Cherry,

Thanks for the erudite reply and of course teaching me about the word Usonian: love Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and did not know that he coined the term.

As to Upper Canada…I was trying to be historically correct. At the time of the Underground Railway the Canadas were colonies. Many of the white people who helped set up the Underground Railway on both sides of the border were religiously motivated abolitionists. And as England had outlawed slavery in 1833, it was natural that the Canadas be a haven for escaped slaves.

But back to the central core of our discussion.

I took umbrage to the article because it had used a broad sweep of a brush to brandish all white people as being inherently racist.

But you are right in that I needed to acknowledge first and foremost her trauma and better empathize with what she suffered under the legacy of racism.

I get the argument that if one is not trying to change the class system that favours white people, one is enabling it.

But I don’t understand is a politically correct methodology which is counter-intuitive to ending it.

It is based on the racist overt generalization that white people have nothing to offer (and if they do they are patronizingly arrogant) and that white people must bear the stain or guilt of previous white cultures or governments.

That’s called shaming of almost biblical proportions.

You know, sorry for the patriarchal allusion…’the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the heads of the sons for four generations’.

And that’s why I use the term counter intuitive.

Shame doesn’t work.

Why alienate any group of people, some of them potentially worthy allies, by blaming them first and foremost, and then not offering the many many examples wherein a white person did step up and try to change a system?

Wouldn’t that provide a modality worthy of emulation?

To not do so feeds into the inane assertion that only white people are racist, have always been and are just waiting to jump out and behave as such.

And that’s not denying that such people do exist and exist among many ethnicities: witness the Chinese Han peoples’ treatment of the Uyghars or the Brahim’s treatment of the Harijans in India’s Caste system.

Even worse, it means judging a people by the colour of their skin and jumping to racist conclusions about their value or lack thereof.

Even more, many many Canadians were simply not even born during the more heinous times of racist behaviours, nor were their parents, nor even were our recent immigrants’ ancestors Canadians: why should they bear the weight of previous generations’ transgressions?

Sorry for the cliche but two wrongs do not make a right. And yet, hopefully, restitution and reconciliation will work, and it is a two way street BTW: victimhood should not be confused with non-accountability.

As to my work here in Canada. Hopefully you will not think this an example of horrid virtue signalling.

As a former high school English teacher, I of course taught as many novels available to combat racism and even brought in some which dealt with the more local forms of our Canadian racism: that practiced against Indigenous people.

Three Day Road was one of my favourites as it provides historical context. And I provided the lesson plans for my school and other schools as well.

I brought in speakers of diverse cultures, Kim Soo Goodtrack, a Lakota elder being one, to speak about Indigenous spirituality. I co-lead groups of my students to explore the Nlaka’pamux, or the anglicized Stein Valley.

However, the real leader of those expeditions was Coyote Aleck, a Nlaka’pamux shaman.

So I like to think that I walked my talk when it came to fighting racism, in all of its forms. And I continue to do so by whatever means I can — even if I am labelled a ‘colonizer’, or am thought to be ‘fragile’ if I complain, am seen as somehow being woefully ignorant about my white privilege…even though my mother was an Irish orphaned one at 9, and and my dad a fatherless boy brought to combat maturity during the Second World War: and both were raised in abject poverty.

So to brandish me and all white people with the same limiting brush as those whose systemic racism hurt the woman writing about her trauma is just plain wrong.

Obviously, I did not articulate that concern well enough.

Again, thanks for the response.