Disadvantaged is the new advantaged, as Prof. Carrie Bourassa, of Saskatchewan University knows only too well.
And advantages are worth fighting for. That’s why she first claimed to be a Métis (mixed Red Indian and European) and then fought a rearguard action when found out.
Prof. Bourassa accessorised her claim with an eye for authentic detail. She called herself ‘Morning Star Bear’ and sported the usual paraphernalia of her supposed tribe: beads, feathers, embroidered shawls.
She wisely refrained from reinforcing her claim by scalping her academic colleagues, for which reticence they should be grateful. Instead those ingrates circled their wagons and vengefully set up a genealogical test, which showed that Prof. Bourassa is a pure paleface of Eastern European stock.
The impostor was suspended, but she didn’t take punishment lying down. Instead she whipped out her trusted woke tomahawk and began laying about her with nothing short of Apache abandon.
Those palefaces, she cried, are conducting a “smear campaign” because they still operate in the antediluvian world. The postdiluvian world inhabited by Prof. Bourassa doesn’t rely on “blood quantums” to establish identity. You are what you say you are, what you identify as.
And identifying as an ‘indigenous’ inhabitant of Canada isn’t just a matter of a deeply felt imperative. For Canada is busily trying to atone for her colonial past, which she acquired vicariously courtesy of the British Empire.
For Canadian academic institutions, this atonement isn’t limited to a steady chorus of mea culpas. They also seek to compensate materially the poor souls whose ancestors were colonised 500 years ago. The pain of displacement knows no statutes of limitations. It never abates without the analgesic of prizes, grants and various other emoluments.
Morning Star Bear knows the game inside out and she plays it with virtuoso dexterity. Actually, she has a strong case, logically if not morally.
After all, if a man can identify as a woman, a woman as a man, and either one as any of the 72 sexes currently on offer, why can’t Morning Star Bear choose any racial identity she likes? No reason whatsoever.
The profusion of sexes springs from the rejection of the obsolete binary distinction. There are men at one end, women at the other, and then there are 70 intermediate sexes based on the degree of proximity to either end. Thus, for example, there are names for people who are 80 per cent men and 20 women or vice versa, although don’t ask me what those names are.
And the beauty of it is that anyone who talks the chromosome talk and walks the genetic walk instantly acquires the stigma of a stick-in-the-mud at best or a fascist at worst. Never mind the chromosomes, feel the identity.
If this approach is so productive with sex, why not with race? Most people have some sort of admixtures to their gene pool. Go back far enough and any Englishman can claim to be Celtic, Saxon, Danish or perhaps ancient Roman.
And don’t get me going on the Russians. Should they wish to do so, most of them could claim to be Mongols, Swedes, Germans – or even Jews. Actually, the last two claims became popular in the 1970s, when some members of those groups were allowed to emigrate.
I knew a snub-nosed Russian chap of pure peasant heritage who told the Interior Ministry that his grandfather confessed on his deathbed that he was a quarter-Jew. Even if true (which it wasn’t), that only made him one-sixteenth Jewish, but who’s to decide which part of one’s blood speaks in the loudest voice?
Another Russian friend of mine claimed to be a Volksdeutsche, a person born outside Germany, but whose culture and language has German origins. When queried, he proved to be familiar with Bach, Beethoven and Goethe, but the only German he knew came from Soviet war films. All he could say was Halt, Hände hoch and Ve have vays to make you talk.
My intrepid friend nevertheless claimed that all his dreams were in German, the language of his blood. The German consular officials were satisfied, and he got his travel documents (the Russians wanted to get rid of him anyway).
A more recent and relevant example dates back to my tenure at NASA, 1974-1975. As a government institution, NASA was in the vanguard of all the perverse trends, planting saplings that have by now blossomed into luxuriant trees.
Hence a young woman got a job in the documentation department on the strength of her claim of being half-Indian, half-black. In fact, she was neither, but the personnel department already functioned as a harbinger of things to come. Not only did Carol (not her real name) get the job, but she even got to keep it after doubts of her ethnicity began to creep in.
Morning Star Bear has to be on a winner there. Her detractors may throw the genetic kitchen sink at her, but she’ll crush them under a woke bathtub. Zeitgeist is her tailwind and she won’t be stopped.
If a woman claims to be a man she can get away with the claim, however if she claims to be a Doctor or electrician she needs proof of identity. Why the inconsistency?
If I may, broken bones and electrocutions are a more serious matter to the public than a she who wants to be a he.
She does have the appearance of an American Indian. So did the famous actor Charles Bronson [Buchinsky]. Charles was a Polish Tartar by ancestry.
This Professor Carrie also claims to be related to the last Czar???
The name for people who are 80 per cent men and 20 women or vice versa is “insane”.
Or perhaps (as we discussed last week): “Too clever by half”. I would guess the majority of people claiming to be anywhere on the spectrum other than the endpoints is playing the game in order to get some advantage.