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Stuff White People Like: NDP Federal Convention

posted by Geordie Geography: Atlantic Halifax Topics: racism, NDP, whiteness

July 14, 2009

Stuff White People Like: NDP Federal Convention

Our friends at Rabble bring us news that the latest NDP convention in Halifax this August will be a pretty white affair.

As can be gleamed from the convention speakers: "7 out of 7 featured speakers at the convention are white; 6 of them are men. 9 out of 9 headshots are of white people. For that matter 18 out of the 18 people pictured on this page are white. Seriously?"

While appealing to people of colour has rarely been at the top of the NDP agenda it's pretty amazing to see them totally absent from a major NDP convention. Especially considering organizers were able to squeak in an NHL defenceman and his Carbon Neutral Challenge.


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Contrived outrage my...

Submitted by Geordie on Sun, 2009-07-19 16:57.

Leftdog,

The outrage is real, hence why I am posting about it. Bloggers such as myself see equity as an issue which effects the millions of non-white Canadians and something which is lacking in the NDP platform, caucus and convention. The lack of it in the NDP leads directly to a lack of it their policy: economic, foreign and domestic.

If for some reason that's not 'progressive' in your eyes...well...I'm gunna take a wild guess that you're a white dude from Saskatchewan who sees equity in the same way that Tories do.

In any event, since you brought up criticisms of the NDP, they have not openly called for nationalization and their willingness to maintain the $60 billion in Conservative taxes cuts as part of the coalition was bad. They should be ashamed of their Executive's policy towards Palestine which is in open contradiction to what their membership called for in 2006.

Cheers,

Geordie

great observation

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2011-04-05 20:54.

Thanks for this article Geordie, this is pretty much every convention. I love the hemming and hawing the white men do when gender parity is called for on the convention floor mics too.

non-white-woman

Sheeeeeesh!!

Submitted by leftdog (not verified) on Wed, 2009-07-15 11:29.

I will repeat here the same comment that I left on another site which voiced the same contrived outrage this morning:

"I suppose when you are unable to criticise New Democrats for anything actually substantive by way of economic policy, foreign policy, etc., enemies of progressive thinking slip down into the gutter and contrive outrage on what must be an otherwise slow blogging day."