Enough with the apologies

Bill Wilson’s letter to the editor contained many of the things I have been mulling over since the editorial on July 26 accusing many people of having a shallow knowledge of history and of cultural privilege. Please excuse my shallow knowledge of the past but I would add to Mr. Wilson’s list the Inuit displacing the Dorset culture and the accounts I’ve read of some First Nations treating the Inuit as sub human and killing them on sight. The other significant historical note would be that the First Nations were the largest owners of slaves in Canada, including hereditary slavery.

There are accounts of some First Nations treating those of slave descent poorly into the 1970s. Where are the retroactive apologies and reparations for past actions? The “white washing” of history has now been replaced by what should be an equally offensive term, the “red washing” of history.

Why not a balanced view including positive and negative events from both sides? Imposing current cultural values and sensibilities, a continually changing benchmark, on all of history and prehistory is nonsensical. Learning from that past and trying to avoid the mistakes of those who have come before is a much more achievable and laudable goal. Should local names be changed to those of the Clovis culture or any of the five or six waves of previously displaced cultures from the prehistory of North America?

If you are half white and half First Nations do you owe yourself an apology? What race ratio transitions you from the victim to the victimizer? Why is one part of your parentage so much more important than the other? There also numerous “white” cultures that had nothing to do with subjugating the Americas. Are they guilty just because of the colour of their skin even if their families moved here in the recent past? The very essence of racism is children born guilty because of their skin colour.

Changing the geographic region demonstrates the futility and inanity of such approaches.

I am half Scandinavian. Should I apologize to the British, many with Viking blood, for raids conducted by potential ancestors? Should Italy apologize for the Roman Empire and the Mongols for Ghengis Khan?

Shaka Zulu’s armies often wiped out half the population of areas they moved through. Should everyone of Zulu blood be responsible for all of time for that? The Hatfields and the McCoys demonstrated the futility of vendetta. They have now moved on. I understand they have a baseball game once and a while. They have found a healthy resolution to their feud.

How close to the present should past events be apologized for and by whom? I would put forth those who perpetuated the deed to those who suffered from that deed, otherwise it is a shallow gesture at best. There needs to be some sort of historical statute of limitations on a cultures misdeeds or we will never heal as a society.

Using race as a differentiator is a shallow and antiquated world view left over from trying to justify poor treatment of different cultures by classifying those different then yourself as subhuman.

The minor gene variance in the expression of melanin is hardly the basis for separating us versus them. Are red Angus cows a different race then black Angus, golden Labrador dogs versus black? Are brunettes a different race from blondes? The human species went through a genetic bottleneck about 75,000 years ago, inadequate time for speciation to occur. We are all African apes to the best of our knowledge. Let us focus on our common ancestry rather than all of our minor differences.

There are massive issues to be dealt with. Over representation of certain ethnic groups, of both sexes, in the justice system and in not completing an education are symptomatic of those issues. Cycles of abuse and neglect that are heart wrenching to witness and hear about are also overly represented.

But judging from what is written about these issues we are not solving them with the current approach.

I would posit that alternate methods of approaching these issues are required to make even generational headway. What those methods are I am uncertain, but hopefully they would involve common sense and a rational approach rather than pandering to the current political climate.

— Ryan Lander, Prince George