By Brian Campbell 
With everything happening in the United States, the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, the subsequent protests, the reaction of the U.S. President, and the response from the rest of the world, I feel obliged to tell a story of a time I witnessed a blatant example of racism, right here in Manitoba. This event happened in the late 1980s, in a bar in my home town. I won’t mention who I was with. That is their story to tell, not mine.
I was home, visiting family, and decided to go out to the local bar for a drink. It was Saturday night and the bar was busy, everybody drinking and having a good time. Later in the evening, an Indigenous baseball team came in and pulled together several tables to make one long table, right in the middle of the bar. They had obviously won a big game and they were excited and celebrating, many trying to talk at the same time, raising the volume of an already loud bar.
One of them stood up at the head of the table and tried to quiet them down so he could say something. “Hey,” he said. “Everybody shut up for a second.”
A white guy next to me whose name I cannot remember yelled out, “All you fucking Indians should shut up.”
The guy at the head of the table of Indigenous players turned and looked straight at me. I was caught off guard and started to say that it wasn’t me, but before I could say anything, the guy beside me jumped up and sucker punched the player. Within seconds, the whole bar exploded into a massive fight, whites against Indigenous. I backed against the wall with the people I came with and watched in horror.
The white people in the bar greatly outnumbered the Indigenous, so it wasn’t a fair fight from the get-go. On top of that, several of the white people, led by the guy that started the whole thing, had gone outside and had one person step back inside to harass and tease individual Indigenous men and lure them to step outside, where they would be ganged up on and beaten up.
The RCMP were called, but they never came anywhere near the bar. I found out later that they had parked their cruisers at either end of the main street and arrested every Indigenous man they caught running away from the bar, many of whom had already been beaten up before escaping. Some of the Indigenous were even tracked into people’s backyards. Not once did the RCMP come into the bar to ask what happened or who started the fight.
Eventually, I got out of the bar and went home. The next morning, my mother told me that everyone was talking about how an Indian baseball team had started a fight in the bar. I told her what really happened, but I’m not sure that she believed me.
What I know is that never in my life have I ever felt so embarrassed or disgusted to be white.
To defeat ‘racism’ requires recognizing what it is by ALL people’s perspectives. In this case you give, Brian, that the “Indigenous” team being targetted uniquely were without fault. But now imagine the same kind of situation today but with a team defining themselves as the “White” team with direct implication that the team’s membership is exclusively white and presumed representative of all people who have white skin.
While the behaviors can be understood as ‘wrong’ by the initiator of the fight, the reflective team members who interpret themselves as a whole would also BE ‘wrong’ for defining their team as “indigenous” as though this genetic coincidence of membership is relevant. In this case, both VIEWS are ‘wrong’ but the one instigator of the fight is wrong for likely expressing annoyance of the loudness as a universal statement about ALL who are defined as “indigenous”. The team’s members are ‘wrong’ (potentially without more information about what they had been discussing specifically) where they come across AS an INTENTIONALLY stereotypically defined team: that all members of it ARE “Indigenous” and representative of the whole of those they themselves believe are qualified to BE members of the team.
In this case, while the overt trigger of the comment seems to be the ’cause’ of something racist, the act only reflects the cause of the particular fight, not the underlying relevant issue about WHICH person(s) are the true ‘racist’. Everyone involved in the fight could be equally racist.