The Tragedy of Reparations: Genocide & Slavery AFTER THE FACT.

if you've been watching this channel for
a long time you'll remember my old motto it ain't deep but it's real this is as real as it gets for me the last time I was in Toronto Canada I sat down to dinner with a white guy this is a guy with a PhD he's a university professor he fancies himself a highly educated person and he said to me that he considered Taiwan to be a country built on genocide I grew up in Canada I currently live in temple and my immediate reaction was when I go to the gym every day I see indigenous people I see the indigenous people they work out at my gym when you go to the gym here in Toronto do you see any indigenous people do you go to a gym that has creeped eople that has a jib way people that has mohawk people that has Iroquois people that has Cayuga people deserve does your gym have Inuit people do you see them at the gym you know now I went on to say something a little bit more intelligent and composed but that was my kind of sputtering enraged statement right now I used to live in Toronto obviously I'm not claiming there were zero indigenous people in Toronto it's shockingly close to zero but yes you will see native people once in a while in the neighborhood I grew up in there was one public library that had a little sign up saying that they had a special collection of books for indigenous people and there was one community center kind of outreach center that had to sign up in a First Nations language all right so I knew there were these little ghostly reminders that somewhere hidden away in the corners of our society there were native people there were indigenous people right but not not at your gym they may go to some gym right but not this guy's gym this guy's a reasonably wealthy affluence highly educated white person living in Toronto my claim isn't that there's no gym anywhere in Toronto where you'd see the native people the point is at the gym you go to you don't see any native people right I go to I go to the most expensive gym in my town in Taiwan okay and our native people are indigenous people I see them at my gym and you know what you can tell right away when you're lifting weights next to them that they're not ethnically the same as the later waves of people who came and settled this island think they do have a colonial history they do have a history of shall we say ethnic tensions and even massacres but I would not state the island of Taiwan as a genocide all history in the same sense that Canada and Australia do it's a very different sort of balance that ended up being struck here of course that's not to say I want a whitewash or glorify the history of this island but yeah these kinds of things they really matter or what can I tell you they matter to me what I feel I've seen happen within my lifetime is this number one I lived through the rise and fall of multicultural policy in Canada official state sanctioned multiculturalism people pretended it would solve the racial tensions in our society and then it fell apart because of course it was fundamentally a way to avoid addressing or solving the racial tensions in our side okay there is no way you can compensate for indigenous genocide the extinction of native peoples and their land rights in their language there's no way you can compensate for that by celebrating Korean immigrants and Korean culture by having a special day for the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival and celebrating Chinese immigrant culture right there's no way you can compensate for the history of slavery and genocide and the extinction of those languages and their people by showing how much you appreciate Jamaican culture which very much was a product of that period of government multiculturalism in Canada so multiculturalism was it a solution to our ethnic problems to our colonial history in Canada the Canada the most remote and worthless appendage of the globe spanning British Empire or was it just a distraction from the ethnic problems right the academic response to the history of black slavery african-american slavery again a whole African slavery throughout the British Empire through it all your peanut butter Spanish French okay the academic response to that was well underway in the 1970s and I think we're seeing the political manifestation of that in the demand for reparations only really emerging now all kinds of different reasons there have been all kinds of different distractions in the last 50 years let's not attempt to summarize that history the academic literature on First Nations slavery the academic literature on the enslavement and genocide of the native people American Indians whatever you want to say it's just emerged in English within like the last five years and in case you think I haven't paying attention I was enrolled as a student of Cree and a Jib way languages of First Nations languages in native languages at First Nations University Canada and I went to their library and looked at every book on the shelf and I went to the National Archives in Montreal and looked at every book in the shelf I really did survey the state of the literature of what had been published just so many years ago and now you know like 2015 to present after that all was part of my past after that ended in failure my attempt to learn the state of those named languages now I see this sequence of books coming out one of them was called the other slavery another one is called surviving genocide and a whole sequence of specialized studies some being the you know the earlier Caribbean period some of them being America after American independence some of them being British Empire different emphases different focus a couple of these books of bought of purchase now two or three I did a book for you already of the other slavery you guys might remember ok others on the internet I just looked up interviews with the authors that sort of thing and one of the reasons why I'm not interest in all these books is that of course each one is kind of repeating the same historical material cover things we're seeing now will break through on the academic side that way and I feel like the mainstream media with artistic products like the The Watchmen series the new TV show The Watchmen HBO I feel like that's still kind of catching up with the political implications of you know really the the black liberation struggle the the particular form of the black liberation struggle that started in the 1970s and it's only now really being voiced as a demand for for reparations of course of course people talk about the 1970s 1980s don't get me wrong but it's maybe only now that's starting to get traction guys when these ideas you know there's this old canard people say there's no force in the world that can stop an idea whose time has come right now finally Germany is looking at paying reparations for its colonies in Africa alright so crimes against humanity including genocide Josiah and other massacres back when Germany had colonies in mainland Africa so these weren't black people taken back to Germany but in Africa and those are fully one hundred years ago all right people are putting together the pieces and wait a minute if reparations were paid to the Japanese Japanese who were put into internment camps for just a couple of years why was it that the liberated slaves that the you know descendants of African slaves why is it that they weren't given reparations okay that's a profound and meaningful question in itself it's now got to be addressed but the time is gonna come maybe not today maybe not tomorrow but soon when the logic of this same question is going to have to be applied to the fundamental historical process of genocide and enslavement that has utterly defined the creation of the United States Canada and to varying extents the whole of Central America Latin America and so on right and it's not really like there were a whole bunch of different possible answers here okay the nature of that genocide is so far advanced that it can't be redressed by turning the clock backwards right it can't it's not a problem that can be solved through conservation because the actual culture you be talking about conserving has really already been destroyed it's going to have to be in historical crime an atrocity that is redressed through creation through creativity not through mere conservation okay when you're talking about languages that are either actually extinct or on the brink of extinction if you want to bring them back to being spoken in the modern era you're not talking about conserving a language anymore you're talking about almost recreating language right you talk about devoting the resources so that we actually have newspapers that are sold in Cree or a Jib way or Mohawk or you know maybe in a new a new language created that bridges some of the minor gaps and dialect between East Cree and West Greek or between og Cree and you know planes a jib way and this kind of thing you know whatever it is so that this actually becomes a language people see on stop signs on those smoking signs on the Front's of newspapers so that instead of celebrating a kind of phony multiculturalism that says hey we have Chinese restaurants and we have Korean restaurants and we have Jamaican restaurants there are four were not racist therefore we're not responsible for this horrible history of slavery and genocide that no no no you fundamentally re-examine the consequences of colonialism Genesis a 12-8 the challenge of multiculturalism is not ensuring that the the ethnically mixed colonists all get to divide up the pie equally that they all get to divide up the spoils of war the benefits of the conquest and slave mañana side of the native people all right we're instead the question is Wow how can we read ress that the total devastation of these people their culture even now the traces of their language and guys I've done the research not just the book learning the statistics you're gonna see if you google it that tell you oh there are still a hundred thousand people who speak at you boy they're all they're all [ __ ] all right look up right now on YouTube a recent powwow in your area okay like did this recently start you can you can look up how while Michigan here on YouTube we can look up powwow Saskatchewan the singing the chanting there are no lyrics those songs historically if you go back and read anthropological studies and literature okay they had lyrics in the native language they weren't just chanting nonsense words yeah they play the drums that chant they dance but they actually had lyrics in their own language and what you see today again and again at at one powwow after another at one drumming ceremony after another in one sweat lodge after another in one you know from one location to another what you see are young people who have need of ancestry who have need of blood and they go through the motions of playing these sacred songs they behave as if their chanting is if they're singing a song but they're just they're just repeating syllables it's just like heya heya they aren't saying anything in any language because the actual ability to speak or sing or memorize and recite the language really has been lost when people do surveys like the census they just ask people oh can you speak the native language there's a sense of pride people have and saying yes they are a Jib way therefore they speak a jib way where it's it's a sense of pride but if you actually send it linguists true linguists who do speak the language to go out and interview people and establish whether or not they can speak language or whether or not they can just say like hello to their grandmother in the limit they can just say five words or something you know guess what the findings are are very fundamentally different all right the ultimate tragedy here whether we're talking about reparations for American descendants of slaves or we're talking about reparations for Native people is that there are some problems you can never fix with money whether you talk about black Americans who are descended from slaves or indigenous people when you're looking at trillions of dollars when you look at the amount of money America spent recently conquering Afghanistan and Iraq like when you're looking at numbers in the trillions either well what if hypothetically one trillion dollars had not been spent conquering Iraq and Afghanistan what if one trillion dollars had gone into this problem whether for African Americans or Native people both you could you could say yeah you know what that's enough money that could have really made a difference like you know if Bill Clinton had done that then what situation would be we be you know sure there there'd be there'd be dead there would be an economic consequence from it but there's debt and economic consequences for what the American government actually did with that join Dawgs but I think we all know the very nature of distributing money nobody can ever give you enough money to buy your culture back nobody can give you enough money to buy your religion back when Christian missionaries have destroyed indigenous religion nobody can ever give you enough money to buy your language back especially not when every trace of your language has been erased except for a couple of books that were written by Christian missionaries who were themselves employed in the act of destroying your culture and religion right nobody nobody can give you enough money to buy your dignity back but what you can do is give people political power you can give them seats in the Senate and give them seats in parliament you can give them seats in government you can give them a controlling interest in the creative process of now trying to recover now trying to propound some kind of new indigenous culture probably for African Americans too what's the future of their of their part of you know Western civilization it's not that they want to recapture something that was lost prior to slavery it's that they want something new and something better right and whatever is gonna be sorted out whether it's reparations or otherwise it has to be fundamentally a forward-looking rather than conservative force in society right who's gonna ask those questions and who's gonna answer them that is a challenge that the British tradition of democracy has absolutely never faced has absolutely never done with all right when they paid reparations to the Japanese people who were interned in California during World War two there was absolutely no question of you know the Japanese being granted a seat in government other than having a bigger role in even the state legislature let alone through there is no question of the Japan a'f occasion of American culture no no no no nobody had any was there was no question of creating a future for the Japanese language in America no not comparable in these ways okay one of the indigenous languages of California is called Yurok you rock with a why why you are okay right it's directly related to the indigenous languages we have in Canada it's an algonquian language so it's related to create a Ghibli believe it or not all right it just barely exists it just barely survives at the mouth of one River in California were one tribe is struggling to keep that language alive okay will the day come when you put your credit card into a bank machine in California and there's the list of languages you can choose from and Yurok is one of those languages is there gonna be a future when these people have an integral and important role in the identity of your state California and of course you could ask that question about the Mohawk and the Korean native way in their respective states and provinces as you go across the map all right is that what we're moving towards or is everyone just going to accept under one excuse or another an inexorable process toward absolute genocide in many ways the inventor of the uniquely American form of racism was Thomas Jefferson Jefferson's obsession was with eliminating African Americans and Native Americans from the writing of history he personally believed that democracy could not exist or could not survive his idea of democracy if they didn't completely extinguish and remove black people and native people from from that history right it's the ultimate absurdity it's ridiculous I end this video with absolutely no hope that the next generation is gonna do a better job than the last one I end this video with absolutely no hope that the mistakes made in the name of multiculturalism won't be repeated again because the real poison of multiculturalism is the idea that everyone being equal is a pretext to never address the grievances of any particular group of people and that dangerous delusion is with us still and in 2019 it's more powerful than ever the idea that well everybody's equal so how could we bend the rules to solve this problem with this particular group of people take a look at historically black universities in the United States in America I've done this research recently it's not worth describing what did take a look at the reality of America's historically black universities and now take a look at the reality of the American Indian colleges the indigenous American universities if you didn't know they were there google it they all have Wikipedia articles you might be surprised contrast that to the reality of white American universities whether you look at state colleges or Ivy League colleges what have you right the reality in 2019 is not that we're starting addressing an equal population or okay we're in a situation where we're living in a hole created by the history of the British Empire and a hole even in our historical awareness created precisely by the overt conspiracy of ignorance fostered by people like Thomas Jefferson