You don't say.
Or should that be, you better not say, White Boy.
Mia Rabson, the Ottawa reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, writes that poking fun at the faux hunger striker Chief Theresa Spence "plays into the stereotypes and racism that underlie much of the struggle First Nations have had in this country for the past 140 years."
Oh,
and the taunts "encourage the racist thinking that has reared its ugly
head in spade since Idle No More and Spence started gaining national
attention."
Rabson and the rest of the MSM crowd are big on smearing people with the label "racist" to silence them. Her colleague Lindor Reynolds went to Morris, Manitoba, to prove her liberal bona fides by attacking the editor of a local newspaper who gave a thumbs down to native "leaders" who make terrorist threats.
Free speech be damned. The "professional journalists" have spoken.
And while they speak, they sure don't want you to.
The FP routinely shelves comments to its stories if they contain stuff like excerpts from the Treaties with Indians signed, er, 140 years ago. It seems that the "professional journalists" don't want people to know what's in those treaties, even though, as the government tells us, we're all treaty people.
The Free Press has, over two weekends, published five full pages of stories on Idle No More and Theresa Spence and the recent Indian protests, but has never found the space to reprint the treaties that govern Manitoba. It's no wonder.
They don't want people to know that the treaties belie everything the Idle No More crowd claim to be true.
* This is OUR LAND; the Indians ceded it all in the treaties signed in the nineteenth century. Even the land the self-proclaimed First Nations live on is OUR LAND, not some sovereign country; it's Canadian land that's reserved for the benefit of aboriginals.
* All the so-called rights the Idle people claim, don't exist; everything given to Indians under the treaties is specifically noted as coming from the beneficence of the Queen. There was never any intent to "share" the land equally; Indians were allowed to hunt and fish on land where they always hunted and fished -- until settlers moved in and then they were expected to become farmers or to move.
* There's no right to consultation in the treaties, that's something judges made up out of whole cloth and judges can't unilaterally change the constitution of Canada, there's a lengthy and detailed process that must be followed.
But you wouldn't know any of this from reading or watching stories on the MSM.
And here's something else you wouldn't know, something that goes straight to the heart of racism in the debate.
First some background: four Saskatchewan women are credited for starting the Idle movement---Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson and Sheelah McLean.
(A fifth, Tanya Kappo, of Alberta, gave the movement its name by originating the hashtag #idlenomore for Twitter followers. She's been pretty much written out of the history of Idle No More, perhaps to keep people from noticing her work with the Liberal Party's Aboriginal Peoples Commission prior to the last federal election in which she ran as a Liberal Party candidate in Peace River. She got 4,573 votes and lost to Conservative candidate Chris Warkentin who collected 27,785 votes.)
But, back to the four founders. The only non-aboriginal is Sheelah McLean, who is as white as can be. She's an academic. In fact, her area of expertise includes the field of -- are you ready? -- whiteness.
You read right. Whiteness.
If you're like us, you said, "What?" We had to look it up. And yes, there is a field of study called "whiteness."
It is the study of being white. You see, that's bad. White people suffer from white privilege. And that's bad. White privilege is benefiting from society because you're white and the rules of society are set up to reflect white values.
When white people came to North America they colonized non-white people. Colonization is making your culture superior to the culture of other people. In the act of colonizing North America, white people made their values predominant. So our legal system is white, our electoral system, our sense of right and wrong is all white. That makes non-whites feel bad.
And that makes being white, bad. Even whites who jump up and down and insist they're anti-racist, are actually racist because they don't realize they benefit from white privilege and they don't see how society is white oriented. So whites are racist whether they know it or not. And racism is bad. So whites are...well, you know.
There's a term for that kind of thinking in Canada.
Villifying "a person or a group on the basis of one or more characteristics such as (ahem), colour" is the accepted definition of hate speech.
So one of the basic premises of Idle No More is hate speech.
Oh, can we say that? Or will that make Theresa Spence feel bad?