Quote:
Originally Posted by PeteMoss
People for the most part just didn't know about the residential school issue I would assume. I had no idea about it until all the facts started coming out in the last 5-10 years.
But the major turning point in all of this is videos of these things happening. People are willing to give the police/government the benefit of the doubt on the facts they give them. But when they can see it for themselves - opinions change.
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Some people obviously knew. People in government administering the program knew. People who suffered from it knew. Journalists digging into it would have or could have known and could have blown the issue open if there was interest and they had editorial support. It could have been included in school textbooks along with other realities of discrimination in Canada. It could have been discussed on the evening news. But, it wasn't.
The severity of problems wasn't part of the common consciousness or the cultural zeitgeist of the time, so the average middle-class, white Canadian was wrapped up in thinking about other issues in their life. Had someone at that time shared the info and railed against the moral injustice of crimes done by Canadian government and society to indigenous families, they would have faced a lot of push back from people who wouldn't have accepted a telling of the story of Canadian life contrasting so starkly with their believed-in story of Canadian life and society.
If social justice work was as simple as just showing people the facts and them immediately changing their views, it would be easy. But it's clearly not. That's not what happens.
I don't think the average Canadian was a terrible person for getting on with life in front of their noses while believing in the happy multicultural story told of Canadian life as they understood it to be. I don't think the average Chinese is a terrible person for doing so now either.
Posts like the one by 81MC earlier in this thread are nasty, and ideas like the one he shared are the sort of thing that are contributing to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in Canada now. Same thing for Cali's ignorant equivalence drawn between China and the communist Soviet Union, or Ducay's ignorant claim that life in China is hell for anyone who isn't Han. The irony of claiming moral superiority over hundreds of millions of regular people while making ignorant and harmful assertions about them and their lives appears to be lost on them. Still, I'm not going to jump to thinking these fellow posters are bad people. I just think they're people that don't know better, because the things they have heard that formed their beliefs don't reflect the full reality.