North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma posted a video yesterday responding to anti-Asian racism in the COVID-19 era, including a recent social media rant by famed rocker Bryan Adams.
Earlier this month the North Shore Multicultural Society noted that incidents of COVID-19-related racist harassment were on the rise, and several verbal and physical attacks around the Lower Mainland and beyond have been reported.
On Monday, Adams, who was born in Ontario and moved to North Vancouver with his family as a teenager, posted a message on Instagram bemoaning the cancellation of his current tour "thanks to some (expletive) bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards."
One day later Ma responded by video, arguing the fight against racism and prejudice is one we all must take part in.
“Bias, prejudice, ignorance – these don’t merely exist within people who we believe are ‘bad people,’ they exist to some extent within all of us,” said Ma. “And our responsibility in this battle is to recognize that we are imperfect as human beings, and so we need to check ourselves to make sure that our internal biases aren’t negatively impacting the way that we think of or treat other people, and to make sure that we don’t go around behaving like assholes to other human beings all the time.”
With everything that's been going on, I've felt very strongly the need to say something about #AntiAsianRacism during #COVID19 ...so here I am saying it. #bcpoli #BryanAdams #HateIsAVirus pic.twitter.com/j5Yv8J9ver
— Bowinn Ma (@BowinnMa) May 13, 2020
The language used by Adams could lead to more attacks, said Ma.
“The problem with prominent people like Bryan Adams, or Donald Trump for that matter, expressing themselves in the way that they do is that it actually encourages people to embrace their biases, their prejudices and their ignorant ideas about other people as though they are righteous,” she said. “And when you do that, you don’t need to name the ethnicity or the culture of the people you are trying to put down in order to incite racism, it becomes a dog whistle that brings out all the terrible thoughts and messages that people are already bombarded by. And when you start to embrace prejudice like it’s righteous, that’s when it can start to manifest as verbal assault and physical violence and as hate crimes.”
Yesterday Adams posted an apology “to any and all that took offence” to his message.
“No excuse, I just wanted to have a rant about the horrible animal cruelty in these wet-markets being the possible source of the virus, and promote veganism,” he wrote. “I have love for all people and my thoughts are with everyone dealing with this pandemic around the world.”
