You are not even allowed to observe: “benign racism”

North American racial totalitarianism is reaching new levels of absurdity. According to this “news” item in the CBC Ottawa site, three policemen are under investigation about a private conversation they had two years ago. Here is the CBC story.

“The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) is conducting an investigation after a video circulating online this week shows uniformed members of its force having a racist conversation.

“The video is a partial recording from a security camera at a person’s home and was originally posted on social media by a friend of the person involved.

“On Thursday, that person confirmed the video was recorded in his garage in the summer of 2019. He said the officers were there to serve a warrant after he had been pulled over for driving without a licence a few days earlier. He asked CBC not to identify him because he fears for his safety and that of his family.

“The video shows three police officers standing in a garage, seemingly unaware that their conversation was being recorded.

“One officer said, “Our days are done. White man’s day is done.”

“Another officer replies, “you’re probably right.”

“A third said, “you’re onto something.”

“The population of North America, we’re the minority I think even at this point,” one officer goes on to say.

“You go to Toronto and every couple you see walking by is a mixed couple. You don’t see white and white people together. It’s white [and] Asian, white [and] East Indian,” he said.

“I told my son he can find a Chinese, Asian girlfriend,” he continued. “If he wants to stay in the mix, get your foot in the door.”

The reaction of the ottawa Police Service was:

Regardless of the intent, the comments expressed in the video have negatively impacted community members and service members. The comments are offensive and they have further eroded public trust as well as internal morale.” 

The police statement goes on to say “such statements are not consistent with the values of the Ottawa Police Service and they have no place in the policing profession.”

In order to turn this banal if somewhat gloomy exchange into a “news” story, the obligatory authority figure is called in to  describe this as “racist”.

“Reacting to the video, Xiaobei Chen, a sociology professor at Carleton University, said: “I think these are very troubling racist ideas that we are seeing behind the conversation.”

“The conversation in the video, Chen said, is a prime example of the “enduring notion of white ownership of this nation,” despite North America first belonging to Indigenous people and being “built on the back of free labour, of Blacks under cruel conditions, under slavery and also exploitation of Chinese labour.”

What’s especially problematic about this [conversation] is it’s benign. What it tells us is that these conversations are probably happening a lot of times, but we just don’t see it,” Chen said.

“Chen said she hopes OPS uses this video as a stepping stone to address white “nationalistic notions and racism and colonialism within the police force.”

What’s especially problematic about this conversation is it’s benign, says the Chinese Canadian sociologist. So according to the CBC it is a racist conversation, and according to the Chinese sociologist it is benign – and that’s what makes it “especially problematic”.

Thus it is possible to be racist, colonial and benign in almost the same breath. You are not even allowed to observe the fact that white people, as such, are being shoved out of power and told their feelings of belonging to the former Canada are both racist and colonialist.

Many thoughts come to mind.

The first is a photo taken [not shown here], I think in 1916 at the rebuilding of the Canadian Parliament after the fire that year, but it could have been taken in 1872 after the orginal building was completed. It is about four feet wide, and shows the entire work crew, numbering over a thousand men, with the architetcts and foremen seated in the centre, in Victorian hierarchy. They are lined up in many rows between the two central towers of Centre Block. What strikes you immediately when you see it is that not a single person among them is black or Chinese. Some faces look French Canadian or a tiny few may be Amerindian, but the overwhelming majority of workers are white  people of British origin. No women. No other ethnic or racial minorities. This was a white Dominion. The photo is found downstairs at Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank Street, just outside the washroom. To see this photo is to see how much change has happened in a hundred years to this country. [Google Images does not have it, because I suspect it shows too many white people gathered together for a historic triumph].

Original Canadian Parliament Building, Centre Block before the 1916 Fire

 

The second thought that comes to mind is that racial or national consciousness of any kind, even benign, is now considered “problematic”. As John Derbyshire has observed, you are not allowed even to observe.

While it is obvious that race and racism -but not actual racial differences – are obsessions of the political Left, it is also clear that the term racsim, rather than connoting a grievous moral fault, has morphed into racial consciousness or awareness of any kind. It is useful to our thought controllers to conflate racism with simple awareness of race. We must be exquisitely conscious of race, but not conscious of what race might actually mean.

The state of doublethink has arrived: we are simultaneously to be hyper-aware of race, but white people are not allowed to converse about it among themselves on any terms, even benign.