The point of eradicating racism is to allow everybody to exist in the same blessed and joyful state of obliviousness and innocence towards racism white people get.

Fellow white people: remember growing up, when race basically never entered our consciousness, and all we did and talked/thought about was fun stuff we liked? That! That’s what non-white people want, and to be safe, and to feel safe.  

If you are tired of hearing about racism, I assure you, so are non-white people!

Let’s put away raging political discourse about The Left or The Right or “anti-racism”: people have one life to live on this planet and it should be as full and as free as they’d like it to be. This isn’t partisan or particularly left or right wing, it’s just basic normal goodness. It’s the Star Trek view of things.

I suspect if you ask most people “Should everyone be free?” they’d say, “of course!” On the surface, everyone claims to value universal freedom. Right? Yet, racism persists. So where exactly do people’s views differ? Where is the fork in the road?

If you believe in standard Canadian mythology—that people here are unusually “nice,” that we live in an advanced country, and that racism is a blight indeed but mostly a historical one—you may be skeptical of reports of systemic racism.

The thinking is pretty straightforward: How can people say Canada is so bad when Canada is so good?

Where we mostly differ, then, is what we think is going on at a street-level, and what constitutes racism. It’s a difference in perception, not necessarily values.

Years ago, with Obama in office and anti-racism becoming mainstream in pockets of culture, it was easier for White Canada to deny racism ever existed, let alone persisted. trump and Black Lives Matter has made that impossible for even the most sheltered person imaginable.

You’d have to be living under a very remote rock to still believe there is no racism. But how much racism is there? How bad is it? Where is it? What effect does racism have on people’s lives?

What sources are you going to rely on to find out? Whose voice do you trust and why? When/if you read about racism/anti-racism, are you consciously/subconsciously invested in exonerating White Canada? Are you reading Black writers only out of due diligence because all formally educated people know to read both sides, but in practice, you’re reading with a closed-mind because secretly you don’t want to believe White Canada is in the wrong?

Nobody born wealthy and white is born Woke, and it’s very easy to understand how white people cling to old and untrue explanations of the world that, let’s be honest, reflect better on us.

If you are a white person making money in a country that everyone surrounding you, movies/TV, and textbooks all tell you is a model to the world, you are likely to be very eager to fully believe them! Not only do you get to live a life of wealth, you get to be respected by society and feel like the respect is merited! You get to have it all! You get to believe, essentially, “Canada is prosperous because it is just and good, and I am prosperous because I am just and good.” What does this person have to gain from considering what Canada is getting wrong, or who it is leaving behind? Even acknowledging the question may undermine not just their sense of accomplishment, but their world-view and sense of self.

If you aren’t making money here but subscribe to the Canadian myth, you get to have an entire political party dedicated to putting “Canada First,” claiming you’re getting left behind because decadent vacuous feel-good politicians are putting sissy internationalist values ahead of good ol’ Canadian boys!

Either way, you are at the unquestioned centre of the mythology. White Canadians are embraced by society from birth, which is great! But it should be done for everybody. It is precisely the thing that must be done for everybody.

You can come at this topic from different angles, and personally, mine is this: there is no god and race is a made-up concept we have horrifically imagined into existence to justify slavery/economic exploitation. Humans are free to make this world a civilized place by ending organized barbarism of paying police billions to jail and surveil historically persecuted people instead of genuinely supporting them with education and housing. This is possible, but the biggest obstacle is: we don’t want to. No communities/nationalities/religions are genetically or socially predisposed towards crime! White supremacy robs people of their childhood innocence—the worst heist imaginable.

Sometimes it may understandably seem like white anti-racists are scolding fellow white people on Wednesday for not knowing/accepting what we just learned about on Tuesday. Or maybe it seems like white anti-racists are saying: look at my lofty and understanding soul!

I’ll just say this: I don’t want to be talking about race, and I’m sure Black people don’t want to either! I’d LOVE to just talk about Dr John and Jerry and Alice Coltrane and the rest of my loves! I’m sure Black people also have a huge amount of much better things to do! Nobody would be in the streets every night directly facing off against a militarized army of violent racists who kill Black people and viciously attack innocent protesters unless things were really fucked up and needed to change.

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Many conservatives and even so-called liberal/centrists believe gender pronouns on campus constitute government tyranny or a threat to Free Speech, but they shrug or even applaud when public servants (ie police) kill innocent unarmed civilians/citizens–this flagrant double standard is a good example of how what is framed as an intellectual argument about society, and what embarrassingly passes for Political Discourse, is really just powerful people believing “if I am irritated, it is a threat to all civilization; if you are attacked or killed by the state, meh/lol, I’m sure they had reason.”

Racism often boils down to which skin colour is reflexively trusted, and which is doubted. Power maintains power through violence, then uses the power to tell nice stories about how it got the power. Privileged people seldom have their illusions punctured because society has historically run on those illusions.

In a world where Black people may tragically have their innocence robbed early on, being able to carry childhood innocence into late adulthood is a real blessing and a privilege, even if it encourages attitudes like the above which are untrue and repugnant!

Years from now, you’ll be humiliated you ever paid attention to people paid to be so embarrassingly out of touch.

Racists sometimes make the following defence: “a person can’t be racist unless they intended on being racist.” While there is a distinction between a proud racist and a person who unwittingly holds one or several racist views, the statement is not remotely true! Try substituting the word “stupid” for “racist” in the sentence above, and see how dumb it sounds! Really, do it: “A person can’t be stupid unless they intend on being stupid.” Makes no sense, right?

According to this defence’s underlying logic, if a person doesn’t intend on driving badly, but they keep crashing their car into trees, they cannot be called a bad driver!

A racist society is inhuman and frankly barbaric for everyone. It won’t get fixed until a critical mass of people with a lot of power decide they’re genuinely willing to trust and listen to people with less power. This isn’t about capitulating to Leftist internet activists or the SJWs or anything like that–everyone should be interested in understanding what is actually happening in the world, and ensuring we live up to the stated values we claim to believe in. What better way to rehabilitate our lofty but largely BS nationalist myths than by infusing them with truth by actually applying them to everyone in the country?