Are African Canadians Allowing Themselves To Be Duped And Exploited By Mayor Rob Ford?

By Lincoln Depradine
Pride Contributing Writer

I don’t know what it is about African-Canadians that so many us are so willing to use ourselves – or permit others to use us – as cheap entertainment fodder for the pleasure of the wider Canadian society.

Apart from instances where the news concerns the sporting exploits of Black folk, mainly those living here and in the United States, we hardly ever make it to main pages of the dailies or on the primetime news of Canada radio and TV.

Well, not really; we’ll get our few minutes of mainstream exposure if it’s a big cultural event where there is no chance of missing or ignoring our presence; say, Toronto Carnival or Caribana; the Grammy’s; a newly released big song in R&B, Hip Hop or Rap.

The latest round of cheap entertainment is being presented courtesy of the Ford brothers, Rob and Doug Ford.

Rob Ford, who is seeking re-election as Toronto Mayor, and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford, have their share of Black supporters that constitute the so-called “Ford Nation’’.

No one, in my view, should fault anyone for their political choices. We live in a free and democratic society and people are entitled to throw their support behind whomsoever they wish to.

And, when our people are impoverished, marginalized, unemployed and underemployed as they are, we certainly could understand what gratitude they’ll experience when they can receive any kind of assistance – governmental or personal – from the Ford brothers.

What the recipients ought to do, we recommend, is to take what they can get but do so with their self-respect and dignity intact.

There is no need to be appearing in the media as a backdrop to the Rob Ford silly show.

Furthermore, how ironic it is that some of the same people who condemn drug use among Black youth are now making excuses and showing public support for a big, hardback public official who is a self-confessed user of multiple kinds of drugs. They display zealousness in defence of the mayor.

That same zealousness, however, never will they use as a force for self-empowerment and community upliftment. It’s never used in championing causes for better services for themselves, their children and the community.

They never show up in the media clamouring for greater employment opportunities, like the jobs that have been created by the construction of facilities for the hosting of next year’s Pan Am Games in Toronto. There is no word on how we can work together to ensure that the Caribbean athletes who are coming here for the Games are made comfortable and will have a swell time on and off the tracks.

Apart from Rob Ford’s well-publicized racist and homophobic comments, the brothers have added insult to injury by more than once referencing Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States of America.

Last week, it was Doug Ford claiming that his brother is more popular with Black Torontonians than Obama is with African-Americans; predicting, he did, that in this October’s municipal polling, the incumbent mayor is “going to have more votes in the black community than President Obama”.

Ford’s statement is plain laughable in its untruthfulness.

In the 2008 US presidential elections, Obama received about 95 percent of the African-American vote and 93 per cent in 2012. That’s more than 15 million people voting for Obama each time.

In the case of Toronto’s 2010 mayoral election, a total of 383,501 people of all races voted for Rob Ford.

And, with each comment from one Ford or another, we endure the indignity of one Black person going after the other in angry public exchanges played out in the media.

It’s like a digitally enhanced 2014 version of an old movie; a rewind of the 1990s when the late Dudley Laws was involved in a no-holds-barred campaign to expose and put an end to racism and policing shooting of unarmed Black youth.

Some Blacks repaid Laws for his selfless sacrifice by ensuring that it was known to the public, through media appearances, that “Dudley doesn’t speak for me’’. They distanced themselves from Laws because, they claim, he was embarrassing them by the way he spoke; and he made them uncomfortable among their white friends on their jobs and in their suburban neighbourhoods.

No such aversion to Mayor Ford.

But this is not altogether surprising. Even under Slavery – the world’s most brutal genocidal, inhuman and oppressive social and economic system – some slave owners and oppressors were popular among some slaves.

But, we suppose the mayor’s supporters could argue that even if Rob Ford is a proven bigot and drug user, it’s small potatoes compared to the murderous, blood-stained hands of the slave oppressor of the 16^th to 19^th centuries.