‘I have native friends but this is going too far.’ – Alberton, Ontario resident

Native group-home proposal sparks racial tension in Ontario town (The Globe and Mail):

All Lori Flinders wanted was to build a group home for displaced native youth in the town of Alberton, Ont. What she encountered was a wave of local resistance that, to her, provided a lesson in reflexive racism.

[…]

The Alberton story takes place at a time when Canada is coming to grips with centuries of legislated bigotry through the federal residential-schools apology and the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And it suggests, on the local level at least, that the stain of racial conflict has not gone away.

Since September, 2008, Weechi-it-te-win Family Services had been exploring the property in Alberton, a paper-mill town of about 1,000 people. It seemed an ideal setting for a children’s group home: 166 acres of nature trails, horse stables, an indoor arena and much of the flora used in local aboriginal medicine.

[…]

But then a flyer turned up in local mailboxes warning residents if they did not attend a June 24, 2009 meeting, “You will have a NON-SECURE NATIVE DETENTION CENTRE/GROUP HOME IN YOUR COMMUNITY.” The flyer concluded, “PLEASE! HELP KEEP YOUR COMMUNITY SAFE.”

Aside from the flyer’s factual distortion – none of the children would be involved with the courts – the racial undertones worried at least one resident.

Dorothy Friesen, who moved to Alberton to retire from a career of charity work and activism in the Philippines and Chicago, thought it was the work of “a few whackos” and that “we’d go to this meeting and outnumber them.” When she arrived at the Alberton Municipal Office that night, however, she found more than 150 people had turned out to oppose the centre.

Toronto Fail (Link Round-up): Shame, Not Pride, Toronto.

Here is a link round-up of some bad news in Toronto.

• An Everyday Epic Battle: Pride Toronto, Blackness Yes, Israeli Apartheid and Sticking Together by Thea Lim (June 23, 2010):
  

  Long story short: Pride Toronto, which is an internationally famous week-long celebration of queer and trans pride, has made conscious or unconscious attempts to curtail the wholehearted participation of queer and trans folks of colour and their allies in Pride. They have attempted to relocate and shrink black-identified spaces, and they [had] banned [Queers Against Israeli Apartheid] from participation in Pride 2010.

• Photos and Videos of Police Brutality June 26 and 27 2010 by Maysie (June 27, 2010):

  (In this video, G20 protesters finish singing the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada”, and immediately after, a line of riot police charge at them.)

• The 20th anniversary of Oka and the continuation of unearthing human rights at the G8/G20 by Jessica Yee (June 29, 2010):
  

  Video after video, photo after photo, story after story came pouring in this weekend telling us about another friend or another relative who had been unlawfully arrested, beaten, spit on, psychologically, physically, and emotionally abused and relentlessly harassed by the police in Toronto.

Women of colour earn 53 cents for every white man’s dollar.

Race, gender remain workplace barriers in Ontario, Census data reveal – Employment equity programs needed to level workplace playing field for visible minorities (Toronto Star):

A new report based on 2005 Census data being released [June 3, 2010], shows that visible minorities in Ontario are far more likely to live in poverty, have trouble finding a job and earn less in the workplace.

Sexism and racial discrimination “pack a double wallop,” for visible minority women who earned 53.4 cents for every dollar a white man earned, said economist Sheila Block who wrote the report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“The Census data reveals that in 2005, at the height of pre-recession economic prosperity, women from racialized backgrounds working in Ontario faced real barriers to success,” she said. “They earned about half as much as non-racialized men.

Meta-Restructure: Top Five Most “Interesting” Posts + Delurking

Here are the top five most “interesting” posts on this blog for the past year or so, determined by some crude statistical ranking.

1. Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only. (July 14, 2009)
2. People of colour are not a story of suffering . . . Or resistance. (October 29, 2009)
3. Feynman called a woman “worse than a whore” for not exchanging sex for sandwiches. (August 7, 2009)
4. Male IT geeks think they are “low status” males. (February 1, 2010)
5. White, male startup companies get funding for being white and male. (February 10, 2010)

White culture rejects the agency of Asian women.

White culture humanizes white women more than Asian women. Racist stereotypes about the alleged submissiveness of Asian women convince even white women that Asian women lack agency. While most white women recognize the paternalism of a government deciding that women are incapable of exercising our personal choices responsibly, most white women think of Asian women in this way. According to most white women, Asian women need to be rescued from our own follies through the interventions of benevolent white folk.

White history teaches white people that white culture is the pinnacle of civilization. Because of this, most white people assume that social justice can only originate from white people, and that it must be taught by white people to brown people in order to achieve worldwide equality. Even white liberals have this colonial mentality and attempt to “civilize” brown people in other countries or at home. Unconscious white supremacist beliefs are so entrenched that most white feminists simply assume that gender equality must have originated from white imagination, when the history of North American feminism can be traced to Iroquois culture. The idea that white culture is not the most socially advanced is unimaginable to the vast majority of white people.