Don't call me Canadian

Thursday, January 31, 2008

It's just amazing how many different terms racists have for people that they don't like - and while I could go into a long list of all the different terms - everyone already knows them - but something I've never heard of until now is white people using the word Canadian in a racist way against black people:

Here's some background from CBCNEWS:

The trigger point occurred over the weekend on the popular American website The Huffington Post, quoting a brief Canadian newspaper story that revealed that the term "Canadian" is being used in parts of the U.S. as a euphemism — as code — for a racist characterization of black people.

A journalist in Houston last week uncovered a widely circulated e-mail from a local assistant district attorney who used the word "Canadians" to describe blacks on a jury in a pejorative way. The e-mail was written in 2003 but was revealed only recently as part of an unrelated controversy.
Apparently - at least according to some sources the article sites - this has apparently been going around for sometime. Here's another quote from a post referenced in the article:

"Ten years ago I was a hostess at a restaurant located in, let's say, a Southern city and the wait staff would often instruct me not to seat them any 'Canadians.' Once I stopped being on the lookout for hockey jerseys and vocabularies peppered with 'eh?' and 'quite,' I made a point of slamming those waiters with all the 'Canadians' I could find."
At least now I know that if someone looks at me and calls me a Canadian, I'll have to take a second to process it and see what they really mean, because maybe somewhere along the way during a secret meeting of white racists there may have been a vote to just use it as a blanket term for all people of color in a racist way.

Read more here down at CBCNEWS.