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TVOntario's Steve Paikin badgers U.S. scholar on Toronto White Supremacy observations

by John Stokes

  Steve Paikin (left), part of Toronto Skyline (middle), and Joseph Darden (right)
 

Steve Paikin (left), part of Toronto Skyline (middle), and Joseph Darden (right).

On 11 February 2008, TVOntario programme's 'The Agenda' featured social geographer Professor Joseph Darden on "how Toronto's poor neighbourhoods could lead to a rise in white supremacist culture." Joseph Darden is a professor of Geography at Michigan State University. He is author of The Significance of White Supremacy in the Canadian Metropolis of Toronto, and co-author of Detroit: Race and Uneven Development. Professor Darden's presented very thoughtful and critical insights for anyone who is concerned about a growing culture for violence in Toronto.

Unfortunately TV Ontario's Steve Paikin as a host, did not match up to Joseph Darden. Mr. Paikin was apparently too busy trying to defend the racist hypocritical norms of Canadian institutions, with particular reference to Toronto. One demonstration of Mr. Paikin's ignorance is his allusion to Toronto Argonauts having had a popular black coach, and to Lincoln Alexander who is also black, and had been appointed as Ontario's Lieutenant Governor. Mr. Paikin sought to use these two examples of individuals to demonstrate that Professor Darden's critical presentation about Toronto is "unwarranted". Of course, Mr. Paikin is simply using a technique that white Canadian institutions have sought to use with greater frequency.

What is this technique, you might ask? Appoint one or two blacks to relatively high profile positions that tend not to have effective power, like the role of "Lieutenant Governor" ("sprinkled" with other visible minorities) for every hundred thousand other blacks that you ignore and that the system then relegates into growing areas of social despair, and alienation.

Professor Darden is an African American scholar who has lived in Toronto for one year. Mr. Paikin indicates that Professor Darden studied Toronto for seventeen years

Joseph Darden makes his critical observations, as someone who views Toronto as a great multicultural city, that is now being threatened by a prevailing White Supremacist racist Establishment.

Professor Darden, observes that Toronto faces a growing culture of violence, which prominently manifests in Toronto black communities, because a racist White Establishment seeks to prevent equal access to educational and employment opportunities. America's cities developed this problem as a legacy of slavery, alongside an American culture of violence that has existed since the American Revolution. However, rather than appreciating the negative example of American urban dysfunctionality, the White Canadian Establishment has sought to ignore the obvious alarm bells, in favour of replicating America's mistakes.

Professor Darden, identifies a powerful and social psychologically arresting racist ideology of Anglo-Celtic and white Francophones, as comprising "founding races" as legitimating Toronto's illogical and alarming descent into American social problems. Toronto which does not have the "inconveniences" of U.S. Civil Rights legislation has provided a milieu for the retreat of clandestine operating right wing elites, who embrace such racist philosophies as social Darwinism and eugenics.

Social Darwinists believe that only the "fittest should survive", and that history favours the "white race" as being racially superior to all other races.

The U.S. Civil Rights Act contains anti-employment discrimination legislation, and was adopted in the late 1960's to latently deal with American urban social problems. If the Ontario Government developed and executed an effective Ontario Human Rights Code, and an enforcement mechanism, alongside social justice provisions that have since been cancelled by the Stephen Harper government, then Toronto would be free of the kind of social problems which are today accelerating in Toronto.

The Canadian White Establishment notably represented by Prime Minister Harper, by Toronto's politicians, and by Corporate Canada, would much rather "throw cops" at the problem, than deal with the fundamental Canadian racism that is at the roots of growing areas of poverty and of hopelessness that creates a culture for violence.

Progressive minded leaders like former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and former federal NDP leader David Lewis during the 1970's appreciated the affirmation of social justice and equality through multicultural policy, as a means to keep Toronto and other Canadian cities protected from the social decline of American cities. However, Steve Paikin who is apparently one of Steven Harper's great fans, did not apparently have the critical insight and journalistic integrity to use the opportunity to interview such a learned Professor, so as to inspire creative discussions on rejuvenating Toronto, as once again, a model 21st Century city, that had referred to itself in the 1970's as the "People City", and that into the 1980's described itself as a vibrant "City of Neighbourhoods".

Professor Darden warns of Toronto's drift into a debilitating urban economic disparity under a White Establishment. that seeks to resist the sharing of political economic power, through a latent institutionalized racism.

It is unfortunate that Professor Darden was greeted with Mr. Paikin as a true representative of the very white culture of hypocrisy, and of resistance to the affirmation of social justice, and that now seeks to hide behind multicultural initiatives of the past, rather than deal with the worsening practices of racialist injustice in Canada's largest city.

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