I often try to build in social issues to my posts; I rarely have the opportunity to speak about something like this directly. The pictures in these posts are supposed to be at least tangentially related to my walks and my travels through natural areas and parks. But much of the time that I’m walking I think about the kinds of issues that engulf our world today.
The park I chose to visit today is Baby Point Club Park: unlike most parks in the city that I include in my blog, this one I couldn’t walk through because it’s a private park in an expensive neighbourhood. But it has been in the news the last few days because of the name behind the club, the park and the adjoining streets.
There have been “plaques” put up around the city that give rise to a part of our collective past that we try to ignore: that which revolves around slave ownership. I put plaques in quotes because they do not have the authority of the city or the province behind them; they are wonderful reminders of something we would like to forget, but they do not have the kind of permanence that we might hope for. I chose to visit the one below. Five of them around the city, I wasn’t able to find all the locations. This one describes Jacques “James” Baby (pronounced “Bawbee”, I believe) as part of a family that enslaved at least 17 black and indigenous people people (for full details, visit Toronto.com, 2020). Baby also “opposed… efforts to prohibit slavery in Upper Canada”. His family’s business efforts benefited from their slave ownership and when confronted with the morality of what his finances were based on, he refused to accept responsibility: and, in fact, he refused to accept that his profit was immoral. He did not see that his exploitation of other people was wrong. He could hide behind the racial barrier to protect his bottom line.
We may not have slavery today, but we have other concerns that help the rich get richer and exploit the poor. Sure, I know a lot of those rich choose to give back to their communities after they’ve made their fortunes and become philanthropists. But that does not expunge their exploitation to make their riches in the first place. Slavery is easy to point to because it’s “safe” and in the past; we can talk about how it’s part of our history that embarrasses us. But can we learn enough from it that we can see what we do today that might “embarrass” future generations?
This is a past that we are struggling to reconcile in the West today. There are protests around the world, but especially in the States. It is a painful legacy that drags down not only America, but Canada and other other nations with European roots. It is one thing to ignore our collective racist past that is partially the foundation of where a lot of our wealth has been built. But by ignoring it we are also ignoring the institutional racism and xenophobia that is a barrier to real equality. Look at the president of the United States. He is not the cause of this kind of inequality and exploitation: he is the result. He is the ultimate beneficiary: and he will do anything to ensure that he continues to wield power in the face of these struggles.
Distance Walked: 3.75 km
Total: 753.28 km
The Geographer's Corner 