Too Close for Comfort

In the wake of the racial violence in the mid-2010s across the United States, several journalists, pointing to historic and contemporary discrimination against minorities in Canada, cautioned Canadians against being “smug about race.” Highlighting the plight of indigenous peoples, one contributor to the country's leading newsmagazine went even further, declaring, “Canada's race problem? It's even worse than America's.” Canadians have long been both keen observers of racial discrimination in the United States and prone to drawing self-congratulatory comparisons. To wit, the Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young's songs “Southern Man” (1970) and “Alabama” (1972) were sharply critical of southern bigotry, while in “American Woman” (1970), The Guess Who told their eponymous American target: “I don't need your ghetto scenes.” As one member of the band recalled of the song's genesis, “We'd never seen ghettoes in Winnipeg before and suddenly we're in Savannah, Georgia, witnessing real poverty.” Yet 1960s Canada did have its own “ghetto scenes,” though many Canadians seemed willfully ignorant of this fact. As the Métis activist Howard Adams complained in 1969, white Canadians were “self-righteous, arrogant, and free from any social conscience with regard to racism.” Two years later, J. Ashton Brathwaite, a Barbadian living in Canada, noted: “Contrary to widespread belief, Canadian society is polluted with the virus of racism—subtle racism.” Canada, he added, should stand for “Cold Anti Niggers And Definitely American.”1

Civil rights · Conscience · Indigenous · Political science · Poverty · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · Canadian Identity and History · Canadian Policy and Governance · Gender Studies · History · Law