. We know the problem is there, but we have to reach all the way back to what we think we know, even to get a handle on it.
The situation is not out of control, though, friends.
Even corporations are now starting to realize that racism is not good for business. That problem, of money, too, is one, too long overdue for a retread.
Along with racism there are its pillars, white privilege and settler colonialism, people claiming Indian lands and treaty rights.
Canada the supposed Good can’t turn a blind eye to the RCMP enforcing illegal laws on unceded Indigenous lands, to build pipelines.
The funny thing about change is that, overall, it doesn’t actually happen until the last person boards the Freedom Train.
In this case it took the white cop’s knee on the neck of George Floyd to wake up the World!
Racism in the North is actually no different than anywhere else.
We see what we want to see or what the media and government want us to see.
Other than that, miraculously, we are now in a position to have to change or are doomed to this history of continued failure.
Mahsi, thank you.