I wanted to spend some time this month, before it expires mind you, to address an issue that is oven foreign to us here in Canada. As I have been made aware for the last decade or so, February is designated as Black History Month, both here in Canada, as well as in the United States. Watching the development of a Canadian campaign to blame society for the social ills experienced by African-Canadians in our larger cities has been amusing especially while it has coincided with a backlash against such attitudes south of the border.

The chief roadblock for those who wish to guilt the rest of Canada into recognizing the black community, in North York for example, as being oppressed by a dominering, white, elitist system has for years been that it is proving more and more ridiculous when you simply look at the reality of the situation. It is simply too absurd to see how Canadians who, on average, are wealthier, better educated and lack the history of segregation that existed in the United States (over fifty years ago, mind you) can be just as poverty-striken and crime-ridden as their American cousins just because the rest of us look down on blacks.

Rather, as many prominant black celebrities like Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman demonstrate, even the Americans who have been culturally sensitive to such race relations for the better part of the twentieth century are starting to realize that maybe after fifty years, it’s not about the skin colour after all. Cosby has become a piriah among many black activists south of the border for suggesting that the wounds African Americans suffer from today are mainly self-inflicted, that it is a sub-cultural tendancy that is holding blacks in Detroit, Harlem and other major city communities back, not the actions of white America. Freeman goes a step further by suggesting that events like Black History Month are more detremental than helpful since it intentionally singles out black Americans instead of trying to harmonizing them with the rest of the country. Both men, along with media like the recently released movie, The Pursuit of Happiness, are starting to paint a different picture of the black struggle in which the battle is not black vs. white, but man vs. himself; in other words, poorer blacks are holding themselves back while those who wish to succeed, can and will if they put in the hard work and effort.

This contrast became clearer for me when you listen to arguements from the other side of the fence. Levar Burton, famous for hosting Reading Rainbow twenty years ago and for playing Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, did an interview for the season three DVDs of the latter show in which he lamented that the show explored the romance of old men, klingons, women and even an android, but that it never tackled the romance of the black man! It took me a bit of reflection to realize just what he was saying since Geordi has a handful of romantic episodes in the series but after a while I realized that he wasn’t criticizing the lack of opertunities to do an on-screen kiss as much as he wanted Geordi’s romances to be done *the black way*. I didn’t know that black people fell in love so differntly from everybody else; as far as I’m aware, the mechanics are the same for blacks as they are for everybody else.

Yet, this attitude of special treatment and acknowledgement, whether it’s coming from Levar or the dozens of black rappers still looking for “respect” as they drive down the highway in a new BMW in their latest movie video just goes to show just how immature the civil rights movement has become in the States, even for those who actually gave it some legitimacy decades earlier. Now this might be out of character to suggest that shun American institutions as we in Canada search to grow and develop, but this is one lesson we don’t want to import from our sourthern neighbours, yo!