In The Globe and Mail of July 10, Wendy Mesley wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasons behind her recent departure from the CBC, Canada’s publicly supported yet pathologically Leftist television network.
In 2020, post George Floyd, informed by a Black CBC reporter that she had frequently been called the N-word, Mesley, in a conference call with the producers of her show, made the mistake of actually saying that word out loud. OMG! One of her producers was Black, another, Asian. “They went silent,” she reports: “I was horrified I had hurt them and apologized, but the damage was done. I was told the bosses would be informed and that there would be an investigation.”
Turns out a few months earlier, in translating the title of a 1968 book “Negres blancs d’Amerique” into English, she had again uttered that ugly word out loud.
Mesley was suspended and forced to take sensitivity training. Ultimately her show was cancelled. That she has always supported “the other,” that she is in no way a racist, that her verbal “indiscretions” were utterly devoid of malice, did not seem to matter. The irony of her article, however, is that while she is critical of the CBC for its treatment of her, she is fully willing to acknowledge her guilt, referring to her language as stupid, thoughtless, insensitive, etc., while at the same time reviling those “conservatives” who had attempted to use her as an example of the utter disdain for Free Speech typical of the political Left.
But who are the guilty parties here? Mesley’s Black producer hardly qualifies as an oppressed member of an oppressed minority. That he was deeply offended by the utterance of a word would suggest either that he has the emotional maturity of a 10 year old or that he was exploiting the situation out of a deep-seated resentment against White people. Only a fool would suggest that Whites alone are guilty of racism. Sadly the Left is rife with fools, including Mesley herself.
Her article, ultimately, is rendered meaningless by its insistence that words spoken without malice in the pursuit of Truth must at times be censored, even as it argues that this axiom is in no way a threat to the principle of Free Speech. It clearly is! Mesley is hoisted upon her own petard, so to speak, deprived of a job by the ludicrous ethos she supported throughout her entire career. It is so encouraging that “liberals” such as Bill Maher have become increasingly disenchanted with the sensibility of the “woke” Left, descrying the childish whining of that sector over issues barely worthy of consideration.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the juvenile sensibility in question than the recent demand by the students of the U. of Wisconsin that a 42 ton boulder of geological significance be removed from campus because a local newspaper article from 1925 had associated it with a racial slur. With no other evidence of the symbolic import of the rock, its racial “significance” apparently forgotten generations ago, it was nevertheless removed from campus at a cost of $50,000 to a remote piece of property owned by the university. A school rep said they simply could not allow it to continue doing “harm to our community.”
Harm? In Burkina Faso, Islamic jihadists have been killing innocent civilians on a regular basis for years now, 59 near the town of Gorgadji this past Wednesday, 132 including children in the town of Solhan this past June. The C.P.P. actively oppresses Christians, Muslims and other religious sects in pursuit of its Communist agenda. In Kabul even as I write the Taliban is going door to door in search of any with Christian/American/Western sympathies. And of course all Afghani Women with a thirst for freedom and self-determination know the door to both those rights is about to be slammed shut.
Yes, tyranny and oppression are recurring Facts of human history. But in the inane narrative of the contemporary Left, tyranny and oppression are the cause of all disparities within the species, intelligence, volition and effort simply eliminated as factors in the human condition. This entails a fundamental rejection of Western Humanism with its faith in Man’s capacity as an Intelligent/Moral Being, and its replacement with what has become the dominant preoccupation of our Culture, a cynical, never ending blame game exposing the heartless Victimization of pretty much everyone save affluent, White, Heterosexual Males!
Problem is, of course, that tyranny and oppression, however imperfectly, have been purged from those nations founded upon the Principles of Western Humanism to an extent not evident in most of the rest of the world. To any rational individual, this is a self-evident fact. But as a reviled aspect of Western Humanism, Reason has been replaced by “feeling” as the arbiter of our valuations here in the “progressive” West. If Wendy Mesley’s colored co-workers felt offended by her utterance of a two syllable word, then they had every right to! If the non-White students of the U. of Wisconsin felt threatened by a 42 ton rock, then they had every right to! If, as U. of Connecticut Law Professor Mathilde Cohen argues, immigrants to France feel demeaned by that country’s reverence for its own cuisine, then they have every right to!
Western Humanists from Socrates to contemporary “conservatives” such as Nathaniel Branden and Jordan Peterson would argue that without Reason we are little more than sophisticated monkeys. Of course that’s the basis of the Left’s cynical narrative of Oppression. Yet ironically, nonsensically, those of that persuasion would never admit to the irrationality of their world-view, [i.e., that they too are little more than monkeys.] Thus are we left with a level of political discord utterly beyond repair. Thus are we asked to accept that if you, as the member of a visible minority, have failed to achieve your life’s dreams, have had your feelings hurt, you must be a victim of “oppression.” Turn on MSNBC or CNN or the CBC or CTV and you will be regaled by such simplistic drivel day after day after tedious day!