I've always had issues with the label. "People of Colour" seems a mighty large basket. I spent a few lazy hours perusing grad class photos from elite Canadian schools the other day, like Osgoode Law, U of T Law, software engineering at Waterloo, and so on. Check it out for yourself. POCs are absolutely thriving in Canada, and are statistically over-represented in these elite institutions.
But guess where People Of Colour are under-represented. Check out this pie chart of Canada's prison population in 2019. POCs are about 20% of Canada's population, but only 13% of the prison population.
Let's see how the other denizens of the BIPOC combine are faring in prison stats. The "B"s make up just under 4% of the population, but over 7% of the prison population. Looks to me like the "B"s don't have all that much in common with the POCs.
But the real outliers are the "I"s, our Indigenous population. While the B's are over-represented in the prison system by almost 100%, the "I"s are over-represented by a factor of 500%!
Sure, they're both over-represented, but what do these groups actually have in common?
Why are First Nations allowing themselves to be branded by the contrived nomenclature of the misguided social justice entrepreneurs who want to convince themselves that everyone not white suffers equally under the yoke of systemic racism?
The First Nations are called that because they were here first. From their perspective, everyone else is an immigrant, and that includes the Bs and the POCs. They have a claim on the conscience of this nation that is on a completely different level than the rest of the BIPOC agglomeration.
They should assert that claim more aggressively, and not allow themselves to be used as water carriers for non-Indigenous social justice entrepreneurs with a larger agenda.
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