COLUMN: Think Again – Adding to history is better than erasing it

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2020 (1871 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 1922, a prominent Canadian activist wrote a book titled The Black Candle. Ostensibly about Canada’s drug laws, The Black Candle contained many racist statements and portrayed visible minority groups, particularly the Chinese community, as a threat to Canadian society. To make matters worse, this person also promoted eugenics and strongly supported the forced sterilization of disabled people.

Did you know there is a statue of this person stationed prominently near Parliament Hill? Not only that, several schools are named after this person, including one right here in Manitoba.

In light of this person’s racist views, are you ready to take down Nellie McClung’s statue and rename those schools?

Wait a second. Are we talking about the same Nellie McClung who championed women’s rights and helped women gain the right to vote in Canada? Yes, we are. It’s ironic that McClung, who so bravely fought against the anti-female prejudices and stereotypes of her time, was deeply prejudiced herself and promoted vicious racial stereotypes.

McClung is far from the only Canadian icon with a mixed track record.

For example, a prominent political leader wrote his master’s thesis on the merits of eugenics. In his thesis, which is easily accessible online, this person classified people with mental disabilities as “subnormal” and advocated forced sterilization of the “mentally and physically defective.” He even recommended they be segregated from the general population.

Of course, today Tommy Douglas is revered as a progressive icon and as the architect of medicare. Not only are multiple schools named after Douglas, in 2004 the CBC dubbed him “The Greatest Canadian.” Fortunately, while Douglas never formally renounced his master’s thesis, he chose not to mandate forced sterilization after he became premier of Saskatchewan. It appears that a visit to Nazi Germany in 1936 made Douglas lose his enthusiasm for eugenics.

As with McClung, there is a mix of good and bad that we must weigh when evaluating Douglas. He was certainly far from perfect.

I could give many more examples. Wilfrid Laurier supported the racist Chinese Head Tax, William Lyon Mackenzie King forced Japanese Canadians into internment camps during World War II, and John A. Macdonald oversaw the creation of the disastrous residential school system for Indigenous children. Even revered icons from other countries, such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, expressed racist views that were widely accepted at their time, but that we now know were wrong.

The reality is that it’s not hard to find serious flaws in pretty much all the men and women whom many of our buildings, streets, schools, and cities are named after. If our first reaction upon hearing about the bad things people said or did in the past is to remove their name from all monuments and institutions, we are going to have a lot of blank spaces across our country.

This does not mean we should gloss over their flaws—far from it. Rather, we must provide appropriate context so that Canadians understand both the good things and the bad things these people did. Updating the descriptions under their monuments and ensuring that students in school learn more about our history are good first steps.

In addition, we should do more to recognize the achievements of Canadians from visible minority groups who had previously been overlooked. Putting Viola Desmond, a Canadian civil rights activist who bravely challenged racial segregation in the 1940s, on our new $10 bill is an example of how this can be done.

Let’s not be too quick to take down a statue or to remove a person’s name from an institution. We should add to our history, not erase it.

 

Michael Zwaagstra is a high school teacher and a Steinbach city councillor. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.