Damn Dirty Ape!

So I have to weigh in on this one. Some time ago, the NY Post printed a cartoon. Like most political cartoons it addressed what was happening in politics at the time. Makes sense. But this one has caused a lot of outrage and while I also am ashamed of this ad, it's for a much different reason. For starters here's the cartoon.


I am kind of confused by this cartoon. I guess it's trying to say that an ape wrote the US's current "economic stimulus" (have we had enough of these words) bill. That's a pretty wealthy ape or at least a very powerful ape.

I say good for him or her. Writing a complicated bill like that would be a chore for any of us. Why not give the job to an ape? Take affirmative action to a new level.

Maybe it's one of those super intelligent apes from NASA. Did you ever think of that?

But to add to my confusion I wondered: why would police or security guards shoot an ape for writing a stimulus bill on a street in broad daylight with lots of witnesses driving by? Was the bill that bad? Doesn't it stimulate you enough? Do the editors of the NY Post want people to go to the zoo and shoot apes? Maybe they should shoot the greedy (suicide?) or economists instead since they are the real problem.

But back to the uproar. People think this dead ape is a stand-in for Barack Obama. This is a bit of a stretch. First of all Barack Obama is a homo (wait for it) sapien. But apparently people of African descent are considered apes or monkeys by silly racist people.

(As a side note, in Europe if you have black football players on your national team almost every country will make monkey calls at them. Hey fat, lazy, drunk white guys! Those footballers could probably kick your balls out of the stadium! Get a life.)

And do people actually think Barack Obama wrote the bill himself? Clearly not. I think this is a case of reading into things too much. I'm sure the NY Post has apologized for any offense by now.

The funny thing is that his predecessor was often portrayed as an ape himself. I read the Guardian on occasion and have greatly enjoyed political cartoons by Steve Bell. Bell's Bush is terribly simian and funny. How is portraying Bush in this way acceptable and just drawing a picture of an ape, far from having Obama swinging from tree to tree on the White House lawn, racist?

Even if you don't believe in evolution like our friend Bush, we're all still descended from apes in Africa.

And that's the real problem. It's not that this is another example of racism (I'm not disputing that by the way), it's that apes are demeaned by this cartoon and our culture more generally. Apes are apes and humans are humans, trees are trees and bacteria are bacteria. There isn't a hierarchy of intelligence or feeling or any of that shit we've been taught since we were kids. If God told you that, then God is wrong. We are all equal, all creation, all species on this earth and we all have a right to be here.

Apes, far from stupid, are too smart to waste their time developing a global economy and huge, bloated governments let alone writing an economic stimulus bill. Life is straightforward for them. Eat, fuck, shit, die, repeat.

Homo sapiens like the editor of the NY Post, Barack Obama and the racist football fan could learn a lot from them and pretty much every single other being on this earth.

Post-Race?

Despite the claims that we are entering a post-race period of history with the election of Barack Obama to the White House, racism in Canada, at least, is alive and well. Sometimes racism is subtle like when you get asked where you're really from. Sometimes it's not so subtle like when you have your teeth smashed in because of the colour of your skin. In both cases you have to expose it.

The recent conviction of JSR, the African-Canadian youth charged with the murder of Jane Creba on Boxing Day 2005, was so clearly motivated by racism that it defies belief. There was no physical evidence linking JSR to Creba's murder. The bullet that killed her did not come from his gun nor did his hands show evidence of having fired a shot that day. How then could he be charged with second degree murder?

Surely JSR was a party to a gunfight and therefore guilty of a dangerous crime. But second degree murder is too harsh given the facts. He is clearly guilty of participating in a shootout and therefore is guilty of a serious crime but the colour of his skin played a major role in his conviction and public demonization. Would there have been the same level of outrage and judicial pursuit had the victim been a young black man or the shooter been a white male?

For many days in December, I have endured gruesome report after gruesome report about the torture and murder of Phoenix Sinclair on CBC Radio One. Beaten, imprisoned, frozen, and forced to eat her own vomit: these words are seared into my memory and the memories of tens of thousands of other listeners. Clearly this is a hideous crime carried out by the girl's own parents and no excuse can be made for their crimes but a greater worry may be the vision of First Nations peoples promoted by these endless reports.

Each day the association of “aboriginal” and “reserve” with these hideous crimes conditioned listeners. From what I heard, I felt that this reporting reinforced the paternalistic attitudes toward First Nations common amongst the Canadian middle classes.

There is terrible lack of complexity in this reporting and the result is clearly dangerous. The legacy of residential schools is still with us. It would be dangerous to paint all First Nations people with the same brush due to a single miserable case of child abuse. Obviously the reporters at CBC Radio One missed this one.

And last and certainly least according to Stephen Harper, there's Omar Khadr, the Canadian apprehended for fighting with the Taliban and allegedly killing a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2001. Setting aside that he was captured as a 15 year old and was clearly forced to aid the Taliban and Al Qaeda by his father his treatment is telling when compared with two other high profile captives of the “war on terror”.

Does anyone remember John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban? Though he, like Khadr, fought with the Taliban against the American invasion of Afghanistan, he was able have his day in court. He is now serving a 20 year sentence. Though this is a harsh sentence to be sure, he avoided the death penalty and a military tribunal something that could not be said about the child soldier, Omar Khadr.

Or how about David Hicks, the Australian who fought for the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan. He is now back living in Australia having been released by his American captors. Again, no different from Khadr, except in one key way, Hicks was an adult making adult decisions and aware of the consequences of his actions. If anything, like Khadr, he should be in Guantanamo Bay, waterboarded, subjected to the frequent flyer program and prevented from seeing the evidence against him.

It seems there is justice and then there is justice. You can find out where you stand on a colour chart. Khadr has darker skin than these other two men. Case closed. So where these men go home or at least get their days in court, Khadr waits for his day before a military tribunal that has already drawn its own conclusions. Much like the conviction of JSR and the reporters covering Phoenix Sinclair, everyone already knows that blacks are violent and “Indians” are bad parents. Simple enough for you?

It seems we've still got a long way to go before we get to that proposed post-race world.

Stubborn Stains

There's a hidden message in the media's hailing of Barack Obama as the "First Black President of the United States" (FBPOTUS). Most people wouldn't catch it so I don't blame you if you haven't spotted it yet. If he is elected, he will most certainly not be the "First Black President of the United States".

If he's elected, he should be known as the first mixed race (though isn't that a terrible and problematic set of words) President of the United States (FMRPOTUS). Obama's mother is a white American and his father is from Kenya. He's not black, in fact he looks quite brown to me. Blackness means that as far back as you can tell, you're family was descended from Africans (slaves, mind you, not Kenyans--there was no such thing as Kenya until relatively recently). The same thing for whiteness (though what does that mean? There are white people from western Europe to the Caucasus and now beyond).

Though I admit few personal details on these pages, I'm the child of a mixed race (ugh again!) couple. My dad is Indian (no, not First Nations) and my mother is white. But much like Obama's blackness, I'll never be more than an Indian. Very few people would ever consider the complexity of my background in defining me. The only thing they see is the stain of my birth: colour.

Here's an example of the usual, everyday conversations I have to endure:

(Suspicious) "You're not Canadian. Where are you really from?"
(Suppressing rage) "Well my mum is from England and my father is from India and--"
(Interrupts smiling) "Oh you're Indian. I love curries."

Whiteness is sacred. It doesn't matter if your parents came from Russia and the Orkney Islands or Finland and Croatia. You're not a complex person, you're white, you're special, you're at the top of the pile.

But the second a white person has a child with a person of colour, the child is forever stained, quite literally, with that terrible act. Even if you never spend a second with your coloured parent and have only white kids as friends and listen to country music, you're coloured. You're not a kid with brown skin who plays hockey with his white friends, eats burgers and fries and listens to country music.

So I encourage you, dear reader, to avoid falling into the trap of referring to people of mixed backgrounds by their stain alone. In fact perhaps you should disengage from believing in the rarely discussed concept of stain altogether; though that's hard since we all believe it utterly and completely like the fact that the sun will rise in the morning.

Despite all this people of mixed backgrounds are just as complex as any other human being or any other living being on this planet.