Too many people look the other way on racism
Not everyone derided first nations players at a quebec hockey tournament. but no one stood up for them, either
Julien Marshall was getting ready to hop onto the ice when the chants started.
“Gang of savages!”
“We pay your taxes!”
“Go home, savages!” These weren’t the ramblings of a young, drunk hockey fan or belligerent parent. It was a group of adults, banding together to let Indigenous children know they weren’t welcome in Quebec City.
After the initial shock wore off, Marshall skated over to the referee.
“I said, ‘Do you hear what they’re yelling? This isn’t regular trash talk, this is racism,’ ” 14-year-old Marshall recalled. “The ref just kind of said ‘Whatever’ and ignored it.”
It wasn’t the first time the First Nation Elites encountered racism at a Bantam AAA hockey tournament in Quebec City last month.
The team — whose players come from Cree, Innu, Mi’kmaq, Algonquin and Atikamekw communities — already had endured mock war cries and tomahawk chops from opposing teams.
But during the semifinal match, things escalated. When representatives from the Elites asked tournament officials to take action, they were met with indifference. One parent says he saw a referee laughing as players and parents hollered fake war cries at the kids.
In the end, the Elites won the game, went back to their locker-room and learned a sad lesson about being Indigenous in Canada.
“I told them, you’ll have to face this your whole life,” said Tommy Neeposh, the team’s manager. “It’s a tough thing to tell a kid.”
Neeposh says one of the players began to weep. The story of the First Nations Elites (first reported by CBC News) garnered attention for all the wrong reasons.
Most of the boys speak an Indigenous language as well as French and English. They play on elite squads during the regular season, alongside white players, white coaches and under the supervision of white referees.
Not all of these kids have an easy home life — some are the descendants of Residential School survivors — and they come from communities where rates of poverty are far above the national average.
For a few, the hockey rink is that rare safe space where they can come out of their shell and truly express themselves.
But to the parents in Quebec City — and I can’t overstate the fact that these were parents — they weren’t kids playing a game. They were a gang of savages who needed to go home.
Of course, Cree, Innu, Atikamekw, Mi’kmaq and Algonquins have called this land home for thousands of years. But that’s another conversation.
The racist chants started after the Elites began laying bodychecks on their opponents. Parents could have limited their criticism of the players to that aspect of the game. They didn’t.
Looking at video footage of the incident, it seems most fans did not join in on the hateful jeering. But there’s no evidence that any of them stood up for the kids, either. And that’s the problem with racism in Quebec. We’re so scared of confronting the issue, we’ve become experts at looking the other way.
In fact, the mere act of calling out racism awakens a sort of intellectual jiu-jitsu — the opponent in the losing position prevails. That is, the person accused of racism becomes the victim.
When the Quebec Liberals announced they would launch a public inquiry into systemic racism last year, it triggered a backlash across the political spectrum.
Opposition parties weren’t mad about the prevalence of hate, they weren’t mad that — months earlier — a young man was so fuelled by racist ideology that he walked into a Quebec City mosque and murdered six people.
Instead, they were outraged about how divisive a conversation about racism would be.
After his players were humiliated by adults, Neeposh told them they should prepare for a lifetime of discrimination.
They will likely receive subpar care at a hospital, their kids probably won’t have access to the same quality education a nonIndigenous child would, white landlords will make up excuses not to rent them property.
And some may face far more brutal acts of hate. But we won’t make an effort to spare them this life.
Because it is too uncomfortable to have a conversation about race, to admit to ourselves that we aren’t perfect and we can change, to get up in a crowded arena and tell another white person to sit down and shut up.