J.J. McCullough @JJ_McCullough
My latest column about burkas and the "cultural common good"
http://www.jjmccullough.com/index.php/2015/03/13/on-immigration-tories-have-facts-and-the-public-on-their-side/ …
We are indisputably going through a phase of dark viciousness in Canadian politics at the moment, much of it rooted in the hysterical, Pavlovian thrashing that occurs whenever the realities of immigration are acknowledged even slightly critically.
Progressives are churning out sombre columns and somewhat less sombre social media campaigns in response to Prime Minister Harper’s ongoing efforts to ban burka-clad immigrants from reciting the citizenship oath, and related claims that this costume is “anti-women.” The plight of a Pakistani immigrant who had trouble at a Quebec courtroom on account of her headscarf — something Harper had nothing to do with, for whoever cares — is usually shoehorned into this same narrative of creeping “Islamophobia,” an evil that also featured prominently in Justin Trudeau’s big “liberty” speech earlier this week.
Progressive thought leaders see only bigotry and fear animating such distaste, but it is not irrational to be concerned about women wearing burkas in this country. Tenting up women as radioactively shameful or seductive creatures is a profoundly alien custom from a particularly regressive part of the planet, and one that will undermine Canada’s hereto understood norms of openness, civility, dignity, and equality if permitted to popularize. Whatever we think of veil-wearing as a case study in constitutional rights, it’s cultural consequences are undeniably corrosive, but the left has long ago abandoned interest in promoting the cultural common good in favor of identity politics — in which the uninhibited promotion and protection of diverse identities is the only principle worth defending.
Even the Conservative Party appears unable to operate entirely outside this intellectual lockbox. In an interview with Maclean’s the day after the Trudeau speech, Minister Kenney attempted damage control on the Islamophobe front by noting that his government has imported nearly 300,000 Muslim immigrants since coming to power. Who exactly, is such a statement intended to inspire, beyond other members of the elite who value the endless diversification of Canada as a positive unto itself? Polls suggest most of us think the country’s diverse enough already.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick MP John Williamson has been subject to a whole other demonization campaign for publicly musing that “it makes no sense to pay ‘whities’ to stay home while we bring in brown people to work in these jobs” — with “these jobs” being those of the traditional working-class.
In shrieking down such comments as “racist,” Williamson’s critics have consciously turned off their brains in a very particular way, since the (literally) colorful terms employed by the MP are well-worn phrases with highly appropriate meaning in the context in which he used them.
“Brown people” is an intentionally condescending turn of phrase used mostly by progressives to mock what they imagine to be paranoid bigots. Just the other day, I was listening to Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast, for instance, and his impeccably progressive guest made fun of the idea, supposedly deeply held by conservatives, that “only brown people are terrorists.” Brown, in this case, is a bland adjective, chosen to emphasize the inconsequential nature of race. For this reason, when someone speaks of “brown people,” they are invariably speaking of victims, or subjects of unreasonable scorn and suspicion.
“Whitey,” in contrast, is a phrase never used anything but pejoratively, and has its origins in the ultrajudgmental rhetoric of black power militants in the 1960s (my favorite example being Gil Scott-Heron’s wonderfully snarky poem: “Whitey on the Moon”). The whites MP Williamson was describing were undeniably of the “trash” variety — entitled slugs content to sit back and collect EI while the state imports low wage migrants from the third world to perform labor considered beneath caucasian standards.
The fact that it’s increasingly rare to see white people working menial minimum wage jobs in Canada’s big cities is a distressing cultural phenomena, and one worth bluntly observing. Yet elite groupthink demands we describe immigration as presenting no moral challenges whatsoever; their mantra cries diversity uber alles.
Immigration in Canada is often spoken of as a force of nature, like the wind or rain, for which the proper reaction is endurance without complaint. But of course immigration is simply a government program like taxes or CRTC regulations, and something that can and should bend to whatever needs and priorities the voting public deems appropriate.
The voting public, for its part, has expressed rather clear opinions on the matter, and the Harper government, in its own imperfect way, is heeding their wishes better than the press or opposition.
At that, many are enraged.
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