‘Playing the Race Card’ & Johnny Choo: Gaslighting during YYCVotes

In the past week we have seen a large number of Calgarians refer to acknowledging the presence of bigotry in our city as “playing the race card,” as though running one of the largest cities in the country is a game, and being concerned that a certain part of it is infected by prejudice is just a move.

A “card” to be played.

We’ve also heard from many people who live, work and raise families in this city who know prejudice is here. While many claim to be, as Bill Smith says, ‘colour blind’, perhaps that’s because they’ve never examined their biases at all.

Enter Ward Sutherland. Many, if not most, people view this video from a forum in Northwest Calgary Wednesday night as him referring to hypothetical interloping artists as “Johnny Jew from New York.”

There are two possible reactions to this. I’m going to write about them in the order they unfolded.

If “Johnny Jew” is indeed what Councillor Sutherland said, it’s a disgusting racial slur. It doesn’t matter that he seems to have invented the alliterative idiom himself. The fact that it hasn’t caught on yet isn’t the benchmark for how disgusting it is.

It was such a quick and casual belittling of a religion that it seems unlikely to some that it is the first time he’s maligned a group to which he does not belong.

As a voter, I hope the comment makes you at least wonder which other groups get insulting cutesy nicknames from Councillor Sutherland in private.

We may not know the answer to that question from all of our prospective candidates, but if “Johnny Jew” is what Sutherland said, we do know the answer from him.

Is that what you’re looking for, Ward 1 residents? Because if he said that and you vote for the man anyway, I’m going to have to suggest you’re playing the “looking the other way and pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t” card.

Now the other reaction to this is where things get weird. “You have got to be kidding me” weird.

Councillor Sutherland insists he actually didn’t say “Johnny Jew.” HE says he said “Johnny Choo” He says “Johnny Choo” is a New York designer, apparently relevant to the discussion at hand, even though no one I can find has ever heard of the guy.

When you do even the most perfunctory research on Johnny Choo, Google does that thing where they won’t let you search it. They try to auto-search Jimmy Choo, the shoe guy. That tends to be a pretty reliable sign that there IS no Johnny Choo, at least not one relevant enough for Google to offer results.

Update: Councillor Ward later said he was in fact thinking of shoe designer Jimmy Choo and misspoke. Seriously, that’s what he said. He blamed the whole thing on Sex and the City, and he’s sticking to that.

Councillor Sutherland insists, that’s what he said, and anyway, there were reporters in the front row, and if they didn’t stop him at the time, the racist blurt must not have happened at all. “Immediate outrage, or it didn’t happen” is apparently what he’s going with.

So to recap, we have a Councillor not taking responsibility, and claiming that if the supposed witnesses (professionals doing 25 things at once to file on deadline) didn’t hear, well, too bad, so sad, we have no choice but to believe him.

There is a word for what’s happening here.

It’s called Gaslighting. Manipulating someone by getting them to question their own perception, their own memory, even their own sanity.

Gaslighting uses distraction, contradiction, denial and sometimes straight up lying.

In this case, we’re being asked to question our own perception. We can hear what Sutherland says on the tape, we have ears. But he is going to sell that Johnny Choo story to anyone who will buy it, and distract-blame the reporters who were in the front row.

Gaslighting is also what is happening when Bill Smith says the mayor is a bully for asking for a list of donors. We the voters can see that it’s odd to hide your list, unless there is a specific reason it would harm your campaign.

This has been a long brutal campaign for anyone involved. It can be made less brutal if we acknowledge some truths that have arisen, instead of trying to manipulate voters into ignoring what is plainly before their eyes.

Using the phrase “playing the race card” is insulting to the people who live in this city and actually face racism. As Jeremy Klaszus wrote for The Sprawl this week, the term needs to be retired. The phrase itself is actually racist. Tireless champions for Calgary like Brett Wilson should be among the first to make the commitment to stop using it, instead of continuing to throw it around on behalf of their candidate.

This campaign has revealed some ugly racism in Calgary. If Ward Sutherland wants to continue to insist that Jimmy/Johnny Choo is a thing, he should do a live sit down interview where he describes everything he knows about Mr. Choo, and how his knowledge of Mr. Choo’s work came to symbolize the specific point he was trying to make at the forum. Maybe bring some pictures of Mr. Choo’s designs that inspired the comment?

Something tells me some holes may emerge in that story. If that is the case and he decides that perhaps it was “Johnny Jew” that he said, then it’s time to retire and let someone else speak for the people of Ward 1.