Why BIPOC is bullsh!t

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.

 

America needs a spiritual re-awakening

People seem to forget that MLK's movement for social justice was very much rooted in the Christian Church.

That's just one of the differences I see in the old civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter. Here's another: MLK didn't have corporate sponsors.

The Christian Church has changed. Instead of MLK, it now has Pence and Pompeo speaking on its behalf. They have corporate sponsors too.

These are tough times in America. Macro-wise, what we're witnessing is the dissolution of the American Empire. In the short term, that's playing out on CNN right now.

In the longer term, we have to hope that there will not be too much collateral damage as the Empire collapses into death spasms. To that end, there needs to be something that can unify the American people, or at least push things in that direction. We know that won't be Trump or Biden.

Now's the time to have a good ole Gospel Tent Revival Tour clear across the country!


Kanye, do you hear The Lord calling you?

If Dog Lives Matter, the scourge of political correctitude must be pretty much down for the count...

Gotta admit that in my adventures in literacy BLM used to mean "Bureau of Land Management." That's the government bureaucrats who prevent redneck white cowboys from running their cattle on public lands for free.

I kinda thought that wasn't a bad idea, keeping private cattle off public lands, which made me a bit of a socialist at the time. If not a communist.

Then Black Lives Matter comes along and I have to do a double check on any BLM headline. Are they talking about this BLM or that BLM?

There's not a heck of a lot of common ground between the two BLMs.

The black BLM is kinda floating along on the winds of political correctitude.

The Bureau of Land Management, not so much.

 The other BLM has taken umbrage over appropriations of their slogan. White Lives Matter? That's disrespectful of black lives. Blue Lives Matter? That's beyond the pale.

But when pop-culture mega-star Axl Rose tweets that "Dog Lives Matter" we don't hear a lot of complaining from the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Why not?

Well, because dogs are dogs and cops are cops. Whites are white and blacks are black. Axl Rose is... well Axl Rose I guess, and as a pop culture superstar he has a license to say whatever he wants to say, without censure.

But it does seem to pencil in some limits to political correctitude... as in, you can transgress the boundaries if you are a bona fide star in the pop culture firmament.

Otherwise, you're a racist shit-bag.

Speaking of shit-bags, Mr. Trump sure hit the wall this weekend, did he not? That wildly misogynistic tape put him dead to rights, eh?

Well, I'm not so sure. Here's one of the left's (and I'm talking about the actual left, not the Clintonesque-Dem fake left that today finds itself to the right of the Republican candidate on practically everything) uber-swamis, Counterpunch grandee Jeffrey St. Clair, musing about the long history of senior pols on both sides of the aisle proving themselves at least as misogynistic as Mr. Trump.

I was surprised he forgot to mention Trump's fellow Manhattan billionaire, Michael Bloomberg.

Surely the virus of political correctitude has infected all parties on all sides. Just as the scourge of misogyny did before it.

But what bothers me is that our corporate media found copious acres of space available for Trump's alleged transgressions this weekend, which are utterly irrelevant, and absolutely no space for the thousands of Podesta emails that were leaked this weekend, which have an immediate bearing on the future of America should Hillary become the next President of the United States.

That dude must have balls the size of cantaloupes

Watched a bit of the Trump rally in Ft. Myers yesterday. Apparently scalpers were out reselling tickets to this shindig, which, if true, is unprecedented in American electioneering history. By all accounts it's not happening in the ever-lamer Clinton campaign.

But what caught my eye was the solitary black dude in the frame of the main camera focused on the stage. I'm not saying he was the only black guy at the rally, but he was the only one visible to me.

That's gotta take some serious cajones!

Not because of what might happen to him at the Trump-fest, but for what might happen later when the local chapter of BLM tracks him down.

Good luck to ya!

TRIGGER ALERT; If you suffer from an infection of political correctitude please skip to next story

When our mainstream media outlets refer again and again to the fiction that Donald Trump's support base is found in the disgruntled white working class, I always wonder, what has become of the black working class?

Are they are still working?

They never existed?

They're not working but still insist on supporting the free trade agenda?

Where exactly have they gone? The reason I wonder is because when I was a pre-NAFTA foot-soldier of the working class, I had black dudes around me all the time. I know they existed.

Where have they gone?

It's a popular conceit among the mainly white intelligentsia and journalsim elites that "working class" means white folks with less than a college education. That substantial quotient of the working class that didn't have white skin just got disappeared to somewhere...

But where?

When I was at Budd Automotive back in the '70's, there were black dudes everywhere on the shop floor. I know for a fact they lost their jobs just like the white dudes when the plant closed.

Ditto for the black dudes at Frankel Steel.

Ditto for the black dudes at Saint John Shipbuilding, where, by the way, I worked alongside black guys who could trace their family's heritage in North America at least 150 years further back than I could mine.

But the black working class is just GONE!

Nope, it's just the white working class that is so fed up with "the system" that they're stooping to supporting Donald Trump.

It's a mystery alright...

Truth is, the unemployed auto-industry black dude, the unemployed steel-fab black dude, and the unemployed black shipyard worker all have way more in common with their unemployed white working class brothers than they do with DeRay Mckesson.