Prince Harry, Unconscious Bias, & RACISM!

So I got a strange question for you today that might catch you a little off guard. How many of you are Prince Harry fans? Prince Harry, Meghan Markle. That's who I'm talking about. How many? You absolutely despise Prince Harry. You don't think he had the right to speak against the institution. Think you can tell that's not my angle. He did an interview after his book came out and he got a lot of attention for talking about unconscious bias. I want to focus in on that today because I think that's something we got to get crystal clear on. So let's talk about it. Bonjour. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine river first nation in Treaty 3 territory in Northern Ontario. And as I mentioned in the opening today, I wanted to talk about Prince Harry's interview after his book the Spare came out. Now, maybe because I'm the middle child, my heart has always been with Prince Harry. I can't even imagine, like, forget about. In the same way that I said about Buffy and take her out of the equation. Listen to all the information. Would you believe just Joe Blow was a pretending with all that information if it wasn't Buffy? In the same way with Prince Harry, Imagine being raised knowing you're the spirit bear that. That your elder brother is the important one because he's the one that's going to run the family one day and you're just around in case something happens to him. The air and the spare like that in itself is just lunacy. And of course I highly, highly recommend reading the book. But one of the things racism came up because Megan is mixed race and so darker complexion. And it came up in discussion what the anticipated complexion of Harry's firstborn child or any of his children would be. And comments that he has chosen not to share were made in the interview. He pointed out that the comment, in his words. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but in his words that those comments were not racism. What they were is unconscious bias, meaning that the people that said them had these biases against people with a darker complexion or maybe a specific group of people, but they weren't even aware of their bias. It was unconscious. And because it was unconscious, what he was trying to imply is that racism is a choice. And that if you don't know you're being racist, it's not racist. It's unconscious bias. Hard pass on that. Hard pass on that. I have said it a hundred times. In my video, racism doesn't require intent and in this case it doesn't require conscious thought. If you were taught a bunch of stereotypes and you have not bothered to unpack them and you were just continuing them by sharing them and they are racist, you are being racist, you are sharing racist things. The fact that you were unconscious of it doesn't change that. And why I thought this was so interesting. I watched the interview for a second time over my vacay. Can you tell why I thought this was so interesting and why I wanted to speak to it is because of how often I stress that my YouTube channel is indigenous centered space. And when Harry now confused it, I will explain it to you. When Harry talks about racism in the terms of someone being unconscious of their bias, what he is doing is centering on the whiteness, centering on the non indigenous person or the white person and the fact that they didn't know, he is not centering the conversation on the person that was harmed, the person that had to endure that racism. So from our perspective as the person harmed, yes, it's absolutely racist and don't particularly care if you were conscious of it or not. And maybe the fact that I get totally upset with you for saying it will make you conscious of it. If there's one thing I am adamant about is we gotta quit creating safe spaces for those garbage comments. We gotta make stereotypes unacceptable, right? Like racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and all of those ickiness. Those judgments are just so popular nowadays. Like just so blatant and it's like gross. Go home, unpack that suitcase, learn to be respectful. And until you do, just be quiet. Don't be saying those things. It doesn't matter. Like that's the joke. That's the all women are. All black people are. All indigenous people are. As soon as your sentence starts with that, I guarantee you what follows is a stereotype. If you haven't figured out that yet, now you know and you gotta unpack that. So that white centeredness centering on it's an excuse. I'm sorry. Well, they didn't mean to be racist. They're unconscious of their bias. Well, that applies to a lot of people. It doesn't mean it's not racist. It doesn't mean it didn't hurt. It doesn't mean it's not problematic. It's just a problem. And I hate to. I'm just looking at my handy dandy index card here. I wish I could say that I haven't seen this on my Channel. But I have, and it goes back to the Buffy Saint Marie videos that brought so many of you here. When I saw in the comment and I made it crystal clear in my videos, again, I was crying because it hurt so bad that she pretended for so long to be one of us to the point that we were looking up to her wanting to be her, to have that love and acceptance and not be judged for being Indigenous. That was the hope she gave us, only to have it shattered. And I made that crystal clear on my videos. Yet time and time again, I had some non indigenous person comment. Yeah, but that's nothing compared to what she did to her family. What, like. Like you're just gonna totally disregard the Indigenous pain and decide that the pain she afflicted on the white parents or non indigenous parents was more important? That's just like saying the fact that you. We don't want to call you a racist. That might hurt your feelings. You didn't know. Unconscious bias. And it doesn't matter if you hurt someone with your words. Every single time you minimize Indigenous pain, Canadian history continues. You can tell us that we are just as important as every other, but those actions speak way louder. Every time you try to take over this space and focus it on some other group, every time you want to focus on some other group's pain rather than ours in this space, you are part of the problem. So Prince Harry, love you lots. That was some hardcore BS because it doesn't matter. Like, nice excuse. That's what he's using because, what? Once he was in a Nazi uniform at one point for a Halloween costume and he got flack for that and now he said, well, it was unconscious bias. I didn't know better. That doesn't make it any better. Still, inflicted harm, right? So the fact that you didn't know. Living under a royal rock, were we? I hope that makes sense. So you need to unpack. You need to do some reflecting back. Maybe before you type the comment, if you want to say, yeah, but these other people, just stop, don't type it. I don't want to see it. Thanks anyways. But before you type it, stop and ask yourself, wow, why did I want to type that? Why is that pain more important than Indigenous pain? Why do I believe it's more important than Indigenous pain? What stereotype are you hanging on to that? If we just did whatever, pulled up our bootstraps, things would be different. If you believe that, you got a lot of educating to do. As I've said a hundred times, Indigenous people are flowers trying to grow in soil dosed in gasoline. And that soil, that gasoline soaked soil is called Canada. Pretty much the US Hope that made sense. I told you hard hitting. Hard hitting. Tomorrow I'm gonna shed some light on some problems that still continue problem because a lot of people are unconscious that they're a problem. So let's change that until tomorrow. I love you. Take care. Bye bye.