Critical Perspectives and Reflections

BILL LEE  June 14, 2020 I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the language that is being used to describe the situation that has evolved between Canadians of Euro-Canadian ancestry and Indigenous people.1 One of the terms that bothers me is reconciliation which suggests we have begun to make up for the many past wrongs done to Indigenous people by our ancestors. I do not think we are nearly in that situation but have written on this in the past.2 The second term that I find problematic is "settler" and this will form the majority of the article to follow. I will end by suggesting that unless we face up to the reality of our colonial status, we can never begin to engage in a strategy to end it.  I suggest that in identifying and discussing the state of Canadian relationships with Indigenous people the term "Colonial class" makes much more sense than that of "settler". True it is a word that is much in vogue and is...

Bill Lee June, 8, 2020 The president of the USA, D.J. Trump, has been twittering (some would say blithering) on about members of Antifa and the "Radical Left" instigating the recent riots that have emerged out of the well organized and quite orderly demonstrations against Police violence against racialized people. He has even suggested he will label Antifa as a "terrorist organization [1] ". As usual with the twaddle that the man brays forth it is a completely unsubstantiated charge. Indeed, Trump is, as usual, misinformed, or lying (it may be that he is no longer, or maybe never was, able to discern the difference between the two). As for the “Radical Left”, Trump's words amount to the usual vague, unsubstantiated diversionary codswallop that he has been spewing, and so the same arguments apply.   Antifa is intent on confronting the Fascist Right and did not organize any protests on, or infiltrations of, this issue that I’ve heard of. I’m not a fan ...

BILL LEE June 1, 2020 I’m getting tired and frustrated with the growing number of stories of white people who attempt to practice their racism, to get some sort of punitive action taken by authorities, to chastise or discipline Black or Indigenous. I suspect that I am hardly alone in this. There are many examples, unfortunately, in both Canada and the USA but two recent examples from the USA are pretty representative of what seems to be a growth in this unsavoury practice.1 The first is a Whitestream2 woman in Central Park in New York with her dog. She called the coppers on a Black man, watching birds of all things, because he had asked her to leash her dog, hardly unreasonable given that they were in a dog leash area. Another was a white man who confronted five Black men he encountered using the building's athletic facilities in which he, and they, unbeknownst to him, had leased office space.  He felt it hard to believe that Black individuals could actually be occupying the s...