The Lawyers Weekly - June 3, 2011

Miller
Continued From Page 5

Certainly there is a larger culinary aspect of such ethnocentric warfare, which sometimes promotes racial discrimination and tribalistic crime. It seems okay, for instance, for Italians to call Canadians and Americans mangia-cakes — cake-eaters — but calling Italians noodle-noshers would be rude, at the very least. Labelling Hispanics beaners, Frenchmen frogs, French-Canadians Pepsis, Italians garlic-eaters is clearly insulting, disgusting, even. It’s reductive stereotyping. But what about Brits as limeys? Germans as krauts? Does the Nazi’s genocidal imperialism make it socially permissible to cabbageify the nation? How does this square with “ mangia-cake” and “Qallunaat?” Are they less offensive for attacking the dominant national culture?

True enough, when you’re a member of the dominant “racial group” there is not much sting to such sticks and stones. As the Goliath, you can understand and brush off the motivation. So when I recently watched Qallunaat: Why White People Are Funny, a 2006 production of the National Film Board, I was more or less amused, but in a sad, condescending, Qallunaat way, given that mostly the film feels like the “So’s your mother” sniping we leave behind in the schoolyard. As with a lot of feckless humour, it feels a little desperate, unworthy of the many good people involved.

The film’s concept, which
seems fair and fun enough, is to
turn the tables: for a couple of
centuries, white people, all
puffed up and self-righteous,
have visited the north to “study
the Eskimos” and inflict
superior “white” culture on
them. So the Inuit principals in
the film create a fictional insti-
tute to study Qallunaat and
visit their subjects’ European
homelands, so as to impose
superior Inuit culture there.

“Does the Nazi’s genocidal imperialism make it socially permissible to cabbageify the nation?

it’s embarrassing to belch and
fart at the dinner table. (Yes,
eating comes up a lot.) We’re
complete duffuses when it
comes to survival in the arctic
tundra. And most of this is
asserted in the serious parts of
the film, featuring sober inter-
views with Inuit about actual
encounters with Qallunaat — as
when a young woman attests
that we smell funny. She knows,
because in her university days
she once visited an elderly
white couple in Ottawa.

Writer-lawyer-translator Jeffrey Miller’s latest book is the comic novel Murder on the Rebound.

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