Tue Mar 22/05
Death in Oogaboogaland

The idea has been rattling around that Canadians would have been more outraged about the events of June 23, 1985 had it been, say, Wardair's flight 182 that blew up off the Irish coast and not Air India's. I think that's probably correct, but media/blogospheric contributions on the topic have been surprisingly perfunctory. David Frum:

The outraged families of the victims ask whether Ottawa would have shown equal carelessness had the victims been predominantly white rather than predominantly of subcontinental origin. On this one point, Canada's record since 9/11 should set the survivors' minds at ease: Yes, the Canadian government would have been just as careless.

Colby Cosh:

On one hand, it's connected with a remote political struggle for which most Canadians know or care little. And, on the other hand, it's a serious black eye for multiculturalism… So those of us with no personal connection to this mass murder tend to regard it… as something that had very little to do with Canada and certainly nothing that had anything to do with Canada's reputation for peace and civility.

Rick Anderson:

Had that been an Air Canada jet, had this been an act of terror committed by extremists linked to domestic politics, would any stone have remained unturned? How complacent would people be about the killers having been "known" to police before the act, about the destruction of important evidence by authorities, about the intimidation, even murder, of key witnesses? Would a tragedy of such import remain unresolved 20 years later without having become a major national scandal?

They all use the concept of racially biased outrage as a rhetorical device simply to prove something else: Frum proffers a cheap shot about Canadian homeland security; Cosh maintains that justice has had ample time to see itself done; and Anderson argues that the justice system didn't work (George Jonas rebutted that premise beautifully yesterday; certainly more beautifully than did Linda McQuaig, who counterpointed Anderson in the Star). But I don't think any of those arguments is as important as the drive-by point they're making about Canadians caring about other Canadians on a sliding, colour-coded scale.

Still, this isn't "a serious black eye for multiculturalism" — nothing has been bruised by our reaction to the Air India disaster that wasn't already hurting. This is exactly the same phenomenon, after all, that makes CNN consider the second-worst school shooting in American history less newsworthy than the potential death of Terry Schiavo, who is already dead by many people's standards (screenshot here). Hell, they were even nice enough to explain, in three short words, why it was less newsworthy:

Here are the New York Times front pages from the days after the Springfield (two dead), Jonesboro (five dead), Littleton (15 dead) and Red Lake (10 dead) school shootings. I think you'll see what I'm getting at, and I don't think there's any other explanation to be had for it except that we — human beings, that is — care more about people who are like us, no matter how superficial that connection might be, than we do about people who are not like us. What a victory it would have been if the Air India bombing had resulted in Canadians addressing that sliding scale, in tackling the low-temperature racism that dwells within most (if not all) people instead of indignantly denying it. It's nothing to be ashamed of really, because it's so natural, but it's something to struggle against nonetheless.