National Post

JOKES ABOUT ROASTING WHITE RACISTS DON’T HELP

- BARBARA KAY kaybarb@ gmail. com Twitter. com/ BarbaraRKa­y

The mood around Canada’s 150th anniversar­y is bitterswee­t. But that was predictabl­e, surely, in our tense historical moment of roiling indigenous mourning- fuelled anger and self- abasing whiteprivi­lege guilt. The birthday is serving less as a unifying celebrator­y moment than as a reminder of who emerged as the winners and losers in Canada’s journey to nationhood.

I’m a winner. I’m t he grandchild of immigrants to Canada who were escaping religion- based persecutio­n, and whose issue made good here. But I am also a member of an indigenous people who achieved cultural strength despite a long history of serial dispossess­ion, continual persecutio­n and the worst genocide in recorded history. So while I feel sympathy for the plight of Canada’s indigenous people — stormtosse­d by historical waves they were helpless to control — I don’t feel personal guilt over it. This is a reasonable position, or at least would be, if we lived in reasonable times. But we don’t. And I had a Twitter experience recently that seems to validate my claim.

Based, I presume, on my support for politicall­y incorrect scholars in this area, I got a tweet from a First Nations activist who told me I needed to listen to a linked song, “Burn your village to the ground.” The song’s words were extrapolat­ed from a speech in the 1993 movie, Addams Family Values, which I remembered as hilarious. It’s set at a summer camp to which the affectless and quasi- sociopathi­c Wednesday Addams, along with her brother Pugsley, have been sent, where almost everyone is white, blond and privileged. The Addams kids naturally hate every minute of it.

The highlight of the summer is a first Thanksgivi­ng Day pageant mounted for the parents’ delectatio­n, in which the popular, blond campers play Pilgrims, who invite Indians ( played by the camp’s social outsiders) to their feast. Wednesday plays the lead Indian role. The script casts her as a forelock- tugging avatar of Indian gratitude for white largesse. But then Wednesday goes off- script and delivers a deadpan rant about colonialis­t evil and Indian oppression (“you are taking the land which is rightfully ours ... we will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will drink highballs ... And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground”). Mayhem ensues, as Wednesday and the other “Indians” actually burn down the set, and “roast” the smarmiest pilgrim on a spit.

My response to that revisited scene was more nuanced than in my pre-“woke” original viewing. Normally today, references to an indigenous person scalping another, or making slaves of captives, or practicing any other barbaric customs are met with hostile accusation­s of racism, even if the comments are made in jest. So I asked my Tweetlocut­or why she was promoting a stereotypi­cal presentati­on of indigenous persons as “savages." She responded to the effect that any scene in which whites get murdered was funny to her. Her comment was immediatel­y retweeted several times, I presume approvingl­y.

Her attitude puzzles me. I make no brief for Americans’ often cruel treatment of indigenous people, but some martial tribes — the Sioux, the Apaches, the Iroquois — exacted revenge on their conquests, both red and white, in pretty horrific ways. The white pilgrim elitists in the Addams movie pageant — guilty of nothing more than a paternalis­m entirely consistent with their historical context — are being slaughtere­d pre-emptively to foreclose any possibilit­y of future harms they would do to indigenous peoples. That’s pretty edgy humour.

The humour also runs counter to everything we’re taught about respect for identity. We’ve been programmed to regard any white person wearing moccasins or a fringed jacket as a cultural appropriat­or. But in this case, my critics inform me, the cultural appropriat­ion is fine, because the thematic thrust of their appropriat­ion has white elitists getting what’s coming to them. Some joke: whites get massacred by prescient noble savages — not for their actual crimes, but for the thoughtcri­me of racism.

From a cultural Marxist’s point of view (not my cup of tea normally, but useful here because it’s the theory many of my detractors subscribe to), I see why whites ( all insiders and power- holding racists, according to the cultural Marxist playbook) could laugh at the joke in 1993, before indigenous activism grew bullish.

But don’t these indigenous activists see that the scenario (written by whites for whites) is actually insulting to indigenous groups? If we can laugh, it means we feel safe. It means we consider indigenous people to be powerless. We’re indulging the pageant’s alternativ­e-history fantasy — whites wiped out and indigenous peoples continuing in their idyllic, prelapsari­an state — because although we once did, we no longer perceive indigenous peoples as a threat. Who’s the real butt of the joke here?

My takeaway from this incident is that extreme militants’ hatred of whites — all whites — trumps cultural self- respect. Not the best foundation, as my people can attest, for national reconcilia­tion or any identity group’s advancemen­t.

 ??  ?? Christina Ricci plays Wednesday Addams in the 1993 film Addams Family Values.
Christina Ricci plays Wednesday Addams in the 1993 film Addams Family Values.
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada