Tidying up a landfill

Imagine for a moment that your house is built on a garbage dump. Your home constantly reeks of not only the discarded foodstuffs and general refuse of our disposable society, but of the general human neglect that accompanies those places we prefer not to think about. All around you is the funk of abandonment, to the point that it permeates your pores.

In other words, you stink.

Now, imagine someone from outside your home notices your living conditions and clucks disapprovingly. You are not invited to social engagements, and are generally ostracized from polite company. Everywhere you go people turn up their noses and avoid you. Noticing this, you say “I know what the problem is! This garbage dump I live in is untidy!” So you pile all of the rotting compost into an organized heap, rake the dirty diapers into a mound, and arrange the biohazardous waste in an aesthetically-pleasing way that really showcases your savvy as a decorator and landscaper. “There,” you say “that should take care of the problem!”

National Front of France bans skinheads

The new leader of France’s National Front, Marine Le Pen, has barred skinheads from the far right’s annual May Day march in Paris. She confirmed for French radio she was banning “trouble-makers” from the first march to be held since she took over from her father Jean-Marie in January. “They draw cameras like flies and naturally we would protect ourselves from such provocations,” she said.

Marine Le Pen has decided that the real problem with her ultra-right wing racial supremacist party is that there’s just too many skinheads around! They’re making all of the bigots in suits look bad! The depressing part of this story is, of course, that her plan appears to be working. As though people don’t really mind racism so much as they don’t like being associated with the ugly parts of it. Your heart almost goes out to those poor bastards – too racist for the ultra right-wing of the political spectrum, and now too ugly to even be seen.

But then I remember that given the chance they’d kick my teeth in and leave me on the side of the road for dead, so my sympathy doesn’t really extend that far.

Orange Country Republicans censures member

A California Republican group censured one of its own Thursday, saying her words and actions since sending an e-mail last month depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee have been potentially offensive, damaging and insincere. Capping a meeting Thursday, the Orange County Republican Party’s executive committee voted 12-2 Thursday to issue an ethics censure against Marilyn Davenport.

Do you want to know how you can tell that you’ve gone way over the line? Like, not just said something questionable or that could be potentially misconstrued, but have left tact and appropriateness deep in the distant past as you bravely rocket forward strapped to a jetpack fueled by pure racism? When you get disowned by The Republican Party for being too racist. That’s like having Mel Gibson take you aside and warn you that you might have a bit of a drinking problem. It’s like Glenn Beck calling you a conspiracy theorist. It’s like Michael Vick leaving you a note of concern about the way you treat your pets.

The Republican party is not necessarily racist, and I think I’ve pointed out this distinction before. There’s nothing egregious in the Republican platform that says “black people are inferior”, but their constant harping on “personal responsibility” as the primary explanatory factor for differences between the haves and the have-nots certainly dovetails nicely with racism. It’s not an accident that every time someone in the news says something ridiculously racist, it’s always a Republican. Republican political philosophy isn’t overtly racist, but it does ‘provide aid and comfort’ to racists. Conservatives hate hearing this – nobody likes being called racist. Most conservatives wouldn’t consider themselves to be racist, and under particular definitions of the concept they aren’t. However, there seems to be a great reluctance among conservatives to try and parse out why the racists always seem to come from their camp, and so much more rarely from ours.

It is a rhetorically unfortunate fact that both of the people mentioned in this post are female, because the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” takes on a sexist connotation. My intent is merely to point out that no matter how much you try and ‘beautify’ something, it is still as fundamentally ugly as it was before you started (although I don’t personally find pigs that ugly). Trying to gloss over – I intentionally avoid the word ‘whitewash’ – the problem by tidying up the landfill that is your political position isn’t going to fix the underlying issues. If you think racism is a problem, if you think that your spotlight is too often taken up having to apologize for and distance yourself from those who are your allies but who say bigoted things, then you have to really look hard at why they feel at home in your house.

People aren’t shunning you because your dump is unkempt; it’s because you stink.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

We no longer have the Conservative Party of Canada

Once upon a time, Canada had two major political parties – Liberal and Conservative. In the mid-20th century the Conservative party re-branded itself as the Progressive Conservative Party. With its economic stance set somewhat toward the right and its social stance being somewhere in the middle of the road, it catered well to those Canadians who identified as ‘centrists’, and tended its garden on the political right fairly well. However, as the NDP rose to federal prominence, the Liberal party was forced to make a rightward drift. Enjoying national popularity and avoiding divisive issues, the federal Liberal party was able to lay claim to the political center.

Facing obsolescence, the Progressive Conservative dropped the “progressive” label and united with the newly-formed Reform party – a party catering exclusively to those in the right wing – forming the Conservative Party of Canada. Because the far right had been all but ignored by the major political parties, the CPC was able to capitalize on a stumble from the Liberals and form government. Their popular appeal rested firmly on walking a tightrope between “Progressive Conservatives” – those with a conservative economic viewpoint but a centrist social viewpoint, and “Reform Conservatives” – what would be called ‘values voters’ in the United States (as though liberals don’t have values).

The problem with the Conservative party is that their base is fractionated – those who are turned off by hardcore social policy, and those that are growing increasingly tired of being slept on while they try and impose hardcore social policy. Until now, the CPC maintained their solidarity by publicly claiming to be socially centrist, whilst simultaneously whispering promises to the more extreme fringes of their base. Now, it appears that this facade is slipping:

Saskatchewan Conservative candidate says the federal government has decided to cut funding to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, a decision he says was influenced by anti-abortion supporters. The decision on whether to fund the organization has not yet been announced. But Brad Trost, the incumbent candidate for Saskatoon-Humboldt, told the Saskatchewan ProLife Association’s annual convention last Saturday that anti-abortion supporters who signed petitions played a big role. In a recording of his speech, obtained by CBC News, Trost can be heard thanking those who had signed the petitions, saying his office was involved in spearheading the petition campaign along with other members of Parliament.

This is not an economic policy. Cutting funding to an international agency is a tiny drop in a much larger bucket. Canada’s foreign aid spending represents about 0.33% of GDP – falling far short of its pledge of 0.7%. Removing funding for one agency does not meaningfully reduce Canada’s budgetary deficit or national debt. Given the involvement of the anti-abortion lobby in this particular move, there is no conclusion one can reach other than the fact that this is an ideological move against abortion rather than anything that could be called economically conservative.

I won’t bother re-hashing all the arguments against defunding Planned Parenthood, except to say that the only thing this move accomplishes is to make it more difficult for people, particularly women, to get much-needed health care services. Abortions do not decrease when they are made illegal, and Planned Parenthood does not exclusively provide abortions – those kinds of services represent a tiny portion of a wide variety of health care procedures. But of course we are dealing with Conservatives here – facts and reality represent a similarly tiny portion of what informs their policy.

I’m not necessarily opposed to conservativism, although I do think it is a short-sighted and ultimately simplistic world view. Overdone conservatism, like overdone liberalism, can be incredibly destructive. However, a well-struck balance between the two opposite ideologies can move society forward in a sustainable and equitable manner. It is, therefore, with no small measure of sadness, that I am forced to announce the death of the Conservative Party of Canada. While Conservative in name, this party has revealed itself to be nothing other than the northern branch of the Republican Party of the United States.

The ugliest, most small-minded and hateful aspects of humanity are on full and proud display in the Republican party, and the Republican Party North (formerly the CPC) is pinning its future on the idea that Canadians are as stupid and short-sighted as our southern neighbours. Given that the CPC is polling around 40% (which, in Canada’s political system, is a majority – it’s because of the metric system), it appears to be a safe bet.

So if you’re Canadian and you’re not planning on voting in the upcoming election, or if you’re planning on voting Conservative in the upcoming election, please don’t tell me. With things like this happening in my country, I’m not sure I can maintain my trademark personal evaluation from ideological. If you’re so lazy that you can’t be bothered to stand up against the forces of stupid long enough to write an ‘X’ on a piece of paper, or so blinded by sound bytes and easy answers that you think that the Conservatives have anything resembling policies that will have a positive effect on the lives of Canadians, then I’m not sure I can know that about you without taking it personally.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Psychology beats “bootstraps”

Crommunist is back from vacation, at least physically. I will be returning to full blogging strength by next week. I appreciate your patience with my travel hangover.

Here’s a cool thing:

You don’t have to look far for instances of people lying to themselves. Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.

Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies.

Psychology is a very interesting field. If I wasn’t chasing the get-rich-quick world of health services research, I would have probably gone into psychology. One of the basic axioms of psychology, particularly social psychology, is that self-report and self-analysis is a particularly terrible method of gaining insight into human behaviour. People cannot be relied upon to accurately gauge their motivations for engaging in a given activity – not because we are liars, but because we genuinely don’t know.

Our consciousness exists in a constant state of being in the present, but making evaluations of the past and attempting to predict the future. As a result, we search for explanations for things that we’ve done, and use those to chart what we’d do in the future. However, as careful study has indicated, the circumstances under which we find ourselves is far and away a more reliable predictor of how we react to given stimuli than is our own self-assessment. This isn’t merely a liberal culture of victimhood, or some kind of partisan way of blaming the rich for the problems of the poor – it is the logical interpretation of the best available evidence that we have.

Part of the seeming magic of this reality of human consciousness is the fact that when we cheat, we are instantaneously able to explain it away as due to our own skill. Not only can we explain it away, but we instantly believe it too. A more general way of referring to this phenomenon is internal and external attribution – if something good happens it is because of something we did; conversely, bad things that happen are due to misfortune, or a crummy roll of the dice. When seen in others, this kind of attitude is rank hypocrisy. When seen in ourselves, it is due to everyone else misunderstanding us. This is, of course, entirely normal – everyone would like to believe the best about themselves, and our minds will do what they can to preserve that belief.

The researchers in this study explored a specific type of self-deception – the phenomenon of cheating. They were able to show that even when there was monetary incentive to be honest about one’s performance and cheating, people preferred to believe their own lies than to be honest self-assessors. However, the final result tickled me in ways that I can only describe as indecent:

This final result could not be more important. Cheaters convince themselves that they succeed because of their own skill, and if other people agree, their capacity for conning themselves increases.

There is a pervasive lie in our political discourse that people who enjoy monetary and societal privilege do so because of their own hard work and superior virtue. This type of thinking is typified by the expression “pulled up by her/his bootstraps” – that rich people applied themselves and worked hard to get where they are. The implication is that anyone who isn’t rich, or who has the galling indecency to be poor, is where they are because of their own laziness and nothing more. It does not seem to me to be far-fetched at all that these people are operating under the same misapprehension that plagued the study’s participants – they succeed by means that are not necessarily due to their own hard work, and then back-fill an explanation that casts themselves in the best possible light.

Please do not interpret this as me suggesting that everyone who is rich got their by illegitimate means. If we ignore for a moment anyone who was born into wealth, there are a number of people who worked their asses off to achieve financial success – my own father is a mild example of that (although he is not rich by any reasonable measure). However, there are a number of others who did step on others, or use less-than-admirable means to accumulate their wealth. However, they are likely to provide the same “up by my bootstraps” narrative that people who genuinely did build their own wealth would, and they’ll believe it too! When surrounded by others who believe the same lie, it becomes a self-sustaining ‘truth’ that only occasionally resembles reality.

The problem with this form of thinking is that it does motivate not only attitudes but our behaviours as well. It becomes trivial to demonize poor people as leeches living off the state, and cut funding for social assistance programs as a result. People who live off social assistance programs often believe this lie too, considering themselves (in the words of John Steinbeck) to be “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who will be rich soon because of their furious bootstrap tugging. While it is an attractive lie, it is still a lie that underlies most conservative philosophy – which isn’t to say that liberals aren’t susceptible to the same cognitive problems; we just behave in a way that is more consistent with reality, so it doesn’t show as much.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

The hypocrisy of the religious right

Crommunist is back from vacation, but still slowly putting his life back together. I will be posting something every day, but don’t expect it to be up to my usual standard until next week.

So obviously this title will raise exactly zero eyebrows among those who have read my previous discussions of religion. I find so many aspects of religious expression hypocritical (accusing atheists of arrogance whilst insisting that the universe is created specifically for them, accusing others of immorality whilst maintaining a hideous behavioural track record), there is one form of hypocrisy that I find unique among the political right wing:

A florist in Riverview, N.B., is refusing to provide wedding flowers to a same-sex couple, according to the event’s planner. After agreeing to provide the flowers for a wedding, Kim Evans of Petals and Promises Wedding Flowers sent an email last month to the couple, saying she didn’t know it was a same-sex wedding and would have no part of the ceremony. “I am choosing to decline your business. As a born-again Christian, I must respect my conscience before God and have no part in this matter,” the email said.

The religious right has two gods: their own perverted vision of Yahweh as some kind of doting father cum eternally judgmental asshole, and free market capitalism. If one takes even a fleeting glance at the agenda of the Republican party of the United States (and anyone who thinks that Canadian Conservatives are functionally different from Republicans, or that the evangelical wing of the Christian faith is anything other than CPC boosters needs to pull her/his head firmly from her/his asshole and take a look around), one cannot help but be inundated by people who’ve never cracked Friedmann in their lives talking about “common sense economics” and the virtues of small government.

It is certainly defensible to hold these two positions in concert, although it should be fairly obvious that neither one is contingent upon the other. It does not follow, for example, that limited government is necessary because Yahweh deems it so. Conversely, being a laissez faire capitalist who believes in allowing the chips to fall as they may does not lead one down the path to accepting the supremacy of Jesus Christ. The conflation of the two non-overlapping positions is a carefully constructed marriage, match-made by the Republican party in an attempt to get a single-issue voting bloc.

Laissez-faire capitalism dictates that someone should attempt to make as much money from a potential customer as possible, provided that doing so does not break the law (well, strictly speaking it doesn’t, but I’ve never encountered a libertarian or conservative who believes that people should flout the law to make money). Considering that gay marriage is legal in Canada, Ms. Evans is behaving in a decidedly anti-capitalist way by refusing to provide a service to a law-abiding person.

Now I have no proof that Ms. Evans is a conservative. My suspicion in this matter stems from the fact that I have yet to meet any evangelical who does not also immediately grant the superiority of unregulated free markets. If she is not a conservative, she should be strongly condemned by conservatives for being anti-capitalist. However, the comments section overfloweth with supportive comments from her CPC brethren.

Dollars to donuts this is going to soon end up on a Christian website as a “prime example” of religious persecution against Christians.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Movie Friday: Tim Wise and the illusion of “post-racial”

I am depressed.

I am depressed for two reasons. First, I am depressed that no matter how hard I work, I will likely never get as good at talking about issues of race and racism, history and the importance of advocacy as Tim Wise is:

The second reason I am depressed is that it seems like the forces of reason are losing the fight to the forces of revisionist history, post-hoc rationalization and short-sighted self-interest. I realize this post is much longer than what I usually post for Movie Friday (and has fewer jokes), but if you’ve found any of my posts on “the good old days” or the importance of recognizing black history, or really anything that I’ve said about race to be interesting (and the numbers suggest that at least some of you do), then you’ll absolutely love this clip.

Any of you who have watched any black beat poetry or other forms of spoken word, you’ll recognize that Tim uses a lot of their cadence and punctuated rhythm to get his points across. It’s not just a lecture – it’s verbal poetry. Amazing stuff, and I really really hope you watch it.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Conservative Party of Canada is against science

There is a surefire way to ensure tyranny – undermine the education of the populace. When the people don’t have the tools required to determine truth from lies or to obtain their information from a variety of sources, they become dependent on the state to tell them “the Truth™”. We can see this currently happening in the Arab world, where state television in Libya is still being used to broadcast misinformation that is (perhaps fatally) undermining the cause of the pro-democracy rebellion.

One way to ensure a religious tyranny is to ensure that the populace doesn’t have access to adequate scientific information. Science is inherently hostile to religion, since the two are very different methods at arriving at answers. The scientific method involves testing repeated observations and inferring rules and laws from trends within those observations. The religious method involves arriving at a conclusion and then finding observations that support the a priori position. The problem with the latter method is that it is trivially easy to arrive at false conclusions and then justify them afterward. By ensuring that the public doesn’t have access to scientific knowledge, you can erode the cause of science and replace it with whatever system you like.

Enter the Conservative Party of Canada:

The public has lost free online access to more than a dozen Canadian science journals as a result of the privatization of the National Research Council’s government-owned publishing arm. Scientists, businesses, consultants, political aides and other people who want to read about new scientific discoveries in the 17 journals published by National Research Council Research Press now either have to pay $10 per article or get access through an institution that has an annual subscription.

Now this on its own is an incredibly minor development. The vast majority of people who access the scientific literature are scientists working at institutions that can afford to buy subscriptions. Furthermore, the lay public get most of their scientific information from people who interpret the studies that are now behind a paywall, so most people won’t notice the difference. This is not the straw that breaks the camel’s back by any stretch of the imagination.

However, erosion doesn’t work in giant leaps – it occurs gradually over time. One of the strengths of science is the ability of anyone who is curious to go back and investigate the source material. Someone tells you that a drug works to treat diabetes, you can go to the paper and check it for yourself. Someone tells you that homeopathy cures warts, you can go check it out for yourself. Someone tells you that the universe was created in the Big Bang, you can go read the papers. This process encourages skepticism and critical thinking, while increasing the trust that the public has in the scientific community (by increasing transparency).

By placing additional barriers between lay Canadians and the products of Canadian scientific researchers, the privatization of the National Research Council is inherently anti-transparent and anti-science. It discourages scientific scrutiny and question-asking, which are two things that the CPC really doesn’t like in the first place. If Harper can’t get a majority right now, at least he can do as much damage as possible with the limited powers he wields.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Bonus movie: Science smackdown!

This was too good to let go

Sadly, the people for whom this kind of speech is most needed are too stupid to understand all the big words that Rep. Markey used:

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Science: making Conservatives wrong since the 1500s.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Movie Friday: The American religion

Hate is not a word I like to throw around lightly. Talking about ‘hatred’ for a group of people in the sense of “hate speech” or “hate crimes” somewhat diffuses individual responsibility, and is a reasonable descriptor; however, I am loath to say that a person is deserving of hate. I am irritated by creationists. I disagree with and oppose the beliefs of conservatives. I dislike certain individuals, sometimes strongly, but I would rarely go so far as to say that I hate anyone.

I hate the people in this video:

It’s hard not to see these people as a pack of braying dogs, mouth foaming as they corner innocent prey. These are people who have been led so blindly astray by the malicious lie of “American exceptionalism” and a conservative revisionist history (one in where the United States is a Christian, rather than a secular country), that they feel justified in persecuting people based on their personal beliefs. The chant of “go back home” simply reveals their deep-seated racism, which has been allowed to slip its leash because of rampant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that equates Islam with terrorism.

I am sure that those holding the reins of the Tea Party (or perhaps the leashes is a more apt metaphor in this case) will tut-tut and say what a shame it is that certain individuals do hateful things, but that people are just scared and you have to understand their fear. The politicians you hear speaking in this video are the authors of that fear, using it to whip up unthinking support for a political agenda that will leave most of their followers worse off than they are now. It’s straight out of Orwell – create a stereotyped enemy, sow seeds of dissent and hatred against that enemy, and then quietly screw the masses while they are distracted in their hatred.

This is the ugliest side of mankind, and it will persist as long as those at the top can continue to galvanize those on the bottom in hatred against “the other”.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Black history in Canada moment: Ontario

This year for Black History Month, I have decided to do a bit of research into black history in my home and native land, Canada. Since there are 4 Mondays in February, I am going to focus on 4 different regions of the country. Last week I looked at black history in the prairies. This week, I am focusing on the Ontario, Canada’s oldest and most populous province. This summary will intentionally exclude Toronto – black history in Toronto is so long and complex that any attempt to summarize it in ~1000 words would be doing it a grave disservice.

I was born in British Columbia, living in the interior until I was ten years old. My family moved to the Toronto area in 1994 so that my father could complete his graduate degree in social work at the University of Toronto. I lived in various parts of southern and eastern Ontario over 15 years, including two years in Kingston, Ontario (which was Canada’s first capital and where first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald resided) while I completed my own graduate degree. While I call British Columbia home, I am just as entitled to consider myself a native son of Ontario, having spent my formative years there.

Black history also has long and deep roots in the province of Ontario. After the United States passed the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 which, among other things, compelled people to return runaway slaves to their owners, the northern United States were no longer a safe haven where a slave could find her/his own life. As a result, emigration (flight, really) of black Slaves into Canada began in earnest. Because of where the borders were located, their proximity to major American urban centres, and the difficulty of moving people across the prairies in the United States, Ontario became a prime location to smuggle in freed slaves. As with most displaced peoples, blacks settled and tried to build lives for themselves as soon as they had the opportunity, which means that black settlement in Ontario dates back hundreds of years – prior, in fact, to much of any group settling in the prairies.

One of the earliest such settlements was the farming community of Buxton. Buxton is famous among buffs of the history of slavery, as it was considered the “last stop” on the Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves from the United States to Canada. The land was purchased and made available to the fugitives by Reverend William King – a fact that should not be overlooked when considering the role of Christians and white abolitionists in the movement to aid slaves. Despite the availability of land and a means of cultivating it, things were obviously not all roses and smiles for freed men in the new “promised land”, as this quote from A NorthSide View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by themselves, with an account of the history and condition of the colored population of Upper Canada will attest:

Among some people here, there is as much prejudice as in the States, but they cannot carry it out as they do in the States: the law makes the difference. I am acquainted with many of the colored families here, and they are doing well. We have good schools here.

Once again, this fact cannot be overlooked by those who would claim that Canada was a racism-free land of milk and honey, or those who would claim that passing laws against discrimination or other prejudice are ineffectual.

I’ve been to Buxton, Ontario. There are in fact several Buxtons with similar histories – one in Nova Scotia, and another in Grenada in the West Indies. The Buxton I went to has a graveyard, which is perhaps the oldest and best-kept black historical site in Canada. There are Cromwells buried in the cemetery at Buxton, Ontario, but these are likely no relation to me – our name is a bastardization of a Dutch surname. Near Buxton is the small town of Chatham, which has its own distinct historical significance. Perhaps chief among its contributions is the fact that it was used as the staging ground for the famous raid on Harper’s Ferry by the American abolitionist John Brown.

In my pokings around doing research for this article, I was struck with a bit of history I had never even heard hinted at before. Reading books by Lawrence Hill (a great Canadian author who you should definitely look into if you get a chance), I learned that Oakville, Ontario has a long black history. This is a particularly outrageous suggestion, given the nearly monochromatic makeup of Oakville currently. I was looking for some information to corroborate this, when I discovered that the Niagara Movement has a Canadian origin.

The Niagara Movement was a political group devoted to antisegregation and the improvement of the plight of black people in the United States, founded by black intellectuals under the supervisory auspices of W.E.B. Du Bois – himself a prominent and influential black intellectual whose life history is an amazing story that is chronicled in the book Up From Slavery (n.b. – Up From Slavery was written by Booker T. Washington, not Du Bois. Du Bois has written several autobiographies, the most recent of which was published in 1968, and which I apparently need to read post-haste). The Niagara Movement laid down the foundation of what would become the prevailing attitude towards the improvement of black people’s lives, and eventually lead to the foundation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which is, of course, still in existence. The inaugural meeting took place in Fort Erie, Ontario near Niagara Falls. Interestingly, the advancement of women was part of the foundation of this movement, working in concert with and anticipating the suffrage movement that was to define the next few decades.

It was at their meeting in Fort Erie that they (mostly Du Bois) built the basis of their foundational document that called for, among many other things, equal and desegregated schools, the protection of trade unions, anti-discrimination statues, and a number of other things that would make any decent conservative wake up in a cold sweat. They also criticized the institution of the Christian churches, particularly their complicity in racial prejudice. Once again, these facts speak against the attempt to re-brand the abolition movement as being in line with conservativism or Christianity, as is often attempted.

As I stated in the header, there is far more to black history in Ontario than I can comfortably address here, and more conscientious scholars than your humble narrator have done much more thorough jobs of chronicling it. The “take home message” of this piece (indeed, all of these pieces) is that black history is closely tied to Canadian history. The prosperity and stability of the territory of Upper Canada (the early name for Ontario) owes a good portion of its existence to the contributions made by black people – freed slaves and their descendants alike. To fail to recognize this is to rewrite history and neglect an important and interesting narrative.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Movie Friday: Stewart Lee – Political Correctness

A friend put me on to a new standup comedian:

There is a general misunderstanding that pervades the society we live in, and it comes from a grating lack of historical awareness. I’ve made somewhat oblique reference to it before, but the problem arises when we look at conditions today and assume that they were ever thus. For example, the words “political correctness” have taken on an almost pejorative connotation, implying an over-sensitive “culture of victims” where every word you say must be scrutinized and agonized over. What this view necessarily neglects is the reasons why those practices came to be in the first place. Whatever your feelings on welfare are, for example, there was once a time when there was no state welfare and poverty was a death sentence. Abolishing welfare isn’t an answer to anything, and suggesting otherwise is being criminally ignorant of history.

Stewart Lee points this out in a very dry way:

“…if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.”

Racism, in a de facto sense, is inherent in conservative ideology and cannot simply be whitewashed over. When we forget our history and the struggles that it took for us to get here (however your feelings might be of “here”), we expose ourselves to the possibility of looking at the world today and crying “injustice” over issues where the alternative is far worse.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!