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Originally Posted by djsFlames
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So yeah, it definitely takes a certain mindset to be a guy in your late forties who actually should know better to let that word be uttered openly by yourself in such a setting and then not think enough of it to not revisit it and own up to it afterward.
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It can go the other way. It’s always product of environment and maybe lack of experience and exposure to learn that certain terms are no longer ok. Or something is dormant for a long time that it sneaks up in you. The older the wiser but also means their formative years were longer ago. My dad is 67, born in 52 in a small prairie town. I’ve know him for 40 years and I would never ever consider him or anything he has done or said as racist in my lifetime. Up until last year during a visit when discussing the recent population increase in his prairie city he used a derogatory term to represent the high percentage of new immigrants as Japanese. I’d never heard him used that term ever and I doubt in 50 years he himself ever had or even had a reason to speak to anyone anywhere about something that would have put him in a position to use that term.
My dad’s father was shot down while piloting in WWII, a time when that term would have been common. If you do the math of dates you can see my grandfather survived the crash. His co-pilot did not. You can guarantee he heard the term as a child, and tacked on possibly because they were considered the enemy that nearly killed his father. He then went on with his simple normal prairie life as a normal dad with wife three kids a dog and a job in the grocery business. He’s also from a region that certainly is not at the forefront of progress on racial, LGBTQ, etc. issues.
So since someone here will tack on that I’m making a bunch of implications towards the Peters situation and inserting some time of condoning of this allegation, I’m not but I might as well add on. Bill is from Three Hills. A rural part of Alberta, that also wasn’t probably at the forefront of the end of racism. I don’t know, maybe they were. I’ve never been but I suspect based on other comments over the last days that there is racism still strongly alive in parts of Canada.
The side of this that will carry on after the dust settles is Bill, his kids, his family and his friends will forever have to defend the question. Is Bill a racist, or was he racist in that incident and otherwise has not been? Are they also racist too?