Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
The fact is, racism against First Nations people is still very present and accepted today. You can try and dismiss icecube’s accusations as “oh, they just think everybody is a racist!” but if you do that without recognising the amount of language and rhetoric born from historical racism in the last while of this conversation, then I think you need to re-evaluate.
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Let's play the Not Mutually Exclusive Game:
* Racism is still a thing in Canadian society today.
* Racism today plays ony a small role in the social ills that Natives suffer disproportionately from.
In other words, if racism were to vanish tomorrow, there would still be a large gap between the attainment of Canada's Natives the non-Native population. So while we shouldn't ignore racism, we shouldn't let it deflect us from those other issues. Such as:
* Toxic home environments for children
* Bad outcomes for children raised in single-parent households
* The lack of economic opportunity in isolated rural communities
* The corruption and inefficiency of the reserve system
* The culture of dependency fostered by reliance on social assistance
I'm confident that if you looked at the social outcomes of rural Newfoundlanders who stay in small isolated towns, don't finish high school, are raised by single parents, and who rely on EI for most of their income, they would be pretty bad. Much closer to the outcomes of Canadian Natives than to Canadian non-Natives.