The F-word
Gracious. A hockey player making “culturally insensitive remarks”? In the middle of a hockey game? What is this world coming to? Next you'll tell me golfers occasionally swear, or that baseball players have been known to spit on the ground...
Most of the commentary on this affair, at least in the English-language press, has focused on the injustice of stripping Mr. Doan of the captain’s C on the strength of what remain unproven allegations: Mr. Doan admits to having referred to “four French refs,” but denies having said “fucking French.” (In some versions, “fucking Frenchman.”) But what if he had?
I had not realized that it is now considered a slur to call someone “French.” Perhaps, in deference to readers’ delicate sensibilities, we should refer only to the “F-word,” much as the word “nigger” has all but disappeared from North American newspapers. (Such is the awful power of a few squiggles of ink on a page.) But again, suppose we accept that it is an insult. Is it an unacceptable one?
That hockey players should be expected, in the midst of attempting to beat each other senseless, to display the appropriate cultural sensitivity is a commentary in itself. Hockey players call each other the most unspeakable things all the time, as any attentive lip-reader can attest. The suggestion of French ancestry would, at a guess, be among the milder aspersions on a player’s parentage. Stipulate that all such insults are wrong, to one degree or another: nevertheless, some are worse than others. Some are, as it were, acceptable, and some are not.
It is indeed a paradox. Call someone any name you can think of, accuse him of the worst moral disorders, and it barely registers. Mention his race or ethnicity and all hell breaks loose. Yet this seeming anomaly can have a sound basis to it; our moral intuition that the one is a far more serious matter than the other is generally well grounded. If I call you a name of the usual scatalogical variety, it is a matter between the two of us. But if I invoke your race, I have made it into something more.
This is between you and your kind, I am saying, and me and mine. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill hockey fight between two individuals, but a stand-in for the tensions that divide society at large. And if I am white and you are black, or aboriginal, or a member of some other minority in a position of social and economic inferiority, it invites all the worst demons of racial injustice to invade the rink. Wherever you go, I am saying, and whatever you do, you can never escape the reality of your race, and of mine. It is a monstrous thing to say.
Had Mr. Doan called someone a “nigger,” then, it is likely he would never have been made captain of Team Canada, if he were even selected to the team. On the other hand, if he'd called someone a “goddamn American” or a “bloody Finn” -- or even “maudit anglais,” supposing his name were Jean Douane instead of Shane Doan -- I doubt we'd be discussing it.
Again, our moral intuition here is probably sound. There's a reason no one gets too upset at references to “tight-fisted Scots,” while a similar characterization of Jews elicits a storm of condemnation: because of the very different recent histories of these two groups. Amid the sometimes rough-edged give-and-take between different ethnic groups that is a part of any modern society, we give a pass to those whose wounds wounds are too fresh.
So the question becomes: is the position of Francophones in contemporary Canadian society more akin to that of blacks in America, or Americans in Canada? Are they as oppressed as Jews, or Scots? Fifty years ago, maybe you’d get an argument. But today?
Yet even his defenders bow to the absurdity of describing Mr. Doan’s alleged outburst as “racist.” Leave aside whether French Canadians are a nation: but a race? There was a time when “nation” and “race” were more or less interchangeable: Churchill refers to “our island race.” But in the present context the word is freighted with a conscious, and offensive, political agenda: to import into the debate over the status of French-speakers in Canada the more explosive associations of race. Not for nothing did Pierre Vallières call his 1968 book White Niggers of America, as if the injustices that French Canadians may once have endured bore any comparison to the legacy of slavery, lynchings and segregation.
This is not, then, merely a matter of grandstanding politicians poking their nose into matters that don’t concern them. Nor is the injustice here that of condemning Mr. Doan for something he may or may not have said. It is the attempt, on the part of the Bloc Québécois and their friends, to claim for French Canadians the status of racial victims. And it is the craven capitulation of the other parties in the face of this crude emotional blackmail.
5/05/2007
