Montreal Parade, Usually a Point of Pride, Raises Debate About Racism

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/world/canada/montreal-quebec-parade-racism.html

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Montreal’s annual Fête Nationale parade is meant to celebrate Quebec’s unique culture in Canada. But the lead float in this year’s parade over the weekend instead prompted a debate about racism in the province.

Four young men of color, dressed in beige, walked beside the float to push it forward while white women, dressed in white, danced around them. The float, commemorating the founding of Montreal, featured an open history book emblazoned with the words “Il était une fois,” which translates as “Once upon a time.”

The singer Annie Villeneuve, who is white, rode on the float, singing “Gens du pays,” or “People of the Land,” often called the unofficial anthem of the province. A white pianist, dressed in a white tuxedo, played on a white piano behind her.

A video of the float, posted on Facebook by Felix Brouillet, a student at the University of Montreal, quickly went viral. The comments it attracted were withering.

“If the organizers of the event had a minimum of sensitivity and understanding of social realities for people of color, this mess would never have happened,” a man named Ré Jean-Pierre wrote.

Another commenter, Sébastien Boudreau, wrote that “the problem is not that it is people of color pushing the float, but that you associate them right away with slaves, instead of just seeing them as proud citizens participating in the national festival.”

A parade organizer, Maxime Laporte, told Radio ICI that the fact that minorities appear subordinate to whites in the float was not intentional but an unfortunate coincidence. “It was entirely by chance,” he said of the racial juxtaposition, adding that the 2017 parade was more diverse than in any previous year.

But Emilie Nicolas, the president of Québec Inclusif, an organization that supports the rights of Quebec minorities, did not accept that explanation.

“The organizers didn’t have a sense of black history to see right away what this looked like,” she said in a telephone interview. To see it herself as a black Quebecer, she said, was “seeing a representation of what is too often your actual place in society.”

Ms. Nicolas, whose group is pressing the provincial government to investigate systemic racism, said the fact that the organizers did not notice what she called the float’s blatant symbolism, intentional or not, shows that “systemic racism is alive and well in Canada.”

The young men who pushed the float were members of a local high school sports team who had volunteered to do the job. Mr. Brouillet, whose video had been viewed more than 1.8 million times on Facebook through Tuesday afternoon, said he regretted that the athletes had been dragged into the controversy.

In a telephone interview, he said many people in Quebec were “willfully ignorant” of racism in the province. “It was a coincidence that could have been averted,” he said of the float.

Of all of Canada’s provinces and territories, Quebec stands out for its nationalism, tied to a separatist movement and a centuries-long feud with country’s dominant Anglophone community that dates to the Treaty of Paris in 1763, when France ceded what was then called New France to the British. Slavery was a part of the province’s life for 200 years, as it was elsewhere in Canada, affecting both black and indigenous peoples; it was abolished in most of the British Empire, including Canada, in 1833.