Protest Marches' Utter Hypocrisy

We assume that homeless people are stark raving mad. They don’t have mental problems. That is only reserved for the elite, the rich and famous or professional athletes and actresses experiencing a slump in their careers.

Not street people. We avoid them. They don’t smell like daisies. They are not like us drowning in French and Italian perfumes. We don’t look them in the eye. That is why it’s pure hypocrisy that we carry placards and march to City Hall when they are frozen to death near thrash cans or when the police shoot them dead because they look like those people that commit crime because of the color of their skin.

You can test drive this hypocrisy yourself. Ask any person carrying a placard that says JUSTICE FOR ADE to tell you who Ade was. They won’t. They’ll tell you about police brutality and how the police cannot be in commissions of enquiry to investigate themselves but they will never give you a concrete reason why they are in the march to demand justice for Ade. Who was Ade? Guess what?

They knew exactly who Ade was. It is embarrassing seeing somebody from Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Nigeria or South Africa walking about half naked on the streets of Toronto or Winnipeg. You know exactly who he is. Equally, a Ukranian or Russian is embarrassed when they see their kinsmen in that position. Somebody roaming about mad on the streets might be from Germany. His countrymen took advantage of opportunities offered by Canada, while he wasted his time basking in being white. He discovered too late that it was not the road to riches.

What’s your point? My point is that we make eye contact with a homeless person for a minute and we know exactly who he is, because we come from the same original country. We walk away because he is an embarrassment. Canada and America are places of opportunities with only one class. Money. We see him on the street. We ignore him. He dies alone under the bridge and bham! We cover him in the mental health blanket. We march to City Hall, placards up in the air: JUSTICE FOR ADE. Some of these protests are pure hypocrisy.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Executive Blogger