I accept the argument.
Those involved in the recent decision to provide a group of — white — residents in Lake Major with keys to an old logging road so they could avoid having to travel an extra 5.5 kilometres through the — black — community of North Preston were providing a small but reasonable favour to those most inconvenienced by a local bridge construction project.
When they — the landowners who provided the keys, Coun. David Hendsbee who facilitated the arrangement, municipal bureaucrats who blessed it — came up with this favour, they weren’t thinking about the race of those involved, or about how those who weren’t given keys might regard this favour.
I accept that.
Just as I am prepared to believe a different set of “theys” harboured no particular ill will to the black residents of Upper Hammonds Plains back in the 1990s when they decided not to extend city water services from nearby Pockwock Lake to their homes, even though main water lines travelled through Hammonds Plains’ backyards en route way to providing water to white communities.
And I’ll buy the claims of other theys that race wasn’t a factor in deciding to locate a landfill in Lincolnville in 2006.
Just as it was not a consideration when they — another different they — dumped an earlier landfall beside the same black community in 1974.
Not to forget the landfill in East Lake in 1992. And the dump in Africville in…
By one estimate, more than 30 per cent of Nova Scotia’s black communities happen to be located within five kilometres of a waste dump.
That doesn’t mean the decisions were racially-based.
Race may not have been the prime motivator behind this year’s cross burning in Hants County either.
Or in the torching of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown in 2006.
And that cop who stopped Kirk Johnston’s car in 1998 — triggering a landmark human rights complaint — may not have done so just because the boxer was “driving while black.”
As a white person, I have no difficulty believing race was not behind any one of those specific incidents or individual decisions.
But I can understand why a black person might see a troubling pattern.
