Dear Editor,
Recently, people have been outraged about posters using the term “white privilege”. I don’t think the people opposing these posters are necessarily bad people, but are simply uneducated.
To put this into perspective, I have an example involving two tragedies. A few weeks ago, a young man named Ryan Shtuka, aged 20, went missing at Sun Peaks trying to walk home from a party while intoxicated. Ryan is a white man from a fairly well-off family; they were able to make the public aware of his disappearance, as well as put resources into helping find him.
Recently, a First Nations kid named Tyris Peters went missing. I have only seen a small number of people “share” a post acknowledging his disappearance. I’ve read comments saying that he’s “just a dumb Native kid” who is “probably drunk in a ditch”.
I don’t know Tyris or Ryan, but we are treating one as a tragedy and one as no big deal. Some people may not even realize this is happening, or that their thoughts are inclined this way.
This is white privilege. Ryan’s life is not more valuable than Tyris’s, nor is Tyris’s more valuable than Ryan’s. However, we ignore and continue to ignore it when kids like Tyris go missing, but “stop at nothing” until kids like Ryan are found.
White privilege isn’t trying to degrade white people, nor is it trying to point out differences. The term “white privilege”‘ simply hopes to point out the systemic injustice that people of colour face.
Skylar Dubois
A white kid from
Cache Creek, B.C.
Dear Editor,
With all the jingoism over Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion creating jobs—and almost all of it temporary work (http://bit.ly/2EMpF7A)—it’s conspicuous how there’s no mention of creating actual long-term employment by processing enough of our own crude to, at the very least, supply the expensive gas-consumption requirements of Canadians, instead of exporting the bulk raw resource, then importing the finished product.
A similar question could be asked in regards to our raw-log softwood exports abroad.
After thirty years of consuming mainstream news media, I’ve yet to come across a seriously thorough discussion on why our national and provincial governments consistently refuse to alter this practice, which undoubtedly is the most profitable for the huge Texas-based corporation. And I’m not talking about open-and-closed on the same sole day, with the topic discussion parameters constrained to the point that the outcome seemed predetermined.
If the Americans can extract and process their own oil, as well as our crude and logs, then we should be equally as patriotic—thus Canada First—even if it means paying slightly more for Canadian wages than those in the U.S.
Frank Sterle, Jr.
White Rock, B.C.
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