[Hakan]

I'm sorry, but I have always known the black licorice candies as "******** babies". No doubt it's racist, but to label it as a thing of the past is blatantly wrong. I've never heard them called anything else. None of me or the people I associate with are racist, that's just what they've always been called.

So "no doubt it's racist" to use that term but "none of the people [you] associate with are racist." Right. This is the definition of hypocrisy. Because you've always done something that way doesn't make it any better or add any reason to why you should keep doing it that way. You have correctly identified your habitual racism but yet still continue to persue it. That is being racist. Like it or not. You can always change what you call those things to something that isn't racist but nobody going to tell you what to do right? That's fine, keep on being racist, but don't absolve yourself of what you are with the most vapid of excuses like your personal tradition.

What really makes me mad is the double standard that exists. There can be a Black Entertainment channel and an Aboriginal Peoples network but can you imagine the outcry if someone made a White Man Channel?

There are many white man channels in everything but name. Infact almost every single channel out there that doesn't cater to a specific minority group niche market IS a white man channel. Don't believe me? Go turn on any sitcom or drama and tell me how much white people are represented as opposed to other visible minorities. How many news anchors/reporters are white? How many game show contestants are white? The only reason that there isn't a specific "White Person Channel" is because the idea of a 'white' race is only ever invoked in racist dialogue. Whiteness is not an ethnicity or a group association but a way to impose power over others that are non-white. Otherwise, whiteness is just taken as normal and the basis where all group relations stems from. Think about it, where do you hear the term white being used to describe a group's interests? Always in some type of racist dialogue: white pride, white power, etc. That's because whiteness is meaningful ONLY in its racial relation to subordinate 'races.'

I read in today's paper the government is spending 56 million over the next five years on anti-racism programs. If that is not the biggest waste of taxpayers' dollars I don't know what is. That money should be going to education and health care, not towards telling Joe Blow from Surrey it's okay his city has turned into New Bombay.

This is ironic because it basically proves the necessity of this kind of funding.