The role I've played in spreading racism

Instead of gaslighting, let's own up to our bad behaviour.

Racism isn’t just the work of racists.

If anything, it’s most dangerous when it comes from well-intentioned people serving it up with a smile and good table manners.

That’s how hate thrives. It’s not the redneck hurling insults at a Muslim woman on a city bus that we should be most worried about. It’s all of the people looking at their feet while he does it.

I know what it takes to comfort racists because I’ve done it on a scale most people will never know.

It was in an article I wrote for the Regina Leader-Post six years ago. At the time, I wanted to highlight social problems in a Cree community in hopes that they would get more play in the 2015 federal election campaign.

So I opened the piece about the election with an anecdote about a bar fight between two Indigenous people in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. Typing that out just now made me cringe.

My intentions didn’t matter. The effect of my actions did, however. I helped spread a racist stereotype to 34,000 print subscribers and thousands more online. I wrote something that hurt people and helped justify hatred.

I mention this now because my home province is going down that same dangerous road.

I’m not referring to Mathieu B**k C*té, Rich**d M*rtineau or any of the Quebecor weasels who make an absurd amount of money fearmongering about immigrants and people of colour. I don’t see any redemption for those people and their foaming-at-the-mouth audience.

What worries me is seeing people I respect use their platform to minimize the effects of racism.

Last week, an article in La Presse quoted a non-Indigenous nurse saying her colleagues in Joliette are afraid of working with Indigenous patients. They’re afraid because something they might do or say could be misconstrued as racism and lead to them losing their jobs.

Yes, the real victims of racism are … white people?

Some context: The article was written in response to the firing last week of two nurses who allegedly bullied a 62-year-old Indigenous patient during a medical appointment in Joliette. The patient, Jocelyne Ottawa, claims her phone was confiscated, she was asked to sing a song for the nurses and they wondered, aloud, whether they could call her “Joyce” — a reference to Joyce Echaquan, the Atikamekw woman who died as medical staff taunted her at a Joliette hospital last fall.

The nurses were fired after a brief investigation by Quebec’s health ministry.

La Presse columnist Isabelle Hachey wrote a piece that only quoted the nurses’ union and unnamed sources who say the firing was political, a response to outrage over Echaquan’s death (now the subject of a coroner’s inquiry).

What’s frustrating here is that, while Hachey writes “no one is accusing Jocelyne Ottawa of lying,” Ottawa’s version of events doesn’t get any play here. Hachey unintentionally makes it seems as though this 62-year-old woman is either too sensitive or not smart enough to know when she’s being discriminated against.

This is wrong for two reasons.

To begin with, I’m fairly certain that Ottawa has seen enough racism in her life to know what it looks like. 

When she was born, it was still illegal for Indigenous people to vote in federal elections. Her community of Manawan was home to a notoriously abusive Indian day school. In fact, two years ago the Quebec Superior Court approved a class action lawsuit in which 22 plaintiffs claim they were sexually abused by priests at Atikamekw Indian Day School in the 1970s.

Given her age, these victims would have been contemporaries of Ottawa’s. She knows what racism looks like because she’s seen it take lives. No one who survived the abuse of state-run schools made it out unscathed. Many took their lives or attempted to. Some live with constant nightmares.

I don’t know Jocelyne Ottawa personally but I’ve visited all three Atikamekw communities. Some houses there have three generations under one roof: parents sleep on couches so their kids can nod off on a mattress and be rested for school in the morning.

When I stayed in Opitciwan eight years ago, some of the Indigenous police officers used expired flak jackets and worked for a fraction of what an off-reserve cop would make. The elementary school there was partially closed because of mould contamination.

None of this would be acceptable in a white community. We tend to look the other way when it happens on reserves.

The other galling aspect of the column is the idea of racism really just being a misunderstanding. In other words, it’s the victim's fault for not being able to see the good intentions of the perpetrator.

Here’s a “misunderstanding” that I’ve never been able to forget.

Six years ago, a Mi’kmaw woman died after she was turned away at the Montreal General Hospital. Even though she had a severe internal injury, Kim Gloade was told she’d need to pay $1,000 to be seen by a doctor because she didn’t have her health card.

So Gloade went back to her apartment and wrote a letter to her mother asking for her to send the appropriate documents to Montreal. She was in agony.

Gloade died before she could mail the letter.

I know about this because, after attending her funeral, her mother, Donna, read me the letter. She found it when she came to Montreal from Nova Scotia to collect her daughter’s remains.

The hospital denied this was a case of discrimination. They chalked it up to a misunderstanding on Gloade’s part.

Here’s another misunderstanding.

Three years ago, Gaétan Barrette — Quebec’s Liberal health minister at the time — ended a controversial practice of not allowing Inuit parents to accompany their children on emergency medical flights south for treatment. Asked why it took the government so long to change their policy, Barrette said something deplorable.

He said he “guaranteed” that allowing Inuit parents on the flight would result in someone “agitated, drugged, … under whatever influence” boarding the plane. After facing some blowback, Barrette insisted he was misunderstood.

Around that time, I covered the prevalence of sexual assault against Indigenous women living on the streets. We saw about 20 cases reported to police and, of those, only two resulted in an investigation. 

One woman thought she was lucky when she managed to get the police on-site while her assailant was still there. They handcuffed him, put him in the backseat of their cruiser and released the suspect two blocks away. Shortly afterwards, he threatened her life.

Apparently, the officers thought the victim “misunderstood” what sexual assault was.

When Hachey’s article was published last week, La Presse editor-in-chief François Cardinal praised it as an act of courage. It was, to his mind, an example of Hachey staying above the fray, not letting outrage define her coverage.

She was standing up for the right of an employee to make a mistake and have a fair hearing when that happens. She was fighting for due process.

All of this would be laudable were it not for one major problem. “Due process” rarely works in favour of the Indigenous people who live among us. The “neutral” journalist fighting for our system is fighting for a structure that keeps people like me at the top at the expense of everyone else.

Look at incarceration rates, the number of children in state care and the disproportionate number of First Nations, Inuit and Métis who live on our streets. Less than 1 per cent of Montrealers are Indigenous but they account for over 10 per cent of the city’s homeless population.

Christ, a few months ago, I reported on an Anishinaabe man who served three years in federal prison because of unpaid municipal fines. That’s what “due process” looks like for Indigenous folk.

That’s not a system I have much faith in, and neither should they.

But this one time something actually changed. Nurses appear to have faced consequences for their actions. Imagine that. 

When Ottawa was interviewed after the fact, she said she never asked for anyone to be fired. She just wanted a safer environment for Indigenous patients. 

I mention Hachey’s article because lately in Quebec media there’s been a backlash against minorities. The throughline is always the same: white people worried that they’ll be falsely accused of racism and have their lives ruined as a result.

So again, I think of the nurses who reached out to a reporter and actually told her they’re the ones who should be scared, and it fills me with rage. They need better training, and that’s on their employers. 

But if you remove accountability from the equation, it’s just a matter of time until we see another atrocity like the one that occurred with Joyce Echaquan.

I know this because I’ve practised racism — not the cross-burning type, but the everyday kind that so many of us are guilty of. Not on purpose, but not without consequences. And I know how easy it is to try to gaslight victims of racism because I’ve done that too. I’ll never forgive myself for it.

So this isn’t me wagging my finger at a reporter whose work is usually stellar. It’s me asking someone I care about to consider how easily we can harm vulnerable people with our words.

Even when we don’t mean to.

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Hey! So after lazybones over here didn’t publish anything last week, here’s Part 1 of a two-part series on homelessness in Val-d’Or. I swear it’s uplifting. No lie.

Also, we did another Zoom call this week with subscribers at it was everything I needed it to be. If you’re down to chat next week email me at heytitocurtis@gmail.com and we’ll set something up. Your feedback is always appreciated and it’s good fun to get to know each other better.

Your friend,

Chris