Undercover Brother

White Supremacy: putting that sh*t on everything.

Recently, someone called me a “racist.” I would like to say that my accuser was Canadian, or perhaps, black, or some other concentration of the oppressed classes. Standing on race at that point, even if it was unfair, that could be forgiven, maybe – but she was not. She was another white, middle aged, American woman expat just like me. What started off as a pleasant conversation with some Canadian acquaintances, turned when my fellow countryman decided to hijack the conversation in order to prove her “woke” bona fides.  While I had managed to change the subject and brush off her first two attempts, being uninterested in discussing her polygamous (and probably doomed) marriage, and whether the land of a certain fictional Western was stolen by white invaders, she was not to be deterred and referenced the recent Dobbs decision on abortion. Between her and the others, they descended into the typical American-bashing tropes.  Tired and irritated, having been forced to attend this function in the first place at the behest of my child, I was having none of it. I decided right then and there I was going to push this to the edge. This woman was tiresome. Damn the torpedoes. I only have so much patience and I was fresh out.

The perception of Americans as evil, racists, misogynistic, and/or morons is a favorite thing of a lot of Canucks. Sometimes it’s just Republicans, (the oppressed classes), sometimes it’s just a particular race (white v black v Asians) and sometimes it’s all of us (various trade disputes, interventionists wars).  And it is everywhere, all the time, whenever it’s convenient. Trudeau even accused the Trucker’s Convoy of being funded by “American MAGA Republicans” which is ridiculous because at least half of MAGA probably thinks Canada is a myth.

But what is relevant to this story is the “why”, not the “what”, and the “why” was I was talking about abortion. Well, okay, not abortion precisely, but the Dobbs decision, the one that “rolled back” Roe v. Wade. This other American, a suburban transplant from a flyover state, was slandering Americans to confirm this sentiment that Conservatives who think that abortion is wrong are simply medieval troglodytes. Her opinion was that they don’t care about anyone, especially women, and all of America was one bad SCOTUS ruling from Gilead.  Also, conservative Americans are, of course, racists. Since most American conservatives have something better to do than quibble with their cruise ship entertainers about American politics, Canadians rarely hear the other side of the argument from an ordinary American. Mostly all they get to hear is all the heated, bible thumping nutjobs, with their crazy God arguments and not the more subtle ones. They never hear arguments like what someone considers a “human being” is as much personal philosophy as scientific statement. Or that the most fundamental human right is the right to live, and how can you claim to support “human rights” when you don’t support the basis of that right? Or that abortion is a convenience because of the needs of men and governments and corporations and not of women and especially children. Or that abortion can leave a scar on the hearts of women that may never heal. But that wasn’t even my original intention; she had stepped into my wheelhouse with the law, and it was at her peril.

But first: a brief treatise on the nature of Roe v Wade

Now there are a lot of reasons that someone, despite being generally “pro-choice,” might think that Dobbs was decided correctly.  Roe v. Wade was a case that made the claim that the Constitution of the United States gives a certain power to the federal government that isn’t actually written down in the document.  There’s no clause governing abortion or even “privacy” in the Constitution.  And the nature of the Constitution, the overriding principle of the document, is that if it doesn’t **expressly** say in the Constitution that the federal government has a certain power, it just doesn’t have that power.  The power to do this “thing”, whatever it is, resides in the States or in the individual people themselves.  That way, the federal government is limited on what it can reasonably tell the states to do. The Constitution, for all practical purposes, is silent on the nature of privacy rights, the basis for Roe v. Wade, and so decisions about privacy and abortion should be decided by each individual state, the bedrock of our federalist system. Deciding what is and is not in line with the Constitution is the Supreme Court’s only job, so that’s what they did.

Now, the argument for the right to an abortion made in Roe v. Wade was that privacy rights are so important to people that they had to be in there “somewhere.”  In the “penumbras and emanations” to use the terms of the actual decision.  The 9^th Amendment insists that there are other rights not mentioned in the Constitution that the federal government can’t limit.  And the 14^th says that the strictures against the federal government meddling in issues of speech and religion and guns apply also to the states. Between these two clauses the court concluded that, somewhere in there, there MUST be some kind of protection of privacy.  But, since it’s not specifically addressed, it was a very debatable point. The 1973 decision was in a lot of ways, a rhetorical trick, and even its supporters admit it didn’t really make sense in the face of the design in the Constitution. Nevertheless, for almost 50 years, it remained the law of the land because of the composition of the court and because a lot of people didn’t want to touch it.

After the ruling, various judges, including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, had expressed concern that the ruling wasn’t really stable, but at the time the judges seemed to have thought that it was women’s business that would just go away. It clearly did not. When the Dobbs decision came down, that it was the States - and not the Federal government - that had a right to regulate abortion, there was a tacit admission that it was wrong all along, at least in some legal circles. Logically and constitutionally, it made sense, even if it disappointed a lot of people.

Don’t like it, just change – The meaning of “Rule of Law.”

Abortion isn’t doomed to be the jurisdiction of the States forever. The writers of the Constitution provided for a way to change our Constitution: the amendment process.  That system isn’t easy, and it’s not meant to be.  It’s meant to force the gridlock that would prevent a small minority or even a bare majority from being able to profoundly change the Constitution.  These rights, and the entire system, go the logic, are important and you shouldn’t be able to just go changing it willy-nilly because that was “the vibe” at the time. 

In this sense, the Constitution is one of the more static government documents ever created. If you believe that the document was created for a particular time and a particular place and that time and place doesn’t exist anymore, it will seem very irrelevant. People who believe this say the guns are different, or the science is different, or TikTok is different, or the world is different and if changing the Constitution through its official process is too hard, we should do that in the Supreme Court.  I don’t subscribe to that vision, but I can understand how compelling it could be, especially when it deals with the death of children. In this belief system, the Constitution can be trickily redefined to suggest that the right to privacy was a thing in 1789 or that guns were the purview of “militias” not just any random farmer.

Original Gangsters

But some people, like me, believe that the document was created to account for human drives, for will, for frailty, and for corruption. People like me believe that as humans have not changed for thousands of years, and a document like the Constitution should only be changed when we fundamentally change as humans. Well, we haven’t changed at all. If we had we wouldn’t understand historical documents like The 12 Caesars, or Plato’s Republic or Shakespeare or the cave paintings in France.  One of the things I love about archeology is finding out that humans in the ancient past were no different than the ones today; a 3,773-year-old complaint about the quality of a certain copper shipment from an irate craftsman sounds like it could have been written yesterday. If humans still have the same proclivities that the founding fathers designed the Constitution to protect us from, then we would be ill-advised to change it frivolously. And if we really want to change it, we should have to follow the rules that the founders set out for us.

Using the court to stretch the meaning of words in ways they were never intended to stretch cheats that system. Such capriciousness would undermine the meaning and the structure of the document and, by default, our democracy which depends on its edifice.  What Dobbs did was take that decision and put in the hands of states, where it should always have been, and now pro-life and pro-choice advocates will just have to fight this out in the dirt in front of the statehouse instead of in Washington. At least, that is the hope, because SCOTUS probably has better things to do like decide that the death penalty is a “cruel and unusual” punishment and make sure children aren’t automatically deported to war zones because they are in the USA illegally. (Edit- I want to specify children here, because I think it’s fine to export M13 gang members but I wrote this in 2023 - Vera) That’s what “rule of law” means. And it matters because if we just replace the meaning of the Constitution with whatever meaning we want it to have on any given day because vibes, we might as well not have it at all. 

Facts and feelings

For argument’s sake, as of this writing there are about 13 states that completely ban or mostly ban abortion.  The rest are a mish mash of time limits, exceptions, and free states. If you can’t get an abortion in Missouri, hop on over to Wisconsin. In Idaho you are spoiled for choices in Washington, Oregon, Nevada and possibly Utah, Wyoming or Montana. Only 13 states completely ban selective abortion, and all of them provide for an exception for the life of the mother. A handful extend that to incest and/or rape. All of these 13 states enacted their bans via “trigger laws” and so were never expected to go into force because up until Dobbs, even conservatives doubted they would ever see the end of Roe. The Dobbs decision was probably as surprising to the far-right wing evangelists¹ as it was to the left, maybe even more so, and probably testifies to an exhausted and fed-up Supreme Court that has regretted the decision since the day it was made. It will be interesting to see what happens now that the pro-life movement has been galvanized by Dobbs.  About 2/3^rds of Americans are pro-life to some extent, which begs the question if there’s enough support for an amendment. At the very least, now faced with the reality of these trigger laws, state chapters of pro-choice lobby groups could just dust off those pink hats and start marching on the seats of state power.  

These laws could be living on borrowed time now the federal government can’t intervene. California and New York can have the abortions up to birth and there’s nothing the President and the Supreme Court could do about it. That’s hardly a win for pro-life advocates and would seem to argue that Americans, even the conservatives, are not as troglodytic as all that.  But my interlocutor probably didn’t know anything about these facts as that would have required work and intelligence. We could have had a legitimate and rational discussion, but it didn’t matter because that was never the point, was it?  As long as she could accuse me of being a “racist” she and, more importantly the Canadian she was trying to impress, could stay on the moral high ground – so she did.

The Price of Tea in China; the argument

So how did I get called a racist?  Well, apparently, I did not take the situation seriously enough. I should be telling Arkansas in no uncertain terms that their position on abortion, which up until fifteen minutes ago was performative legislation at best, is unacceptable.  Why Gilead is just around the corner, obviously.  My reliance on the structure of the Constitution, my faith in the American people to eventually settle on a compassionate compromise, and my commitment to democracy, even if I didn’t like the result, was enough to get me branded the Horrible Person (TM) by this moron.  This person’s specifically stated position was that I would condemn a black woman to stay in Tennessee and have and raise a baby she couldn’t afford. She most likely would not be able to beg, borrow, or steal enough money for a bus ticket to Virginia where abortion is perfectly legal and probably could be completed in a matter of hours. Clearly, if I had my druthers, I’d be burning crosses on lawns and donning white robes. The whole point of our country’s founding document be damned and my libertarian sentimentalities irrelevant in the face of this $25.99 for a bus ticket problem. At least, that’s what it seemed from the people now almost shouting at me for simply explaining what was patently obvious to anyone with a smattering of legal education – without even opining on the morality of abortion. But I use this as an illustration ;the morality of abortion is another essay.

We are not the same- My fellow cowa…I mean Americans

I meet these kinds of Americans once in a while.  So desperate to be accepted they will agree with any stupid thing. Yes, Americans are violent. Yes, Americans are dumb. Yes, Americans are imperialist. (Although since little Syrian children started washing up on the beaches in Europe, less of that.)  Most of the time these Americans find that immigrating is far harder than they imagined. Despite claims to the contrary, they are disillusioned, convinced they were coming to a progressive Shangri-La only to discover to their horror that the other side of the looking glass is very strange indeed. 

This Promised Land they have arrived in is provincial, judgmental, hypocritical, snobby, and very, very expensive - just like home or Santa Barbara. Recently, they have even had to begrudgingly admit that Canada at least flirts with fascism in a way that the American government would never dare. But the real killer is that jobs that were easy to come by become exceedingly difficult to get, and friends, real friends, are hard to find.  Either subsume all rationality to the whims of your most petty and insecure neighbors or go home, defeated. For a lot, that’s too much to bear, and they go home, or somewhere else, California or Texas maybe. Out of the rain, and where their progressive fantasies of the rest of the world (maybe just Sweden or Norway now) can remain intact.  I envy them; I would repatriate tomorrow if it was economically feasible.  This particular American was a very educated professional, but she wasn’t working now.  When I asked why she said that her field was too “sexist,” but I suspect it wasn’t that.

So, I am an embarrassment to Americans that are attempting to ingratiate themselves to our boorish hosts, spoiling the games with pedantic speeches about the nature of law, or even worse, ECONOMICS. Part of it is disposition, I don’t believe I have ever gone along to get along in my entire life. Part of it is my “Americanness” that loathes authority with a white hot passion. Some of it, and at the moment this was most certainly the case, is just pure malicious schadenfreude. Watching the world burn is fun now and again, but some of it just nationalistic pride. No matter, now my own kind won’t talk to me either. I never told her I if I was pro-life or pro-choice, something she could have hung an argument on, just explained the nature of the law. Frustrated and sputtering, unable to counter the radical and atheistic libertarian argument, she grabbed the only thing that seemed available, my assumed racism.

White Fragility- becoming the hated minority

I’m going to resist the urge to qualify my next statements with phrases like “There’s no denying that racism is a problem…today, or was yesterday or whatever.”  The fact is that until I moved to Canada, I was part and parcel of the dominant, and mostly white, culture, as least as far as my skin color goes. Any understanding of racism I got through secondhand experience, but I thought of myself as fair. For a few years I lived in this country backwater town in the USA, and it most certainly matches the assumptions that foreigners extend to whole country. It was a hard town, one that was also the home of the Grand Dragon of the KKK.  There were few good jobs, women didn’t leave home until they were married. There was more than one near prison and I’m sure more than of my neighbors had a criminal record.  Not to brag but I was friends with the only black girl in our school, and was ostracized immediately for that, among other things. However, three days after graduation, I got gone, and I stayed that way, wanting nothing to do with the provinciality of a town that regarded atheism, feminism, and egalitarianism as a communist plot.

That’s as probably as close as I have gotten to actual racism in the United States.  At least, that’s what I’m aware of.  I’ve always lived in cities with significant populations of people of color, and at work I was surrounded by not only Americans of all colors, but people from all parts of the world. Such is the way when you live in big cities. All of the black men and woman I worked for and with were lovely people and I didn’t feel like they were any less competent or different than myself or their white counterparts. Quite the contrary, as young and green as I was, I often sought their approval. One of my first jobs was working for a well-known black jazz musician, running programs in urban schools that taught about how the music of America was a combination of church hymns and African rhythms. Bluegrass, country, funk and rock, all of this beautiful American sound wouldn’t have existed were it not for that.  I enjoyed working for him, it was one of the best jobs I ever had. Many of my black coworkers and friends were, and still are, much more successful than me.

I don’t mean to make this some kind of “all my friends are black” kind of bona fide anti-racist screed, but if there was racism in the big city, it was invisible to me.  Perhaps that’s the problem, perhaps to someone of color it is as subtle - as when I went to open my sole bank account with my husband and the agent kept looking at him. But I had opened many bank accounts elsewhere without him before without any issues. Its rareness was what made it stand out, in an almost comical way.  Oh, she thinks I need him.  How quaint.  But I wouldn’t have concluded that the Roxborough Manayunk Bank had some policy to only open accounts for married women. Maybe it did; maybe that’s why it’s closed now. In any case, despite the disrespect, I still opened an account and never thought about it or her again until now.

We don’t do that here

When I first heard a Canadian say, “I don’t look very aboriginal, but my sister does” I had no idea what that meant. After learning, my best friend at the time joked that I “could pass.” Then I was a little offended that my Asian girlfriend hesitated to buy a leather jacket because it made her look “aboriginal.” When I saw an “Indian from India” boy walking down a street, pants hanging off his ass and a do-rag on his head, channeling every gangster rapper you have ever heard of, I thought it was hilarious.  Software engineers didn’t pack heat and cap asses. And I was irritated when a homeless man, sitting in the back of the bus, reeking of urine and sweat, started yelling racist epitaphs at the little Korean girls who were just minding their business and riding the bus. A man born in Canada, to Indian parents said to me “I don’t look as Canadian as you do.” I replied to him, “You look Canadian to me.”  Everyone who wasn’t American was Canadian to me, obviously. I told my mother, “They had a government order to take the police to the Indian villages and take away all their CHILDREN!  For no reason!” We stared at each other in horror. There was no doubt that if the authorities had come for her grandchild, we would have met those cops at the gate with loaded guns like Branch Davidians.  One time, a visitor to the office noted the race of my co-worker and asked out of the blue, and with no seeming relevance at all, if I had “ever worked with a black person.”  I didn’t know whether to be offended or flabbergasted.

But my favourite encounter was with that crazy Chinese guy. He is the best.  You could chalk his lack of filter up to language, but he speaks perfect, if accented English.   One time he came on the bus, and struggling with the seats on the new busses the city had just bought exclaims, “What is this crap?  Canadians are fine with garbage! Why is this shit?”  Someone from the back of the bus went “If you don’t like it go back to China!” Without missing a beat, he responded, “China is a third world country!  Canada is supposed to be a first world country!  Things should work!” I had to stifle a chuckle.

Bad boys whacha you gonna do?

It would seem that in my personal experience, Canada still is up against America on racist incidents. That doesn’t stop Canadians from discussing our complex racial culture as if they are the enlightened ones.  Of course, this isn’t helped by the constant drumbeat of claims, made by our media, and echoed by our institutions, that racism is alive and well and responsible for every ill that triggers headlines like “unarmed black man killed by police.”  There’s probably some truth in that, but there are also questions of circumstances, personal responsibility, and the alternatives available. How do you control a fighting man, stronger and bigger than you, high as a kite on powerful painkillers, without resorting to extreme and maybe lethal force?   He feels no pain, he is unpredictable, he is boundless. Like the Angel that wrestled with David, he has an advantage, a chemical god on his side.

And that’s not the only thing that could cause such a tragic consequence. There is a justice system which is creaking and cracking under its own weight. Courts, required by law to be fast, work all night and day ruthlessly processing bail, petty crimes, parking tickets.  Police, untrained and paranoid act too quickly or not at all. Underfunded services and shelters pile people on top of one another in cities where the weather is too cold to be outside at night. Skid row develops a culture of violence and rape and death that seems too complicated to approach.  The desire to stay in business creates the perverse incentive in NGOs and charities that keep them from curing themselves out of existence. Like a shark that can’t stop swimming, they just keep looking for any new problem to devour and exploit, even if none of their solutions ever work.

There may be racism, but there is also more. Much more that could act as reasonable explanations as to why any given black man winds up in a grave.  However, flattened, stripped of nuance and awareness of place, to anyone outside the ghetto or outside the country, racism is the obvious answer. No one sane that has lived in the slum for any length of time could ever think that “defunding” the police is going to make life better. That is the exclusive belief of middle-class white ladies from the suburbs and other countries. To a lot people living on the bad side of town in New York in 1990, the NYPD are practically saints.

Keeping up with the Coopers

It’s not just black people that seem to have outsized problems with America’s justice system. Dealing with the American justice system requires a bit of finesse and like owning certain dog breeds; it is not for the novice.  Outsiders of the US can be particularly oblivious to American attitudes to crime or how the justice process works in the United States. In Canadians’ case, they assume their social position will protect them because Canadian justice does still hold some of the old “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” character.  Numerous politicians in Canada have engaged in the kind of corruption that would sink any American politician’s career almost immediately. It’s almost comical that no Canadian I know of has been able to understand that Buttigieg’s political career is effectively over. But as far as American justice goes, if racism is the only problem, why would you, a non-black person, having maybe committed a crime or been arrested, bother to STFU and hire the best lawyer you can? Because of this, foreigners, especially Canadians, often find themselves in deep, deep trouble. 

In 2013, Adam Tang, aka Afroduck, posted a video of him on YouTube careening around New York City in his fancy BMW.  I think the first rule of getting away with criming is to NOT post it publicly for anyone to see.  That would have been bad enough, but he taunted the police, saying that they couldn’t identify him. Read that again: TAUNTED THE NYPD. LIKE SON OF SAM!! It’s one thing to break the law, that can and is often ignored in New York City.  It is another to accuse the NYPD of being stupid and woe to the person who does.  It may be true that there were no traffic cameras in NYC, but there are plenty of other cameras, owned by entities like YouTubers and Comcast, that would sell some poor sap out for less than it would take to convince me to have a free tequila shot (spoiler alert: not all that fucking much).  It didn’t take long for his whereabouts to be discovered and he was arrested and charged with reckless driving.

Mark Emery insisted on selling seeds to customers in the United States, a crime he was warned about and then extradited for. Up until his American incarceration, and even after, Emery’s involvement with marijuana continued to get him into trouble, but he never rolled the dice with American authorities again. Instead, he vowed revenge on the government that turned him over to the Americans in the first place. It doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.  Apparently, the privilege to be withheld from American authorities in Canada, and eventually released, is only extended to wealthy Chinese banking fraudsters and not aging potheads.  In his defense, Emery also was arrested in 1991 for selling two copies of 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” a crime in Canada and something he never would have been arrested for in the USA.

Perhaps the most famous of the Canadian convicts was Lord Conrad Black, who unfortunately removed some boxes from his Toronto office and was better besties with the British than his own people. He did so at the behest of the company, Hollinger, which he had founded, and that had ordered him to vacate his offices. Hollinger had kicked him and his cronies out of the company, but a few fancy deals later, he and his wife were living the high life on Hollinger funds and Black had kept his office in Toronto, even if he was never at it. Run by a suppliant board with lackadaisical accounting practices, Mr. Black’s consulting contracts turned Hollinger into his own personal ATM.  His downward spiral would only start when a New York based hedge fund, heavily invested in the company and annoyed it wasn’t getting its expected ROI, came calling looking for its money.  But none of that would be why he would spend three and half years in the federal pen in the USA.  Ultimately, he would be held on a single count of obstruction of justice because it would never be known for sure if there had been incriminating material in the boxes he removed or not.

I have some sympathy for Mr. Black.  Knowing what I know about the American justice system and Canadian attitude to justice, it would seem completely plausible that Mr. Black failed to understand the situation he was in. He had been asked to leave his office and it was in Toronto after all.  It’s important to note that all the self-dealing, all the back room horsetrading, the weakness of the board of directors handing loonies like candy to the Blacks, none of that was ultimately the crime for which he did time in the American prison. No one from Hollinger board was convicted of any crime that I know of, and Black’s partner-in-crime cut a deal. He served time in Canada by ratting out Mr. Black for a crime that was never actually considered a crime.  The papers carried on relentlessly about the fact he had relinquished his Canadian citizenship to receive his Lordship title from the UK.  If anything, Mr. Black was convicted by his own people for embarrassing them in front of Americans, and they were happy to leave him twist in the wind.  

Ramble on

So back to racism, and our last hapless Canuck, Amy Cooper, aka the “Central Park Karen.” What happened that day on the Ramble in Central Park in New York?  Amy Cooper was walking her dog in Central Park. She was walking in an area called “The Ramble” which is halfway up the park, near the West Side.  I’m sure I’ve been there at some point.  I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the park, it was the 90s after all, but if memory serves it’s a populated part of the park, well maintained and generally quiet and safe.  

I haven’t been in New York for a long time, but after I left, a Red-tailed hawk made an appearance and “bird fever” swept the city – a city not very well known for its natural beauty.   This has transformed the birding community and Christian Cooper was a card-carrying member.  Apparently, (and I cannot believe this is a thing) a pitched battle is being waged between New Yorkers who want to walk their dogs in the Ramble and birders who want those dogs not to chase away their birds in the Ramble.  I do not know when all these jabronies moved into the city, but they need to immediately move out and return my precious urban wasteland back to its natural form of criminal chaos. (Thanks, Joe Biden) ANYWAY, Mr. Cooper, no relation, had appointed himself the Leash Police of this particular part of the park. When he encountered Ms. Cooper’s dog off leash, he proceeded to admonish her to fix it, and when she didn’t comply, (because, ah, it’s fucking NEW YORK) he decided to up the ante.

Mr. Cooper, despite saying to Amy, “you won’t like what I do”, claimed he was not a threat, he was really just an obnoxious, self-appointed, hallpass monitor. Had Amy had control of her dog, as she was legally obligated to do, he would have ignored her and moved on to more fertile fields.  Instead, her sense of entitlement caused her to square up with him, and in a very colorblind moment, treated him like any other bully she might have encountered.  Even when she interpreted, understandably, his threat as a threat, she attempted to give him an out by warning him that other, ACTUALLY racist police would come and find her credible and might hurt him. That hardly seems the activity of someone who harbors ill will to someone of a different race. So, what was her crime anyway?  Walking a dog off a leash?  Or was it assuming the disposition of the NYPD? Or was it something else?

I shot the sheriff

At the same time the Coopers were having their little faceoff, halfway across the country, another black man was encountered by a cop and this time that black man came out the loser.  Apparently, high as a kite and sitting behind the wheel of a car, George Floyd was approached by three officers who were intending to arrest him.  I say “intending” because there was no way, legally, to allow Mr. Floyd to leave. When the 911 call came in, the caller stated that:

“they was sitting on their car. We tell them to give us their phone, put their (inaudible) thing back and everything and he was also drunk” and “…. and he’s sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he’s not in control of himself.”

Most states have now passed strict impaired driving laws. Even just sleeping in your car, with the keys not in the ignition, is enough to attract a charge.  Some of these laws will put you in jail or take away your car, leaving you unable to get to work or school.  It may take months and thousands of dollars in fines to get your license and/or your car back. If you happen to have an outstanding warrant…well, you aren’t going anywhere.  And these charges are common, so whatever the situation was, Mr. Floyd was not leaving that scene unless it was in cuffs.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye

Whatever you think of Mr. Chauvin’s conviction, the incidents leading up to George Floyd’s death are not in dispute.  When the police approached the car to talk to Floyd, there were two other occupants, both black. They spoke to the police for a moment, but when it became clear that Mr. Floyd was about to be arrested, both people seemed to have left the scene immediately.  Floyd originally cooperated with the arrest, although all the time going “please don’t shoot me” while he was being taken out of his car and put into cuffs.  Floyd seems lucid if a bit hyperbolic about the threat he faced from the police. However, it was when the officers attempted to seat Floyd in the squad car, he became uncooperative, fighting with the officers and refusing to stay in the car and be buckled in.  Over six feet tall and muscular, he fought with officers until that pivotal moment when he would expire as he was being held down on the ground by officer Derrick Chauvin.  While his exact cause of death is the crux of debate, we now know he had enough fentanyl in him to be lethal.  At the very least, it was enough to give him some immunity to pain, which is its purpose.  No doubt, it made him difficult to control.

I’m not going to address Floyd’s death or Chauvin’s culpability, but facts about Floyd don’t paint a flattering picture.  Floyd had a longstanding addiction problem, he had overdosed in the previous weeks and almost died, he had lost his job because of the pandemic shutdowns and was attempting to pass off a fake bill. He had several convictions for petty crime and dealing cocaine, and he even had robbed someone at gun point.  Most of this was buried or at least not accentuated, but even if it had, would people really think that he deserved to die for this?  I’m guessing that most people would think probably not. Was he just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time? Well, not quite that either.

This and the incident in Central Park happened on the same day, and so, in the case of at least one paper, were featured on the same front page. Neither Amy Cooper nor Derick Chauvin had exhibited any outward signs of racism. Maybe they were angry, maybe they were frustrated, they both did something wrong, but it’s hard to see how those things were motivated by color.  Subsequent witness statements would say that Mr. Cooper had a disposition of being aggressive and frightening to dog owners in the park, so it might be fair to say that Amy had a reason to be fearful. It would seem in Amy’s case, that she was being explicitly nonracist considering the theoretical risk she was taking by confronting a strange and threatening black man. If you are diminutive white woman with a small dog, being approached by an angry black man, the pragmatic thing to do is to pick up the dog and leave.  Would that be racist? Probably.  But considering demographics of perpetuators of heinous crimes in New York, it also might be common sense.

According, the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2019 over a million white people were victims of violent crime at the hands of another race. It’s about equal split between blacks and Hispanics, but that’s almost four times the number of crimes perpetuated by white on black and Hispanic victims.  I don’t have those stats broken down by gender, but one could assume that Amy, a woman, stood a much higher probability of being injured in any altercation between the two of the Coopers. You don’t need to read “How to Be an Anti-Racist” to know it.

Anyone who has lived in New York wouldn’t need to know that statistic. All they would have to know was that every time the news flashed that the police were looking for someone who had committed some heinous crime, it was likely to be a person of color.  Which is why the face off was so rare.  As bad as it was, it could have been worse for Amy, much worse, and she would have known that. Instead, she treated Christian as if he were one of her irritating own and warned him that others would not be so charitable. That hardly seems “racist.” So, what was it that Amy did wrong?

Maybe it was just embarrassment.  Back to the argument with my fellow American over Dobbs; it never had to happen. I wasn’t engaging in it because I thought SCOTUS was right, or because I needed to discuss with two strangers, finer points of Constitutional law and libertarian philosophy that they neither had the education or the smarts to comprehend. It was this other American’s own obsequiousness I found revolting.  Her willingness to throw her own people, me included, under the bus offended me to the core. Her accusation of racism was the last straw. Now my only goal was to humiliate her. I moved from the legal argument to where I didn’t pull my punches, going straight for the jugular: “Most abortions are of black children and is having an abortion because you are poor really a ‘choice’?” I asked. She stalked off in a rage.

It was humiliating, and had I not been so disgusted, I would have felt sorry for her. Today, I kinda do.  Calling me “racist” was the worst thing she could think of, hoping she could prey on a vulnerability I do not have.  And here I was, just wanting to have a nice conversation about the law.

Everything is awesome.

Calling people and even inanimate objects “racist” seems to be the standard go to now if you don’t want to admit failure. Bad at saving money? Banks are racist. Bad at math? Racist. Bad at staying out of jail? Racist. Bad parenting? Racism. Clearly being bested in an argument at the respectable Munk debates? MUST BE RACISM. People don’t like you because you are smarter, more skilled, irritating, and critical of them? Racist. Apparently even coffee is now racist.  I don’t care if it is, you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

This isn’t to deny that racism, in a classical sense, doesn’t exist. There are a small, fringe minority of people who make unfair assumptions about people simply because of their skin color and who will never be dissuaded from that opinion (fuck, I said I wasn’t going to do this…) But I’m not sure that chalking up every failure to racism as the causal singularity is accurate, sort of like me attributing my lack of friendships to my persistent claim to United States citizenship. It could be that I humiliate people in stupid arguments for fun. The problem is that it’s hard to know if that’s it when I’m not doing it intentionally. Some people are just very, very stupid and sometimes I don’t realize it and I say something that should be OBVIOUS to everyone but again, these people are very, very stupid and now they know it. It’s hard to know if someone doesn’t like me simply because of my nationality or because of some OTHER reason that I may or may not have control over.

Certainly, I could have walked away from the argument about abortion and kept things civil, or at least been a little more magnanimous in my victory.  Often that is the case, especially when I’m not with my own kind, pissed off, at a low stakes function that has no bearing on my employment.  As it was, I never got to make the constitutional argument at all, even though that *is* my main argument for Dobbs.  But the fact is I know that, in some people, the thought that Americans are somehow inferior does exist and that knowledge makes me doubt every interaction. Like Chris Cooper in the Ramble, if Amy had just leashed her dog and walked away, would he have thought she doing that out of shame because what she was doing was wrong, or was she doing it because Chris is a black man? She could have legitimately been afraid as well. You wouldn’t ever know.

Lying down with dogs

Identity shame has a transitive property.  The ugly American, snapping his fingers at the waiter, murdering the French language, asking for things the restaurant doesn’t carry, or acting “trashy” (whatever that means to you) can be so “cringe” as the kids call it. I actively avoid such displays by being unfailingly polite to anyone serving me, and if I had ever seen it, I would have put as much distance between us as possible.  I haven’t ever, but also, I’ve never waited a table in my life.  Keenly aware of this embarrassing stereotype, many Americans abroad often pretend to be “country dumb.”

This is a social habit, mostly from the south, where someone feigns ignorance to get someone else to do something for them which they easily could have done themselves. Think Tom Sawyer convincing Ben Rogers to paint the fence but not as clever. Sort of like a bird faking a broken wing, Canadians and Europeans feel sorry for us poor dolts, and point out the safer places and good restaurants because obviously we could never figure that out for ourselves – allowing us to skip the lengthy research and learning the language, mitigating any hostility, and just sending us on our merry way. These “dumb” tourist Americans don’t help our reputation as idiots abroad, but I don’t mind them as much as the invertebrate Americans that choose to stay and melt into Canadian society, trashing the homeland in the process. You should have at least a little bit of dignity. It’s embarrassing watching your spineless countryman unctuously confirming the worse stereotypes of your precious homeland. And stop putting Canadian flags on your backpacks, you pusillanimous legumes.  

I suspect plenty of black and Hispanic people feel a similar embarrassment of stereotype when a dark face pops up on the TV screen, wanted for murder or aggravated rape.  If you can mitigate the embarrassment by blaming racism, well racism it is.   George Floyd wasn’t a perfect victim, and just having bad luck, being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with too many drugs in his system, that wasn’t going to cut it. It had to be racism there, somewhere. That way all those little crimes, they wouldn’t matter, and bad luck didn’t happen. It would be a meaningful death, one caused by a scourge instead of Floyd’s own failings. Floyd could be savior, his sacrifice forgiving the sins of all black men. Chauvin would go onto to be convicted of murder, which is currently on appeal, but at no time did the government press for a hate crime charge.  They knew they didn’t have it, because there was no smoking gun, there was nothing to hang that charge on. Nevertheless, the fate of Mr. Floyd is inextricably linked to the idea that racism is rife in America and can never be exorcised from its consciousness.

Escape from New York

But what did Amy the Canadian do wrong? Well, maybe it was embarrassing. It dragged the NYPD through the mud and reminded every old New Yorker of the catastrophic failures of the past, like Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima. These incidents were also considered “racist” even though there’s no indication that either man was targeted for abuse and murder specifically for their race.  I could be that the NYPD was just indifferent to the racial component of their victims, but still, the actions were so horrific, it begged the question if the cops had only dared do it because of race. The fact that Amy, who probably is completely unaware of these incidents, had turned over a particular nasty cultural rock is not her fault.  But the assumption, that it would be the POLICE that would be racist, despite many people holding the same belief in 1997, somehow tarred her. Conveniently, her sacrifice could wash away the sin from all the white ladies, who would have, sensibly, just grabbed their dogs and ran and called the police from a safe distance. She was some Canadian, so who cared anyway?

By acknowledging the devil, it came into being. Amy Cooper’s sense of entitlement, to walk a dog off leash, inserting herself in the middle of a contentious and petty HOA squabble, just like she inadvertently does with the ugly history of the NYPD, was enough to equivocate her entitlement with the idea that she thought she was superior because of her race.  Maybe it’s fair to say she did, she assumed that the police would take her word over Christian’s and that he wouldn’t dare hurt her because he feared the racism of the police.  But does that say anything about her racism or more about her bigotry to Americans whom she assumed to automatically be racists, especially the NYPD, as melting pot of a police force you could ever find? 

Amy, again, was another Canadian that found herself deep in waters she could not understand. She probably didn’t know about the ‘90s and its astonishing police brutality or the thin-skinned reaction it could have caused. She probably didn’t think about how multicultural the NYPD was, or how Machiavellian the New York press is. She certainly didn’t think her story would go viral, on the same day that halfway across the country, a black man would be manhandled and killed by the police. No, the only thing she probably thought, aided by being surrounded by disingenuous Americans like the one in my face-off, was “those stupid American policemen are a bunch of racists and I’m so much smarter than them and this a-hole, I don’t have to mind my manners.” So, she didn’t. And that was the crime.

Retreat

Amy, along with Lord Black, Marc Emery and Afroduck, have all returned to their homes in the Great White North.  Amy tried to sue her employer but ran headfirst into another American difference, that employers can fire you for any reason or no reason at all, if it suits them. Emery has more or less vanished, and as far as I know never tangled with the American justice system again.  Both Black and Afroduck have complained bitterly about the unfairness of the justice system.  Black commented that his “long ordeal with the U.S. justice system was never anything but a confluence of unlucky events, the belligerence of several corporate governance charlatans, and grandstanding local and American judges, all fanned by an unusually frenzied international media showing exceptional interest in the case because I was a media owner.”

But Black also did something you never do in America, and something which poorer and foolish litigants do every day: keep talking and approach the bench without competent counsel. His lawyers in the first instance were “men but of advanced age and poor health, and lacked experience in commercial cases; one was a Canadian lawyer who had never pleaded in an American court before. They did not have the stamina for an 18-week, very complicated criminal trial.” Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey they were not.  Finally, Black settles on calling the justice system “mostly evil” but with a full presidential pardon and a libel settlement of $5 million from the former head of the SEC, Mr. Black should be able to hopefully move on.

Afroduck, perhaps cleverer than Mr. Black, cut and ran back to Canada before he could be sent to prison for his conviction.  Because his conviction was state level and not federal, he will fortunately escape any punishment as long as he stays out of the US. Americans probably won’t miss him. He still bitterly complains, saying in an article in Jalopnick, “I understand what I did was firmly in the realm of "STUPIDITY", but again, does stupidity in America = jail time?” and “A legal system that takes every opportunity to lock someone up for financial, political, or personal gain outweighs what should be the blind logic of justice, is not a country I wish to live in.”  Well, your big mistake was taunting the NYPD. You know that, right?

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck

I’m also afraid I have very bad news for Afroduck. Section 320.13(1) of the Canadian Criminal Code, states:

“Everyone commits an offence who operates a conveyance in a manner that, having regard to all of the circumstances, is dangerous to the public.”

And according to Section 320.22

“A court imposing a sentence… shall consider, in addition to any other aggravating circumstances… the offender was operating a motor vehicle in a race with at least one other motor vehicle or in a contest of speed, on a street, road or highway or in another public place;”

Unlike in the USA where what is a crime is decided state by state (al la that “federalism” the Constitution talks about), the Canadian criminal code is a federal statute.  Punishment for racing a car around any Canadian city includes imprisonment for up to ten years, even if you don’t kill anyone. And we do have civil forfeiture here so they will take your car.  Maybe he should find a different hobby or another country.

In any case, Afroduck’s long complaint in Jalopnick didn’t win him any American friends. The top comment on the article simply states: “what a fucking douchebag.” Afroduck should probably thank his lucky stars a black man wasn’t run over by a street racer the same day somewhere in America. Then he would have been a racist, as well as moronic douchebag. Like threatening to call the police, arresting an alleged drunk driver, breathing the air in LA, coffee, and Daylight Savings Time, street racing would have been deemed an example of white (Or in Afroduck’s case, Asian) supremacy and then the entire Fast and the Furious franchise would have to be cancelled.

Wooden Ships

When Scott Adams did his infamous bit on how white people should get away from black people, I knew he was doing it as a bit. To me, it was obviously “tongue-in-cheek” which is now referred to as “a troll.”  In 24 hours, Adams and his entire body of work had been completely disappeared from polite society. This seemed an awful overreaction for saying something that a lot of white woman dog owners on the Upper West Side - with the exception of Amy Cooper – would quietly acknowledge to be true. You have to wonder how much guilt of this knowledge led to the whole Cooper business in the first place. At the same time, a rash of videos of black children beating up white children, some of them quite seriously, went viral on Twitter.  Not all these attacks were motivated by race, one was clearly by a kid who was obviously developmentally challenged² and therefore completely unaware of the consequences to such behavior, but all of those children are now going to be introduced to the justice system – the one that Lord Black referred to as “mostly evil.”

Sometimes I’m flakey, or late, or stubborn, or just screw up at work. I don’t act like a “normal” girl with fascinations with true crime podcasts or organic food or fake nails. I hate running with a passion. I’m not that much into feminism that is anti-natalist just because I love babies. There’s nothing glamourous to me about the lives of rich women without children. I feel rather sorry for them. Even though I come from very wealthy parents, you would think I’m one foot out of the trailer to meet me, a perception I cultivate to spare me from the many, many confidence men that inhabit where I live. It’s also useful to avoid arguments I’m probably too “white trash dumb American” to have and frankly, find exhausting. I’m introverted and avoidant and sometimes annoyingly direct. I didn’t grow up in Canada and there are things you share with the people who you grow up with. And the older you get, the harder it is to make friends. And while they may never admit it, I can intimidate people in a debate. My problems could just as easily be chalked up to culture and disposition and talent which are all about me - not my Americanness.  It’s probably not living in Canada that is exclusively or even mainly responsible for the social alienation I feel. There could be a lot of reasons I don’t have multitudes of people around me, an effective way of succeeding in this world; we just don’t connect in that familiar way. That’s not xenophobia, or racism, that’s just life.

And if being here in this place is really the problem, maybe I should then just do as Adams suggest and throw in the towel and just go home – and yet, I don’t. But there is always that little thought in the back of my head, a flea in my ear, trying to convince me that my problems are not because of me, or the choices I made; it’s “The Haters” the Canadians who say things like, “Everything the United States touches turns to shit.” (True story) THEY are the bad guys that are causing all my problems. Because sometimes it is, and I never know when. It’s not unfair to look at my black friends and realize they probably feel that too. Maybe they even feel that when dealing with me. I hope they don’t because I love them, even if it is in my white, dumbass way.

The singularity of color

In society now, on the interwebs, and in universities and corporations, racism is the singular cause of cultural failure. I can’t help but worry what the consequences will be to letting certain societal institutions continually attribute racism as a cause to things when it could be actually something else. It’s entirely possible that certain failures could be caused by something like culture, or disposition, or talent. Those causes are complex or may be unsolvable or demand self-reflection and embarrassing admissions. And it will certainly be completely invisible to someone from outside the country like Amy Cooper.

Adams clearly jokes, but there will come a point where white parents and Asian parents and Hispanic parents will no longer be willing to endure the indignities and suffering heaped upon them, regardless of the cause or the fairness of it all. As the developing backlash to critical race theory in schools shows, people will let petty insults pass but mess with their children and they go to the mat.  Yeah, maybe this or that incident, a beating here, a stabbing there, didn’t have a racial motivation, but who give a shit when all this ridiculous and unpredictable violence is only coming from one side? A half a century of racial progress could be undone in a very short period of time - in both countries as the USA and Canada share a robust cross border trade in Very Bad Ideas.

It could be segregation would be better for everyone, like Adams suggest. With no one to blame but themselves, the black race would be on their own to build their own parallel economies, societies, and institutions. Freed from the constraints of what was systemic racism, from system itself, blacks would be able to rebuild a whole new system that is progressive, productive and fair. Another black Wall Street, only this time there’s an actual wall. A Wakanda in the West. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream would be officially dead then; now “good fences make good neighbors” as a cis, white man once said. Certainly, various anti-racism intellectuals are saying that’s what they would prefer, and because of this attempts are made to exclude the white race or anything considered “adjacent” (read: Asians and Jews) from study halls and play performances and bank loans and jobs. ³

The likely outcome is that as the races isolate from one another, the society becomes more and more homogenous. Blacks and whites, freed to engage in naked homophilious arrangements would naturally continue to separate until like me and my American friend discovered, it would be very hard to straddle the line. People would be forced to choose: enter in with your own kind or disown them as heathens. This could shove the races, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Aboriginal.. back into ideological and geographic bubbles, separate and probably never equal.

Take white supremacy out of the equation, and what remains is American success unbound by forced inclusion. Merit can now be born out of the culture of religion and Tiger moms, high SAT scores, and immigrant spunk. With no mandatory social scaffolding, now all the wannabes and almost-rans that suck resources and distract from the truly gifted can be guiltlessly escorted down Wash Out lane, no more nods to systemic causes. And while no one ever wants to admit it, you have natural dispositions and genetic propensities that fall along ethnic curves which are now excluding the drag down that IQ researchers have to carefully dance around whenever they talk about the stats. Children, the bravest among us, convinced by their elders they have a right to preserve their race against a hostile and dangerous Other, will cease trying to cross the divide. They will stop adopting the tropes and habits of each other. They may even lean into the cause, prone as they are to thinking of themselves as visionaries and activists, determined to make a better world for themselves. If historical trends serve, for Jewish, white, Asian, and maybe Hispanic children, that seems to mean private schools and cul-de-sacs and jobs that involve math.

Honkeytown

But what for black children, the ones that aren’t aborted? (Okay, FINE, I will stop.) If white supremacy isn’t the cause of whatever it is that causes rioting, mob robbery, and young black women to twerk in the middle of the street during some kind of crisis (when, exactly, did that become a thing?) then what the hell is it? Culture…class…genetics? It could be that “racism” is just a cover, a fig leaf, on very real and embarrassing problems that hamper human flourishing and societal progress and that will certainly undermine the creation of the Brave New Black World. If it is something other than racism, like culture or class that’s causing the degradation of a particular race, that problem will still be with that race – and now it has been abandoned to this problem alone.  The idea of a “racist”, that there are people in this world who unfairly sum up the character of others completely on the basis of skin color – and not merit – will be rendered unusable and impotent.  It won’t matter if racism exist anyway, because that’s those people’s problem.

I get that that sounds all “white savior-y” at the very least, but having lived in a country that would not exist but for the massive economy at its southern border, it begs the question how much societies really rely on each other. Canada is essentially a gigantic mine and car factory, whose main market is the United States. The sheer size of the USA, with its trillions of dollars in trade, sustains a great many things in Canada, like healthcare and disability payments. Not to mention the whole thing with the Ruskies and the Northwest Passage. Despite endless whining about “decoupling” and being BFFs with frenemy China, Canadian dependency on American institutions, military, and markets is probably going nowhere. They will just have to console themselves with insulting me at children’s birthday parties.

Don't come around here no more

Anti-racist grifters are fond of saying that white people didn’t build their culture all by themselves either. That is kinda true. They took things from Asia, South America, Africa, and pretty much anywhere else that had something useful. That they located some of these things in the British museum is unfortunate, and probably requires some serious repatriations, but they also took the ideas and adapted them to move forward. They are the universal early adopters to whatever great idea came along. Just look at the English language. Alright, fine, “great” is a stretch, but of all cultures, Western culture seems most inclined to adopt whatever idea works – like my Chinese friend pointed out on the bus. Now adaptation is called “appropriation” and let’s say goodbye to all that standing on the shoulders of giant’s stuff. So why does the pale world need it then? It can just ignore the Ebola outbreaks in New Liberia. No need to ride into the rescue with Western science. The new “better world” in this vision excludes foreigners because the unipolar world just didn’t work out, and now you are raising a new generation of segregationists and supremacists. And if you want to see what is going on, go online. The whole world becomes the British Museum when you have the internet at hand.

So what if black people invented a lot of cool stuff like traffic lights, mailboxes and super soakers, a veritable godsend to white college students everywhere? The argument you are now courting is to ensure peace, a totally segregated society necessary and everyone will have to just get on without whatever benefit might have been. Potato chips aren't worth potentially being murdered by some thug for telling him to move his seat. But that same argument could be made for a lot of things, like the Patriot Act. It could even be made for slavery. Consider the drug addicted homeless: *anything* might be better than becoming one of the walking dead that you can find strewn about the streets in San Francisco or Portland. Of the addicted that could be cured, surely the whip and the farm would quickly cure them of their sloth and their delusions, while also providing a home and becoming useful members of society – but no one is suggesting we bring slavery back either.

The Last Fandango

The argument I had over abortion happened about a month before the 2022 election.  It was perhaps the going consensus at the time that there was to be a “red wave” and my American friend was panicking. There’s nothing like having a bunch of troglodytes win an election by a landslide to fuel the perception of all Americans as evil, racists, misogynistic, morons. Both her and I would have never heard the end of it, and every time it came out that we were from the USA everything about us would have been political. No matter who we were or what we said or what we believed, we would have both been guilty by association. There would be much idle wondering how we could all be so stupid to vote for Dr. Oz or Glen Youngkin, or hate women, or be racists, or invade Iraq. Didn’t we learn anything from 9/11? Which we deserved for our imperialism?

In that moment she and I would have to choose: agree with our rude Canadian interrogators and smear and dishonor our remaining friends and family in “The States”, or lean into a vigorous defense that would drive away the affections of even the most accepting Canuck. My fellow American clearly did not have the wherewithal to stand it. However, my commitment to the truth about my people required death before dishonor. I was not convinced it was going to be a Republican layup just for this reason which was my lead in to the argument in the first place. Abortion, for whatever reason, is a persistent hill that many people, right and left, were willing to die on. She should have been consoled that the Democrats had *something* to run on. When the wave turned into more a ripple, I was both unsurprised and relieved. Now everyone was just confused and neither of us had to hear about it from our northern neighbors who fancied themselves our moral betters.⁴

But my fellow American probably felt pretty sheepish after the election. She texted a week or so after. I read the first line written in a somewhat conciliatory tone and decided that I had had enough. It was one thing to disagree about politics with me, it was another thing to call me hideous names in the process. Especially in front of the help. I decided that despite the fact that I would, yet again, find myself isolated, that was still preferable than having to deal with the Next Dumb Thing she alit on.  I decided just to get away from it and never responded. We were done here.

1. Over the 2024 election, one of the hosts of the Daily Wire made an observation that the Pro-life movement had become “demoralized” because so many states did not magically elect to ban abortion wholesale after Roe was repealed. Abortion, as a national issue on which all other issues are to be judged has ceased to be. And no one should miss it.

2. I only use “retarded” for retards. Not children with real issues

3. And now a lot of white people are saying that too. Looking forward to getting a visa so I can go visit Amerikanda.

4. I spoke too soon. With the loss of abortion came Kamala Harris and now we are still all the sexist assholes we were before. I should have known.