Several years ago, in between periods of a hockey game, a black player was being interviewed. The host referred to him as “African-American,” and the player corrected him, saying, “I’m Canadian.” Less than a minute later, the host repeated the error, and again the player corrected him. This happened at least twice more. The look on the face of the poor interviewer was one of abject horror: He knew that he was in a PC minefield.

Takes me back to one dinoblogger’s effort to progressivize a Washington Post editorial on university enrollment by capitalizing the word “black”.

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?

President Obama may have wanted health care to dominate coverage of his news conference, but at best that topic is sharing space with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Obama said Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, an African-American scholar who teaches at Harvard; the president also said race “still haunts us,” and that too many blacks and Hispanics are still pulled over without cause.

Was the question a set up?

Obama went out of his way to call on that reporter as the last questioner of the night — even when some confusion about whether he’d called on someone else resulted in his having to go back to her after taking another question.
For a wartime president managing a slew of manufactured “crises” in a reeling economy, he was sure armed with an astonishing level of detail about the arrestee’s side of the story in a local breaking-and-entering case that had resulted in no charges being filed. Obama even had a “spontaneous” joke at the ready about how he himself would probably get “shot” if he ever tried to break into the White House. The joke, of course, fell flat. Trust me on this one (I used to be the guy who decided whether to file federal charges in Westchester County in the first few years after the Clintons moved there): Outside the courtiers of the White House press corps, no one — especially the Secret Service — likes jokes about American presidents getting shot.
And it is just shameful for an American president to describe the police as “stupid” and feed into the racializing of the Gates case. At this early stage, no one has testified, the matter can’t possibly have been thoroughly investigated yet, and the real facts simply aren’t known. Obama, moreover, is not just the president; he’s a lawyer. He’s supposed to know better — though last night he sounded like exactly the sort of lawyer he used to be back in the good ol’ ACORN days.

(Officer’s response and police report.)

What could possibly go wrong?

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities.

More here.

(click to enlarge)
From the Toronto Sun comments section.

“Cuz Lawd knows, we kaints do dis for ourselfs.”
h/t Shaken

Asian Achievement Week at the University of Saskatchewan;

You can participate in this very special week by attending any class taught by an Asian professor or by raising relevant and non-relevant Asian issues (such as the evolution of DDR) in your classes (regardless of their subjects), being EXTRA proud of being Asian, perhaps by asking out that shy asian girl from class, or just high-fiving some asian dude in the Arts Tunnel.

Blogging the past couple of days has taken a back seat to a junior dragster paint job. Photos when I get them – I left it in the paint booth at 11 pm last night ready for clear. After 14 straight hours standing on concrete yesterday (minus one 10 minute lunch break), today’s going to be a slow one too, while I rest up and tend to some other work.
Tomorrow we hit the road for the Home of Hope, City of The Pretty, Metropolis of Changeopolis – the Chicago that brought you Blago! OK,. I’ll stop now. We have five days of dog shows, plus two days driving time each way. I should have net access in the evenings, but for the most part I’ll be leaving the joint in the hands of the trusty guest bloggers. Please help make their job easier – respect the rules, and ignore any trolling drive-bys.
Thanks for your patience – and wish us luck.

Inaugural benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery:

‘Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around… when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen’… “

(via)
Update – (Dan Cook has the full quote.)

The proposal to abandon the Carleton Unversity Students’ Association was put forward after it was recently revealed to only include bigots, and primarily idiots.

I admit some remorse after reading this column in the Torstar;

“I’m not certain the truth about history will do much to enhance the cultural esteem of white students, though perhaps ultimately, that’s what we need is for black people feel [sic] a little better about themselves and for white people to feel a little worse.”

Mostly for the 45 seconds I’ll never get back, but as badly as it’s penned, it does ask a question that I’ve struggled with most of my adult life. Why can’t I feel worse?
I live in a modern western society, blessed with wealth I’m told was extracted at a cost of centuries of pain and exploitation. But try as I might, I cannot bring myself to share this essential white burden.
While my melanin content is a product of my birth, “guilt” does not come easily to me. Call it a flaw in character, but my guilt has always been partnered with “consequence” – consequence for my transgressions – not my mother’s, nor my grandfather’s three times removed.
I cannot feel their pangs of conscience. Their remorse eludes me.
And even in those rare moments during quiet reflection, when I push back the force of reason and allow quivers of 18th century slave-trading shame to wash over my 21st century privilege… I have no place to put it.
Scotland was never known for its cotton.
While I’m sure many Scots grew fat trading in human bondage, I can’t count my rooming house ancestors among them.
And there withers the root of my spiritual failure. Like the African hyphenated people of today, my cultural history is lacking completeness. Their ancestors were robbed of their liberty – my ancestors were deprived of their slaves.
History has never fully reconciled my people, haunted as we are by a record of slavelessness.
Our society, our governments, must reach out to support our search for worse feelings, recognize and answer for our diminished angst.
I know there’s no turning back the clock. No government can compensate my ancestors – men and women who toiled their own soil, tended their own flocks, washed their own laundry. No program of today could provide the restitution that might fulfill my ancestral guilt – a slave of my own.
But they could pay for a maid.

It’s a question some are aksing…

Where are our new Canadians from China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and the rest of Asia?
Sixty four of the 66 Canadian military personnel killed in Afghanistan since the start of the mission in 2002 are white Canadians. The other two are black Canadians.
There is something not right with this picture.
Walk in downtown Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal and you will be greeted with a glorious mosaic of cultures, mingling and mixing, sharing and caring, fighting for and defending all things Canadian.
Look at the queue of soldiers heading into a Hercules transport bound for Afghanistan – it is overwhelmingly white and male.
This stark contrast clearly illustrates that visible minorities are vastly under-represented in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Indeed. Read the rest.
Via Mark Collins

kate@uptime:~$ whois tobaccowise.com
Registrant:
Aboriginal Cancer Care Unit
620 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M5G 2L7
CA
Domain name: TOBACCOWISE.COM
Administrative Contact:
Smillie-Adjarkwa, Christine dns.admin@cancercare.on.ca
620 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M5G 2L7
CA
+1.4169719800 Fax: +1.4169716888
Technical Contact:
Cruz, Alfredo dns.tech@cancercare.on.ca
27-1300 King St. E.
Toronto, ON M5G 2L7
CA
+1.4169719800 Fax: +1.4169716888
Via Free Dominion.
(Or chew.)
More thoughts
I missed an opportunity with this post. (And not the obvious one that advertising of tobacco and promotion of its use to children is illegal.)
Instead of serving it straight up, I ought to have replaced the Cancer Care and Health Canada logos with those of Imperial and Rothmans and watch the fur fly from the left about the criminal actions of Big Tobacco.
Or, alternately, substitute “sacred” tobacco with evangelical faith healing and leave the government sponsorship indicators intact.
If separation of church and state is good enough for Christians it’s certainly good enough for First Nations, yes? If tobacco promotion to minors is illegal in white communities, it should be illegal in First Nations communities as well.
Yes?
Yes?

The “R” word…

LOWRY: If a robot or to dress like a prostitute, isn’t that the kind of outfit it would wear?
SHARPTON: Do you have a copy of the outfit? I happened to have been there that night, because it was the night I did a tribute to James Brown at the BET Awards, and the outfit was a totally clothed outfit.
LOWRY: Looked like a robot, didn’t it?
SHARPTON: It did not.
LOWRY: You think he thinks Beyonce is a robot.
SHARPTON: Slow down, Richard. Don’t go past your statement. The problem you guys get with me is I know how to listen so I can out-debate you. He said a robot would wear that outfit if it was a prostitute. What does that mean?
LEVIN: Guys can I just get one word in?
LOWRY: It means the costume looks like a robo-prostitute costume.
SHARPTON: Why? Why?
LOWRY: What if he said robo-stripper? Would you be upset?

h/t

Tintin In The Congo;

Borders has reportedly moved the book to the adults “graphic novels” section, where, according to the Times, it is wrapped with a paper band and a note warning that it contains “bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period — an interpretation some readers may find offensive”.

Come on, you tolerant lefties – you know you want to!

In the 1990s;

… for the first time since the Spanish came, whites left California. Two million departed. From July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, 100,000 more packed up and headed back whence their fathers came. The “Anglo” population of the Golden State is down to 43 percent and falling fast. White folks are now a minority in Texas and New Mexico. In Arizona, Hispanics account for over half the population under 20.
The future is not in doubt. Why ought this be of concern?

Jonathan Kay;

The reason multiculturalism now seems like such a fraud is that experience has taught us that old-school racism has nothing on the sort of hatreds brought into this country by the immigrants themselves: hatred toward homosexuals, toward heretics, toward “loose” women and, most importantly, toward each other.
It’s hard to get too riled up about Don Imus or alleged “racial profiling” by cops, for instance, when I see Canada becoming home to African blacks who have been charged with murdering other blacks by the villageful for the crime of belonging to the wrong tribe. Ditto when I watch Canadian Sikhs who are so proud that one of their coreligionists murdered another group of South Asian Canadians that they hold a parade partly in his honour. And then there’s the Liberal candidate in Edmonton- Mill Woods-Beaumont, who will have to explain to his constituents what he meant with his attacks on Israel, India and France.

I have advice for my friend Andrew Coyne – “Never equate the obvious with the unlikely”.
In other words – sometimes he thinks too much;

Barack Obama’s campaign for president has barely begun, and already the questions are mounting. Is he experienced enough? Is he tough enough? And, bizarrely, is he black enough?
[…]
It’s a pointless debate, by and large: black voters, for whose benefit the arguments for and aganst Mr. Obama’s blackness are supposedly being advanced, will decide for themselves whether and on what terms they will support him. Still, it’s fascinating that the issue should have arisen, and if it is pointless, it’s useful to know why it’s pointless. One of the things Mr. Obama’s candidacy may achieve is to confirm, not the irrelevance of race as a political issue, but the incoherence of it — the maddening, irresolvable undefinability of it.

“It’s fascinating that the issue should have arisen”…. Really?
The Obama campaign is running on melanin because it can’t run on track record.
Having elevated a biomolecule to the status of “political virtue”, what other outcome is possible, than to provoke debate about whether it is present in sufficient purity and quantity?

CJunk;

A reading of the ruling, in its entirety, and knowledge of the facts as they unfolded in Saskatchewan is needed in order to see through the dangerous precedent set by Justice Smith. He ignored completely the possibility of a conspiracy to defraud the father of his child, yet claimed with much flourish that because the father had not been with the child, the child could not, should not, and would not, bond to him. Yet, everyone in Saskatchewan knows that the father did all he could to gain access to, and reclaim his son … whom the mother did not want.
Welcome to Saskatchewan. Welcome to Indian politics. Welcome to the cesspool of Sask. government departments seeded so heavily with the “progressive” class that they can conspire and triumph wherever, and however, they want where race politics are involved.

While there are legitimate arguments about the “best interests of the child” in this case, ruling that the biological father be deprived of visitation rights for the next year seems especially mean-spirited — not to mention illogical.

“My concern is Ian could have immense difficulty, particularly in the early stages of his development, in reconciling all the complicated adult relationships in his life.”

What then to make of visits from those constituting other “complicated adult relationships”, like the biological mother, grandparents and other maternal and custodial family relatives? Some villages are more equal than others, I guess.
Less than a month ago an Ontario court issued a ruling that named three people as parents of a single child. One wonders if “Adam” might have received a better outcome had he presented himself to the court as a gay man.
There’s a link to the ruling here.

Racial preferences that favour visible minorities are “progressive”. When they encourage whites, they’re a “stunt”;

All the media attention is focused on a $250 Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship offered by Mroszczyk and the BU chapter of the College Republicans. Applicants must have a cumulative grade point average of 3.2 or higher; they must write two essays; and, here’s the kicker, they must be at least one-quarter Caucasian.

The reaction is proving their point.