does white privilege exist in canada?

again: this is an american concept, it's not a canadian one, and it's certainly not a universal one; you can't just take an idea that is specifically derived from the legacy of chattel slavery in a very small geographic area and apply it to a country and a culture where that never existed. that would be called "universalizing the specific", and is an error in logic. it's ahistorical. it's wrong...

so, if you want to talk about privilege in canada, you need to separate it from the legacy of slavery in the united states and place it in the context of canada's own race relations. in canada, we had the underground railroad, and we wrote our constitution specifically to restrict "states' rights". where anti-black racism existed, and it did, it was mostly carried out by citizens, and opposed and fought against by the state; our government almost always intervened on the side of the blacks, in an attempt to fight against the white supremacists. the history is almost totally reversed, in that sense.

does something like white privilege exist in canada? kind of. sort of...

in canada, privilege is mostly about our relationships with indigenous groups. we didn't have chattel slavery, but we did and still do have the indian act. the thrust of our colonial state was always directed at the indians, not at the blacks - who we went out of our way to free and help settle here, even though they chose not to stay for very long.

to an extent, privilege is more of a perception than a reality, and if you're convinced that it's real then it becomes real. it's a kind of solipsism, in that sense. so, it's really important to actually go out and talk to people about it...

for example, i had a conversation a few weeks ago with an asian person that was convinced he had asian privilege. there's some debate over this - is it a real thing? well, he was asian (i suppose he's still asian.), and he was convinced it did. that's his perception, i guess.

so, does somebody like jagmeet singh have asian privilege? he's not really black, of course. well, i don't know, i guess you'd have to ask him what his perception of that is. i can tell you what the statistics say about second-generation south asians in canada, and it's a pretty well off group.

and, i can point out that he's a 38 year-old with no meaningful life experience running for prime minister at the head of canada's historical third party - an opportunity that somebody with his background would be unlikely to get in pretty much any other place in the world, and that one wonders if he'd have here if he wasn't asian.

so, i don't exactly want to reject critical race theory. i'm broadly in support of critical legal theories, as ideas. but, we can't just take the american crt and apply it here. canada needs it's own crt, and nobody's really developed it, yet. i don't think...

the liberals are supposed to do better than this