I'm actually surprised by the amount of pushback against the verdict, from Trudeau and the federal justice minister to legal scholars to marches in most major cities. I won't go so far as to say I'm expectant of something better next time, but the high-profile response is better than in the past. I agree that there should be more outrage, but, well, white Canada does not like to entertain ideas that racism exists except amongst its whining victims.Inder wrote: ↑14 Feb 2018, 3:03pmThat verdict should've received Zimmerman-level outrage and media coverage, but I guess the Olympics are on or something. A disgraceful outcome.Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑14 Feb 2018, 11:29amThe boss got her first piece of genuine hate (e)mail this morning. About a year and a half ago, there was an incident back in Saskatchewan where a white farmer shot and killed a First Nations kid on his property (the kid and his friends had been drinking, may have been coming to steal, may have just been goofing around—it's very open to interpretation). The boss wrote an op-ed for one of the national papers about the initial reactions to the case. It was mostly well received (tho she did get a few "you don't know how hard it is for white people" emails), but in the wake of the trial's conclusion—the farmer got off; cynical as I am, I was surprised, because the evidence was open-and-shut manslaughter, but the all-white jury proved Saskatchewan is indeed the Alabama of the tundra—her piece has been circulating again as part of a general discussion about the case. So she got this rambling, semi-coherent email demanding she resign and that he was crowd-funding to make the dean fire her for being hateful and backward and ungrateful for all white people have done for her and her fellow savages. And I thought … "Vince?"
I grew up in the town where the trial was held and told a student who thought the verdict was justified (he has a misapprehension about Canada recognizing castle defense arguments, as well as a confused belief that the kids were on trial) that for all I knew there were people on the jury who I went to school with. So I came of age in that mindset. It's not necessarily hating and fearing indigenous people but that they are not quite human, not quite deserving of sympathy or recognition. They aren't normal and so they are abstracted. Between that and the jury more easily identifying with the defendant—by race, region, perhaps occupation—I guess that was enough for them to decide that no matter what he'd done, he was an innocent who didn't need his life ruined by an encounter with those lesser creatures. As some have suggested, a simple thought experiment helps illuminate what was going on. If the jury had been all indigenous people and they convicted him of murder, his defenders would see race politics at work. That they deny it with the all-white jury that did exonerate him is telling—race is something that exists amongst non-whites and it's a mark of inferior status. I'll have to go back to that shithole town the day my mother passes and is buried, but after that I never want to set foot there again.