Racist comments in Kitchener are the tip of the Canadian iceberg

On Wednesday night, about 60 people joined a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Kitchener.

The peaceful demonstration was one of several held across the country, to protest the death of Somali-Canadian Abdirahman Abdi, who died last month after police in Ottawa tried to arrest him.

Some people cheered on the marchers as they made their way from City Hall to the Waterloo Regional Police Services detachment office nearby on Frederick Street.

But others appeared hostile. One man blocked their way with a piece of rope, forcing the marchers to walk on the street. A few minutes later, a woman outside a bar on Queen Street yelled at some of the black protesters.

“If you don’t want to have any more children, stay celibate,” she called, according to my colleague Anam Latif, who was reporting on the march.

Then, Latif said, a man standing next to the woman said something about how he hates it when black people complain.

What a disgraceful display of racism.

I was shocked to hear about this happening in my community, even as I know that racism and bigotry in Canada are a bigger problem than any of us like to admit.

Canada takes pride in its tolerant attitude to people of many faiths, cultures, skin colours, and birthplaces. It is rightly seen as one of the most peaceful and free places to live in the world,

But let’s face it: If patting yourself on the back, and telling everyone how much better you are than Americans, were an Olympic sport, Canada would have won 23 medals at the Games in Rio, not 22.

In fact, on some measures we are worse than Americans.

Look at how the most discriminated-against minority is treated in each country. By nearly every measure, Canadian aboriginal people have a worse life than African-Americans do south of the border.

Our indigenous people have an unemployment rate of 14 per cent, while 11 per cent of African-Americans are unemployed.

Our aboriginal high school dropout rates are 23 per cent, African-Americans are eight per cent. Our aboriginal people are 10 times more likely than all Canadians to be in jail. African-Americans are three times as likely as all Americans to be incarcerated. You get the picture. Canadians are also more antiSemitic than Americans, according to a 2014 poll from the AntiDefamation League.

The U.S.-based league says 14 per cent of Canadians have antiJewish attitudes compared with nine per cent of Americans.

Among the findings: 26 per cent of Canadians (but only 15 per cent of Americans) agree with the statement: “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.”

So Canadians have nothing to be smug about.

Last month in Cambridge, an artist participating in a festival found a racial slur written on his work as it sat partially completed overnight.

And a Record investigation earlier this year found that Waterloo Regional Police have stopped black people and question them on the street four times more often than their presence in the community warrants.

There are some hopeful signs in high places. In the last federal election, Waterloo Region voters sent three non-white MPs (and one white guy, Harold Albrecht) to the House of Commons. That was a first.

And our police chief, Bryan Larkin, is taking seriously the fact that blacks get stopped more by his officers. He is studying why it happens and thinking of ways to make changes, such as hiring more minorities to the force.

It’s important not to be complacent as we move forward.

The ugly comments made to black protesters this week in Kitchener will help remind us of that.