This past Saturday, I went to the annual conference at my university titled, “Racism and National Consciousness: White Supremacy and the Regulation of Identity.” I learned a lot, felt challenged by some of the ideas, and had a good time listening to other people. I even intend(ed) to write a few posts about some topics that came up.
On Monday morning, I checked my email, and lo and behold, one of the conference organizers sent attendees an email, informing us that Margaret Wente has said something atrociously racist yet again. I hope she’s happy now that other journalists are following suit.
Some time ago, Olympic official/McGill university chancellor Dick Pound decided to verbalize his years of colonial schooling and say that 400 years ago, Canada was a nation of savages. As he explained in his sorry excuse for an apology (oh, I can rest easy now that I know he didn’t intend it), he was speaking en Français and used the phrase “pays de savauge”, which is a part of French being a colonialist and racist language. I’m jaded enough to expect these kinds of comments, given the anti-Native riots that occurred during the Oka standoff, wherein Mohawk effigies were burned. Those sentiments still exist.
What I didn’t expect, was that not only Margaret Wente, who makes a living off of being an edgy bigot, argued that Dick Pound was right, but a bunch of other journalists and publications defended Pound and told Natives to get over it.
Excerpts from Wente’s article (emphasis mine):
The truth is different. North American native peoples had a neolithic culture based on subsistence living and small kinship groups. They had not developed broader laws or institutions, a written language, evidence-based science, mathematics or advanced technologies. The kinship groups in which they lived were very small, simply organized and not very productive. Other kinship groups were regarded as enemies, and the homicide rate was probably rather high. Until about 30 years ago, the anthropological term for this developmental stage was “savagery.”
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Today, however, it is simply not permissible to say that aboriginal culture was less evolved than European culture or Chinese culture – even though it’s true.
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Needless to say, Ms. Widdowson, who currently teaches at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, has been accused of hating aboriginals, and much else. “It doesn’t mean that you’re a racist or a colonialist if you recognize that there’s a culture gap,” she says. “But to say that aboriginal people were just as sophisticated as the Europeans – that’s just nonsense.”
“Culture gap”? Well, I guess if it isn’t European, it isn’t civilized.
Then we have Gary Mason’s article, also from the Globe and Mail:
Mr. Pound explained himself. The IOC seemed to be satisfied with his explanation and dismissed the matter. It suggested the group contact Mr. Pound directly to get his clarification. It didn’t. Instead, the aggrieved party sparked what amounted to a nationwide jihad, with native groups calling for his resignation and provincial politicians like B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell demanding Mr. Pound immediately make amends for “disgraceful” comments.
Apologize, Mr. Pound did. Over and over and over again. And when I talked to him the other day, the first thing out of his mouth was: “I am truly sorry for offending people. It was not my intention at all. But if somebody runs over your foot accidentally it hurts just as much as if someone ran over it deliberately.”
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I certainly wouldn’t want to minimize the discomfort his comments, however unintentional, caused some people in Canada. At the same time, those same people should not minimize the pain and grief this whole affair has caused someone who has spent decades fighting for good and representing the country with honour.
And someone, I will say right now, who doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.
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It’s a terrible thing, the lynch mob mentality we’ve developed in this country.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. All I hear is, “WAH YOU GUYS ARE BEING MEAN TO THE REALLY NICE WHITE GUY! IT’S JUST LIKE A JIHAD! LYNCH MOB!” I was half-expecting him to claim reverse racism. Are people supposed to hold Pound’s hand after he said something incredibly racist? Tell him “it’s okay, you apologized”? The guy seems sorry, I’ll give him that, but Native people don’t owe him a single thing. It is not their responsibility to teach him about his white privilege or to at least be aware of the type of colonial lies that Canadians are taught throughout their lives.
It doesn’t stop there, folks. If you look on Google News for “Dick Pound”, what’s the first article you’ll get? In defence of Dick Pound from The Vancouver Sun, basically saying Dick Pound can’t be racist because he’s served on the Olympic Committee (yay, diversity!), Europeans were basically opportunistic, and he has a right to free speech. Dick Pound’s free speech trumps the free speech of Natives, and colonialism is a thing of the past. In fact, most of the articles you’ll find will be either “matter of fact” reporting (Pound said this, people are outraged), or editorials and opinion pieces saying that he was sorry and Natives should move on after the apology.
Alas, white supremacy reigns, and we still need to hold annual conferences on racism and national consciousness.
Check out these posts from other blogs:
Shameless Magazine – Not just dumb, but racist
Racialicious – Open Season on Natives
gary mason’s bullshit pissed me off even more than the og racism. AUGH.
good to see you today, wish we had time/energy to debrief on the conference!
Me too, k! actually, Wente’s article didn’t piss me off quite as much as mason’s did once I read it, only because I expect it from her. it’s her trademark!
we should debrief on the conference! i don’t know if you + r will be around tomorrow, but I’ll probably be around until the evening.
But…weren’t the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas civilized, with writing, mathematics, astronomy, and complicated cities, presumably without the help of Old Worlders (or, in the popular minds of some New Age types these days, space aliens)? And weren’t most Europeans living in Neolithic kin-based cultures until…sometime after the fall of Rome? Rome and Greece were the exceptions, not the rules. They were the Aztecs and Incas of Europe. And they got THEIR civilization largely from the Middle East, didn’t they?
Yes, the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas may have taken several thousand more years than the earliest Old World civilizations to develop, but keep in mind that they were isolated from the Old World since several thousand years before even the Middle Easterners were civilized. They figured it out on their own; they didn’t need the Sumerians to civilize them.
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings of “evolution” is that it necessarily means “progress.” In many ways, civilization was a big step back, because it hastened the spread of disease, a problem we only solved about 100 years ago, and made famine due to crop failures more frequent. The cultural evolution that allowed us to live in civilizations with more than a 25-30 year average life span did not occur until after all the peoples of the world had met and influenced one another. And we still continue to take steps backwards, or make only false progress, or do the same thing over again. “Slaves” have been replaced by “third-world factories.”
Ok…I get now that they’re talking about 4000 years ago. But still, Whites weren’t civilized 4000 years ago. Only Brown and Yellow people were. Ancient Greece started 3000 years ago. And Europe did not develop civilization on its own. That happened maybe 3 times: first in the Middle East, then in China, and then…in the Americas.
oh shoot, it was 400 years ago. oops…still…
I think its a half-half phenomenon. If somebody is racist, one cannot help it. But if somebody exploits someone based on race, then half of it is effort put by the racist and half of it is acquiescence shown by the victim. If members of a race put their foot down and stop acting according to somebody else’s diktats, like working for low wages, getting mistreated, this will stop.
I had not heard about this, thanks for writing it up. Canada soo loves to call itself anti-racist. Yes, the sweet salad bowl that is welcoming to all. This country is frighteningly anti-Native. I still remember the police in Saskatchewan leaving Native men outside in the cold to die.
It is time to acknowledge this racism for what it is. I am sick of these racists making apologies after the fact as if they didn’t know what they said was racist to begin with. If you cannot keep your privilege to yourself at least have the good sense to mute yourself.
Anonymous, it is not the responsibility of the marginalized to ‘pull’ themselves out of marginalization. Racism is a system that tries to take away their power and autonomy, and it does a damn good job at it. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be, plus, you speak as though people of colour do not organize or resist racism, or ‘put their foot down’, as you say. There are consequences I don’t think you are grasping here.
Great post…
Being Native I have always thought this society that the white male has created is savagery. The fact that this is a system that sets up everyone to get locked into consumerism and ultimately your dreams will fail because you are so intricately tied into oppression from everything. The disconnection from land, pollution, exploitation, slavery, discrimination, racism, classism, ageism and sexism is savagery.
““Culture gap”? Well, I guess if it isn’t European, it isn’t civilized.”
But they give evidence in the portion you quoted for why they think there was a ‘culture gap’, also specifically mentioning China, a non-European country. Why do you think there was no culture gap? What reasons do you have? You don’t say, you only give their reasoning, which apart from ‘evidence based medicine’ which I believe was actually a later development, looks, on the face of it, sound.
What am I meant to think? Especially given the inaccuracy of your European jab.
p.s. by ‘on the face of it sound’, I don’t mean ‘right’, merely believable. For example she mentions ‘broader laws and institutions’, I’ve no idea whether that’s true, but as I’ve never heard any different, and it seems very possible in a tribal culture, then that seems believable.
Also, I’m not saying this woman isn’t racist, just disputing your characterisation of what you quoted. And I don’t care about Dick whoever either.
I didn’t expand on what I meant, since I thought the quotation would speak for itself.
I don’t deny there are differences between cultures, or “gaps”, as she says. I never said I thought there weren’t cultural differences. Widdowson is using “culture gap” as coded language to mean that European cultures were far more “developed” than Native cultures. She’s using the phrase in a hierarchical manner. In other words, she’s making a judgment call on who was more “sophisticated” than the other. How do we define sophistication? How do we define development? How do we define civilization?
European Canada has a history of placing itself as superior, “developed”, enlightened over Native cultures and civilizations (and they still do it). Aboriginals were functioning quite well with their own rules/laws/institutions. But because it wasn’t written down (writing and codifying was something Europeans were fond of), Native institutions were not seen as valid like European institutions or others like it. Basically, from what I’m reading from this, Wilkinson is saying this “culture gap” has Europeans at the top and Natives at the bottom because they didn’t have systems in place that resembled European systems.
Wilkinson (the person Wente was quoting) was not speaking specifically about China. That was something Dick Pound said, and Wente built upon it briefly in her article.
I love the new layout by the way! ;)
Thanks, Cecelia! The old one felt too cluttered to me.
Yes, I’m sure he would have used exactly the same terminology if North America was populated exclusively with whites 400 years ago. No racism to see here! Move along please!
Great post.
sorry to be shallow here, but:
Dick…Pound?
-really-?
Believe me, I had to struggle to not comment on it.