ACKNOWLEDGING RACISM A GOOD START

Pascal Siakam is no stranger to racism.

He has experienced it and he sees it pretty regularly. What the Raptors all-star forward can’t fathom, and what he won’t accept, are those people who pretend they don’t see it.

With the entire continent forced to finally take notice of the different treatment blacks receive than whites from police and society as a whole with the George Floyd killing as the tipping point, Siakam says acknowledgment more than anything else has to be the first step in rectifying these wrongs.

“I think a lot of people don’t do that and we tend to act like it’s not happening or ‘I’m not seeing it where I’m from or where I live,’ but I feel like the way the world is now it’s impossible not to see it,” Siakam said on a conference call with local media Wednesday. “This is something that exists and I’m sorry to say it, but if you don’t see it then you must be blind or something. You gotta be able to see that and you gotta be able to acknowledge that. That’s the first step, knowing that it exists and accepting that it exists.”

Siakam doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to fixing this continent’s racial issues, but he knows the fix won’t be easy.

“For us moving forward, it’s not just the police system, we know what has to happen there,” he said. “We have to do better. We have to do a better job there. I don’t know how they have been trained, I don’t know what’s happening on that side, but we need to hold each other accountable for our actions and once something like that happens, as a white person, you seeing that, you have to be able to call that out because it’s there. We have to be able to do that.

“Moving forward we have to learn about each other, communicate, learn about different races and different places and things that you are not used to learning about. Talk. Talk about it. And if you see it, say it and don’t be scared to say it.”