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I’m Native Canadian. Which is the Canadian equivalant of Native American. … American Indian. Aboriginal. To tell you the truth, I don’t know anymore. You see, around my parts, we’re known as any number of magical things. But that goes with the territory I guess. Next time Cristopher Columbus stumbles unto you’re people thinking he’s in India, you may suffer from identity crisis too.
In this fine city that I live in, their are plenty of Natives about. The city is rank with us. The poorer the area, the greater the number. Because of that, we are obviously met with some degree of racism. I grew up around it. Fortunatly for me, I’ve got fair skin. It’s not easy to spot me for a redskin, but here I am. I spent my childhood on a reservation and everything. But with my fair skin, I don’t experience racism against me very often, but by God, do I see it. I saw it at school growing up and I’ve seen it at the workplace as an adult. Canada is a forward thinking country. Not forward enough, apparently.
Where am I going with this? X-box Live is a breeding ground for racial/discriminating comments. I mean, it’s crazy what some of these people will say without any sort of consequence. Human decency takes a back seat to unadulterated discrimination. I’ve heard it all. The sad thing is, I’m not shocked anymore.
Even today, I still think that one of Microsoft’s greatest decisions was adding voice chat to all their online enabled games. However, there is error in this great decision. Unlike Phantasy Star Online, you can’t place "@#$%#!" over someone’s voice. You get every delicious expletive. Every "intimidating" racial slur.
A few months ago, my good cousin was introduced to Xbox Live for the very first time. Way to go cousin, you’re one of us now. It took exactly one play session of Halo for him to be subjected to the f*****’s and the n*****’s of xbox live and caused him to say "Oh my God, is it always like this." We chimed in "No… but often. You get used to it." How sad is that? You get used to it.
I guess I’m fortunate in some ways. I’ve only experienced racism towards my own people once on xbox live. It was random and seemingly harmless. But when is racism harmless? When no one gets hurt? It’s still racism.
I’ve recently renewed my Xbox Live gold membership after a 2 month hiatus. I’m playing Modern Warfare wearily. It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m nervous about the lack of hate-comments. Nervous, because I know this will end at one point. The more I play, the more likely it is this peace will end.
We’ve all learned to deal with it. It’s just a part of the internet. The internet has given the devil anonymity. He speaks through children and under developed adults. But there he lingers. And we’ve excepted him. After all, what else can we do?