The French Canadians became white some time ago. I mean look at Ross Perot and Pete LePage.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
My students were very unhappy at Nègres Blancs d’Amerique.
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Replying to @jacremes
Very problematic text, yes. It's true in 1950s/1960s French Canadians were a colonized people, but in todays context it's hard to justify the title.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Right. My point was that my students had a very hard time accepting the idea that Quebecois could have legitimately used racialized language, or that Nègres Blancs or Speak White could have been anything other than appropriative. I think they’d laugh at Canuck as a slur.
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But my broader point was that Muskie wasn’t that long ago, and that Canuck can have different valences to different people.
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Replying to @jacremes
I think that's fair. I've reviewed some good books on French-Canadians in America (the fiction of Clark Blaise & Philip Marchand's Ghost Empire). My argument would be that is more a submerged ethnicity than one subject to active discrimination.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
That is certainly right, although I think there’s a good argument to be made that the discrimination went away because of assimilation. That is, the fact that they’re no longer subject to active discrimination comes from their giving up language and culture—ie the bigots won.
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I think Valliers’ framing was also seen as problematic and/or reaching at the time, not just in retrospect. This comes out it Geoff Turner’s podcast on the October Crisis.
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Replying to @AdelePerry @HeerJeet
I haven’t heard it yet (it’s on my list for when I’m back to commuting and listening to podcasts again). Is the argument that there were mixed feeling and opinions then, or that even the there was consensus that he’d gone too far?
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I’d characterize it as more of the former? He makes the point that black activists found the framing problematic at the time.
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Worth remembering book came out only a year before George Williams protests, so there was a lot of people around who would have seen the problem with the title.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @AdelePerry
Yes, for sure. One of the things I found surprising in Sean Mills’ book, though, is his citing some non-Montreal Black thinkers and activists approving of it (Césaire and Carmichael in particular).
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