[Wamvan] NOII Statement on White Supremacist Hate Crimes

[Harsha W.]

This Friday January 27th Alastair MacDonald appears in Court at 222 Main
Street (at Cordova) at 9am. NOII members are planning to attend court, but
since it is a work-day we would like to ensure there are enough numbers.
Please RSVP to noii-van at resist.ca if you can join us, we encourage white
allies to be present and people of colour to break the fear, silence, and
invisibility with us.

Web link: http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=4661


No One Is Illegal Statement on Blood and Honour White Supremacist Hate Crimes

No One is Illegal-Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories is a grassroots
anti-colonial and anti racist migrant justice group. As a multiracial
movement led by people of colour, we are outraged to hear of the rise of
overt white supremacist groups in the Lower Mainland. In the past month,
it has come to light that at least three men, Robertson de Chazal, Shawn
Donald Finlay MacDonald, and Alastair Miller with known links to Blood and
Honour are being charged in a number of violent assaults and hate crimes
from 2008-2010 against a Filipino man who was set on fire, a Black man, a
Latino man, and an Indigenous woman.

Racism manifests itself in (under-reported) hate crimes, such as the
violent assaults of these four people of colour, as well as daily forms of
racist harassment, such as racial slurs. These forms of individual/overt
racism do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic/covert
forms of racism. A glaring example of this is the Asiatic Exclusion
League, formed by white supremacists and union leaders, along the West
Coast in the early 1900’s. In 1907, the Vancouver Riots saw thousands of
people chanting racist slogans through Chinatown and vandalizing Chinese
homes and businesses. The racist sentiments expressed and fostered by the
League eventually contributed to the passage of the Chinese Immigration
Act of 1923, which prohibited almost all Chinese immigration to Canada.

The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions, because they exist
amidst an underlying racism that continuously places people of colour as
Outsiders from an imagined White Canadian identity. Within Canada, people
of colour are three to four times more likely to be poor. We are
over-represented in low-income jobs such as garment and janitorial work.
Institutional racism is embedded in public bodies such as the criminal
injustice system and educational system, as well as the laws and policies
that govern these lands and our lives. Over the past few months alone,
there have been numerous examples of state-sanctioned racism– from Jason
Kenney’s niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies to Harper’s response to
the Attawapiskat crisis – with real consequences and impacts for the
self-determination and dignity of our communities. They also highlight the
normalizing of public racist discourse that tends to take the form of
“immigrants stealing jobs/not integrating” or “natives getting a free
ride” or “black/brown men or youth always being violent” etc.

We are not holding our breath for any politician to declare white
supremacist organizations like Blood and Honour “the enemy within” or “a
danger to public safety”, or for any public official to single out white
communities “to report any suspicious behaviour of homegrown extremism”.
We do not expect all young white men to start getting racially profiled at
schools, airports, libraries, coffee shops, or walking down the street.
There will be no slew of media articles psyscho-analyizing the
peculiarities of White Culture that inherently preaches such hatred and
violence. And we are sure that the Society of Moderate Whites will not
need to issue a statement condemning such unacceptable intolerance from
within their own community.

Let us not forget that Canada is built on the white supremacist crime of
colonization. Based on racist assumptions about the “inferiority” of
Indigenous people, Canada has dispossessed Indigenous people of their
traditional lands, resources and cultures. This continues today with the
over-representation of Indigenous people, disproportionate rates of the
apprehension of Indigenous children, extreme poverty amongst Indigenous
communities, and the tragedy of missing and murdered women.

On the global stage, Canada has lent its support to imperialist
interventions in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iraq. The
current War on Terror is an incarnation of a very old phenomenon of
crusading in defence of so-called Western civilization. Despite the
current occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are devastating
the lives of millions of people, they are justified (as parroted by the
mainstream media) through the racist dehumanization of brown bodies as
collateral damage. Canada also supports international free trade
agreements that allow the free movement of capitalism and corporations to
devastate the land, privatize public services, slash labour standards, and
displace people all over the world.

Of the millions of people forcibly displaced across the globe, only a few
hundred thousand even make it to Canada. Of these, tens of thousands are
deported out of Canada each year and families are forced apart. Precarious
legal status, deportations, detentions, and security certificates all
contribute to making migrants vulnerable to poverty and insecurity. Many
Canadian businesses rely on the exploited labour of migrant and non-status
workers, thus maintaining a social and economic system that has created
two classes of people.

Which is why we assert that from historic injustices – such as
Japanese-Canadian internment camps and residential schools – to the
current mass imprisonment and impoverishment of racialized people and
refugees under the War on Terror; Canadian corporate mining from the
Alberta tarsands to Barrick Gold in Guatemala; the expansion of
exploitative migrant worker programs; the tragedy of missing and murdered
Indigenous women, and military occupations from Afghanistan to Haiti –
racism is an ugly truth about Canada.

We encourage our friends and allies to remain vigilant, to be pro-active
in countering racism, to strengthen our communities of solidarity and
resistance, and to never let the haters have power over us.

No One Is Illegal, Power to the People!

http://www.nooneisillegal.org
https://twitter.com/noii_vancouver
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal



-- 
Harsha Walia

https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/author/dtes-power-women-group




-- 
Harsha Walia

https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/author/dtes-power-women-group