What happened to an understanding that no one is perfect and that everyone makes mistakes? What happened to accepting a sincere apology and moving on?
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That doesn’t sound racist at all. 
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I’m not sure this will have the legs with the public that it has on forums like this one. Today everyone is going to be upset. Tomorrow there will be editorials about how we shouldn’t judge people for the mistakes of their past running against editorials saying that Trudeau should have known better at the time. People will read the apology as basically sincere without parsing the text too much. Liberals who aren’t Trudeau will talk about all the racists in the Conservative party and-hey-do-you-remember-how-Sheer-is-anti-abortion-and-anti-gay-marriage.
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Because racism isn’t a real problem, and the people who talk about it are just trying to distract us, and are probably just puppets of the REAL people in power… If only those people would shut up so the white saviors can deal with REAL issues! /s
AS IF working class communities and communities of color of all economic status aren’t already bearing the brunt of environmental degradation in the first place and almost always have…
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This is the “I’ve never heard other white people complain about this.” defence.
In other words, it’s often framed by other white people as an “innocent mistake” (same as in the US), but Canadians still recognize it as an embarrassing and racist fuck-up, and Black Canadians and other Canadian POC have protested it from the 1840s up until next Halloween.
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As a newcomer to Canada, I wish I knew more about the politics here… I think I’d come down on “fool manipulator”… He is self-deluded enough to think he could wield power based on this family name, throwing hunks of fake meat to the left, but really just running everything straight down the middle… Shrewd, but not nearly enough. At least that’s my rather uninformed impression!
Perhaps you’re right - hard to say how the average Canadian will take this. The media is in a frenzy right now, but that’s what they live for.
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At the VERY least, he apologized, BUT his claim that he didn’t know better in the 1990s and in 2001 just rings hollow.
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Fuck all the self serving denialism going on in this thread.
Unfuck Trudeau, his requisite nonpology and his bullshit ass excuse.
Unless he was living under a rock far removed from society, he knew better even back in the 90’/aughts, and he still did it anyway.
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Not really? Being an ignorant prick is not the same as being hateful. And he did pretty much admit to being an ignorant prick by saying he should have known better.
How quickly are we supposed to “move on?” It’s been less than a day since we learned he did this. Expecting everyone to immediately forgive and forget is like that scene from Pulp Fiction when John Travola says
“Did you ever hear the philosophy that once a man admits that he’s wrong, he is immediately forgiven for all wrongdoings?”
…while he and Samuel L. Jackson are still dealing with the splattered brains of the kid Travola’s character accidentally shot.
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The pain is real. I live in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s riding so at least I can vote for her and call it “voting for the rule of law”. If I lived in almost any other riding I have no idea what I’d do.
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There’s no difference to the victims of either, if the end result is the same:
And let there be no doubt; marginalizing and mocking the existence of people of color historically leads to not seeing us as your fellow human beings and that makes it much easier to do atrocious, inhumane things to us.
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And as I said above, racism isn’t ONLY about being hateful, it’s also about perpeptuating stereotypes and reinforcing white supremacy as a result.
At least he said that, though it’s really not an excuse then or now.
Until we really wrestle with racist structures of western democracies were built upon, these things and these thin excuses will keep on.
And white allies who do not speak out against this stuff are also complicit, no matter how “woke” we believe ourselves to be. As Stokely Carmichael said, whites need to deal with their own internalized racism and fix their communities in order to fix the heart of the problem, which is something whites have never done, not fully, not most of us. It’s on US to do that, not communities of color. We built and benefit from this system most, and NOT understanding that fact or accepting it means these sorts of things are going to continue. I’d rather we decolonize our minds rather than keep refusing to believe that there is a problem.
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Yes, I know. But I don’t think anyone was trying to find excuses. He owned up to what he did, said it was shameful and he should have known better but didn’t, the implication being that he was an ignorant prick. That’s pretty much all. Is the apology half-baked? Maybe, depending on what you want from an apology like this. But I don’t see any fishing for excuses…
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Considering it happened almost two decades ago and does not appear to be evidence of anything thing more than poor judgement, I would say we couldn’t move on fast enough. Or are you perfect and have never done anything in you past which you are ashamed of?
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I’m more than ready to be wrong, and because the polls are dead even losing a point off of this might end up being disastrous. I just don’t think white people really care about blackface, and for rich white men like Trudeau, 30 years old is still in the range that people will count things as “youthful mistakes”.
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And you see nothing asinine about comparing a silly costume party to lynching? Physician heal thyself.
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Isn’t that the definition of finding an excuse, though? At the very least downplaying it.
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Perhaps try looking harder; this thread is damn near staggering from the sheer weight of them.
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