August 8, 2023
I attended a concert, with fifty people in the audience, in Collingwood, ON, as part of the porch festival on July 26, in 2023. The concert triggered my thoughts on monetizing past grievances.
The porch festival evolved in response to Covid when artists could not perform in closed venues. Instead, people with a porch on their houses and a backyard welcomed artists to play on their porch to an audience in their yard, sitting on camp chairs.
Quammie Williams gave the concert, with Tiki Mercury-Clarke and a local bass player. Quammie, an accomplished drummer, singer, actor and consultant on culture – he was Director of Culture in Barrie, ON – sang and drummed African “resistance songs” with Tiki, who played the piano and ssng in an impressive tonal range.
As usual today at these venues, the MC started out by thanking the Ashininaabi (indigenous) people for letting use of their land for this concert. I am not sure what the homeowner thought about that.
Quammie and Tiki included history talks about slavery in between songs during the concert. Although I heard many of these stories before, I came to listen to jazz and began to get restless as the performance went on with lengthy stories. Quammie’s stories about the emotional toll of slavery on Black people were draining and should have been told with more anger and shouting. But no. Quammie quietly explained the stories behind the “resistance songs”, making his message of slavery even more powerful.
I looked around and beyond the three black artists on the porch, there was not one black person in the audience. But the audience lapped up the talk and the music and gave the performers a standing ovation. Whether the performers meant it or not, the underlying message was unmistakable: white folks were the slave owners creating hardship for Blacks. In my offbeat way of thinking, I thought the enthusiastic clapping was almost an exorcism for the well-heeled senior crowd, consciously or unconsciously, cleansing their souls of having embraced slavery in the past.
I really enjoyed the music and my negative reaction towards being told to be grateful to the Anishinaabi and being responsible for slavery were fading, when I read that the Black Class Action Secretariat (BCAS in Toronto) sued the Government of Canada for past discrimination of black civil servants for C$2.5 billion in the court system. I do not question that discrimination has occurred against Blacks in the Canadian federal civil service and wish it had not happened. The government should have solved this issue in the past. What concerned me was that past grievances have become issues for restitution, always resulting in monetary awards.
The mother of all these restitutions is the “reconciliation” process with Indigenous people in Canada. It started out with “reparations” for the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, that ended up with a C$5 billion settlement. Other claims followed. To date, over C$60 billion have been awarded to indigenous people by the government (there were circa 1.2 million Indigenous people in Canada in 2021). And other claims are in the pipeline. Compare this number to the Canadian defense budget that was C$26 billion in 2021.
I am afraid this trend to sue the government for past grievances will continue and the grievances will become weirder and weirder. Any minority group, ethnic, religious, or other, could organize a class action claim and sue the government for damages. Many may be legitimate, but I wonder if we should consider whether grievances to historical events should be compensated. How far back in history should we go to fix past wrongs made by previous generations?
Monetization of past grievances is a dangerous and costly trend and should be stopped. Why should the current taxpayers pay for injustices committed by previous generations?
andrasthehun.ca 