CONTEXT IS NOT AN EXCUSE

This a long one.  Think of it as a double-double since it’s also my first post in a couple of days.  I haven’t posted until now because I’ve been ruminating on recent events, but also I’ve been seeking a way to express context. 

This whole Trudeau brownface thing is playing out international, and that bothers me because it brings up one very obvious point that thus far the media hasn’t touched on, yet:

Why was a Canadian high school year book that could affect the outcome of an election given to a foreign news agency during an election?

I could understand if this story had broken on CTV, CBC or even the poorest excuse for journalism in Canada, SunMedia, AND THEN it had gone International.  It’s an election and fair is fair, but it didn’t start here and then go international, it was given to TIME MAGAZINE, an internationally known foreign news entity.  So whoever provided this to TIME knew that they weren’t just scoring points against Trudeau with this, they weren’t just airing our dirty laundry on the world stage, they were deliberately seeking to damage Canada’s reputation in the world community.  Who does that?

Well, the obvious answer is Conservatives.  Conservatives have stated to me that they will do anything to keep Trudeau from getting re-elected, and their history on the world stage, where they believe they were “standing up for Canada” but marginalizing us with everyone, is very well documented. 

And based on the polls leading up to this revelation Conservatives are desperate.  

The aggregates put a Conservative government in the 20% margin, so not only were they unlikely to get a majority, Andrew Scheer was unlikely to remain leader of the party.  This would rightly have him in a panic because you have to remember, Andy has had free housing since he became Speaker of the House in 2011.  

A free Mansion, cleaners, a chef, a driver, a car… Andy’s done rather well at the taxpayer’s expense, racking up an estimated $2 Million plus in expenses while living rent free.  That’s not bad for a failed Insurance Agent from Saskatchewan and I don’t necessarily blame him for not wanting to lose that (I don’t respect him either, but I understand personal greed).

And since the school Justin taught at was private (by his own statement he left because they were a “bit too Conservative” for his liking) it also makes sense that a Conservative who feels strong negative emotions about our Prime Minister, coming across this yearbook and seeing that picture, would want to use it against him.  

I mean, if Justin’s socks enrage Conservatives, can you imaging what him smiling in a costume while posing with three pretty women does?  

But regardless of who forms government in this election Canada’s brand is damaged, publicly because of this.

So serious dirty politics are behind this and the parties responsible don’t care how it impacts the nation AND no one in the media seems to care that foreign agents have now influenced our election.

Which takes us back to Justin in brownface, not one, not twice, but let’s say a half dozen times leading up to 2001.  Here’s where the context comes in.

I grew up in Vancouver, went to school in a suburb literally 32 minutes by bus from the Downtown of Vancouver.  If you’re 32 minutes by bus from City Centre in Mississauga chances are you’re still in Mississauga, same with Toronto and I would hazard Montreal, so the idea of getting from a suburb to the absolute heart of the downtown of Canada’s third largest city by transit in about half an hour should tell you how close I was to Vancouver without actually being in it.

We had one black family in my school.  

They were in my Elementary school, then my Junior Secondary school and then my Senior Secondary school.  It’s not that it was an all white community.  There were dozens of Japanese kids, an increasing number of Indian [East Indian not First Nations] and Pakistani kids, but there were more kids from Quebec in my area (and not even many of those) than there were black kids. 

In short, racial tension was not in the daily dialogue around Vancouver when I was growing up.  

The eldest son was a scholar-athlete, the younger daughter was a scholar-athlete, and the middle son who was my age hung around with the tough kids.  He was athletic but a big of a jerk, and being a nerd I was well below him in the pecking order of any class I had with him.  He also lived in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood and was likely just trying to have fun, while I lived in a subsidized development of low-rise apartments with all the other children of recently divorced single mothers.  

That was the closest Richmond, BC had to a “hood” back then, it was where I grew up and it was almost entirely white.

And this was back when Italians weren’t considered ‘white’.  They were immigrants and they were changing the culture and not adapting and if I ever heard anything derogatory about anybody (other than the Quebecois) it was them.  I also heard they made great pizza and had fantastic pasta and could do things with a salad that you'd swoon over.

The point of this is that the culture of Vancouver was parochial.  Naïve.  

The only racial tension anywhere near us that I can remember was when kids from a school in neighbouring Surrey that were predominantly Sikh got into a major street brawl with kids from another Surrey school where some other Indian group and the papers complained that immigrants had no business bringing their ‘old world issues’ to Canada.

It stayed this way until well into the "Hong Kong Invasion" of the 1990's, but even then, that was one established culture reacting to the mass integration of a completely foreign culture.

And while I was in Vancouver I was also in drama.  Drama in Vancouver meant you likely didn’t have the person available to represent the culture you wanted to represent.  A common meme now is “I’m glad I did all my stupid before the internet”, well, I was an early adopter of audio and video back then, so I have a lot of my stupid on Super 8, cassette tape, beta, vhs and yes, even U-Matic – a format of 1 inch tape we goofed around in because the teacher let some of us come in on a PA day and use the old equipment to create our own version of SCTV.

And since the only black kid in school was likely to beat me up rather than appear in my sketch, if we had a black character in it, then we made due as best we could.  And as best we could meant we tried copying someone else’s impression, a stereotype we saw on TV or heard on the radio, because again, back then real black wasn’t on either much and even if it was it was also exaggerated because black in America got paid more if they played along.

Thankfully I’m not saying I did blackface – but I’m not proud to admit that’s only because I don’t like putting on make-up.  I’ve done black voice.  I’ve got recordings of other impressions that I cringe about now.  I cringe now but then I was just a sheltered kid in a little pocket of Pleasantville trying to make myself and my friends laugh.

But all that was before we were ‘woke’.  And that brings me to context.

Somewhere, somehow, at some time, there was a moment where suddenly even the center went, "Wait, whoa, maybe that's insensitive, maybe it's not nice instead of funny and maybe we should stop doing that!"  It took me a couple of days of research to figure when that was but I think I have.
I'm pretty sure it was 9/11.

Prior to 9/11 very few people were even remotely aware of the impact that stereotypes actually had.  And even fewer of those people were in Canada.

Sure we knew that some people’s feelings could be hurt, the people on the far left had been blathering about that since ALL IN THE FAMILY, but we laughed at them because what they were saying was so extreme, and Archie's response was so funny.  Heck, most comedy in the 1970’s and 1980’s was mostly just people saying hurtful things to each other, or mocking what was different about them.  It was the very format of funny and the wall paper of our culture.

It wasn’t until 9/11 when the misguided but good-natured and naïve among us began to realize there was some among us who didn’t get the joke, who didn't realize it was supposed to be harmless fun.  That where were some among who used the jokes as reasons to hate others and justify doing hateful things.  

It wasn’t until 9/11 that it became evident stereotypes weren't just faux pas but harmful. 

That was when people you knew as different, but also knew were sweet, gentle and harmless, were suddenly being told they should go back where they came from, or even assaulted.  That was when you, as an empathic person who wouldn’t want to be treated that way if you had moved somewhere entirely new (like Moncton, New Brunswick) realized that we hadn't moved beyond that sort of inhumanity, that jokes contributed to a culture of intolerance that some people used to justify hating and hurting those who were different.

And that was when the naïve among us became woke. 

It was also likely when Justin realized blackface wasn’t cute or playful or entertaining, but hurtful.  And on being woke, he stopped it.

Thing is, I'd bet if we used a time machine to view anyone's past, context would not be an excuse for any of us.  But maybe we'd be less likely to over-react so much.