Canada watches U.S. riot, but must keep eyes open
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To clear Pennsylvania Avenue of American vermin so he could walk with an entourage to a boarded-up and deeply offended church for a photo-op and jiggle an upside-down Bible as if it were a sack of Shake ’n Bake.
What is he doing, we asked ourselves, again. And why?
It was a surreal interlude in a prolonged police riot that had spread across the U.S. since the weekend. The pitilessness was shocking, almost as agonizing as hearing George Floyd beg for his life as bored, uniformed men pressed him to death. They knelt on his neck, a sick parody of taking a knee.
Here in Canada, I was guessing how many American bodies would be struck by that marauding New York City police van, or the transport truck in Minneapolis. We saw a woman deliberately trampled by a Houston cop on a horse, a young man beaten for trying to help a friend collapsed in the street, demonstrators shoved so violently they flew into the air, a news photographer with her eye shot out, and many other attacks that were personally intended, not randomly directed.
It was particularly sorrowing that so many demonstrators were young, dressed in light summer clothing, and still idealistic enough to believe their right to protest would be respected.
The media were singled out for police punishment and arrest, as they had been at Trump rallies for years. White reporters tended to do better than those of colour, but that was just as true before Donald Trump won power.
Protesters armed with nothing more than a bit of cloth on their faces weren’t prepared for military thugs who came at them in sound-blocking helmets, face shields, uniforms and body armour, in armoured vehicles, and carrying guns, batons, tasers, gas canisters and other instruments to cause instant pain and terror.
And the mix was there, too: white supremacists posing as average citizens online and egging on the hate; good cops forced to join the riot; Trump thugs rejoicing; men at their worst; men at their best; good-hearted rally organizers trying to keep things calm; and above all, Americans with black skin displaying with their bodies, hearts and minds that life so long after slavery was still intolerable.
Trump was hiding in the bunker under the White House, shades of the German chancellery. Can’t you just see Trump jabbing his finger at street maps and shouting at his officials? What a silly man. Yet he will have his way.
The blood on the streets of American cities this week was a read-through, not even a rehearsal. But what is to be done?
It is intolerable to be something other than white in the U.S. and that has to change. But Canada has to change too, though not by these means.
I am proud that Canadians marched peacefully on the weekend for racial justice, but it seemed somehow fauxAmerican at this time of extreme U.S. racism to seize on a heartbreaking but as yet unproven story about Toronto police racism. Many Americans of colour who are alive and breathing at this moment will not see this year out. Trump, whether by coronavirus or bullets, will cause that.
It is not my job to agree with received wisdom, which is fortunate as I often don’t. I am of mixed race and in these fraught times, more racism is directed at me from the left than the right. It is possibly a borrowed American twitch.
Oh, Canada. I am always taken aback by how quickly Indigenous torment, Canada’s great shame, is forgotten in favour of mimicking loud, bloody, urban American pain under Trump and his retro-tribe. What of missing and murdered Indigenous women or young Indigenous men shot on a Prairie night?
Canada has different ends, different means. We are not Americans, not by any stretch.
“You can get killed just for living in your American skin,” Bruce Springsteen once sang about murder by cop. So much American blood will flow before November thanks to Trump chickenry.
That won’t be true of Canada, not if we keep our thoughts raised high, our kindness undimmed, and our intellect in flow.
It is intolerable to be something other than white in the U.S. and that has to change. But Canada has to change too, though not by these means