No Post This Week

Astute readers of my blog will notice that I’ve missed a couple of posts on the schedule recently. This was due to family responsibilities. I’m not going to go into details publicly, but suffice it to say that this year our family Thanksgiving holiday schedule includes an entry titled “internment of the ashes.”

It’s my hope to be able resume a normal posting schedule after this holiday weekend, because there’s certainly a lot going on in the world that I want to unpack including the Canadian federal election; the far-right’s continued attack on activists (including the closure of Soufi’s restaurant following a campaign of cowardly threats by white supremacists and hate groups); the threats against HCCI by the same hate groups and apparently by an official representative of the PPC; the latest news on the continuing fallout from the Pride attack by (you guessed it) those same hate groups; antisemitic graffiti left at a synagogue and the harassment and intimidation of Muslims in their mosque in Hamilton; the community reaction to the horrifying murder of a bullied teenager in Hamilton; the attack in Halle by yet another far-right shooter; and of course the betrayal of the Kurds and the opening stages of a feared genocide in Rojava.

It’s been a bad week.

The Blackface Scandal

This turned out to be a very brief post today. I’d thought to write about the “Blackface Scandal” currently enveloping the Canadian federal election… but the truth is I’ve got nothing to contribute.

Oh, I can share my personal experience of shock and dismay, but that’s not much different than every other white person’s reaction over the past couple of days. I can express my concern that this will impact the election (which of course why the images were released; this is textbook ratfuckery) and that we might end up with a Scheer government but that seems crass and political. I can even say “I love and support my PoC friends and they shouldn’t have to suffer this” which is true… and in fact so true that I shouldn’t have to say that. It should be one of those self-evident things like how awful it is to dress up in fucking blackface.

But frankly, none of that breaks new ground; it’s not helpful, it doesn’t present a radical new angle, and it isn’t even particularly relevant. The last thing this scandal needs is another white pundit interjecting his opinion into the situation. So what I’m going to do is use this platform I’ve got to amplify the voices of people of colour.

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