You Get A Safe Space... And You Get A Safe Space... And You Get A Safe Space....
Diversity is strength. At least, so says prime minister Justin Trudeau. But it appears that diversity is in the eye of the beholder.
Among those with a unique slant on Trudeau’s Diversity is Lido Pimienta, a choleric Columbian-Canadian singer who advertises herself as the La Papessa. Pimienta is the self-appointed mayor of Safe Space, a bedroom community of one lodged between her ears. As such, she has some… novel ideas about how society should order itself— especially at one of her concerts.
“I started asking men specifically to go to the back of the room because in my 15+ years of attending shows, both on stage and in the audience, men make it unsafe for me to be in such spaces,” Pimiento told Billboard.
“From the stage point of view, I noticed how most men who plant themselves at the front, they tend to overpower ME. Their presence usually at my own show is a threatening one and I have had men grab me, grab my hands, grab my waist, scream "TE AMO MAMACITA.” There’s more of this bilge but you get the general idea.
Pimienta’s diversity also includes bringing “brown” women to the “safe” front of her audience and dispatching white people to the back of the hall. At something called the Halifax Pop Explosion (sounds like a skin eruption) Pimiento did her Diversity thing when— struth!— a white volunteer balked at the idea of being treated in the manner of a menstruating Muslim woman.
Because Pimienta is an inclusive performer, she said, “No problem”. Of course not. She pitched an epic fit about racism, oppression etc. and had the volunteer kicked out of the hall (which is a publicly-funded facility).
Naturally, the HPX organizers were mortified. Not by Pimienta. But by the “racist” volunteer. Their press release is an effusion of SJW groupthink. ”A white HPX volunteer along with several other white people in the audience reacted to Lido Pimienta inviting 'brown girls to the front' of the venue with overt racism. This volunteer was removed by Lido herself….
"We will not accept this behavior and neither should you... Be responsible for your friends — talk to them and support them as they move towards unpacking their racism. People of Color deserve safe spaces and it is your responsibility to help. It is also ours.”
Well, you might suggest, Halifax is a progressive college town. As someone once said it’s five universities with a little port operation on the side. You’d presume this artist agitprop is confined to the overly heated corner of Nova Scotia. No one can condone segregating crowds like cattle.
You’d be wrong. Pimieneta won the 2017 Polaris Music Prize worth $50,000 (all the while f-bombing the organizers). She’s a lionized CBC icon when she isn’t playing slum landlord in her safe space. In spite of labelling her hometown of London, Ont. as “racist” and “horrible” she’s funded by the Canada Council and, as noted earlier, performs her Mengele-on-the-train-platform routine in publicly funded halls across the nation.
As they say, if you fund certain behaviors you can be sure you will get more of them. And Pimienta’s high-handed social engineering is hardly an outlier in Canada’s artistic/ academic community. Continued success in subordinating people is rampant in Canada.
Take the vitriolic censure of author Jospeh Boyden for allegedly appropriating Indigenous culture or the strong-arming of editors at Write magazine over yet-more appropriation or the introduction of “safe space” black-only convocations at University of Toronto as but a few examples of how far Pimienta’s grievance gospel has intimidated the arts community into surrender.
Diversity in these terms is not diversity as we know the term. It’s social engineering by an insulated group of crypto-fascists like Pimienta to leave them calling the shots. Marx would be proud. And the capitulation of the mainstream to her cohorts has spilled over its banks at universities to flood into the general public.
When I tried to report the Write magazine bun fight, prominent Canadian artists just said, You think I’m crazy enough to get invovled? A prominent website yanked a podcast critical of indigenous agitation, because an executive of the site was afraid of the ate Gord Downie’s censure. Ladies and gentlemen… the products of the 1960s civil justice.
The Enlightened Ones’ enforcement of its conformity template was supplied by Canada’s new governor general Julie Payette. Addressing the issue of science Trudeau’s choice as GG made it clear that conventional religion is so Tuesday. “We are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention, or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone— oh my goodness— a random process,” the former astronaut opined.
This from the Canadian representative of the Queen— the head of the Church of England.
But you can bet Payette’s searing indictment of religion doesn’t extend to the indigenous people’s worship of the buffalo, the crow or the clouds. They are part of Pimienta’s “brown people” who are afforded safe spaces and illogical double standards in Trudeau’s Diversity Inc.
But who’s surprised? Only in Trudeau’s Canadian vision would an immigrant given everything her native land couldn’t supply then turn on her hosts as oppressors and threats to her safety. And be awarded $50,000 by the cringing intelligentsia for calling them racists. While be celebrated as a truth-teller by the national broadcaster.It’s Trudeau’s world, and you’re welcome to it.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com)