So, on a whim the other day I went to the mall and bought myself a Blue Jays baseball cap from Lids. No, i'm not a particularly intense Jays fan or anything like that but i figured "Hey, why not have some patriotic spirit and support my fellow Torontonians?"
I was walking to school yesterday morning, and i was waiting on the southwest corner of a busy intersection along with a huge crowd of about 20 other people, a uniform distribution of nearly every ethnicity in existence (Usually i wouldn't remark on the cultural diversity of Toronto; I think most of us are used to, and embrace it by now. That said, i know this seems like a random detail but you'll see why I consider it relevant in just a moment.) There was a really old, beat up car travelling east along the street that i was facing. It switched into the right turn lane and decelerated, preparing to turn south, which would cause it to pass by the crowd and me, only a meter and a half away. The car was occupied by two people, both white. As they made the turn, the passenger rolled down his window, sticking his torso out into the open air, and pointed straight at my head. He yelled, spit flying everywhere, at the top of his lungs: "Look at this FUCKING CHINK wearing a WHITE MAN'S hat." I was completely stunned out of mere disbelief. I looked around to see if anyone else had heard what he had said; wondering if i had just imagined it. Every single person in the crowd, of each and every ethnicity was staring at the ground as if it had the secrets of eternal youth inscribed in it. Not a single person was ballsy enough to even look appalled. Instead they just made like Ostriches and buried their heads.
No, i don't give a dead rat's ass what that stranger thinks about me. He can think of me as a dirty chink for the rest of his life and it won't make my life any less comfortable in the slightest. I've had people be racist to me all my life, it barely even stings nowadays. In fact, i almost feel pity for that guy because he feels the need to say empty words like that to a complete stranger. Maybe it makes him feel important?
What really grinded my nerves though was the fact that there were 20 other people around me, and not a single one of them seemed as if they paid any attention to what he had said. I'm not saying that i expect each and every one of them to get up in arms for me and commit a mass citezens arrest and beat the guy black and blue with a noodle until he apologizes. But I kind of had more faith in the Canadian culture... I expected when i turned around after he had spewed his verbal feces that at least one of them would have even a flicker of thoughts parallel to mine. I was hoping that even though what he said wouldn't change a thing in my life (and trust me, i will go on wearing this hat as much as I please) that they would feel the same kind of pity that I did; that Canada, though with the great cultural progress we've made, still has not completely liberated itself from the prejudice in the minds of some people.
What could they have done to make me not rant about them you might ask? Even just a tiny bit of disgust written in their faces rather than staring at the ground and pretending it didn't happen would have made me a happy camper.
I'll take a risk and even say that i find racial slurs funny sometimes. Not in the "HEY, YOU'RE FOREIGN. HAHAHA" sense, but more the in recognition that everyone in this country comes from a different cultural background, and will therefore be different. I think making light of these differences with good humour is completely acceptable. Hilarious even. Senseless and ignorant categorization however, is an abomination to Canada's achievements to date.
What makes a Jays hat a "white man's hat" anyways? Beats me :P
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