April 2007
Re: How Not to Handle a Genteel Racist (January 27, 2007)
Joseph Brean describes how Jared Taylor’s attempt to speak in Halifax was
drowned out by protesters who banged on pots and ended up dragging Taylor
himself bodily from the room he had rented at the Lord Nelson Hotel. What he
doesn’t mention is that, in comments on the regional evening news, two Dalhousie
Black Studies professors, Dr. David Divine and Isaac Saney, appeared to excuse
the thugs for their behaviour. In an age when Nova Scotia authors (John
MacLachlan Gray and George Eliot Clarke, in May, 2002) applaud the banning of
books from Nova Scotia high schools, it perhaps ought to come as no surprise
when Nova Scotia academics express a preference for hooliganism over argument.
According to Karen Mock (former executive director of the Canadian Race
Relations Foundation), since open debate makes us vulnerable, liberal confidence
in it is simply naïve. But if our commitment to “the big law” of liberal
tolerance flags, we are left with what G.K. Chesterton called “the small laws,”
the meddling of petty bureaucrats and the installation of regulators and their
goon mascots to decide for us what we can stand, and what we can be trusted, to
hear.
Which brings us to the Dalhousie Black Studies web site, where your readers will
find an announcement for an upcoming conference on “the politics of inclusion.”
Sponsored by the race-exclusive James R. Johnson Chair in Black Canadian
Studies, and scheduled for April 11-12, 2007 in Ottawa, the announcement urges
participants to question the value of inclusion, to explore its “costs and
alleged benefits,” and to entertain the inviting prospects of black
separateness. My guess is that the Canadian taxpayer will generously subsidize
this bio-political frolic, and that professors Divine and Saney will utterly
miss the irony. For their view, like Jared Taylor’s, is a strange brew of
self-pity and self-romance, an expression of misguided petulance that
accentuates blood and belonging at the expense of individual character and
achievement. In the chests of the white separatist and the black separatist are
two hearts, you might say, that bleat as one.
Dr.
John E. MacKinnon is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Philosophy, Saint Mary’s University.
National Post, January 30, 2007.
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