A Sometime Fighter For The Disabled: Part Four.
When Ron Malevich became a racist he was unfortunately part of a Canadian tradition. Rulers in early Canada like our first prime minister John A. MacDonald had total contempt for First Nations people. Soldiers and police herded the First Nations people onto reserves. Young aboriginals lived and died in horrible residential schools from the late 1870's onto the next hundred years.
Black people faced outright racism in Nova Scotia and in other parts of Canada. White males reserved the best jobs for themselves and their sons. Canada's federal governments slapped a very heavy head tax on Chinese immigrants who tried to come to Canada in the 20th century. This made immigration into an "only whites are welcome" situation.
So it's really no surprise that racism reared its ugly head again when increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants and other Asians came to Metro Vancouver in the early 1970's. .Ron Malevich became a virulent anti-Chinese racist. He started a scene in one restaurant, telling a man who had a meal with him," I can't take these people. We've got to stop this immigration."
This ironically was the same kind of statement that Canadians from white European countries said about Malevich;'s parents about 50 years before. Malevich spoke kindly of Doug Collins, the Vancouver area journalist who became an outspoken anti-immigrant voice in the 1980"s. Malevich started hanging around with anti-Semites. Like them, he denied that the Holocaust had ever happened. When he voiced these racist ideas to people on the left, they said things like, "Sorry, I don't agree with you. See you around." But most of these people never came near Malevich again.
By the time a stroke felled Malevich in his late 70's, his progressive days were far behind him. He ended up in a long term care hospital. It was a sad end for a man who at one time had helped many people.
No comments:
Post a Comment