Bambi would like to thank her friend Amale for sharing this information about a white student association at McGill University.
As per the CTV article above, McGill University now has or could have a so-called “White Student Association”. Can you imagine?
Why are we allowing ourselves to be divided into black and white?
We have seen or heard of association such as the “black public servants” or “black students” or “black entrepreneurs”.
Can you imagine the narrow-mindedness of tribalism? It can go quite far.
Today, the story is about an association of white students at McGill University. Tomorrow it will be about “white this” or “white that”.
When will all this insanity stop?
An association of white, black, yellow, green red, etc… The colour does not matter. It is the sectarianism that Bambi is worried about.
Other associations of the so-called BIPOCs for “black, indigenous, and people of colour” (that funny term that Bambi is supposed to fit in ?).
In Bambi’s time, the associations were meant to celebrate cultures, not to fall into the trap of divisions… and sub-divisions.
It is both sad and worrisome to see stupidity and dangerosity, going hand in hand.
What has changed all of a sudden in 30 years to now to require associations based on stupid skin colours (whether white or black or other)?
Skin colour or hue (we may be darker in the summer for some of us) is just one characteristic of a person’s complex identity in life.
What happened to our unity?
As Canadians? As Québeckers?
As human beings? Bothers and sisters in humanity!
Is this the Canada we want to live in and leave as a legacy for our children and grand-children?
Bambi has escaped stupid divisions of civil war and she has never ever thought she would find a a neo-form of sectarian Apartheid in Canada one day.
Are all white people the same? Can we inter-change them?
Are all black people the same? What does a Palestinian from Gaza who has a black skin has in common with a financially privileged black American lawyer chosen as a vice-President or with a hard-working Ethiopian worker in some foreign countries?
What about a successful graduate student or entrepreneur of Nigerian origins? Or a Montreal youth from a poor neighbourhood who happens to have a black skin, who is a gang member, and whose dream in life is to succeed as a drug dealer?
Where is common sense for God’s sake… Not that common anymore. Bambi misses it.
If we do not stop to think about what is happening in our society (thanks Dr. Mathieu Bock-Côté for using your brain on our behalf), the end result can be quite ugly. Bambi knows what she is talking about. The Lebanese civil war was sadly famous for killing or kidnapping on checkpoints when people were from the “wrong” group of those in power. The best thing that Lebanon did post-war was to change the IDs of its citizens, erasing from it their religious affiliation. The population knows very well now that all those divisions were artificial.
In Canada nowadays, we seem to be moving into the opposite direction. We seem to be increasingly focusing on one single aspect of our complex identities and we are making it holy.
In the name of equity (or whatever it is called, diversity, inclusion, and equity), national funding agencies of science are now asking research teams to fit criteria of the above be funded… Instead of focusing only on MERIT.
What world are we living in? Where, in the name of anti-racism or equity (good intentions for sure), we focus on the composition of research teams instead of assessing their science only (who cares whom they are?).
For instance, would you like to consume a health app or a vaccine from a competent lab, produced by a competent pharmaceutical company? Or a lab that has an equal number of scientists from this colour or this religion, or this gender?
Bambi prefers safety and effectiveness to ideology in life.
To come back to civil war, how do you think all this started in Beirut? With much dangerous ideologies first and… then with weapons after.
To conclude this post, please make no mistake, no country in the world is immune to civil problems and even unrest, even those that are more stable and advanced like Canada. In other terms, democracy is a constant work in progress. For the latter to prevail, critical sense of citizens is a must!
