This happened on November 30 but I don't believe a thread was made on it.
Uncivil dialogue: Commenting and stories about indigenous people
CBC said:
Today we made the difficult decision to temporarily close comments on stories about indigenous people. We hope to reopen them in mid-January after we've had some time to review how these comments are moderated and to provide more detailed guidance to our moderators.
CBC said:
We've seen thoughtful, insightful and moving comments on our pages. We've seen ignorant, ill-informed and objectionable comments as well. All of it is acceptable, in our view, in a marketplace of ideas where the issues of the day are freely debated and tested. For that to work, the debate must be respectful, even if it's vigorous and pointed.
But as our guidelines make clear, we draw the line on hate speech and personal attacks.
While there are a number of subjects and groups of people who seem to bring out higher-than-average numbers of worrisome comments, we find ourselves with a unique situation when it comes to indigenous-related stories.
We've noticed over many months that these stories draw a disproportionate number of comments that cross the line and violate our guidelines. Some of the violations are obvious, some not so obvious; some comments are clearly hateful and vitriolic, some are simply ignorant. And some appear to be hate disguised as ignorance (i.e., racist sentiments expressed in benign language).
This comes at the same time CBC News has made a concerted effort to connect with indigenous communities in order to improve our journalism and better reflect these communities to a national audience. The success of our Aboriginal unit and our investigative journalism around missing and murdered indigenous women are just two examples of that commitment.
We don't want violations of our guidelines by a small minority of our commenters to derail our good work or alienate our audience. So we're taking a pause to see if we can put some structure around this. We will reopen comments as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience in the meantime.
Brodie Fenlon
Acting director of digital news
CBC News and Centres
So, basically, there is a ton of racism towards Aboriginals, overt and covert, and the contracted mods are having difficulty detecting the coded racism that is commonly used in the comments section. CBC promised to reopen the comments for mid-January but I just checked and the comments are still closed.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal
Many of you are probably wondering, how bad was it? CBC posted a one minute video later that week that answers that question.
CBC indigenous staff read real comments from CBCNews.ca
Here is a
YouTube link. It's kind of funny actually.
Here is The Guardian's take on this. I'll just highlight the parts that stood out to me.
CBC's racist comment sections spark debate on Canada's prejudice problem
The Guardian said:
Its a significant move for the CBC, which, as a publicly funded corporation, faces pressure to maintain an open space for democratic discussion. While other Canadian publications have shut down comment sections altogether or turned them over to Facebook, CBC still allows readers to post anonymously and employs moderators to weed out the hateful posts, which Fenlon says amount to between 15-20% of the one million monthly comments.
Its no surprise that the discourse on indigenous stories, which the CBC reports on more than most other major news outlets in Canada, is contentious. The legacy of forced cultural assimilation, in which the government funded church-run schools to abolish aboriginal culture, is still felt by First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. They make up 4.3% of Canadas population and many live on reserves in deplorable conditions. They experience higher unemployment, addiction and murder rates than other Canadians.
Let me just interject here to quickly explain why this is the case for those who might not know. For 150 years, instead of segregation, the strategy in Canada was "integration" or more accurately, assimilation. Sounds nice right? Wrong. The goal was essentially to "kill the Indian in the child" and to "civilize the savages" or "save" them. This was done by kidnapping Aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in church-run schools where they were banned from speaking their mother tongue and practising their religion. In these schools they were physically and psychologically abused, as well as molested by the staff and students. Conditions were so poor that at some schools, the morality rate was close to 70% (disease, undernourishment and murder). The result was cultural genocide. The last residential school closed in 1996 so this isn't in the distant past. The people that are committing these crimes and doing drugs either attended these schools or were raised by parents with PTSD that did. This is something that CBC commenters love to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
Anyway, back to the article.
The Guardian said:
Indigenous comedian Ryan McMahon has less faith that open spaces online facilitate productive discussion. Theres no one who walks away from a three-day online fight and managed to make some guy with an egg avatar and a fake name say You know what? Maybe I am wrong about the history of Canada. Thats never happened ever.
Though he believes in free speech, Winnipeg-based McMahon has lost countless hours trying to persuade ignorant commenters that indigenous people are not drunks who live off government handouts. He abandoned hope in 2014, when a group of commenters threatened to shoot up the Alberta theatre where he planned to perform his comedy special, Red Man Laughing. His CBC producers added extra security measures.
McMahon says the real problem is that commenters represent the views of Canadians at large. Its not a small segment of the population, he says. Theres a large racism problem in Canada no ones talking about.
The Guardian said:
[Female indigenous writer] doesnt think the onus should be on indigenous people to wade into these really harmful conditions and educate people and resents the fact that when her kids go online to learn about their history, they see a bunch of comments about dirty Indians and all these other stereotypes.
Were talking about people who literally express their belief that indigenous people are subhuman, she writes. You can cure ignorance with information, but that doesnt work with racists.
Meanwhile, in Canada's most racist city...
Winnipeg community centre fires worker for hurling racial slur at boy
CBC said:
A Winnipeg community centre is apologizing to a mother after her teenage son was called a "stupid f---ing Indian" by an employee while waiting for a ride after school.
Lisa Harper says her 14-year-old son was with his friends just after 3 p.m. Thursday on the field outside Champlain Community Centre, which backs onto the school he attends, when a worker yelled at them to get off the grounds. Harper said she learned of the incident a few minutes later, when she arrived at the school to pick her son up.
"I got a call from him and he just said, 'Mom, the guy in the park called me a stupid f---ing Indian,' and my son was just really upset, he couldn't even talk," she said Friday afternoon.
Harper said she doesn't know what could have prompted the remark. She added that a community centre supervisor who later approached her on the field tried to deflect the issue.
"'Why would your guy call my son a stupid f---ing Indian?' Like, why? What's going on?" she said.
"I didn't get an answer [as to] why somebody would do that to a child. It didn't make sense to me."
That was on Friday.
TL;DR: Racism is alive and well in Canada. It's just towards a group of people that nobody here cares about.
