Offensively racist
Confessions of a student journalist part 8
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
—Jonathan Swift
Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind
If Mahatma Gandhi had worked at The Peak, he’d have emerged with all the passive-aggressiveness of a Hell’s Angel.
I’m thinking of days like November 5 2001, when I picked up the latest Peak to find this notice in the masthead:
In last week’s issue of The Peak, Glen Callender’s Wasting My Youth column contained language the Peak editorial staff considers offensively racist, thereby contradicting The Peak’s mandate*. Our response has been to censure Mr. Callender. We consider this issue dealt with and assure our readers that such an occurrence will not take place again.
There’s nothing like a good dose of libel to start the day.
This “censure” was a blatant violation of the Peak constitution—I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that Peak editors have no right to publicly smear the paper’s own contributors, just because they feel like it. The weasels were afoot once again.
The alleged racism occurred in a column titled Scenes from a bus, a collection of my most vivid memories from Vancouver public transit. Here is the passage that provoked the editors’ wrath:
One crowded afternoon on the #148 bus to New Westminster, a bickering aboriginal couple got on. They were both staggering drunk. The female half of the pair was about nine months pregnant. She was wearing a filthy oversize T-shirt with a cartoon of a man passed out on the floor surrounded by beer cans, with the caption “DRUNK ALERT! I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T GET UP!”
They shouted profanities at each other as they moved through the crowd. The woman sat across the aisle from me. Her eyes showed that she was on more than just alcohol. She had missing teeth. There was something wrong with her skin.
She nearly fell as she got off the bus. Her partner helped her steady herself. The moment she got her balance, she started to slap him. The bus pulled away.
That was the most upsetting thing I ever saw on transit.
Strong stuff, to be sure. My inclusion of the word “aboriginal”—thus identifying the ethnicity of the drunk couple—was all the editors needed to censure me for “offensively racist” language.
(As opposed to, I am forced to assume, “inoffensively racist” language. This oddball terminology alone should be enough to demonstrate that there weren’t many bright lights on The Peak’s editorial chandelier.)
Angered by the editors’ abuse of their positions—the latest of many cheap shots from a small leftist clique who wanted to run me out of the paper—I went on the warpath, which inexorably led to a tongue-lashing at the hands of Luke, one of The Peak’s all-time nastiest editors. Luke shouted at the top of his voice as most everyone else in the offices found excuses to slip out for lunch.
“That column makes me sick!” Luke shouted.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s fucking racist, that’s what wrong with it. You’re portraying aboriginal people as dirty, irresponsible drug addicts!”
“I’m not sure what you’re implying, Luke. This isn’t something I made up to make aboriginal people look bad. This is something that actually happened, right in front of me.”
“So fucking what? Why did you have to say that they were aboriginal? Why didn’t you leave that detail out of the piece?”
“Because I thought it was a relevant detail,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “When you ride public transit in this city, you continually get these sorts of insights into the tragedy of aboriginal people in this country, and I thought it would be gutless of me to whitewash that out.” So to speak.
“Really. So if the people on the bus had been white instead of aboriginal, would you have identified their race?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied, knowing full well how he’d react to what I said next. “Probably not.”
“See?!” he shouted. “You even admit it. You’re racist. You’re fucking racist.”
“Oh, give me a break. It’s not racist to acknowledge a legitimate social problem. Or should I not talk about ‘drunk Indians’ because white people don’t want to hear it?”
“That’s not the issue. You’re perpetuating negative stereotypes.”
“I don’t give a shit about stereotypes, Luke. I wrote it like I saw it. The truth is that there is an epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction in Vancouver’s aboriginal community, and I got a three-minute dose of it that scared the crap out of me. So I’m passing it on. Maybe if we all had drunk, pregnant aboriginals in our faces more often, people would be motivated to do more about it.”
Of course, this argument didn’t sway Luke, nor would any other. Luke despised me, and he’d drop dead before he’d stop defending the censure.
Luke’s nastiness aside, I couldn’t deny that some of his points had merit. Was it wrong, or at least poor judgment, to identify the couple on the bus as aboriginal? Perhaps.
But my story was an honest reaction to what I saw. It was a politically-incorrect nightmare come to life, so extreme that I’d have doubted its veracity if I hadn’t seen it myself.
Take a few moments and actually think about it. How utterly destroyed must an alcoholic be for her to drape a “DRUNK ALERT” shirt over her pregnant belly? To make a sick joke out of the permanent injury she’s inflicting on her unborn child?
If your answer is that you honestly can’t grasp the hideous machinations that could lead to such a thing, then you’re about where I’m at.
But there was more to the story, at least as I saw it. This was a suffering aboriginal woman, and unlike many other suffering aboriginal women, she wasn’t languishing on some distant reservation where non-aboriginals rarely tread. She was a drunk, pregnant, drug-addicted aboriginal woman barging right into the face of white Canada, a captive audience on a crowded suburban bus, bringing with her an unavoidable dose of savage Reality.
I wanted my rendering to be brief, blunt and disturbing, just like the experience itself. I wanted it to confront my overwhelmingly affluent and non-aboriginal readers the way my experience confronted me. And if it upsets some readers, well, good.
Then again, what one intends to write and what one actually writes are sometimes very different things. Perhaps my reasoning was flawed. Perhaps the passage could have been better written. Perhaps there are no easy answers.
But I’d rather brave a few slings and arrows by writing something problematic—something that might make people talk and think—rather than duck the issue altogether, and write something “safe.”
These were the thoughts that ricocheted around my brain as I defended myself against Luke’s tirade. But there was little point in trying to communicate them to the caricature currently swearing at me, for the simple reason that he wasn’t listening. I just sat there and stared at him, a defensive smirk plastered on my face, as he assailed me with every insult that came into his mind.
“I think you’re a fucking idiot,” he shouted, clearly taking great relish in his words. “Everything you write is bigoted and offensive. I think you’re racist, I think you’re sexist, I think you’re... What the fuck are you even doing here? How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven! Why don’t you get the fuck out of here? Why don’t you get a fucking life?”
A strange insult, seeing that The Peak routinely counted people in their thirties among its editors and contributors. At least there was an easy comeback for this one.
“Seeing that you’re giving me the politically-correct shit-kicking, what’s the deal with the ageism?”
“Fuck you,” he said. Touché, Monsieur.
Later that week, I was raped over the coals once again at the Collective meeting, this time with three editors at my throat. I got in a good hit when I asked them to explain how it could be that my column was so blatantly and outrageously racist, yet not a single reader wrote in to complain.
Of course, the editors didn’t care what the readers thought—activist cliques never do—so that was a waste of breath.
Unbelievably, one of them even accused me of making fun of the plight of aboriginal people, even though, as far as I can see, there isn’t a flippant word in the whole passage.
In the meantime, most of the other editors remained silent because they really hadn’t supported the censure in the first place; they just went along with it because they didn’t want to face the poisonous abuse of these bullies.
This personal email from one of the editors, written shortly after the meeting, illustrates exactly what was going on behind the scenes:
i just wanted to let you know that i was not present at editor’s meeting when the desicion to censure you was made, and had i been there i would have opposed it. i didn’t actually read your column until last night, and i didn’t find it even remotely bit racist.
i did know on friday that the censure was going in, but i didn’t say anything at that point to oppose it. i am tired of fighting. conflict in The Peak is too ugly, and i no longer have any desire to participate in it. not cool, i know, but that’s what it’s come to for me. i have learned that voicing dissent at The Peak makes me the target of aggression, and doesn’t make a difference in the end anyway.
i am not going to comment on the depths of the fuctitude this represents, ’cause it’s obvious. and, unfortunately, symptomatic of the culture that is being created at The Peak right now. i am sorry that it was allowed to manifest itself as a published attack on you. i am also sorry that i didn’t try harder to stop it.
During the fracas, several people privately expressed similar sentiments. Alas, this is always what happens when an aggressive clique takes over. A minority of bullies starts pushing people around, a timid and apathetic majority allows themselves to be pushed around, and the few who stand up to the bullies are mercilessly hounded until they shut up or leave. C’est la vie.
In the end, the Peak Collective didn’t have the fortitude to fire or even discipline the editors responsible for the censure. But it was a small consolation that sanity prevailed just enough for The Peak to run this in the subsequent two issues:
Notice of Retraction
The Nov. 3, 2001 [actually it was Nov. 5, 2001] issue of The Peak contains a censure of Mr. Glen Callender for “Scenes from a bus,” the Oct. 29, 2001 installment of Wasting My Youth. In the masthead of the issue the column is described as containing “offensively racist” language and a notice of censure is given.
The Peak editorial staff circumvented editorial review policies and overstepped its authority by issuing this censure. The Peak collective and editorial staff sincerely regrets [sic] publishing the statement and hereby issues [sic] a complete retraction. The Peak collective and editorial staff also apologize to Mr. Callender for any hardship or inconvenience he may have experienced as a result of this statement.
Just another week in the turbulent vortex of bile and madness known as The Peak. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth book.
♦ ♦ ♦