Adams a racist? That’s the wrong question
Let’s just say this: I don’t give a bat’s ass whether Bryan Adams is racist or not.
Everyone’s asking the wrong question about Adams. It isn’t whether he is racist, but whether what he said is racist.
Deciphering whether a person is racist requires a knowledge of their intentions or for them to have made unambiguously racist remarks or have an established history of racism.
I don’t know Bryan from Adam to know whether he had ugly thoughts about Chinese people in his mind when he had a tantrum that his London gig had to be cancelled due to COVID-19 and posted these remarks on Instagram on Monday: “Thanks to some f---ing bat eating, wet-market animal selling virus-making greedy bastards, the whole world is now on hold … my message to them other than ‘thanks a f---ing lot’ is to go vegan.”
Is what he said racist? The answer — and it breaks my GenX heart to say this — is unequivocally yes, on many counts. Let’s see the ways in which this is so:
“Bat-eating”: Plenty of people around the world eat exotic meats and while there may be some who eat bats, it’s not a traditional Chinese food in Wuhan or elsewhere, nor is it eaten to the scale of, say, kangaroo meat in Australia. In addition, researchers haven’t yet pinpointed the origins of the virus. All they know is that some of first few people who got it had in their history visits to the wet markets of Wuhan.
“Wet markets”: For some reason, this term has become coded to mean something uniquely Chinese and backward or unsanitary, as if Canadian supermarkets only sell dry goods.
You could say Adams was just being thoughtless thus far, but his framing of the problem becomes racist because the term “bat-eating, wet-market animal selling” evokes Wuhan and China and blames the culture rather than the natural evolution of viruses for the disease. This kind of unscientific characterization has already led to overt racism against Chinese Canadians, and, coming from someone this high-profile, only legitimizes it further.
“Virus-making greedy bastards”: That’s the cringeworthy WhatsApp-level uncritical conspiracy nonsense about the Chinese manufacturing a virus in a lab for world domination that a celebrity of Adams’s stature should be ashamed of perpetuating. (The same conspiracy is switched around in China where some believe the CIA created and planted the virus there to sabotage its rising status.)
The defence and apology: “Apologies to any and all that took offence to my posting yesterday. No excuse, I just wanted to have a rant about the horrible animal cruelty in these wet-markets being the possible source of the virus, and promote veganism,” Adams wrote in another Instagram post Tuesday, next to a video of him singing the song “Into the Fire.”
The distilled version: I’m sorry if you’re offended, but it was not my intention. No mention of how his words harm Chinese Canadians. Also, veganism.
Allow me, a lactose-intolerant person who was raised vegetarian and still flinches at the sight of raw meat, to say: I wish western vegan activism could crawl back into the un-furlined colonial bat cave it came out of.
This isn’t about castigating the dietary preference or the stance against animal cruelty, but the brand of thinking that enables Brigitte Bardot, an actress from France, where frogs and snails are a delicacy and people eat horse meat, to think she has the right to decide whether people in other nations should eat meat or what they should ban.
Or Paul McCartney, the Brit, to decide he has the moral authority to call for an end to the traditional Inuit practice of seal-hunting. Or the U.S. diplomat Caroline Kennedy to shame the Japanese for hunting dolphins, a traditional source of food in Taiji.
Or Bryan Adams to decide that the stereotyped Chinese cruelty to animals caused COVID-19.
His compassion would be more appreciated — as the tweeter Joy Henderson said — if he took a stance closer to home on, say, the human workers at Cargill meat facilities in High River, Alta., and Montreal, many of whom tested positive for the disease, and have been stigmatized for it.
These activists would also be appreciated if they focused their ire on the root cause of disease, deforestation and displacement: global capitalism.
Industrialization of food, raising animals solely for slaughter and overfarming and overconsumption of food — including grains and fruits and vegetables — are wreaking havoc on farmers’ lives in the global south and messing with climate change.
Instead, Bardot described inhabitants of the Indian Ocean island of Réunion as “degenerate” and as “aboriginals who have kept the genes of savages.” McCartney in a spectacularly unselfconscious display of unawareness told media he was racist without knowing it — as a child. And Adams continues to drape himself in the goodness of veganism.
He’d be better served if he conducted a self-inquiry into how the issues he champions are complicit in the oppression of others.