Where the staff are now:

http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/149609-where-the-home-s-staff-ar...

The building looks much better now than when I saw it. It was then surrounded by dark forest, unpainted, neglected. It had a great, flat front without that 2 storey porch extension, and had that horrible, big sign, Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children.

It was a quite dreadful site. Nova Scotia has a dreadful history of racism (as we all have and still maintain.) Nova Scotia is not different from the rest of us. Just worse.

It sickens me.

Institutional abuse is a reality we try to deny and avoid. We cover it up at the cost of peoples...

We change the names and faces and that is all.

Penn State, Boy Scouts, church youth, First Nations and Metis peoples, blacks, orphans, reform school inmates, the elderly, the mentally ill, the physically or mentally challenged....

We do not want to think this is the places "our" children are, where "ours" are held or housed or homed. We like to think it is in the past or in "those" places.

We do not like to think that today, right now in time, someone is being raped while someone else walks away, turns a blind eye or joins in... and our tax dollars paid for the victim's experience and then the denial or the cover-up.

Our ignorance and turning of blind eyes make perfect hiding places fro predators

People preying on the vulnerable and being in power over them.... and those in power protecting the abuser to maintain power.

It sickens

It's also the whole society picking on African-Canadians. I don't think people realize just how recent the open and widely accepted racism of Nova Scotia was normal.

That whole building and its sign and its isolation and neglect were vile. There never would be such an institution with a sign reading nova scotia home for white children. Indeed, even an elegant building would never have had such a sign. It would be just assumed that "coloured" children would not be accepted.

Plenty of that attitude still exists across Canada. It is within, probably, the lifetimes of most rreader of this thread that Canadian universities will imposed quotas on Jews and African Canadians. That was true of our most respected universities - and of at least one church university I know of. I attended it - with the first Black student it had ever accepted. But it thoughtfully accepted the sons of a prominent white billionaire - though they were short on brains.

I am not about to turn folks who lived in a different era and may have been a product of their times and/or ignorant into vile racists. I am aware that very good and decent human beings have been a product of their times.  Likewise I am also not about to label  an entire province.

The word "coloured" goes back to colonial days. It was a word assigned to people who were not white. It was accepted vernacular in 1921 when the building was named and opened. The word negro was also once a word deemed acceptable to use.

Poeple of colour or black people may have referred to themselves as such.

Both are now seen as insensitive (it is about labelling and identifying people instead of allowing them to self identify). They are not correct language any longer.

A sign that said home for the "retarded" would not mean people were mean or cruel. Heck it is what we called my cousins. It did not imply that we thought that they were less than or worthless. It was the word used then and it is not the word used now.

If they erected a "coloured" house today it would speak volumes.

The nation, the world, has changed. Some of our past is yes, less than pretty to reflect back on. We might want to acknowledge that we are reflecting back and looking with modern eyes.

I found it a little odd that the CTV article used the spelling 'colored' instead of 'coloured'.  I would have assumed that it was called the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children.

If CTV changed the spelling, I wonder what their reasons were for doing so.  I wonder if it's to try to distance the fact that this did happen in Canada.

I think the sign I saw said coloured.

I was not referring to people of a past time. Nor was I saying Nova Scotia was the only racist province.

Racism in Nova Scotia was quite open and respectable at least into the 1970s. And the fact that such a "home" with such a label could exist to the present day should tell  you something about attitudes in Nova Scotia. New Brunswick doesn't seem racist now. I don't really know because it can be very, very hard to detect. it certainly was very racist, indeed, through most of the twentieth century.

Nova Scotia, incidentally, has quite recently had serious and violent racism exercised by police officers.

It was in Montreal I learned you could never realize the degree of racism until you got to know the target communities. Until very recently, there was open racism in hiring, in renting, and it still exists. The language war of Quebec today is largely racist in its nature. There is, of course, no such thing as a Quebcois race or an anglo race - but separatists have invented them.

Racism is not just the old days. it continues to exist today to a far greater degree than is realized.

graeme

I think the home still  exists under a new name today and its multicultural.

I'm sure you're also  familiar with the story of Africville. Its something hellish. Halifax did apologize not too long ago but no individual  compensation was ever paid to the residents who lost everything. Halifax did build a new church and made a large donation towards turning Africville into a park and a museum. I don't know if its completed yet.

Here is a long rant for anyone interested. Scroll up on the website  to read it.

Scroll up :

http://www.transmopolis.com/2010/07/africville/#comments

In the 1960’s, using the language of “progress” and “urban renewal” to justify the behaviour, the City of Halifax loaded women and children from Africville into dump trucks and knocked their homes down with bulldozers as they dropped them off with their possessions at condemned houses in other parts of town.

Folks who were not home when the bulldozers arrived lost everything as city workers levelled furnished homes, forcing people into homelessness and destroying generations of keepsakes and heirlooms.

An unidentified victim of the Africville diaspora spoke to a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1976 about the destruction of her community. “They brought us in more or less like you would herd in a bunch of cattle. They used their city dump trucks to load up the children and brought them in and set them in the city.

This was a complete disgrace. The City disgraced themselves. They were a perfect disgrace to do that. This is the only place in the world that you would send an old workin’ dump truck to move children, mothers and families into a city. We were in a position, there wasn’t anything too much we could do about it. We were threatened. They put threats on our heads. If you don’t move at a certain time we’ll bring out the bulldozers and push ya’s over, push your shacks over. Now if they call them shacks, we call them our castles. It was our homes,” she said.

The destruction of homes in Africville, and the resulting diaspora, was covered extensively in the mainstream media in the 1960’s. Canadians were told by politicians and journalists that the destruction of Africville was “progressive.” Terms like “urban renewal” and “integration” were used to mask the racism and terror. “Africville, obviously must be redeveloped. Sometimes, some people need to be shown that certain things are not in their own best interests and not in the best interests of their children,” said John Edward Lloyd, the white mayor of Halifax, on television in the early 1960’s.

In 2002, the United Nations declared the destruction of Africville by the City of Halifax to be a human rights violation.

Here's a video  also about Africville.

Since some years now in New Glasgow N.S. where I once lived there is an annual Run Against Racism Day .

I do not deny racism exists.

I do not deny that it can be recent.

I agree it may not be addressed. It may be seen as accepted, tolerated, "just the way things are", popular or "fashionable"....

Does Nova Scotia have a real history of racism? Certainly.

Yet, the wording of the sign, during those years (est. 1921) could have appeared anywhere in Canada or the US. It was the word used.

Making the schools name and very existence an act of racism is also kinda incorrect or denies other truths.

I mean what does NAACP stand for?

I mean , it was a home for orphaned and neglected  children of colour, called during those times "coloured children". It was the dream of James Robinson Johnston who wanted a prep school like Tuskegee. BTW Johnston was black.

That children of colour might live in poor houses or on the streets because white folks would not adopt them was a sad reality of the times. It was, sadly because of racism, that the school was needed. A home that would provide for those children was to be a godsend.

For me, where the racism really comes in is that it was deliberately and habitually underfunded, ignored by the goverment, overcrowded... the kids were neglected and abused and then it was covered up. That, to me, is the racism.

There seem to be many things that happened in the long ago that we now cringe about.  When I was a child I regularly heard remarks condemning Jewish people, People with black, brown or yellowish skin -  any color different from the majority in the area.  Did I hear it at home?  No.  At school? No - except for a few students who got to pay a visit to the Office.  Adults and children alike expressed dislke for people wo followed a different branch of Christianity from them. 

Residential Schools in Canada started, in part, to try to improve things for aboriginal children.  The Childrens Home that started this thread going began with someones good intention to right a wrong.  There were philanthropists in the UK who ran Homes for disadvantaged children.  At least one of them sent young children to Canada and Australia  to live with new families and have a better chance at becoming successful citizens.  Very few children were treated with love and respect, mostly they were 'free labor'. There is a book about this called Empty Cradles that tells the dark side of the venture.

I'm not sure we can look back with our eyes and evaluate these things reiably. 

We arre, it seems, naturally disposed to racism. But let's all be clear on the meaning of it. It does not mean to mistreat people - thought that is often the result. It is the belief that peoples, as groups, can be defined as haviing common social characteristics. Hitler thought North Europeans whom he (incorrectly) called Aryans were superior to all other peoples in intelligence, morality, etc. That is as racist as his definition of all Jews as being treacherous and greedy.

The spirit of racism isn't dead at all. some politicians (helped by news media) assign people to racist categories. Thus moslems have been turned into a race, characteriized by murderous behaviour. We all reacted differently to tragedies - depending on who the vicitims are. Canada was plunged into sympathy by the killings of 9/11.  That's because the dead were people much like us. But most are indifferent to the killing of a quarter million Guatemalan native people, several million Vietnamese, and over a million Iraqis.

That is at least similar to racism in that we feel connected to people who look and act as we do, but don't feel connected to inferior peoples who are different from us. There is a pronounced tone of racism in the language wars in Quebec. To belong to the right race, you must be born in Quebec and speak French as your first language. Though my family was one of the first French families to settle in Montreal, I could never be accepted as a Quebecois. The PQ government perceives all anglos, bilingual or not, as objects of hatred.

It's easy enough to see the same phenomenon in reaction to any immgration movement in the whole history of Canada and today.

The deservedly respected J.S. Woodsworth wrote a book - Strangers Within our Gates - which effectively divided our immigrant groups in clearly racist terms. we still quite often do it.

kaythecurler

Yes..... I remember we discussed " the Home Children"  a few years back. Many came from England and lived  on the prairies. They were sent to Canada with good intentions that turned into nightmares for the children, more hellish stories of abuse. I will agree with you that the times were very different back then. Children weren't considered to be very important. They were to be seen and not heard......:(

Thanks to all who responded. I'm  still reading. There's so much about this case.

Posted by Bethany Horne on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 Lawyers for the former residents of the Nova Scotia home for Colored Children have had a small victory today. Justice Patrick Duncan has sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the Home to hand over any documents from a five-year period (1955 to 1959) that relate to any abuse.

This against defendant arguments that no documents will be found and will just be expensive to search through. I've heard from many former residents who asked for the Home's records for themselves, and received nothing. Presumably, the staff looked and couldn't find anything, but maybe they did not look at all.

The Home's disorganized record keeping has come up in the court files before. In a transcribed interview from 2008, then director Patricia Mugridge, with some help from the home's lawyer, John Kulik, answers the questions of one of the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Mr. Dull. In the interview, she details her process in attempting to satisfy the court requirements for records. They are initially talking about the boxes in which the records are kept:

The talk - see link:

http://www.openfile.ca/halifax/blog/curator-blog/curated-news/2012/supre...

Update re the lawsuit -

For years, there were whispers that children at the orphanage were subject to cruelty and neglect. In the late 1990s, former residents began to speak publicly about their treatment. They contacted Halifax lawyer Ray Wagner, who, in 2001, filed the first of dozens of individual lawsuits against the home and provincial authorities. But Wagner says the cases stalled, as did attempts to pry documents from the province.

Last year, Wagner chose a new tack. He filed a class-action suit against the home, later adding the province as a defendant. All told 33 people have signed on, including Johnson. A certification hearing has been scheduled for June 2013 in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the individual cases of 56 residents are still before the courts.

The latest allegations have roused police and politicians. An integrated RCMP and Halifax Regional Police sexual assault unit is now investigating 38 complaints. Last week, a series in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald prompted opposition MLAs to call for an inquiry. “If you look at some of the documents, a person can become horrified,” says Progressive Conservative community services critic Keith Bain. He said an inquiry could address complaints faster than the courts. “We have to look at the human aspect of the whole thing. If an inquiry is going to speed up that process of healing that’s what should be done.”

For its part, the home has denied all allegations and argues that too much time has passed to properly investigate the claims. “In many cases, the workers who were at the home at the time are deceased,” says John Kulik, the home’s lawyer.

Wagner disagrees and says the case “is no longer about compensation. It’s about addressing a past wrong.” The home, he says, was chronically underfunded, receiving a fraction of the money that institutions serving white children received.

Today, the building is boarded up. The home has changed its name and moved to new headquarters, but still serves families in Dartmouth.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/11/01/breaking-the-silence/#more-306840

Court Documents Filed 2012:

http://www.wagners.co/lawyer-attorney-1726223.html

graeme,

You said, "It  (racism) is the belief that peoples, as groups, can be defined as haviing common social characteristics."

I would say that, for me, your definition falls short or is perhaps even too all encompassing.

Your examples may hit more on what I would say racism is.

Racism is the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. (Oxford Dictionary, emphasis mine)

Thus, a racist is a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.

Race is many things. 

We have largely rejected race as anthropological fact (physical differences are in this group).

What we do still acknowledge is that peoples can and do share a culture, a language, a history... (Thus according to your model, peoples in the Middle East are not a "legitimate" racial or ethnic group and to others they are.) It is about those things mentioned and the conditioning to "belong" or the condition of belonging. It is also things in common. It is also common ancestry.

Yes, the idea of racial superiority and social Darwinism reached their culmination in Nazi ideology. 

Yet, we can acknowledge racial diversity, respect racial diversity, embrace it and not be a racist.

That last sentences contradicts all that went before it. There is no such thing as race. Therefore there is no such thing as racial diversity - and if you embrace the idea of such diversity then, whatever your motives may be, you are - by dictionary definition - a racist.

You get on even shakier ground when you speak of cultural diversity. Nobody has even been able to define culture. It's an extremely vague word with a different meaning for virtually everyone who uses it.