Is Equity Equitable?

 Here's another vid to start a post. Start right from the beginning (after the intro music) and you see a white male apologizing for laughing. At a comedy show. Akaash Singh, from a position of non-white safety, says, "Look what we've done to white men." As another comedian Louis C.K. might say, "Yeah, boo, white men! Fuck them! Hah hah!" The last members of our society that can be shamelessly mocked or slagged or criticized. Why? White male privilege. Before I go on, there IS one other group we bash whether we like to admit it or not. We openly discriminate against the ugly Louis CK also points out. And if you don't think that's true YOU fuck them then! Go ahead. Pity the poor white, ugly, male! Three things he had no control over are destroying his chances of getting laid or being taken seriously. 

But back to this guy who had the nerve to be white AND male... Akaash Singh goes on to make one of the best speeches I've heard in years! "White men are like shelter dogs now." "Like watching Reek in Game of Thrones." "Name one thing a white man can't have. Okay, an opinion." "If you don't let white guys express themselves they bottle up their feelings. They fester and get real dark. Then they walk into a voting booth every four years..." "And we all wonder 'how did this happen?' THAT'S HOW!" 

So anybody in the U.S. who doesn't want Trump .2, anyone in Canada who doesn't want another Trump wannabe messing things up more than they already are, let the white guys off the hook. Older white guys, well maybe. We might have had a taste of white male privilege, but the young fellas are on your side. They're not the bad guy but if they are marginalized because of some mysterious thing they've never experienced, they could be. And it's not like we're easing off at all.

Remember a couple of posts ago when I said I believe ethics should be allowed in schools as long as it's not taught with bias and there's no indoctrination or inculcation? Well this is not the way Canada has chosen to tackle issues of what is called "equity" but is really the revenge of the non white males. This is what has turned Canadian males into shelter dogs. A lot of them anyway. If you disagree with me I invite you to take this course:

"Employment Equity" is an initiative that was started exactly when I graduated high school, 1986, and was trying to get work to support my university education dreams. At the time I was heartily against it because it blatantly contradicted its main purpose: to discourage employers from basing hiring on gender or sex. If anything it has gotten more blatant, I mean look at the name. Gender Based Analysis. It means you have to analyze prospective employees or projects or initiatives based on gender. The plus is for every other prospective employee or team member except... you guessed it, us Reeks over here. They have over the years honed their explanation of how "equality" and "equity" are different and they throw that at you in hopes that you don't see the massive flaw in that argument. Let me explain it and see if you think it isn't even MORE misogynistic than just hiring the person who is best for the job.

We've all seen this pic, no?

It illustrates how showing INEQUALITY to the short purple shirt kid allowed him to see the ball game. This was presented to us students studying the GBA+ program with the insinuation that the tall dude is the white male. Born with the privilege of being able to see over the fence. It's not too big a stretch to see the fence as the barrier between gainful employment and/or participation in the workforce. They certainly don't say this but are they then comparing women and minorities to the person with a birth defect that makes him short? Are they implying that by birth women, and minorities are just naturally ill suited for employment so they need MORE than equality, they need equitably applied INequality? It sure looks like that to me and that is awfully discriminatory don't you think? Take the course, see if you don't get that impression. It was laid on pretty thick in my opinion. Thick enough to qualify as indoctrination and/or inculcation.

Just recently at work a person uploaded some Christmas cards that we could personalize and send to students during the Christmas season. IMMEDIATELY that person, who I'm pretty sure was male but I don't know about the colour of his skin, was jumped all over for not showing proper sensitivity to Muslim students or students who just don't celebrate at that time of year. Yet this course that is mandatory for all government employees and even for people like me who are paid indirectly by the government with government funds shows this video:

which includes graphic video of black women being manhandled by police. White male police. Why? This is nowhere near as serious a problem in Canada as it is in the U.S. BUT, do you think that showing preference, or in governmental indoctrinational terms, "gender based analysis" when hiring people for jobs across the country that favours women and minorities is the best way to make sure it never comes to this in Canada? Like I said last post, it's a foot-shooting government strategy if I've ever seen one.

I think we've had employment equity for long enough. I think we should have gone with employment EQUALITY right from the get-go, but now that we've included punishment for white male privilege for a few decades and most men in this country have never experienced it, can we please knock it off? 

I work in a place where white and male are extremely underrepresentative of the gender and ethnic make-up of the country. I feel like I am walking on eggshells all the time trying not to be insensitive to anyone. There are no other white males there although I could probably say something about some genetic defect shared by males and all the women and the other three men would let it slide. I might even get away with bashing white skin and everyone but me and the one other white person would just play our submissive roles and laugh it off. But woe unto me if I said anything that could be construed as disparaging of females or any ethnicity of colour! This is the reason I can't just talk about this sort of thing or write about it in my blog. I have to make sure I START the post with a brown guy saying it first to possibly mitigate the blowback I am likely to get. 

Is this fair? Is this equality? Is this multiculturalism? Is this Canada? I'll tell you what it IS, it's EQUITY or at least the Canadian version of it. I'll tell you what else it is, it's bullshit. 

What do you reckon? Is my white male privilege showing?