Wanting Walls, Roof Not Racism: PATTON

Claims of racism are the first refuge of those who are incapable of providing a rational defense of what they support. Page one of the cancel culture playbook. A playbook used by those who claim they have critical thinking skills.

Ron,

Let’s not forget that, while there are those who use ‘racism’ as a cudgel, racism is very real in our society and around the world. It’s easy to dismiss it when either it doesn’t apply to you or when you don’t understand its effects.

While I too reject such a claim when it comes from certain quarters or in certain circumstances, I’ve seen too many legitimate instances of racism to reject all such claims out of hand. It’s particularly heinous when it affects children. In some instances, it is overt, in some, thinly veiled and, in others, very carefully cloaked. However it presents itself, it can be very damaging to the victim.

We need to recognize that people do face racist actions and behaviours which affect their lives, sometimes very deeply, and not lump them all in together with those for whom it’s a part of their agenda to cry “racist/racism” at every possible instance. The majority of the people I’ve heard objecting to the Sprung structures are doing so because they are not appropriate for the use the City is proposing to use them and/or they are being placed in locations without proper access to supports. There are those, however, who have said they are opposing them, whether in their community or across the city, because they don’t want “those people”, “people like that”, “foreigners” and similar descriptors to be accommodated in the so-called welcome centres. When you see people as “them? as opposed to a component of “us” and are excluding them on that basis, it may be based in racism whether you are aware of it or not.