The visible minority blues....

I was listening to CBC radio the other morning (which is clearly dangerous to my health) and they aired a piece about visible minorities and the law. To the CBC, and their experts, the fact that so-called 'visible minorities' were 'over-represented' in being arrested. This was 'proof' of institutional racism.

That was the whole report. No questions asked.

But I have some:

1. Do we really have to divide the world into 'visible minorities' and 'non-visible minorities' which really means caucasians???

2. Are 'visible minorities' monolithic? Isn't it insulting to lump so many people together in one pool? Couldn't we delve a little deeper? For instance, there are probably minorities, liket Chinese, who probably don't run foul of the law that often.

3. Why do we use a ridiculous statistic to prove a charge of institutional racism? We have institutional racism because a proportionately high ratio of visible minorities are arrested...and a proportionately high ratio of visible minorities are arrested because of institutional racism. It's a tautology.

4. Can't the CBC find anybody with a contrary opinion?

We all deserve better. We deserve to know if any particular group has a problem in breaking the law. They might just deserve to be arrested. But, to combat the problem we need to understand what it is.