Surviving The Fall, 20

It's in the news these days that one of Emily Carr's paintings hanging in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto has just been renamed from "Indian Church" to "Church at Yuquot Village." This is the idea of their curator, a very nice white woman who doesn't want indigenous Canadians to feel hurt or insulted. How does she know that First Nations Canadians find "Indian Church" offensive. Well, she doesn't. I have heard the opinions of at lest one local First Nations Canadian, and an artist and an administrator at our local arts college, and they all say the same thing: the artist, Emily Carr, named her own work "Indian Church" and in their opinion, "Indian Church" it should remain. Why would a white settler woman in a prestigious art gallery presume to know better than our aboriginal people what is best for them? Because this is classic European white arrogance in motion, perhaps just a little bit red-washed, but still arrogance, still colonialist, still racial and cultural superiority. Do I really care? Well, I'm not aboriginal, neither do I relate to the snotty white establishment of Canadian society, and really it's none of my business. Except, I am really sick and tired of this Post-Modernist sourced racializing nonsense that we are being bombarded with. Especially when it's coming from someone who should really butt out and mind their own business. This isn't to say that their aren't any indigenous Canadians who don't find the name "Indian Church" offensive. There likely are, but their voices need to be heard, and not some well-off white lady who knows what's good for them. I appreciate and respect the outrage and anger that is being expressed by First Nations people as well as by people of African heritage and other non-Caucasian categories of humans. I do get impatient with the undirected rage that often gets expressed and I am rather sick and tired of feeling demonized simply for not being a person of colour. And I do hope that as we lurch and struggle towards reconciliation that we really stop looking at race and start seeing human beings. We are not categories. We are more than our cultures and way more than our skin colour. The human soul does not have a skin colour. Hello? But we still have to struggle through the mess that our ancestors and too many of our contemporaries have left behind for the rest of us to clean up. On one hand, I do not like being yelled at by black women or physically threatened by black men for the mistake of being white. I feel I can understand where the anger is coming from but we do not need whipping boys and more, much more needs to be done to help persons from traditionally oppressed minorities heal and move beyond their collective trauma, and for the well-off white folk who still think they can speak up for their poor coloured brethren, to get past their blindness and arrogance. Starting a race war is not going to do it. Neither is getting people to hate themselves for their lack of skin colour. Race is a myth. A construct. Even while clenching our teeth and white-knuckling it, we still have to learn to live together, and live together we must, whether we like it or not. And once we learn to like it, or better, to love living together, then we will really begin to move forward.