Western Standard - June 21, 2024


Mark Milke How colour blindness became racist

Topics
reverse racism
Mentioned
Ibram X. Kendi Martin Luther King Indigenous Canadians Chong Nguyen Corey
'Organized Labour Is Spreading Like An Infection' Alberta NDP Leadership 2024

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

173.06

Word count

771

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the concept of reverse racism and how it came about in the 21st century, especially in Western countries like the United States and Canada, where when you say you're colorblind, you're considered part of the problem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 New evils or old evils, rather, and old ills always show up in new ways and possibly often in ways you wouldn't expect, right?
00:00:07.180 So Chong Nguyen and I wrote a column recently on this notion of reverse racism and how this came about, where when you say you're colorblind, now you're considered to be part of the problem.
00:00:19.060 You're considered to be racist.
00:00:20.520 And the most famous proponent of this view is Ibrahim X. Kennedy out of the United States, a quasi-scholar who has promoted this line of thinking.
00:00:29.180 So how did we get to this place where when you say, look, I want to be Martin Luther King, you know, his famous speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he says, judge people.
00:00:42.780 I want my kids to be judged on the color of their skin or sorry, the character, content of their character, not the color of their skin.
00:00:48.640 How do we get to a place now in Canada, the United States and in Western countries anyway, where to say that, to say I'd like to be colorblind, to be treated colorblind.
00:00:57.660 I am colorblind, is now suspiciously looked at.
00:01:02.660 Well, really, you're part of the problem.
00:01:05.200 And how this came about in part is because of the redefinition of what it means to be racist these days.
00:01:10.020 Corey?
00:01:10.220 Yeah, well, it just seems that they're trying to keep the divisions going when we'd actually been making them fade.
00:01:17.580 I mean, you know, race is going to be there.
00:01:19.380 Cultural differences are going to be there.
00:01:20.800 They don't have to be erased or disappear.
00:01:22.500 But we, you know, what we wanted to work towards was stopping, allowing those differences to control our actions with and to each other.
00:01:31.100 But now it's come full circle into trying to embrace and segregate the different cultures and races from each other, which is only going to lead to more friction yet all over again.
00:01:40.260 And I just get so frustrated watching it.
00:01:42.340 I mean, the celebration of a black-only graduation recently and other events where we should be working together, you know, while still celebrating cultural and history and things like that.
00:01:53.420 But we're going the other way.
00:01:54.620 Well, we are, and again, I think it's due to a number of factors.
00:01:59.060 One is that people look at differences in outcomes between cohorts, right, statistical cohorts.
00:02:04.460 So, you know, you can be, you know, one ethnicity versus another or majority of population white in Canada versus, you know, the black population or something.
00:02:14.980 So you can carve up statistics in this way.
00:02:17.600 And, you know, there's some use in doing that to figure out what's going on.
00:02:21.600 Is some community, some particular community as defined by however you want to carve up, you know, cohort and statistics doing well or better on some indicators.
00:02:29.640 So, for example, we know that Indigenous Canadians are not doing well on average compared to, say, other Canadians or compared to Taiwanese Canadians.
00:02:38.980 Now, the assumption, though, that a lot of people have is they see a difference in outcomes and they say, OK, that must be due to racism.
00:02:45.340 Now, why people pick one factor, you know, is there's a whole bunch of reasons, I guess.
00:02:50.380 But it's it's monocausal. 0.93
00:02:52.040 It's wrong.
00:02:52.720 So why is there a difference between, say, Indigenous Canadians on average incomes and, say, Taiwanese Canadians on average incomes?
00:02:59.280 Well, one factor, education levels.
00:03:02.180 Taiwanese Canadians are among the most educated as a group in Canada on average compared to, say, Indigenous Canadians.
00:03:08.260 You know, and guys like you and me with our skin color are in the middle of somewhere.
00:03:11.880 So is that due to racism?
00:03:13.220 No, it's due to education levels or another factor that can affect incomes is, again, using Indigenous Canadians or First Nations Canadians as a specific example, is a greater proportion of First Nations Canadians live in the middle of nowhere, often not always, but often on a reserve.
00:03:29.420 A greater proportion live in rural areas because you live on a reserve in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:33.320 Well, we know whether you're white, Indigenous, Asian, Canadian, if you live in a rural area, you will earn less.
00:03:39.800 So you add education, you add geography. 0.82
00:03:42.300 And all of a sudden, this notion that everything can be due to, you know, is assumed to be due to racism today or past racism becomes ridiculous.
00:03:51.640 There's lots of other factors that go into why people succeed or not, even why certain cohorts succeed.
00:03:57.320 There's lots of other factors that go into why people succeed.