Trudeau's Pattern of Behavior
I am not a person of colour, so I really can't appreciate what it is like to be a person of colour.
I don't know what the long term effects of these images will have on Trudeau.
I can't imagine how people who have experienced discrimination on the basis of skin colour are feeling. I do know how a very minor issue affected my family.
I am a very proud Ukrainian Canadian. The reason that I am so proud to be Ukrainian is because for the first 25 years of my life, I wasn't proud to be Ukrainian.
I grew up in Dauphin which has a large Ukrainian population. It was also the capital of Ukrainian jokes. It was the Ukrainians who found them funny. Even as a young child, I didn't find them funny, and I found them hurtful. Most of the jokes had the two characters of Johnny and Metro and stereotyped Ukrainians as stupid. My mom found them hilarious. I couldn't understand. She was a first generation Canadian and heard of the struggles of both of her parents leaving the Ukraine and coming to Canada. I guess it was one of those things that only people who have that ethnicity could find funny. With a name like Ireland, I could simply deny that I was Ukrainian.
It was hard to understand my mom. On one hand, she laughed at the jokes. On the other hand, she taught me to speak some Ukrainian and she encouraged me to proud to be Ukrainian. I wasn't.
One time, when I was about 8 years old, my parents had a fight and it was the type of fight that escalated and they both went below the belt in their verbal hits. My dad called me mom a stupid Ukrainian. The second those words came out of his mouth, he started apologizing. It didn't matter to my mom, the words were out and she was devastated. I had never seen my mom speechless. The argument was over and my mother went upstairs and my father slept in his den. My parents didn't speak for three days.
I asked my mom how she could laugh at the stupid Ukrainian jokes yet she was so upset with my dad. My mom said because she had a sense of humour. My father's remarks did not come in the context of humour. I tried to play mediator and pointed out that my dad apologized immediately and expressed profound regret and said the remark when he was emotional and not thinking. According to my mom, that was why it was so offensive to her. He wasn't thinking and he was emotional yet he had that statement locked and loaded, so to speak.
It still was hard for me to understand my mom's position.
My parents were really in love so they got over this. My father started asking my mother to teach him some Ukrainian and he insisted that we celebrate all Ukrainian traditions. Things were fine but everytime my mother had a few too many drinks, she would always remind me that "your father called me a stupid Ukrainian."
For me, I became a proud Ukrainian when I left home and I realized that Ukrainians were not as prevalent as they were in Dauphin. I didn't want my culture to die so I became someone who tried to dispense our rituals and traditions.
The day before he died, my father met with a Home Care Case Coordinator to talk about services and gather his history. When the Case Coordinator met with my mother after, she asked how my father was Ukrainian with a name like Ireland. She said that when she asked my father what his ethnicity he was, he identified himself as a proud Ukrainian.
Even though my mother had long forgiven my father, she still had a little bit of resentment. This was the last gift that my dad gave my mom. He was choosing to identify himself as Ukrainian. It meant the world to her.
So, can Trudeau find a way to recover from this? His actions have been so hurtful to so many. I can't appreciate this because I am not a person of colour, but I'm deeply troubled. If my mother had such a difficult time forgiving the love of her life over one comment, I don't know how Trudeau moves forward from this.
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