"Canadian" audacity (+sodomy!!!)
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I find it audacious of Canadians such as Macpherson to say that the "men who built up this country... were men of first class, A 1 stock" and that Indian migrants could not be Canadian because they "cannot appreciate our mode of life, our mode of education, all that goes to make up Canadian citizenship" (p. 84), when "Canadians" never bothered to appreciate the mode of life and education of the Indigenous populations that were present on the land when they first arrived as colonizers. It is ironic to claim that Indian migrants are dirty and that they carry diseases that threaten white life when the white settlers brought diseases with them from Europe that eradicated Indigenous populations all over Canada.
Also, as many of us know, Canada is praised for being a "multicultural" society nowadays, where and when did the idea of Canada as multicultural start and when did the ideal of "white homogeneity" end?
As for the Shah reading, I'd argue that historical records focus on nonconsensual male-male sex and nonconsensual polygyny because those are the acts that can be used to push for racist ideas. In the Don Sing case specifically, the court never questions whether or not Murray has been sodomized, it is presented and believed to be a fact. The sodomy of a white man by Brown men then presents an image that weakens the white man and feminizes him, which is humiliating to him, and by extension, to every white man. That humiliation undermines the supremacy white people believe they possess over Brown people, and is taken advantage of in cases such as these to restore the white man's dignity at the expense of the Brown men, and to send a message that reinstates the white man's supremacy. No one cares if two Brown/White men are kissing consensually, because nothing can be done to reinforce white supremacy then. However, when a suspected nonconsensual relation takes place, there is an opportunity for the court to publicly remind the migrant populations of their inferior place in society.
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It's interesting that what ultimately commutes Dom Sing's sentence is Verma's angle of Sing's inherent masculinity as given by his marital status, specifically catered towards the Western sensibility. "Verma emphasizes the wife’s ‘‘miserable condition’’ and her ‘‘cries for help’’ because she was without means of male support and would become destitute" (Shah 128). A damsel in distress is conjured to remind the court of Sing's patriarchal responsibilities, that he, too, is an honorable man like any other with a woman/family to provide for. This institution of Christian/moral monogamous heterosexual marriage so inherent to colonialism and white supremacy is used to reinstate the reputation of the non-white man and essentially undermine the white man's dignity in the process.