Race & Culture
Things that were once taboo are now out in the open. We behave as if prohibition never existed. Behaviours that were once commonplace have been ruled out of order. But pushing that least favourite article of history to the back of the closet doesn’t cancel it. No amount of nose holding or looking the other way will make it disappear. Being aware of the past is a necessity for survival. How many times can we make the same mistake? The past shouldn’t be something mysterious, unimportant, remote, or forbidden, because humans have a knack for forgetting. Their psyches tell them that it is unhealthy to revisit bad experiences too often, but they shouldn’t take the balm of amnesia too far. When memory is erased, mistakes are repeated, and new strains of bad old ideas come along and take root again.
Toppling statues of icons like Saddam, Stalin, or Nero, is a post-conflict knee-jerk reaction to life under a dictator’s heel, but it does not change history. People have always had to use what little they were given and what they could learn, in the race to survive. It is easy to ignore history when the greatest personal accomplishment is to stay alive. Defeated people have no stomach for remembering the gory details of the past; they only hope that the present and future will be better, but they have forgotten that a hungry, intimidated, and uneducated populace is easier to control. The indignant can vent their anger on statues, but it is the ideas, not the statuary that need addressing.
There are many statues that should be consigned to the scrapheap, but pulling them down won’t erase the sins of the past. The buzz about cancelling offensive images from the culture is a distraction from the real thing. There is probably laughter, margaritas and tortillas at a Cinco de Mayo party, but many American’s don’t know that it celebrates a Mexican victory over French troops, who would have gone on to join the US Confederacy, helping the slave owners defeat Lincoln. Yet even in Texas they mindlessly celebrate Cinco de Mayo while protecting statues of Confederate generals. These sharp differences of opinion, usually based on mutual ignorance, which keeps people fighting amongst themselves, a useful result for those who hold power.
Nobody has put forward a fair and workable political system, but the idea is dead in the water simply because it is a system. People are not systems. They are round pegs trying to fit into square holes while experts debate whether it is better to make the holes more round or humans more square. Meanwhile, to survive, humans find their own ways to adapt and move forward. Along the way they may ask themselves if there could be things they are doing now that will be considered unfathomable errors by historians of the future. They drink beverages from open containers when it is known that exposed liquids are bombarded by harmful viruses. They wear eyeglasses, an outdated technology, akin to a pirate having to strap on a wooden leg. They fail to provide free healthcare, housing, and food to the weakest members of society. They send soldiers to kill other soldiers over remote pieces of land so they can move another square on the chessboard of domination. They fill the atmosphere with poison.
Looking back and judging things according to today’s standards is like accidentally driving down a cul de sac. It is true that there are some sins too big to wash away, that no matter when or where they happened, they will always be unforgiven. “Just following orders,” is less convincing today than it once was. Concentration camps have always been hell. Traumatized soldiers were once shot for desertion. Hungry thieving children were sent over the edge of the earth to Australia.
In a tightly organized society, anxiety is a problem. Presumably bees and ants don’t feel the frustration of constant collisions with their own kind but experience the event as a bonding ritual. People also look for ways to keep themselves calm in the mêlée. Tobacco was once the most widespread worldwide remedy for anxiety but it has become a health taboo. Like CocaCola, its addictiveness was an early experiment in product loyalty. But smoking, drinking Coke, and chewing tobacco had willing consumers, early adopters of microdosing, playing Alice in Wonderland, a bit more of this and a bit less of that until they had found the right balance to help them navigate their unintelligible lives. But even smokers don’t know that in the First War, soldiers used cigarette smoke to cover up the stench of rotting corpses. Lung cancer was the least of their worries.
If a long dead, barely remembered man like Al Jolson were to come back from purgatory, he would be sent straight to hell by the latest cultural posse who would lynch him as if he was the antichrist of blackface. He would be greeted by howls that his face paint is insensitive, hurtful, and dehumanizing. But it is dehumanizing to forget that Al Jolson was an actor and a singer who was trying to put food on his table. If he thought that painting his face green and pretending to be a Martian would help get him work, he would probably have done it. People did not believe he was an actual black man, blackface is never convincing, but he was a good singer and that’s what mattered to his audience. He didn’t think he was offending anyone. When he was at the height of his popularity, the American Civil War had ended fifty years earlier, and though black entertainers were becoming known, they were not allowed the same access to the public as white artists. Jolson paid homage to his black brothers; nobody saw it as mockery. He played a character who knew how to tug at the heartstrings and the audience thought he did a very good job of it whatever colour he was. Disney probably copied Al Jolson to create Mickey, but there has been no outcry about mice in blackface. There may have been black singers who were angry that Jolson was taking work that should have been theirs. He would probably have said “Everyone’s gotta eat,” and they would have left it at that. Worse damage was done to the image of blacks, by entertainers like Stepin Fetchit, who had no need to put on blackface. Like many actors, he discovered that he couldn’t find work unless he played a stereotype. Some actors with big noses only find roles as bad guys.
As a post war child I saw some of these early performances repeated on television, though by then there had been some breakthroughs in the theatre and cinema by having blacks played by blacks. Who could imagine that ”A Raisin In the Sun” could be presented by any other cast except one of colour? It would not make sense if it was done in white. Although blacks playing black in works from the 21st century is correct and admirable, in the beginning it was controversial, like the current discussion of handicapped actors playing roles as handicapped characters.
I grew up in a place that never had a black inhabitant until the mid-nineteen sixties, so the earliest impressions I had of black people came from stereotypes like Amos & Andy, and old clips of Bill Robinson teaching Shirley Temple to tap dance. I didn’t know if the radio actors who played Amos & Andy were white or black. It wasn’t a question I asked myself. I was aware that they poked fun at each other and their wives, like Ralph and Ed on The Honeymooners. They could have been like the Happy Gang, always good for a smile and a laugh, but I didn’t ask if their characters represented anything.
With the taboo of blackface, brownface, or any other kind of cultural appropriation, people find other ways to step out of themselves on occasion. They paint their faces blue, copy sci-fi creatures, and make tails out of pool noodles. But will some real alien come along and tell them off for being disrespectful? Children who dress up for Halloween would be mortified to be laughed at. They are paying homage to their idols, and to them it doesn’t matter if the skin is green, painted like a skeleton, or a pleasing shade of tan like Princess Jasmine. Blackface in show business may have been a lame imitation, but it was never comical based solely on skin colour.
In more innocent days, I was friends at school with a skinny native boy with a mop of unwashed hair and dirt-streaked skinny arms. We played marbles on the pavement around the school building and counted our wins together before the bell sounded to end recess. One day I came home with a yellow cats-eye cob that my friend had given me.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “Did you win it?”
“No,” I piped up in my six year old voice. “Fleabag gave it to me.”
“Who?” she turned to look down at me and gave me a hard stare that made me shrink.
“Fleabag,” I said, unsure of myself.
“That’s not a name,” she spoke sternly. “He must have a name.”
“Everyone calls him Fleabag,” I tried to excuse myself.
“Well you are not to do it just because everyone does. Better to find out his real name.”
My mother was a nurse and a democratic woman. She had seen enough sickness and death to know what was good and important and what was wrong. I was embarrassed by my thoughtlessness, but the event triggered a different and better way of looking at things. I have been allergic to nicknames ever since.
Recently, while researching a story set on the North West Coast of British Columbia, I had occasion to spin through many reels of microfilm from a small town newspaper printed in the early twentieth century. In these photographed broadsheets, I regularly came across evidence of racism that now jumped out as being on the wrong side of history, but were accepted back then as normal. The ignorance passed down from one generation to another had prompted the Canadian government to pass race exclusion laws, though not all citizens were convinced. World news was surprisingly well covered, with the latest in European battles, troubles in Ireland and Russia, as well as the latest Chaplin film at the Empire theatre, but between the ads for stomach remedies and cigarettes, there was an ongoing litany of small stories about men being killed in fishing, lumbering, railroading, drinking, and fighting.
There was an alcohol prohibition in the province at the time, so the papers reported a constant parade of bootleggers before the judges. Many of the accused were repeat offenders, bartenders who were only allowed to sell near-beer, workmen caught on a binge, an old widow selling spirits to buy food, and even a few policemen accused of selling contraband. There was a Chinese community who came off very badly in the papers, because the court reports were also full of opium cases. The accounts gave the impression that all Chinese were were dope fiends, a title only slightly less respectable than running a laundry, a place where people took their dirty clothes even though they were nervous it could be an inscrutable front for nefarious dealings. Most Chinese had originally been brought to Canada as disposable labour to construct the railway that was supposed to bring prosperity, and it was assumed that they would leave when the job was done. When they wanted to bring their families over, the government put on the brakes and imposed a head tax.
I read about one or two blacks who ventured north from Seattle on the steamer and ended up in street fights prompted by racist remarks. Locals fought with outsiders, even though all of them except the natives were outsiders themselves. There were women of no fixed address who were shown the road out of town when an unseemly disturbance made their profession clear to the court judge. There were backcountry men who went mad and tortured or killed their families, and there were stopovers by minor royalty. Breathless reporters gushed over celebrated transcontinental biplane pilots who had touched down just long enough to refuel on their way to Alaska. Both local articles and items picked up from the worldwide press, reeked of such blatant racism that a millennial would choke on his bubble tea.
The Chinese workers that Canada had used to build the railway had done a good job but some complained there were too many of them. But then in the First War, the government imported eighty thousand young Chinese men, destined to be shipped to European War to work as sappers, were quarantined and trained at William Head in Victoria. There were riots and escapes from the harsh conditions. Politicians wanted a 2% cap on Orientals. White women were not allowed to work for Chinese employers. Chinese were required to sit in the balconies of movie theatres. After the war, Canada passed the Chinese Expulsion Act, which disenfranchised any resident Chinese. Struck from the voters list, they did not have the right to join professional organizations as doctors, accountants, dentists, or nurses. Since they weren’t officially recognized and certified they weren't allowed to work.
During the same war, 8,500 civilian prisoners, most of Ukrainian descent, were arrested and held in internment camps across the country, only because they were originally from Eastern Europe. In certain periods Canada encouraged immigration, but only accepted the right kind of people, Western Europeans mainly, preferably women who could be brides. Germans and Russians were not welcome.
There were the Sikh passengers who arrived in Vancouver on the Komagata Maru, who after two months at anchor, were sent back to India to be arrested and shot. The official word was that “having been accustomed to the conditions of a tropical climate, immigrants of this class are wholly unsuited to this country.”
While researching the Miller Bay Indian Hospital near Prince Rupert, I discovered that the site was originally a farm belonging to a family called Miller or Müller, who were believed to be Swiss, but because they spoke German their property was confiscated.
I knew there was worse to come in more recent history. The internment of the Japanese in the Second War, had traumatized the parents of some of my schoolmates. They told me their parents had been lied to and robbed, and never felt safe again in Canada.
In 1936 a test case before the Supreme Court about a bar in Montreal refusing service to blacks, concluded that it was in the interest of good morals and public order to refuse service.
Canada’s own aboriginal population were herded into residential schools to “civilize” them, and they were not given the right to vote until 1960. The last racially segregated school in Canada closed in 1983, which brings us close enough to the present to make it clear that there has always been racism in Canada.
It used to take an invasion or revolution to shake up the structure of society, but the ubiquity of the digital revolution has accelerated the exposure and drawn up battle lines. With a sense of history that only stretches back to the last ephemeral trend, new generations might come along and ask, “Who are these guys and why did they do that?” They will learn that the world is, and always has been, full of good, bad and questionable characters. The bad ones are more fascinating but their stories have already been told, so the sleuths go looking for chinks in the armour of those who have been judged to be good. They want to stick their lances in to see what spills out while the spectators huddle round pretending to be aghast. These pokers and prodders are not looking for context, but sound bites, the more shocking the better. Online scandal-hungry communities attract like-minded moral bankrupts to their flame, until their indignation becomes a hurricane and causes a shift in the current moral compass. Another figure in history is stripped of his good intentions and pushed naked into the same human swamp that the critics inhabit.
When the ego-inflated, indignant boots of online crusaders march in, schools, streets and parks are renamed and statues are pulled down. This general or that governor had views he shouldn’t have and needs to be stricken from the record. Every person, living or dead, is fair game for the lawnmower of public opinion. There are reasons that states are not governed by public referendum. People are too easily manipulated. The title of demon of the month moves as fast as fashion. As Heidi Klum would say, “One day you’re in. The next day you’re out.”
Collectively, Canada likes to think of itself as a tolerant country, though we are made up of people from every part of the globe who landed on someone else’s native shore and imposed our way of life on them. We are no different from the tribes from the steppes who swept over Asia, or the Normans who invaded England.
In Canada the English prevailed, so colonial tactics were adopted to subdue the troublesome natives by selling them alcohol, infected blankets, and by stealing their children. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the imperial machine was at full power. Canada was sparsely populated and needed people, so various schemes were cooked up to attract the right immigrants. Unlike the now hollow American boast of “give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses”, Canada tried to be selective and open its borders to those who might settle successfully and participate in the experiment. They didn’t want dreamers or idealists, revolutionaries or Bolsheviks; they didn’t want Chinese, Italians or Slavs who would stay on after their backs were broken. Canada offered free land as bait, but the conditions were harsh. There was a high failure rate and many could not fulfill the conditions to keep the property they had been given, but they were allowed to stay on as wage slaves.
Politicians have always pandered to voters and given voice to xenophobic theories by playing on the insecurities of populations struggling to make a living, who want someone to blame for their condition. The implication behind these ideological campaigns is that the doors to the country should have been closed behind their ancestors who were the last of the good immigrants.
Canadians are fed pablum half-truths about their country and its history, so it is no surprise when a long forgotten shoot of racism sprouts from the stump of a tree that was supposedly cut down long ago. We can never remedy the mistakes of the past, but before we trumpet ourselves as a do-gooder immigrant haven who never had a bad thought for anyone, we need to be aware of what we have already done.
If others are offended by cultural practices that are no longer acceptable, we need to listen to their reading of the situation, but we should not be too hasty about throwing everything onto the fire. If blackface intends no harm, is not meant as a joke or a mockery, there should be nothing wrong with playing a part that pays homage to another race or culture.
I watch a lot of Italian television. There is a popular evening program in its ninth season that challenges contestants to imitate popular singers from the past, a mix of Italian, British and American artists. These are not parodies, but genuine attempts by the performer to create the magic of the original. It is difficult even for an olive skinned Italian to be Louis Armstrong, early Michael Jackson, or Donna Summer without some sort of makeup. If the contestants are from the south of Italy, some need thick makeup to pull off a convincing Adele, Mick Jagger, or Taylor Swift. There have been both tanned and powdery white versions of Lady Gaga. The point of the performances is not to make fun of the popular singers, but to be as true to the originals as possible, to find the soul in the song. There is racism in Italy as there is in all countries, and some comic sketches that poked fun at ethnicities have been recently censored by the state media. It could be said that the makers of this content didn’t understand at the time, the sin that was being committed, but more likely they went for the low-comedy cheap laughs. However, as they do with food, Italians take music seriously, and musical interpretations are not intended to be disrespectful, hurtful, or insensitive. Italy has its own painful racist history, and a present that finds its shores the principal landing point for African migrants, so it is in the thick of coming to terms with its own multiracial society. In the 1950’s a man who moved from Sicily to Milan was called an immigrant.
The US news reported recently that Orange County’s John Wayne Airport should be renamed because he made racist remarks in his time. Actors are often unreconstructed examples of humanity, and some promote ideas which are questionable at best, but actors like all of us, are human and sometimes have bad judgement. Perhaps the solution to constant cultural revision is never to put anyone’s name ever again on a building, a street, a park, or airport, and that they be called building A, B, or C. Even that might be exclusionary to those who don’t use the western alphabet, so we are reduced to symbols like an illiterate people.
There have been bad players in history, and their errors have been pointed out, but there is a mistaken assumption that everyone in the past should have acted according to our modern standards. Dredging up forgotten sins and passing judgement on them, doesn’t serve the present or the future. The motto for the Province of Quebec is “Je me souviens” which translates as “I will remember,” and is good advice for the entire country. We should not forget the past, because it explains how we got to where we are now. We can never be free from our history, nor should we be.
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