Like Mr. Mathieu Bock-Côté, Bambi refuses to fit limited identities (e.g., BIPOC or “Black, Indigeneous, and People of Coulour” or whatever other funny trendy acronyms… even if it is “deer of colour” ?).
She is just a deer. Period.
You can call her an immigrant, if you wish, because she is a first-generation immigrant (for over 30 years now).
Most importantly to her, she is a proud Canadian. She will remain proud… even if our society “succeeds” in destroying both its common sense and unity, with much ideology and less substance.
Bambi is a deer as well as a human being (yes it can happen!) who is Canadian, whilst being a New Brunswicker. She is also a Québecker who happens to also be Lebanese (with much pride of both!). Thus, she is also Arab (with tenderness, especially that the Arab world is in its darkest period of time ever)/Middle-Eastern, and Mediterranean (she is biased she knows… for her, the latter remains the most beautiful sea of the world, excluding our Atlantic ocean for sure ?).
All those trendy categories or sub-categories Bambi refuses to be re-assigned into, just like Mr. Bock-Côté (e.g., white, black, brown, yellow, etc.).
How can we succeed in truly respecting, and even embracing, others’ identity/ies if we do not have enough self-knowledge of/self-respect for our own identity/ies?
Thanks to Mr. Bock-Côté for describing to us the “absolute toxicity” of the “2020 identity reassignment”, to use his own words (an English translation is followed by the original tweet):
“Identity reassignment 2020
The new dominant ideology: I have seen myself as a Québecer, placing the French language at the heart of his collective identity and a historical adventure of four centuries. I learn that I am only a “white man”, and that apparently the colour of my skin is more important than my language, my culture, and my history. I must dissociate myself from the history of Québec and make myself united with the history of English Canada and the British Empire, due to skin colour. I finally learn that if I refuse this forced reassignment of identity, which uproots me in addition to abolishing my memory to racialize me, I fall into racism and colonialism. In other words, because I refuse to let myself be mentally colonized by the American imaginary, I would thus reveal my overall complicity with “white” colonisalism.
All of this becomes absolutely toxic.”
