I went to a high school with an incredibly diverse student body. While I didn’t really recognize it at the time, I was incredibly lucky: I was surrounded at all times by people from all over the world with a wide variety of experiences and beliefs. It didn’t “force me” to be tolerant or anything …
Category Archive: hate
Apr 03 2013
Mere speech
There is a long predigree in liberal public discourse about the dangers of punishing hate speech. The oft-quoted aphorism goes something like “the antidote to hate speech is more speech”*. The basic idea is that in a marketplace of ideas, bad ideas will be forced out by good ones, and thus the solution to hate …
Mar 20 2013
Some Extremely Effective Grassroots Protest Methods & Exactly Why They Work
Last week, I wrote about an annoyingly pervasive blight of unchecked male privilege at grassroots protests, which is actually angry-making when the protest concerns an attack against women’s rights. But when that attack against women’s rights involves multiple layers of outright racism on top of that (racialized women’s rights being particularly vulnerable already, due …
Mar 13 2013
Philosophy Dudebros & Grassroots Don’t Mix
Hi-dee-ho, there, FreeThoughtBorg. I know a lot of you are eager to-be activists and even more of you have a lot of philosophy under your belt buckles. But you may not know yet that being Philosophy Dudebro in a grassroots action is terribad form. And if you don’t yet know this, you need to know …
Feb 27 2013
New Required Reading: How a Wound Heals
Did you watch the Oscars? I didn’t. I don’t have cable, and to be honest even when I did the Oscars seemed like a complete waste of time. Other people like them though, so my Twitter feed was absolutely SLAMMED with #Oscars tweets, which is how I learned that satirical news-site The Onion decided it …
Feb 26 2013
South of what, exactly?
One of the chief arguments pressed into service in defence of so-called “casual” racism – that is, racism that occurs as part of popular culture without any awareness of racist content on the part of the majority – is that in the absence of intent, acts are not racist. While we here know this to …
Feb 25 2013
Reflections on the Oakville Klan story
I want to follow up this morning’s post with a couple of things that were sitting in the back of my mind as I was reading. Canada’s polite racism, and the ‘tone’ crowd One of the defining features of racism in Canada is that it usually comes disguised in very neutral, inoffensive language. Canada’s myth …
Feb 25 2013
Black History Month: The KKK in Oakville, Ontario
This year for Black History Month I will be examining Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 by Constance Backhouse. Please read the preamble post if you haven’t already. Part 1 of this series is here. Part 2 is here, and a follow-up can be found here. Part 3 can be read here. Read Part 4 here, and its follow-up here. …
Feb 13 2013
Canadian government funds anti-gay group to work in Uganda
If you don’t watch the Rachel Maddow Show, you really should. She is unparalleled in her journalistic excellence, and her self-deprecating wit is matched only by her insightfulness. If you’ve watched The Newsroom and longed for a hard-hitting newsman like Will McAvoy, the good news is that Rachel Maddow has been doing exactly what Sorkin fantasizes about, …
Jan 02 2013
Connected by a common thread
Because of the way in which the conversation has been traditionally framed and understood, we face a serious reluctance to identify all but the most egregious examples of racism in common parlance. To be sure, there are those of us who make a habit of exploring the racial component of every human interaction under the …
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