Tamil questions that can't be asked

Whoops, sorry. That’s racist. What I meant to say was: and, if so, now that the Tamil dream has been crushed in Sri Lanka, wouldn’t the simplest solution be to carve a Tamil homeland out of the GTA? After all, most of the people who want one are already here, and, as long as they entrust traffic control on the Gardiner and QEW to UN peacekeepers, they generally get along with their neighbours in the Great White North better than they do in the Indian Ocean.

The word “immigration,” itself all but verboten in polite society, hardly begins to cover this phenomenon. As for Canadians—or “Canadians”—many would value a language in which they could debate this topic without being damned as “racist” by Lorrie Goldstein. “Any journalist who’s been around” ought to stand against the shrivelling of public discourse in Canada rather than join the massed ranks of professional ethnic grievance mongers crying “Racist!” at the drop of a turban.

“Racism still with us,” read the headline on a Toronto Star editorial the other day. No doubt. I fell asleep halfway through the ensuing mush, but not before noting that it didn’t entirely bear out that headline:

“Second and third generation immigrants, identifiable by race, felt less attached to Canada than their parents.”

So a third generation immigrant’s “attachment to Canada” is ipso facto the result of Gordy McHoser’s ingrained white racism? As opposed to, say, a vague suspicion that a country so willing to blame itself must perforce be generally sucky and lame and unworthy of his allegiance? Who knows? The Toronto Star says “we need to work harder,” redouble our efforts, throw more money at the usual ethnic ward-heelers. And no doubt 20 years down the road they’ll be reporting that fourth and fifth generation immigrants feel even less attached than the second and third generation, and we need to re-treble our efforts.

Last year, the BBC made a documentary about “class.” And at one point they wound up in a council flat filming two young ladies who claimed to be “middle class” on the grounds that they certainly didn’t qualify as “working class,” having no desire to work at all. The interviewer asked who they’d be voting for:

“What? In that Parliament stuff?” said the first girl (white). “I don’t know . . . Wait, there’s one of them, yeah, I can’t remember what ’e’s called but there’s a reason my dad votes for them. The BNPs, or something.” That would be the British National Party.

Affectionately brushing the first girl’s hair, the second girl—her best friend (black)—started laughing: “They’re racist to me, you stupid bitch.”

“I ain’t racist,” giggled the white girl.

“They’d get all the blacks out of the country,” her black bosom buddy explained, still chuckling and brushing her pal’s hair. “And I’m ’alf black, you stupid slut.”

“Oh,” said the white girl. “I thought they’d just chuck all the Pakis out . . .”

“Naah, I’d be chucked out wiv them,” said the black girl. “I’d be rowing me boat back to Jamaica.”

On balance, I’d rather a multiculti society talked about race with that kind of robust insouciance than with the plonkingly platitudinous nancy-boy earnestness of the PC enforcers. As the Liberal party attack poodle Warren Kinsella recently discovered, after some ill-advised remarks about eating barbecued cat at his favourite Chinese restaurant, tiptoeing on eggshells is impossible—even for the big-time “anti-racists” who helped build the course.