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.
00:00:00.000New evils or old evils, rather, and old ills always show up in new ways and possibly often in ways you wouldn't expect, right?
00:00:07.180So 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.
00:00:20.520And 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.
00:00:29.180So 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.
00:00:42.780I 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.
00:00:48.640How 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.
00:00:57.660I am colorblind, is now suspiciously looked at.
00:01:02.660Well, really, you're part of the problem.
00:01:05.200And how this came about in part is because of the redefinition of what it means to be racist these days.
00:01:10.220Yeah, well, it just seems that they're trying to keep the divisions going when we'd actually been making them fade.
00:01:17.580I mean, you know, race is going to be there.
00:01:19.380Cultural differences are going to be there.
00:01:20.800They don't have to be erased or disappear.
00:01:22.500But we, you know, what we wanted to work towards was stopping, allowing those differences to control our actions with and to each other.
00:01:31.100But 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.
00:01:40.260And I just get so frustrated watching it.
00:01:42.340I 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.
00:01:54.620Well, we are, and again, I think it's due to a number of factors.
00:01:59.060One is that people look at differences in outcomes between cohorts, right, statistical cohorts.
00:02:04.460So, 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.
00:02:14.980So you can carve up statistics in this way.
00:02:17.600And, you know, there's some use in doing that to figure out what's going on.
00:02:21.600Is 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.
00:02:29.640So, for example, we know that Indigenous Canadians are not doing well on average compared to, say, other Canadians or compared to Taiwanese Canadians.
00:02:38.980Now, 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.
00:02:45.340Now, why people pick one factor, you know, is there's a whole bunch of reasons, I guess.
00:03:13.220No, 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.
00:03:29.420A greater proportion live in rural areas because you live on a reserve in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:33.320Well, we know whether you're white, Indigenous, Asian, Canadian, if you live in a rural area, you will earn less.
00:03:39.800So you add education, you add geography.
00:03:42.300And 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.
00:03:51.640There's lots of other factors that go into why people succeed or not, even why certain cohorts succeed.
00:03:57.320There's lots of other factors that go into why people succeed.