YOU PEOPLE

Here we are, careening into the holiday season, our poppies put away, and with them, Don Cherry. That will be a Remembrance Day to remember. Are you satisfied? Outraged? Sad? Do you consider yourself to be one of the “You People” Cherry admonished, or one of the Us People that mourn his dismissal? Can we possibly be both? I think we can.

My parents were casual, unknowing racists. Like Don Cherry, they were born in the 1930’s. Like others of their generation, they were too young to go to war, but also too old to embrace the youth movement of the sixties, and so they grew up in a relatively conformist environment. My father came from Ireland, and my mother from a largely Anglophone community north of Quebec City, where they just didn’t encounter people of different races or beliefs. As such, they didn’t so much dislike or feel threatened by people of colour as much as they were utterly bewildered by them. My father in particular would embarrass the holy hell out of me when, trying to be affable, he would jokingly compliment a black friend on their tan. My mother had a lexicon of terms straight out of the Antebellum South, which she would occasionally deploy with such innocence I’m sure she meant no harm, but I can’t bear to repeat them here.

Never mind that my parents themselves were fish out of water. They settled in Montreal in the sixties, and although they hung out with what I now perceive to be a fairly swinging crowd, they never quite fit in. They always seemed to be scrambling to keep up appearances, without questioning what lay beneath. Despite being an immigrant himself, my father looked down on other people new to this country, unless they came from a similar background (i.e. highly educated, of Northern European descent). My mother was socially ambitious, and would come home from dinner parties and tell me who was there, and where they came from. They kept a copy of Peter C. Newman’s The Canadian Establishment on the bookshelf, and were, I’m afraid, terrible snobs, as only people uncertain of their own place in the world can be.

As such, as their first and only child for a number of years, I was sent to private school. A French private school, where I was one of the very few English kids. Furthermore, as I was painfully shy, I was also sent to a children’s theatre school, where I was virtually the only non Jewish kid. Now I was the fish out of water. Interestingly, while the French kids bullied me terribly, the Jewish kids were embracing. I grew up wishing I was a child of Israel instead of a nerdy Anglo bookworm.

And now for a moment of irony: flash forward to a fundraising event held a number of years ago for a Toronto hospital, heavily supported by the Jewish community. It was modeled on Dancing with the Stars, and I was a judge, alongside several prominent celebrities I will not identify. One of them, a comedian who has since been disgraced for reasons other than this, was incredibly harsh, although he thought he was being funny. The crowd booed him, and then they booed me when I tried to set things right. Without thinking, I (laughingly) said “what’s wrong with you people?” I just meant you people, but at a largely Jewish event, spoken by a non-Jewish person, it of course sounded wrong. It was wrong. It was a horrible horrible evening, and I will never forget it.

This is all to say that it isn’t always easy knowing what to do, or to say, in a diverse society, and we are often misunderstood. I am not defending Don Cherry. It was time for him to move on, if only because he can’t – or won’t – keep up with the country we are fast becoming. As for me, the Anglo, Jewish-wannabe child of an immigrant and a 10th generation Canadian growing up in Quebec, I’ve never been certain just who “you people” are, but I’m hoping they turn out to be us.

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