Conrad Black Talking About Racism? Nonsense.

For those of you who don’t know, Conrad Black is a professional rich old white man, born in Canada to a wealthy family. When he’s not performing literary fellatio on Donald Trump, he writes the odd column for The National Post, a conservative magazine he founded with his father’s money back in 1998.

Mr. Black was once convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison, but after said literary fellatio Mr. Trump (in an extraordinary act of coincidence) pardoned Mr. Black.

Neat!

Back in December, Mr. Black “dropped some jewels” as the kids say, for The Post. It was an article entitled (pun intended): “Conrad Black: Canada racist? Nonsense.”

After a lengthy introduction in which Mr. Black carefully proves he knows words you and I have to look up, he launches into a beefy defence of Canada as a tolerant, not even remotely racist nation, and quickly dismisses the notion of systemic racism as leftist hysteria and something that was born in the United States and unfortunately crossed the border to infect us.

It’s quite the read.

Where does he start? Why, with slavery, of course! And that’s not a surprise, because as every professional rich old white man knows, racism means slavery. And that there isn’t any slavery in Canada!

Ah ha!

And not only that, but he also takes us back a full 170 years and tells us there were no slaves back in Canada then, either!

Double ah ha!

And then he shrewdly points out that slavery was abolished by the British before Canada even existed as an independent nation!

Triple ah ha!

(Second paragraph in and dude is already on a roll. What a pro.)

Of course, it’s not just black slaves that experienced racism, and Mr. Black knows this all too well. After touching briefly on discrimination against Jews in Canada (which apparently only happened in the 1930s at universities) he moves on to the “natives.” (Who “enslaved each other in considerable numbers.”)

Neat!

Now, you can’t talk about First Nations people in Canada without talking about the residential school system (if you don’t know what that is, research it only if you like crying). He defends the intentions behind the school as an attempt to — hang on, I have to steel myself to type this — to, “…take the young from the grinding poverty of their early years and equip them to participate in society.”

That’s an awfully white statement, that.

It’s also a statement that ignores the fact that thousands of children died in the schools, thousands more were horrifically abused, and First Nations people already had a society to begin with and only became impoverished when white folk went about imposing their European colonial version of society on them.

But whatever.

Anyway, after this Mr. Black meanders on, proving that yes, he’s educated and yes, he’s written books with incredibly clichéd titles about historical figures no one cares about. But in all his arguments about Canada not being racist, there’s something Mr. Black cannot mention. It’s a hole in his reasoning that is conspicuous in its absence to the point of incrimination. A key piece of evidence.

And what is that thing?

Why, it’s Jimmy’s shed, of course!

As I’m sure you’re aware, Jimmy’s shed is a small, red and white building on the south side of Joe Batt’s Arm, Newfoundland. Like most outbuildings in Newfoundland, it’s situated hard against the shore, next to a little stream that babbles along until it meets the saltwater.

It’s old: the roof sags in the middle and the door is rotted in places and lets a draft in. But it’s still a sturdy little structure and has years of storage and gathering potential left in it.

It belongs to its namesake, a portly, Caucasian resident of Joe Batt’s Arm. Yes, Jimmy is a father, a husband, and tender of the crude stove in the shed, converted from an oil drum. Jimmy and his friends gather there to imbibe, smoke, and pretend to work on a quad or snowmobile. People stop by, drop in and out, it’s quite the parlour.

Mr. Black has never been there, but I have. And what I’ve heard Jimmy and his friends say make me question Mr. Black’s assertion that Canada isn’t racist.

For a while, this was Jimmy’s favourite story:

He had recently returned from Halifax. He’d been walking through the airport with his son, who was six. They encountered a man Jimmy described as, “this fuckin’ paki” and his son pointed at the man and said;

“Look daddy, he’s dirty!”

Oh, how Jimmy laughed when he told that. It was a belly laugh, a throaty thing that bespoke of phlegm lodged in his esophagus. And his friends laughed, too! Over and over again.

Mr. Black didn’t hear that. He wasn’t there. Someone of his privilege and stature wouldn’t be caught dead in Jimmy’s shed.

Which begs the question, what other places did Mr. Black omit from his racial analysis of Canada?

Well, my house, for starters. He didn’t hear my Dad say, “leave the white man to his ivory tower and the Black man to his fuckin’ jungle,” then giggle hysterically. He didn’t hear my cousin say, “it’s bad enough that she left me, but for a fuckin’ n*gger.” He wasn’t in the church of St. Patrick in the 90s when the first Black priest arrived, so he didn’t notice the absence of people who had attended their whole lives yet suddenly stopped going when the Black priest showed up. He didn’t hear my brother, an executive sent overseas by a major oil company, talk about, “this sea of chinks” in a Hong Kong airport.

If Mr. Black ever did go to Fogo Island, he went here, but I doubt he did.

I lived there. Grew up there. I saw and participated in racism that was ingrained, traditional, and widespread. Some of it was the polite kind, talking about the n*gger at the parish club the night before, and some of it was the vehement kind, talking about choking the priest I mentioned earlier to death.

Is home racist? Well, I haven’t been home in a while, so attitudes may have changed drastically, and I don’t know how to quantify it, but…

…probably, yeah.

The Canada Mr. Black has seen since he was a child is absolutely not racist. But the Canada he’s known as a professional rich old white man isn’t Canada. To quote Boots Riley, Mr. Black has been, “rich ever since his daddy’s dick went squirt.” He hasn’t walked where the poor Black person walked. He hasn’t come from Asia, barely speaking English and thrust into the center of a white Canadian city, and he certainly didn’t grow up like me, frequenting places like Jimmy’s shed and seeing casual, unconscious, and blatant racism day after day after day.

He grew up in money. And in the rarefied, wealthy air he breathes, in the stratosphere of macroeconomics and prepaid education and white history written by white historians, where money affords the time to write flattering books about a president who pardons you for a crime, the non-whites he saw were also wealthy. So of course if he, a professional rich old white man sees a Black person with money just like him then Canada can’t be racist, right? And when he reads white historians talking about their white history and they tell him Canada has never been racist, well surely Canada has never been racist, right?

I moved with the common folk in Newfoundland for 35 years. The working class, the poor, the addicted, the fishermen, the plant workers, the cops.

I know racism is there. I saw it, consistently, everywhere. And the rest of the country? Is it hard to imagine Jimmy’s shed existing everywhere in Canada? And that the people who tell jokes and imbibe and smoke there are the same who work in our court system, drive our police cars, and make our laws?

Who write in our newspapers?

Which brings us back to the question Mr. Black attempted to answer: is Canada a racist nation?

I don’t know. I can only speak for the part of Canada I know intimately, Newfoundland. I know that if home isn’t racist, it’s pretty damn close.

But, beyond that, I’m a white guy. I don’t know what it’s like for a Black person in Halifax or an Asian in Winnipeg or a new immigrant in Calgary. I haven’t experienced it — and I can’t — so I don’t know.

Maybe we should ask the Beothuk if Canada is racist — oh wait.

I guess the only way to determine if Canada — or any nation — is racist, would be to bring non — whites the world over together and have them share their experiences. If only some movement existed where grave acts and micro — aggression alike could be documented by a larger whole. Then perhaps people of colour could come together and communicate their version of history, share their experiences living in a world dominated by white people. Maybe then, the sum of the whole would be greater than its parts and if professional rich old white men like Mr. Black listened, maybe he could be told if Canada is a racist nation.

Like I listened when I was in Jimmy’s shed.

I wonder if such a movement could ever exist?

And if it did, would men like Mr. Black even listen to it?