Racism vs systemic racism

This isn’t Québec bashing, I just live in Québec and thus my examples comes from there. I’m sure you’ll recognize people from your place who say they don’t see color. I’ll show here why this is naive.

First and very fundamental, one needs to understand the difference between racism and systemic racism.

Racism does and can exist towards anyone. Doesn’t mean it’s systemic.

Systemic racism is when an often unconscious pattern of discrimination is installed through a rigid system.

When I was in Jamaica, I experienced racism many times but twice in explicit manners.

First one was when I was walking some street of Kingston and someone yelled “Go back to England white boy” to which I answered “Never been, thanks!”

I’m a french-canadian with some Aboriginal, Irish and Scandinavian genetics who had never been to Europe, so, of course, this was reactive racism, he saw a whither skin and through his personal experiences of English colonialism aimed his hatred at me.

Another interesting example is of positive racism. I entered a hotel and asked where I could use the internet. The doorman brought me to a private room obviously reserved for clients, which I wasn’t. Had I not been of such a pale skin color, I doubt very much that they would have allowed a non-client to use their private internet freely.

Now this last positive racism could be considered systemic in the sense that the whole touristic structure there encouraged this type of behavior.

Now to the matter at hand, recently, in Québec, Mpambara called out Dolan for being part of a system of racism.

Dolan could have answered many things, like the fact that for his story only white actors would fit or whatever other answers that weren’t part of this systemic racism, but he answered precisely in the way someone part of the systemic racism thinks. He said that he didn’t saw color but talent.

Now here is the fundamental vicious circle of a system. Why would an actor be better? Well, there’s innate talent, of course, genetics, beauty, but what studies have proven, often told as the 10k hours rule, is that practice is the key, and thus, experience is key.

What happens when for generations of people only hiring white actors, is that the black ones never do get more experience, and instead of being paid to play, they are somewhere doing another job to pay the rent hoping for an audition, wasting their talent.

The same goes for women. Cormier, a known singer in Québec, said that male scene technicians were better. Well yeah! Duh! You only hire male technicians, these girls never get to prove themselves nor take any experience. It’s a vicious circle!

We could take a clearer example. Let’s imagine that slavery was just abolished in the USA and someone at the Harvard admission commity would say that they don’t see color, that blacks and whites now have an equal chance of getting in.

Not without scholarships they won’t, they don’t have a great-grand-father’s gold coins heritage from Europe.

That is also why we see many governments around the world doing positive discrimination for employability, to even out the past.

Let’s close this with a final example to help differentiate racism with systemic racism. Racism is a very superficial thing, it can be something like confusing the origin of someone because of the tone of their skin but it can also be a generalization of ethnicity, so yes the Jews calling Germans such and such during wwii was racism, but it wasn’t systemic, there wasn’t a system in place discriminating against the germans.

But there was a systemic discrimination towards the Jews, we all know that part.

And yes it can change through time, now, in Palestine, the systemic discrimation is against Muslims, so a Palestine Muslim calling a Jew such and such isn’t systemic racism because the system is now aimed at a systemic discrimination against Muslims, but it is still racism for a Palestine Muslim to call Jews such and such, get the difference?

Does this mean that our filmmaker Dolan or our singer Cormier are racist and sexist? Not necessarily. But does it imply that they profit from systemic racism? Definitely!

They do not take any risk in breaking the pattern, only use the elite and thus repeat the patterns installed by their ancestors. This is clearly systemic racism and sexism.

Saying sorry isn’t the answer nor saying that one is so above it all that they don’t see race or gender, they only see the soul of the individual. Bullshit.

One needs to invest in apprentices, and pay them and yes, dear Dolan and Cormier, that short-term implies less money in your pockets, but do you have any visions, as artists should, or are you just sitting on top of your ancestors arrogance?

We’ll see, I know I’m with Mpambara and the feminists on that one.