Brian Bowman, the current mayor of the city in which I
reside, Winnipeg, the capital city of the Province of Manitoba in the Dominion
of Canada, is not a man noted for his intelligence. Indeed, as far as I can tell, he is noted
for only two things. The first is his
close resemblance in physical appearance to Jon Cryer, the actor who before he
took on the role of Alan, the anal-retentive loser brother of Charlie, the
drunken letch portrayed by Charlie Sheen on Three
and a Half Men was best known for playing “Duckie” in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink. I have long suspected that this is the real
reason he was elected. If only a Charlie Sheen look-a-like- had run
against him. Or, better yet, Charlie
Sheen himself. Yes, Sheen has been
struggling with a lot of personal demons in recent years, but the late Rob Ford
struggled with many of those same demons in the city formerly known as York and
he was the best mayor in the whole Dominion at the time. His brother Doug rose to the premiership of
Upper Canada on his posthumous coattails although Doug has subsequently proven
himself unworthy of the Rob Ford mantle.
The second thing for which Bowman is noted is his act of hysterical
wailing and hand-wringing over the evils of racism. Unlike the problems that Rob Ford and
Charlie Sheen struggled with, this precludes one from being an excellent, or
even a good mayor. Bowman’s example of
the performance art of racially “woke” virtue-signaling is second to none in
Canada, not even that of Captain Airhead himself, although Captain Airhead, who
is also the country’s foremost blackface artist, retains the championship title
for hypocrisy.
Bowman has declared this week to be Winnipeg’s first
“Anti-Racism Week”. The official theme
of the week’s events is “What would Winnipeg look like without racism?” If the organizers of this pompous display of
left-wing pseudo-piety, including our feckless, inept and dimwitted mayor, were
ever to learn the answer to this question, they would be horrified.
A Winnipeg without racism would be a Winnipeg in which people
were no longer treated differently from others because of their skin colour or
the place of origin of their ancestors. This means, among other things, that in a
Winnipeg without racism, people with white skin colour, whose ancestors came
from Europe and the British Isles, would no longer be treated as if they all
shared a collective guilt for racism while people of all other skin colours and
ancestry are treated as if they shared a collective innocent victimhood of
racism. This is pretty much the opposite
of what Bowman et al. envision a “Winnipeg without racism” as looking like.
While all these people who wear their “Anti-Racism” in
prominent display on their sleeves like to adopt the stance of Mizaru, Kikazaru
and Iwazaru towards racism that is directed against white people, such racism
is not difficult to find. Earlier this
week, all sorts of left-wing personalities found themselves with egg on their
faces as they rushed to delete all the tweets and other social media posts in
which they had spouted off about the evil, racist, white man who had shot up a
grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, killing ten people, before it was revealed
that the shooter was a Syrian refugee who liked to rant on the internet about
the evils of racism, Islamophobia, and Donald Trump. They had, of course, assumed the shooter was
a white man in the vernacular sense of the term rather than the technical sense
in which physical anthropology classifies East Indians and Arabs as part of the
Caucasian race. This assumption was based upon a stereotype,
the type of assumption they would have been the first to condemn had somebody
mistakenly assumed the perpetrator of an inner-city mugging to be black or
mistakenly assumed the culprit in some major financial swindle to be Jewish.
If you think the above example to be of a relatively minor
form of racism consider this next example from last week. This too pertained to comments made about a
mass murder, in this case the shooting spree that a sex addict had gone on in
the massage parlours of Atlanta, Georgia on the sixteenth of this month. Since most of the people killed in this
earlier massacre had been prostitutes of various East Asian ethnicities many
had speculated that the crime had a racial motivation although the evidence
seems to be against this interpretation of the event. One person who ran with this interpretation
was Damon Young, co-founder of the blog Very
Smart Brothas which operates under the umbrella of the older black e-zine The Root, and author of the 2019 book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.
In a post on the seventeenth entitled “Whiteness
is a Pandemic”, Young declared “whiteness” to be a “public health crisis”
and “white supremacy” to be a virus which “will not die until there are no
bodies left for it to infect. Which
means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it and kill
it.” This is eliminationist language,
the language of genocide, and the argument that seeks to explain this away as
talking about “white supremacy”, a system, idea, or ideology rather than people
is completely invalidated by the fact that Young uses “whiteness” and “white
supremacy” interchangeably throughout his rant. Would-be defenders of Young might attempt to
point to this usage as indicating that by “whiteness” Young means the system or
ideology of white supremacy rather than “the condition of being white” as the
term would be more naturally understood.
Nobody, however, would accept that kind of reasoning as being valid in
excusing the use of this sort of language in connection with “blackness” or any
other “ness” other than whiteness.
This use of “whiteness”, a term that naturally suggests the
condition of being fair skinned and of British or European descent, as if it was
the designation of a system set up to limit power to white people and oppress
all others, is not original with Young. This
has been standard usage on the campuses of academe for decades now where it has
always been accompanied by either calls for genocide that are cleverly excused
as demands for the abolition of an unjust system or demands for the redress of
racial grievances, real and otherwise, that are irresponsibly worded in eliminationist
rhetoric, depending upon how much grace one wishes to extend to those, such as
the late Noel Ignatiev, who use this kind of language in one’s interpretation
of their motives. The University of
Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, both located in this city, are no
exceptions to this, and, indeed, some might argue that they are among the worst
universities in Canada for this sort of thing.
That they are not among the first campuses that come to mind when this subject
comes up is due to a dearth of high-profile incidents connected with these schools,
which itself can be attributed to the national media not particularly caring
about anything that goes on in Winnipeg.
The closest to a high-profile incident took place two and a
half years ago when somebody put up signs saying “It’s okay to be white” on
walls around the University of Manitoba.
The CBC reported on this under the headline “Hate
messages show up on the University of Manitoba campus”. Immediately beneath the headline is the
sentence “Many students say they feel unsafe due to threatening nature of
messages, union says”. Both the
headline and this sentence were plainly nonsensical. The words “It’s okay to be white” make a
simple, positive, assertion about white people.
They do not express hatred of people who are not white or threaten
people who are not white. They don’t
say anything about people who are not white at all. To reject the statement “it’s okay to be
white” is to affirm its negative counterpart “it’s not okay to be white”, and to
affirm the latter is itself a racist act, because to say that it is not okay to
be white is just as racist as to say that it is not okay to be black or to be
any other race. Indeed, it is not just
racist but racist of the genocidal or eliminationist type. While the left has recently decided that sex
is no longer an immutable aspect of human reality, that people must choose or
discover for themselves whether they are male, female or some other option, and
that it is a horrible offense to reject a person’s own gender
self-identification and stick to the older reality of sex, they have not yet
applied the same lack of reasoning to race and so being white or black or
whatever is still, for them as much as for rational people, something one does
not choose, is born with, and cannot change, unless, perhaps, one is Michael
Jackson, and so, the statement that it is not okay to be white is followed
logically by the statement that white people must be eliminated. All of this is very obvious and all of the
people cited in the CBC article – a student, an associate professor in the
department of Native Studies, the head of the same department, the Students’
Union president, and the university president avoid all discussion of the
actual content of the text of the posters they were denouncing. Their arguments – if you can call them that –
were basically of either the “these posters are bad because they made me feel
bad” or the “these posters are bad because bad people put them up”
varieties. The lengthy quotation from
University of Manitoba president David Barnard’s diatribe denouncing the
posters left a very poor impression of the man’s intelligence and
integrity. In reporting this sort of
drivel, the CBC actually managed to compromise what little had remained up to
that point of its journalistic standards.
Neither the explicitly eliminationist anti-whiteness
rhetoric on campus nor the equation of even the simplest positive assertion
about white people with hatred and threats towards non-white people appears to
be of much concern to Brian Bowman and it is unlikely that his vision of a
Winnipeg without racism would exclude these forms of racism. The only racism that he seems to recognize is
racism directed towards BIPOC groups and even then only if it is perpetrated by
whites and not by other BIPOC groups.
This makes his anti-racism into something of a farce.
In Winnipeg, the emphasis of anti-racists like Bowman is on racism
directed towards Native Indians. Indeed,
Bowman who is white as a lily, identifies as Métis, in much the same way that Elizabeth
Warren identifies as an Indian (a distant ancestor on his mother’s side was
Cree). When
he gave an interview about this at the beginning of his mayoral career his
remarks seemed oddly racially condescending.
He mentioned his mother making bannock and his getting into a fight at
school over it when he was a kid almost as if these were his credentials for
his racial self-identification. Many
would consider this to be akin to pointing to one’s love of fried chicken and
watermelon as proof of one’s blackness. In
January of this year, he jumped on board the bandwagon of the “Not My Siloam”
movement that sought, ultimately successfully, to remove Jim Bell as CEO of
Siloam Mission, on the grounds that under his leadership the Christian homeless
shelter had not done enough to promote Native Spirituality, a new religion
invented in the late twentieth century that bears approximately the same
relationship to the religions of the pre-evangelized Native Indians as Wicca, the
twentieth century religion founded by Gerald Gardner, bears to the
pre-Christian paganism of Britain and Europe.
It would be interesting to know just how deeply Bowman looked into the
facts of this “scandal” before getting involved. Did he ever learn, for example, that the font
of most of the accusations against Bell was a disgruntled, ex-employee of
Siloam, who had earned for herself a reputation within not just Siloam but the
broader community of outreach to the homeless and indigent of extreme bigotry
towards those who were not Native Indians, especially fair-skinned Christians
of European ancestry, people of whom she seemed unable to speak without the use
of pejoratives? I suspect the answer
is no. Bowman’s most publicized
initiative with regards to Native Indians has been his Indigenous heritage
initiative. It consists of little more than
looking into changing certain place names and altering the wording on certain
historical markers. David Chartrand,
the leader of the Manitoba Métis
Federation was
quoted by the Winnipeg Sun last month
as being totally unimpressed, both by Bowman’s initiative and by the Year Zero,
Cultural Maoist, monument toppling that was the context in which it was
announced.
In recent months the broader North American anti-racist
movement has been emphasizing racism directed towards “Asians”, a designation
that lumps together certain nationalities from Asia on purely racial grounds
despite the fact that these nationalities have historically hated each other
and would have found the thought of being to be lumped together in a common identity
with the others as utterly repulsive.
Needless to say, racism against Native Indians and racism
against Asians are the types of racism that have been talked about most this
week. The most interesting detail about
these types of racism, however, has been conspicuously absent from the
discussion. That detail is that
explicit and outspoken racial animosity towards those of the ethnicities designated
as Asian is far easier to find among Native Indians than among whites, and
explicit statements of contempt for Native Indians are far easier to find among
people of Asian ancestry than among whites The reason for this omission is easy to see –
it doesn’t fit well into the narrative of Anti-Racism Week about how whites and
only whites are the bad guys who are guilty of racism and all others are
victims who must unite in solidarity against their common oppressors.
That narrative is total bunk, and therefore so is
Anti-Racism Week.
Is it too late to draft Charlie Sheen to replace Brian
Bowman as mayor of Winnipeg?
