“Hymns to Freedom” Show Presents Conflicting Narratives
Mainly positive message roils on a sea of contradictions
Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher; commentator)
The Hymns to Freedom Project, created by Cory Butler, recently came to the Rose Theatre Brampton. There were two performances, one a matinee for students, the other an evening performance for a general audience.
The name of the presentation comes from a musical composition by the late, great Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925 - 2007), “hymn to freedom”. The song calls for peace and harmony among all people — an inspirational, civil rights-era message most often attributed to Martin Luther King Junior. Peterson’s musical activity often took him to the United States where he experienced Jim Crow-style racism and the civil rights movement of the 1960s first hand.
Butler’s event was, at times, an awkward mixture of promotion (he runs a private music academy), US civil rights history, and references to current “anti-racism” dogma, as well as some religious content. I am guessing the school performance must have been attended by private or Catholic school students as the Peel District School Board would likely not approve such a field trip due to the religious messages.
The evening show started with a lengthy and typically ahistorical Indigenous Land Acknowledgement. Black activists know their place on the oppression hierarchy! The performance included the Rose Orchestra Brampton, singer Jackie Robinson, a couple of students from Butler’s music school, and Butler himself (on piano), culminating with Peterson’s iconic song. Listening to it, I was struck by the discord between the message of Peterson’s song and the tenor of current anti-black racism activists, whose ideology has captured Canadian institutions and our federal government. These are the words to the song:
When every heart joins every heart and together yearns for liberty,
That's when we'll be free.
When every hand joins every hand and together molds our destiny,
That's when we'll be free.
Any hour any day the time soon will come when men will live in dignity,
That's when we'll be free.
When every man joins in our song and together singing harmony,
That's when we'll be free.
DEI, critical theory, anti-racism, identity politics, “wokeism”, whatever you want to call what activists are pushing in Canada today bears little resemblance to the aspirations of the Civil Rights era, nor does it at all align with Peterson’s song, which calls out for “freedom”, “liberty”, and “dignity”.
A modern, DEI inspired version of Petersons song might go more like this:
When every heart rejects effort and merit and instead yearns for equity,
That's when we'll be free.
When every hand together molds race-based diversity by joining arbitrarily,
That's when we'll be free.
Any hour any day the time will come when people affirm their group identities,
That's when we'll be free.
When every identity group blares its own distinct melody creating a cacophony,
That's when we'll be free.
Hymns to Freedom is a multimedia event that starts out with images and sounds from American civil rights-era race riots. During this segment, Butler wandered out on stage with his infant son as if somehow finding himself and his son in the midst of the rioting. After walking around on stage in a faux panic for a minute, he ran off with the baby. Luckily, he did not trip and drop the child on the essentially dark stage.
At the outset, the audience is told “we are not here to rehash the past”, but that is pretty much what happens. Not only that, it is America’s past. In the 1960s, about 0.1% of Canada’s population was black. Black people just don’t figure much into Canada’s history until you get to the late 20th century because, well, they didn’t exist.
Today Canada’s population is about 4% black, and blacks, along with Indigenous and other “racialized” people, enjoy preferential treatment over whites according to our constitution and human rights codes. The courts have consistently ruled that these documents permit discrimination that benefits “marginalized groups” in hiring, post-secondary admissions, the criminal justice system, etc. If you’re white you can only be considered “marginalized” if you’re disabled or LGBT. How long this can be sustained with a declining number of able bodied straight white people living here is anyone’s guess. What’s the exit strategy? I don’t think there is one.
To be fair, Butler’s show, framed around Peterson’s famous song, talks about equality (not equity) and brotherly love. But it also connects “systemic racism” in Canada - and no one claiming that exists ever really explains what it is or provides any evidence for it other than anecdotes and outcomes — to the legacy of Black Slavery in the USA. The show goes into great detail about the misery suffered by black slaves in early America, but, as usual in such discussions of slavery, presents it as a black oppressed by whites phenomenon, when the reality is that the engine of the transatlantic slave trade was black Africans rounding up other black Africans and selling them to Europeans, a practice they continued long after the British Empire banned slavery in the 1830s. There are more slaves in the world today than there ever were in the past, and many of them live in Africa.
Then there is the fact that slavery has existed in every known human society ever, including among the Indigenous people of North America. The only slavery that ever existed in Canada was Indigenous enslaving Indigenous and it was the Government of Canada that put a stop to it. Why do you think they call it “The Great Slave Lake”?
This presentation of past American black slavery as somehow exceptional and a uniquely white-man’s evil is totally counterproductive to promoting freedom and justice in the world today, especially given that it was white Westerners who were the ones to abolish the practice, and that whites were themselves subject to slavery in the past. In fact the word “slave” originates with the Slavs, Eastern Europeans who were enslaved during the Barbary Slave Trade.
But it was when Butler declared that his inspiration for the show was the death of George Floyd, who was famously found to have been murdered by a police officer in a controversial, politically-charged trial, in Minneapolis Minnesota USA back in 2021 that he really crossed the line. Evidently, like most people, Butler thinks Floyd was an innocent victim of a racist police force, and that his case is one of hundreds or even thousands of similar cases of police killings of unarmed and innocent blacks across the USA and other western countries every year — proof of systemic racism.
The reality is that Floyd was a violent career criminal who was high as a kite on fentanyl when he was reported to police for trying to pass counterfeit currency in a store. He violently resisted arrest. What happened next was a tragic failure of police procedures but certainly not racially motivated murder.
The systemic racism narrative around police killings in the USA falls apart with the slightest investigation. In fact, there have been about 12 police killings of unarmed black people annually in the USA since 2000, not the hundreds or thousands widely believed as a result of activist propaganda. In Canada, I have not been able to find the same data, but since 2000 about 30 people total per year have been killed by police. This is the total for all races and genders and includes all cases, in most of which the “victim” was armed and engaged in fighting with the police. Thus, it is fair to assume the number of unarmed blacks being killed by police in Canada in a given year would be in the single digits or even zero. Of course, any killing is a tragedy, but we do expect police forces to protect us, and themselves, with force, including deadly force, if absolutely necessary. And sometimes it is.
Overall, I am hard pressed to say whether Butler’s show did more harm or good. On the one hand, it is essential that kids learn about slavery, and the Atlantic Slave Trade is a recent and abhorrent example. On the other hand, a fully contextualized, nuanced, and balanced discussion of the topic of slavery is key if we are not to simply inflame tensions, resentments, and hatreds while perpetuating false narratives. Thus, a presentation like “Hymns to Freedom” would need a great deal of preparatory and follow up study and discussions to form an effective part of a school curriculum on the topic of slavery or civil rights.
I doubt that happened.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Peel District School Board Practices Speech Control
Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada
Or, by contributing to our Donor Box:
Igor Stravinsky, a pseudonym, is quiet about who he or she is but is refreshingly candid, an example:
“The reality is that Floyd was a violent career criminal who was high as a kite on fentanyl when he was reported to police for trying to pass counterfeit currency in a store. He violently resisted arrest. What happened next was a tragic failure of police procedures but certainly not racially motivated murder.”
That was a really enjoyable story. Certainly, 99% of us would be totally unaware of it so thanks for writing. Such a well written piece.
I only recently learned from my wife’s cousins in England that the British spent 20% of their GDP one year abolishing the slave trade. I’d never heard that previously. As with all of the DEI agenda… So much misinformation.