WOW.
I thought that G.D. Maxwell was going somewhere positive with his April 14 article “The long fight against prejudice.” But it never did. It actually supports racism.
At the beginning, shame and acknowledgment were held in the announcements of the author’s internal struggle. About halfway in, the insidious, ubiquitous monster that is racism reared its ugly head. Racism lives in the grey zone, where there is confusion and pronouncements such as saying that not acting on our prejudice makes us “good enough” and saying “I am not a racist” is worthy of a boast. Really?
And if we do act on our prejudices,”a momentary eruption of what lies in our unconscious does not an “...ist” make.” Acting on our prejudices is exactly what discrimination is, and if it is against others of different colour, it is exactly what a human racist is made of. Racism does not have to be full-time, it can be constructed of “momentary eruptions” of prejudice. Racism is ever-evolving, versatile. It is also about excuses and white people letting ourselves off the hook.
After this part of the article, I thought, OK, now he is going to talk about the most important part of racial prejudice: the harmful impact we—as whites—can cause through racism, on a spectrum ranging from a small daily hurt to the destruction of another human’s mental or physical health. That was not mentioned, nor was the possibility that if we do “slip” and act on our prejudices, we can apologize; when we see or hear a discriminatory act, we can step up, speak up, advocate. We can be an anti- racist, anti-sexist, etc. It is not “good enough” to be silently complicit anymore.
We have decades of scholarly, well- documented, available information to help anyone who is interested in understanding our “cesspool of deeply-ingrained prejudices ... I’ll never drive them out. You’ll never drive yours out. For the most part, I’ll never even understand what all of them are; neither will you.”
We, as white Canadians, have no excuse when it comes to understanding what stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination entail, and we have the option to fight racial prejudice, and in our world today, it is not “good enough” to be a part-time human racist. It is time to be a full-time anti-racist.
By the way, the last paragraph is super confusing and disturbing and off-the-wall racist. Are you actually saying that someone who won’t accept a “little” racism is intolerant, and intolerance is “just another ugly prejudice ... one that makes lynching seem reasonable”? Are you kidding me?
