Pate Chinois and Cultural Identity
Language is always biased, almost by definition, so we need not just remove particular words from AI, but more importantly words strung together that imply certain intentions.
For example, in Quebecois French, sheppard's pie is called pate chinoise. This sounds like it's racist, but in fact when the people working on the Canadian rail road got their rations, the Chinese workers combined the meat and vegetables and potatoes in one dish, much like a British cottage pie, so in a way the name was a tribute to an innovation, not a slight.
What I'm saying is that we all make a million judgements based on what we see. So if we're offended by every word or depiction, we stop communicating.
The important thing is not recognizing that people look different, the important thing is how you treat people after making that recognition.
For example, my doctor noticed I'm a bit rotund which is bad for my health, but still treated me like a human being and tried to help me based on that judgment.
The point is if someone is visibly disadvantaged, do you offer to help them? Or if they are disadvantaged in some other way that you cannot see at first, do you help them? No protocols or diversity mandates and rules can answer that question for you.
What people need to be happy and kind and thriving is training in face-to-face communication, in sharing a good, honest, direct meal. Training in personal culpability. Positive encouragement, and reinforcement.
If everyone believes that they are the strong one and not a victim, then everyone is capable of helping someone else, maybe by offering them some food.
Socially, I don't care what you look like. I care about your intentions. Socially, it doesn't matter what your particular label or cultural background is. Not that I don't care about your story, but that I know it's complicated.
If we can begin to view people's cultural identity and identity in general as transient, as subject to change, as in flux, as something to be digested and consumed, as a living thing that breathes and changes, and only stationary objects as having a fixed cultural identity, we can start to consider ourselves human beings, human beings who sit down and eat together and don't hurt one another, like people did in the past.
Maybe people are a series of actions that they perform and that identity isn't fixed but always changing.
The internet affords an amazing feature even better than anonymity: it allows us each to tell our own unique story, and for our experiences to be tailored specifically to each of us.
We can start to say, as Canadians, as a human race that there are ways that people once were that people no longer are. We can start to think of history as just that. History as there being wars of cultures and identities, but in the future as in the present we will align nations not by history, by culture or labeled identity, but by nations made by ideals. We will sit down over a meal, unsure of our cultural identities and discuss the principles and ideals we can adhere to. That would be very Canadian,
And there might just be Canadians everywhere, or honorary Canadians, or better yet–peacekeepers– sitting down to eat together, not forgetting our differences but talking about individual stories at a potluck celebrating culture as fixed only for an instant in this particular dish that marks your individuality, but ideals as things to be agreed upon.
