Remember the guest who said she “hates white people” on Radio-Canada? The radio management and the ombudsman have just decided on this matter after receiving 46 complaints from outraged listeners. In your opinion… there’s nothing there! Keep walking, there’s nothing to see. We can make race-related comments if we do so with “sensitivity” and in a specific “context”!
• Also read: Radio-Canada: Racist anti-white?
Allowed racism
On Sept. 17’s “Oil on Fire,” director Mara Joly (who has one black parent and one white parent) said, “I hated white people for a long time, but yeah, I mean, I don’t think you can .” I like white people if you live in Africa, and I don’t think you can like white people if you’re African American in France.” Most of the complaints filed against the show said: “If If these statements had been directed against blacks, Muslims, LGBTQ+ or any other minority, they would never have been broadcast.” The first director of Ici Première, Sylvie Julien, responded in her decision that the presenter at the beginning of the interview “the personal journey of her Gastes mentioned, with the aim of giving the audience the key to discovering the very personal roots of Frau. Joly’s speech” and to “enable the listeners to understand the pain that their guest felt during his childhood.” So if we have the “keys”, have had a “difficult journey” and have felt “childhood pain”, we can do we then say that we hate Jews, blacks or Buddhists? Ombudsman Pierre Champoux, for his part, concluded that the interview “conformed to Radio-Canada’s journalistic standards and practices.” On the other hand, he regrets that publishing an excerpt on Instagram “did not provide enough context to fully understand the meaning of the statement.” So in his eyes, given the right “context,” can we say we hate an entire group of people? “Anyone listening to the interview in its context, ideally from the beginning of the show, had, if not all, a sufficiently varied set of keys to understand the source of Mara Joly’s remarks and accept them as such .” So are they obsessed with keys and key fobs at Radio-Canada? Is there a “keyboard” that would allow us to understand anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia?
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The ombudsman continues: “With all due respect to those who were shocked by Mara Joly’s statements, I did not sense any incitement to hatred or anti-white racism, an idea which, by the way, seems to me to have very little conclusive basis in data.”
Mr Champoux believes that Mara Joly made a speech which she “has every right to make, however unpleasant it may be for some people to hear it”. Would he say the same about someone who said he hated black people?
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TWO WEIGHTS, TWO DIMENSIONS
The Ombudsman concludes: “While it is important to address difficult topics such as racism or identity issues, it is crucial to do so with sensitivity and context.” Be warned. If you want to say, “I hate gays/women/Jews,” you must do so “with sensitivity and context.” We really are considered idiots.
