Some people in Newfoundland and Labrador are talking
about racism.
This is good.
Unfortunately, they are talking about racism somewhere
else.
This is bad.
And, they aren’t really talking about racism with the
intent to do something about. They are
talking about something completely superficial and meaningless.
That’s worse because nothing will change in Newfoundland
and Labrador, where racism is so commonplace that most people don’t even
realize it.
You can see how disconnected the racism conversation in
Newfoundland and Labrador is from the local reality by the talk of tearing down a
statue to an obscure Portuguese explorer who may or may not have taken 57 slaves
from somewhere in North America to Portugal.
If you are looking at that and scratching your head a
bit, well, you should.
We know very little about Gaspar Corte Real. On his one voyage early in the 16th
century, Corte Real led a small fleet of three ships, only two of which made it back
to Portugal after stopping *somewhere* along the coast of northeastern North
America. The one with Corte Real on board disappeared.
And everything about him disappeared into the ocean, or would have had the Portuguese government not resurrected him and embellished his story as
part of a campaign in the 1960s to win some support for Portugal at time when
its dictatorial government was involved in human rights abuses and a bloody colonial
war in Africa.
As part of the campaign, the Portuguese government
gave the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador a statue, which has
stood in plain sight but entirely invisible since 1965.
Flip
ahead to 2017, when, in the midst of a national flurry of stories about statues
somewhere else, a reporter for the Telegram looked around to see if there were
any dubious statues that could be hauled down here. It was the ultimate local angle approach to a
national and international story since pretty much everything in the story is
unsourced.
The claim about 57 slaves in the story comes with no
attribution or source and the source cited in the Wikipedia entry on Corte Real
gives the Telegram story as the source.
The number is absurdly precisely, given the fact there is very little
known about the guy. But in all likelihood,
Corte Real did what pretty well every European explorer did at the time. He landed, captured some locals, and brought
them back to his country.
Doesn’t make it
right by any measure but that really isn’t the point. The story about capturing slaves and that he was a slave trader is an invention of very recent writers. We do not know very much of anything with any certainty about him beyond that he existed, was from Portugal, and may have reached some part of North America around the time that John Cabot sailed from England to what is now Newfoundland.
Three years after *that* story from the Telly, the statue has come
back into view as a result of a local demonstration inspired by events in the
United States. Even after the Telegram
story, an astonishing number of people – including many who supported the local
demonstration – did not have a clue who Gaspar Corte Real was.
They just wanted to haul down the statue.
But what does that have to do with racism in
Newfoundland and Labrador?
Well, nothing
at all. The statue isn’t there to praise
slavery and racism. That’s what the controversial
American statues are all about. Edward Colson, whose statue wound up in Bristol
harbour last week, made his fortune in the European slave trade. He was English. Bristol was his home port, and well, you can
see a direct line.
But Corte Real?
There isn’t a line.
There isn’t anything.
The people fired up about Gaspar Corte Real are not
really interested in doing anything about racism in Newfoundland and
Labrador. They are just sending a message
about themselves. The statue isn’t about
history, it is about today and about consciously avoiding any concrete action
to acknowledge racism in Newfoundland and Labrador.
An empty gesture is easy. It requires no effort.
But the thing is, many of the folks ready to pull the
statue down, were alive in 2007. That’s
the year that they and their neighbours elected a government with one of the
largest majorities in the province’s history.
A part
of the platform was a policy to give women $1,000 for every baby they bore,
along with another hundred bucks a month for the first year of the baby’s life.
This was an answer – supposedly – to the province’s
declining population. It looked an awful
lot like the sort of pro-natal policies in nationalist and ultranationalist
countries around the globe. And just so
no one could misunderstand what it was about, the Premier even made that plain
at the news conference when he made the campaign commitment.
“We cannot be a dying race.”
Not a single reporter asked what race the Premier
meant.
Not a columnist nor editorialist asked the question.
A couple of reporters dismissed your humble
e-scribbler’s efforts to ask the question with the admonition that “we all know
what he meant” or words to that effect.
Truth is, people *did* know what he meant and they
were just fine with that move as part of a larger effort to create a
closed society defined along what one throne speech referred to as a nation
made up of many nations.
Sounds wonderful but when you live in a province in
which 96% of the population is made up of locally born descendants of Europeans
from the British Isles, the dying race in the 2007 policy wasn’t anyone with dark
skin. The reference to nations looks suspiciously like someone substituted the
word nation for what people used to call race.
Even then, though, there as something that was about dividing
people according to their ethnicity. Sectarian education, and the associated division
of government spoils, and electoral districts, along religious lines also
paralleled a division between ethnicities:
English and Irish chiefly. So, the
attention paid to European ethnicity after 2003 – the celebration of “Irishness”
is part of that - harkens back to the old days.
Separating people into groups and discriminating among
them on that basis is an essential feature of political culture in Newfoundland
and Labrador because it is an essential feature of the society and culture in
the province. The signs of it may be
less formal, less obvious today than it was 20 years ago but the signs are
there is you understand what you are looking at.
The whole thing is built around definitions of us and
them, of defining who is the same and who is other. We do that effortlessly internally in the
same way we do it externally as well. After
2003, we had a litany of stories about foreigners who were supposedly trying to
rip us off. Federal Liberals in Ottawa,
mainland companies like Abitibi or ExxonMobil, and - at the zenith in 2009 – the
vast and nefarious “Quebec” conspiracy to shag us at every turn. “Their” agents were everywhere.
This tendency lives with us today. The ban on travel during the pandemic reeks
of xenophobia. Those who are not from
here come off as filthy (disease-carriers) who cannot be trusted to follow the
rules. The government announced the policy after lurid tales of tourists
surfaced from Bonavista.
“I met a
couple from Nova Scotia,” the mayor of Bonavista told CBC. “I also met a couple from Quebec. I've seen
some of the American licence plates — I have yet to speak to any of them
in person but we do see them around and we see them going to the drive-thru
that's still operational, we see them going to the coffee shops, as well as
some of the local grocery stores.”
“If you come from away, stay away,” the province’s
health minister said.
If that filthy, untrustworthy outsider tone wasn’t
clear when the government first announced it, then the exemption policy on 05
May certainly rang the gong. People who
could get in were some version of locals. It was a call to tell what Danny
Williams once called homing pigeons that they could come back. But the others were barred, even if they owned
property here and even if there was a constitutional guarantee that as Canadians,
they had a right to move about the country
These are all old subjects for regular readers of
these e-scribbles. Other people's bigotry
and prejudice and racism turn up frequently in 15 years of posts. Very
little has changed. So commonplace are
racial slurs that a young man from the west coast recently noted on Twitter
that he had used an ethnic slur to describe himself, without realizing it was a
slur. A young woman on Twitter,
self-identified as Indigenous, did not bat an eyelid as she attributed attitudes
and beliefs to someone else based solely on her perception of the other person’s
race. Or consider the dispute between the Innu and the NunatuKavut people, that
includes
arguments that are based on race and racial purity.
Racism is so common an element in local culture that
the recent
stories about anti-black racism are hardly
astonishing. What is remarkable,
though, is the intensity with which some people carry on about an irrelevant statue.
The reason is simple to understand, of
course. It is like the plastic bag ban. The
largest source of plastics pollution in the province is from plastic fishing
gear. No one would lift a finger to deal
with it, though, because to do so would challenge a large and influential part
of the economy and society. It would take work. So folks settled for a meaningless display, satisfied their consciences, and went on to other things.
Getting rid of a statue no one knew anything
about and cared even less for allows the people who want to trash it to signal their virtue as they do nothing to address the problem
of racism in the province. It is an
expression of power and privilege. In its
own way, the statue crowd are as plain a reminder of who has power in the
province and who doesn’t and that is what will make ridding Newfoundland and Labrador of racism such a long and difficult struggle.
-srbp-
