WEIGHING IN ON RACISM

This will not be about the presidential election. It will be about a totally unvarnished look at the innate bigotry of people who profess to know better but still make judgments based on some kind of racial notion. It is the old I-told-you-so school of bigotry, in which a professed tolerator shows his/her true colours – in spite of themselves.

With Obama clearly in my mind (isn’t it in everyone’s?) I engaged in a dinner table conversation with two older and we hope, wiser physicians. People of character, but sadly for me, like many- if not most – members of that profession starkly right-wing. Not that there are not thousands of that group who give of themselves in causes for social and medical justice – I apologize to them for what seems to be a generalization.

We all remember the outflux (is there such a word) of angry doctors from England during the time of the NHS. We all remember the strike by doctors in Saskatchewan when Tommy Douglas created what would become a national treasure – our own national health act.

But about racism: a civilized discussion about the virtues and failures of the American health system. Liberals like me always comment on stuff like – infant mortality – the U.S. is something like 17th on a world list. My dinner-table friends commented, not without truth, that if you factored our black Americans, the number would be closer to the top.

In Canada we have our own “factor-out” statistics. Crime heads the list. People suggest that if you factored out young Jamaican men from crime statistics, we would appear to be a lot safer. In the Prairies, if you factor out the aboriginals the prison population gores down dramatically.

All of these statistical gymnastics are true. What is also true is that we repeat what we have always done: we marginalize the unfortunate. We also criticize the poor for being poor. We criticize single mothers for being single. We arrange the arithmetic of society in such a way that we can find convenient scapegoats for our own failures.
“It’s not us – it’s them.” That may be true unless you just happen to believe that a humane society is judged by how it treats the least of us.

To all the libertarian supporters of Ayn Rand’s grotesque Objectivism – I wish you luck and success. By the way, if things do get really tough and you have no more scapegoats to blame, a friendly government will pick up the tab. My goodness – didn’t they just do that??