Tag Archives: Black Lives Matter

The Diocese of Montreal is dismantling anti-black racism

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The diocesan dismantler-in-chief, Rev Christopher Belle seems to think that the diocese is a veritable hotbed of racism, although he did have to reach back to the 1840s in order to find something to dismantle. This, of course, is how the church strives to be relevant.

As an aside, how do you dismantle racism? You can dismantle an electric kettle because it has parts. Islamists like to dismantle humans by removing their heads. But how do you dismantle an idea?

Rev Belle seems to be under the impression that if we all stop singing “Jimmy Crack Corn”, that will be a good start. I know it will be hard, you are probably humming it as you read this, but now you will have to stop. I have and I know I feel better for it.

From here:

Dismantling Anti-Black Racism in the Diocese of Montreal

Our television screens have been inundated with images of racial discord as thousands upon thousands band together to speak out against police brutality aimed at people of colour. There have been cries for justice, racial equality, defunding the police, ‘Enough is enough!’, and so on. For a while, it felt like there was a new instance of racial discrimination, perpetrated in a violent and, all too often, fatal manner, every other week. The rallying cry “BLACK LIVES MATTER” has been heard loud and clear for years now, as people all over the world stand in solidarity with Black people who have had to suffer life-threatening injustice for way too long. Enough is enough, indeed.

[….]

Sooo…why do we need to worry ourselves with dismantling racism in the Diocese of Montreal? We’re a bunch of God-fearing people, who love the Lord, and love each other. So many of us would insist that we don’t have a racist bone in our bodies. Surely there’s no anti-Black racism to dismantle here. Hang on. The lyrics printed at the beginning of this article come from a little ditty called ‘The Blue-Tail Fly’, a song performed during those delightful minstrel shows from the mid-Nineteenth century.

[….]
When it was time, I took my song sheet. I looked it over. I heard somebody say, “Let’s sing Jimmy Crack Corn”. I was on board. I knew this one. I did not know it was a full song. I scanned the page until I found the lyrics. I started to sing. And then I stopped.

Diocese of BC supports Black Lives Matter

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Well, of course they do: black lives do matter:

From the diocesan website:

Let me be clear, I support the Black Lives Matter movement.  My dear beloved friends, in the name of Jesus, the Liberator, let’s do our work.  We are all formed by racism – our psyches are constructed by it from birth.  Let’s free our souls so that we can love as Jesus loved.

The fly in the ointment is that included in the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement are the following gems of the most crypto-Marxist, family destroying, misandrist, anti-civilisation, gender-confused drivel you are ever likely to encounter when out of earshot of an Anglican Church of Canada pulpit:

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Taking a knee

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When I first heard of taking a knee, I thought to myself: “whose knee? Take it where?”

And I was reminded of Spike Milligan’s version of, “I left my heart in San Francisco”:

I left my heart in San Francisco,
I left my knees in old Peru.
I left my little wooden leg
Hanging on a metal peg,
And my eyeballs I gave to you.
I left my teeth on Table Mountain,
High on a hill they smile at me.
When I come home to you, San Francisco,
There won’t be much left of me.

I don’t know why the saying irritates me so profoundly, but it does. Why can’t people say, “I knelt”? Is it because “I knelt” evokes echoes of Christianity which today, as everyone knows, is a thinly disguised euphemism for white colonialism?

Like or not, though, those who take their knees are performing an act of religious obeisance to a god: the god of conspicuous righteousness in this case.

Here we have some police men and women who have taken their knees, not to old Peru, but downtown Toronto to show everyone that social distancing isn’t as important as they claimed when they handed out tickets to people getting together for reasons other than demonstrating on behalf of black lives matter.

It’s a lovely image: heads bowed in reverence, cameras clicking, fists raised, CBC microphone at the ready, poised to capture any whispered pieties.