Canadian Conservative parliamentarian accuses black rival of "thinking the world revolves around her skin colour"

They are not doing this. They are explicitly making polices based on race. That’s what led Bernier to comment in the first place.

It was telling that one of the first targets of the Harper Conservatives was Statistics Canada. It’s easier to pretend that discrimination doesn’t happen when you don’t collect the data.

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He also tried to muzzle Canadian government climate scientists on the topic of global warming.

In the U.S. see also conservative attempts to stop the CDC from collecting data on firearms violence and the GOP’s on-going war against the 2020 census.

One might be forgiven for sensing an over-arching trend when it comes to conservatives these days.

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Who wants to make a colour-blind society? I don’t.

To be blind to race is to be grossly ignorant of most of the history of the last millenia. The state of our global society is intricately enmeshed in the still-ongoing history of white supremacy; it is the basis for Western capitalist dominance of the world.

What I want from society is justice, not ignorance.

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And here is where we fundamentally differ. I don’t want to live in a society where your identity is based on your skin pigmentation or sexual preferences or your religion. I want to live in a society where people are judged on their values. I think you will find that the majority of people believe the same thing.

Here’s a good Racism-101 level primer:

image

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An interesting aspect of this situation is the strong implication by Bernier and his far-flung defenders that by acknowledging the existence of racism its victims are somehow inviting the abuse they suffer.

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some people occupy this world the whites have created out of the lives of darker people. this world predicated on the automatic superiority of whites and the automatic inferiority of non-whites. they occupy this world and have no idea how much killing, how much humiliation, how much oppression has gone into its creation. all they know is how uncomfortable it makes them when someone points it out. how angry it makes them to have to accept anything that moves them closer to equality with other people with other skins. all they know is that they wish those others would stop talking, stop complaining, stop demanding respect, stop stop stop.

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Too bad that’s the world all of us currently live in.

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Why be so simplistic about this? (Rhetorical question – I know why you’re doing that.)

To lack race-based privilege does not mean that one cannot also have class-based privilege.

I do suspect that you’re quite capable of thinking along more than one social axis at a time. You’ll get along a lot better here if you start doing so.

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With apologies if I’m wrong, but all I can think when I read crap like this is ‘…spoken like a white dude.’

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Or banking regs. One of the reasons Canada weathered 2008 as well as we did is we have some serious regulations that prevent the kind of shenanigans that went on elsewhere.

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Regulations that Harper was on track to remove until he was voted out of office.

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Canadian Conservative parliamentarian accuses black rival of “thinking the world revolves around her skin colour”

Oh she knows very well, Mr. Conservative parliamentarian, that it revolves around your skin colour, not hers.

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As I recall, Harper had managed to change a few minor regulations around the time things went to hell in the US. He then quietly stopped trying to “improve” our banking laws. The man was/is a soulless cretin. He didn’t have a plan, he had a scam.

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http://nationalpost.com/news/politics/the-nerd-who-came-from-nowhere-stephen-harper-knows-you-dont-need-to-like-a-politician-to-elect-him

Like many young Albertans, Harper flirted openly with libertarianism in his university days. Naturally, this included a requisite phase of enchantment with the writings of Ayn Rand.

A fellow classmate recalls an undergraduate Harper showing up to on-campus architecture talks still energized by The Fountainhead, Rand’s novel about an individualistic architect hero.

Later, he said, the future prime minister would nurture dreams of going into city planning, then destroying it from the inside as a service to free enterprise.

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Oh, I didn’t say he didn’t want to deregulate. But even he knew there’d be pitchforks, torches and guillotines if he did.

But now

https://twitter.com/omanreagan/status/1001729666154020864?s=21

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He’s like a pale, Canadian imitation of Obama.

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