CANADIANS SHOULDN’T BE SMUG ABOUT INEQUALITY
Native people here face same woes as U.S. blacks
“How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it? I come to say to you this afternoon: however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.” — Martin Luther King’s speech from the steps of the state legislature, Montgomery, Ala., March 25, 1965 If there is one lesson that Canadians might take from the marches and the riots that have spread from Ferguson, Mo., to more than 170 cities and resulted in more than 400 arrests across the United States this week, it’s that we have nothing to learn from Americans about how to deal with the subject of race.
We might even go so far as to claim that Americans could learn a thing or two from us, at least if they ever decide to do something about their notoriously low standard for justification in the resort to deadly force. That low bar is what more or less forced the Ferguson grand jury to reject indictments against Officer Darren Wilson, the white cop who shot and killed Michael Brown, a young unarmed African-American, last August.
But Canadians will only make themselves look silly by taking things much further. Race in America is entangled in deeply partisan fractures and grotesquely polarized contradictions.
The president is himself an African-American who was swept into office on a wave of euphoria that welled up around his eloquent pledges to heal those same wounds. Even now, nine times out of 10, the killer of an African-American man is another African-American man. Even the University of California at Berkeley, once the great coliseum of civil rights and free speech, is now a censorious star chamber for “micro-aggression” and privilege-checking.
Canadians have long boasted that this country was born in 1867 without the “original sin” of slavery. We’ve prided ourselves on being unblemished by the thing that disfigured the American republic of 1776. The wickedness that persisted in Jim Crow laws a full century after the bloody civil war of the 1860s was pulled down only by the great civil rights movement that Martin Luther King led to the steps of the Alabama legislature in Montgomery that day in 1965.
But Canada harbours its own disgraceful legacy. Down through the decades, scores of federal and provincial laws isolated, dispossessed and ghettoized one racial or ethnic minority after another. Asians and federally-registered Indians weren’t allowed to vote in Canada until the late 1940s.
There are many heartening, role-model exceptions that are routinely cited, but they only prove the rule: The conditions that torment aboriginal Canadians to this day are no less a disgrace than the dead-end impoundments
More than half of Canada’s aboriginal kids probably won’t finish high school. That’s a dropout rate roughly six times higher than among non-aboriginal kids.
so many African-Americans find themselves within today. Aboriginal Canadians and African-Americans suffer from a nearly identical suite of maladies: high rates of cancer, of heart disease, mental illness, suicide, spousal abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome and tuberculosis.
The median income of African-American men is about $31,000. Among white American men it’s $42,000. In Canada, the median annual income for aboriginal people living off-reserve is $22,500 (among those living on Indian reserves it’s $14,000); the average annual income for Canadian wage workers in general is about $48,000.
The unemployment rate among working-age aboriginal people in Canada is 13 per cent — more than twice the general jobless rate among working-age Canadians. This is every bit as wide a gap as between African-American men and white American men.
Comparing welfare rates makes Canada look far worse. Slightly more than 10 per cent of African-Ameri- cans are on welfare, but in Canada, roughly one-third of aboriginal people are on welfare or some other form of income assistance.
Canada looks worse again when we look inside the prisons. African-Americans make up only about 12 per cent of the U.S. population, but 40 per cent of the U.S. prison population is African-American. A mere four per cent of Canadians are aboriginal, but more than 23 per cent of the inmate population in federal institutions are Aboriginal people — an incarceration rate 10 times higher than among nonaboriginal people.
Things are going downhill, too. Over the past decade, the aboriginal population in federal prisons has grown by more than 50 per cent. In Western Canada, two-thirds of the inmates in federal and provincial institutions are aboriginal people.
About 28 per cent of African-Americans are stuck with something less than a high school education — half again higher than the rate among white people. In Canada, about 29 per cent of aboriginal people have less than a high-school education, compared to 12 per cent of non-aboriginal people.
While one-third of African-American children entering high school will drop out — twice the rate of white kids — current dropout rates indicate that more than half of Canada’s aboriginal kids probably won’t finish high school. That’s a dropout rate roughly six times higher than among non-aboriginal kids.
On reserves, 74 per cent of schools are so dilapidated they lack such basic amenities as drinking water. More than half the schools function without a library, a gymnasium, a science laboratory, or a kitchen. Of Canada’s nearly 1.5 million aboriginal people, about half are under 15 years of age.
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King proclaimed all those years ago.
African-Americans might be forgiven for every once in a while losing patience with how long it’s taking that arc to fully bend towards them. For Canada’s young aboriginal people, it’s not clear that the arc of the moral universe is even bending in their direction at all.