Of all the legacies U.S. President Donald Trump is going to leave behind him, overt racism is going to be one of the hardest to eradicate.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the United States being affected. If it was, we could just build a wall around them, and the rest of the world could forget about what’s happening.
But the racist dog whistles from Trump and his populist peers around the world have spread the message loud and clear that it’s okay to be racist.
The recent desecration of Jewish gravestones in a French graveyard is disgusting enough, but in a different way, so is the attempted hijacking of an oil policy protest in Ottawa this week, when “Yellow Vests” attempted to use the protest to spread an anti-immigration message.
It’s hard to understand how, in a country of immigrants, people can be anti-immigrant. There are many reasons for people embracing racist ideals, but fear is doubtless one of them.
Fear that immigrants are going to bring their own culture with them, and change the society that you barely understand right now. Fear that immigrants are going to take jobs away from good hard-working Canadians.
But the biggest cry of the yellow vests seems to be that we are somehow importing terrorists who are going to operate in and out of Canada. It’s kind of ludicrous since no government is going to skip vetting refugees.
But what the racists are trying to do is to get you to share their fear. Their own fears go much deeper, but crying out that they only want to protect Canada is more socially acceptable and can draw more followers than ‘I am afraid of them because they are not like me.’
– Black Press