Old Fashioned Racism in New Bottles of Intelectual Scepticism
Oct 27th, 2008 by Charles Menzies
I often find Wente’s comments interesting to read, at times enlightening, and sometimes
infuriating. She’s a 21st century Denny Boyd. But, like Boyd, her commentaries can verge
toward the insensitive and the just plain wrong. Take this one on Dick Pound’s comments about
Canada’ being one time a savage place.
It is possible that the use of the word reflected Pound’s linguistic skills -speaking in a second
language can sometimes lead to awkward moments. But Wente goes beyond that to pick up the
dismissive argument of two former Northwest Territory employees who consider the measure of
culture and society to be the complexity of the machines a culture has invented. How sadly
wrong they are.
The complexity of a culture is not measured by the complexity of their machines. As an
anthropologist who has both worked for over a decade with Indigenous peoples, as a person who
has read extensively on global cultures, and as a person who has lived in Canada’s north I can
assure the reader that social and cultural complexity comes in many forms. The problems that
Wente points to are problems of a colonial history, not the problems of a savage culture.
Here’s Wente’s commentary in full.
http://blogs.ubc.ca/ecoknow/2008/10/old-fashioned-racism-in-new-bottles-of-intelectual-skepticism/