Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[jeffster]

Not too surprised, coming from London. I am a 'white' guy, with some indigenous heritage, not much. Anywho, I've been to London several times, and have been yelled out "Get the f*** out of our city, you f***** Jew." No one outside of London has mistaken me for being Jewish, not that I would have a problem with that. But this has happened to me 3 times while in London with threats. That city has some serious issues. Traffic is just another one of the issues.

I've not personally experienced it, but I have heard from friends I grew up with London definitely has racism problems. But I don't necessarily think they're any bigger than we have here, I mean, we are all painfully aware of the hate posters posted in Wilmot, you know the ones that WRPS and the Crown Attorney feel are entirely acceptable under Canadian law, the ones that are clearly promoting a hate group...don't really understand that but regardless, leaving that aside, a friend of mine who is Asian routinely have slurs shouted at them on the way to Kitchener market. Another friend had an egg thrown at him. Racism is present in our community. We've got to address it.

So this is aging myself quite badly, but I digress. When I was a very young child, my dad took us to the Eat-n-Putt. To be honest, it was just another empty promise my parents would make, but that's another story. So anyhow, we go there, probably close to 10:00PM, and we get out and start walking to the restaurant, and a group of young men come out and yell at my dad "Go home paki, they're closed!" I asked my dad "what's a paki" as I had no idea. My dad just mumbled something under his breath.

His skin colouring was much darker though, and obviously the indigenous blood was deeper.

I think I had mentioned another story here about my dad, how he was arrested by WRPS for a crime he didn't commit (even as far as the witnesses (or really, the victims) telling the police they had the wrong man). He had his company lawyer trying to get him out, but the police insisted on a confession for a crime he didn't commit. My dad refused, and eventually was let go. There was a story about it in The KW Record the next day "Wrong man nabbed." He did get pulled over quite a bit, but was always let get when they saw the last name.

So yes, systemic racism is alive today, but it has existed for some time, and it's infiltrated into our police system really bad, with no commitment to end it (other than attempting to make a cute looking police cruiser).

This London thing though, so so sad. I personally haven't experience racism in Kitchener, though my dad did, especially with WRPS. I have only experienced it in London (3x).