49/51% Racist

Brandon is not a racist town. That is, if you don't consider 49% to be a significant figure.

When we try to ascertain whether a town is racist, we often think what we need to tally up is the percentage of individuals who are racist, as if a person is either racist or not. Actually, a more accurate way of tallying it up would be to ascertain the percentage of each individual person's attitudes which are racist, because we are each a mix. Brandon is a borderline town. As one person put it, "it doesn't take much to push people over the line when they hover just below the line".

The recent municipal vote as to whether to allow the neighboring First Nation to set up and urban reserve with a casino on it brought out a lot of latent racism, which many people scrambled to sweep back under the rug, as it was just a little too visible.

One other surprising incident happened a few years ago at an ecumenical gathering at Easter in the Concert Hall. I was standing up at the back as it was packed. The speaker was a Jew who had converted to Christianity. As he spoke about his early childhood, of being adopted into a gentile home, and the abuse he suffered as a child, it was unclear for a short time whether the abuse occurred at the hands of the Jewish or gentile family. For just a split second, something swept over the crowd, something which could only describe as "permission to hate Jews" and then it went back underground as the speaker clarified the situation (that it was in fact at the hands of gentiles). I was astounded.

One dynamic which is upcoming for the business community is the hiring of native workers in large numbers. At recent economic development planning meetings, the issue was raised in terms of how to harness the labor pool of native people for local jobs. When one considers the large First Nation population in and around Brandon, the large Native student population in the Community College and University, and then one looks at the low number of native staff in local stores, one has to ask "Why?". My guess is that the problem has many dimensions, but that one of them is the racism issue. It will be interesting to watch.

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