Johnathon Kay Versus Royson James

To the best of my knowledge none of my "ancestors" owned slaves and/or benefited from slavery so I question having to offer up an apology.

Jonathan Kay: Ok, Royson James, we get it: Slavery was bad. Now find a new subject to write about.
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The Toronto Star has become the newspaper of monomaniacal crusades. Over the last few months, Star readers have been subject to an endless series of tedious articles urging Ontario to increase its minimum wage to $10. It's kind of an interesting issue, but not when a media outlet makes a hysterical obsession of it. From January 28 till now, no fewer than 96 Star articles have cited the issue -- including editorial after editorial, all saying the same thing. As a former full-time editorial writer, I can only pity the poor guy at the Star who keeps getting the order from higher-up: "We need another cut-and-paste job on the minimum wage. 600 words."
The new issue that won't die on the Star's pages is slavery -- how it was evil and despicable (which every reasonable person knows to be true), and how every white person alive should feel guilty about it (which is silly, since Canada is inheritor to the moral tradition of the first empire on earth that decisively abolished slavery, and used its military force to compel others to do the same.)
The Star has given us 18 articles citing this subject since March 14. The worst have been by Royson James, who seems to be aiming for the same journalistic role at The Star as Bob Herbert has on the op-ed page of the New York Times -- i.e. endless tales of real racism, alleged racism and imagined racism.
James' latest installment is particularly lame. In a front-page article in Wednesday's edition, he describes first-hand how an aggressive anti-slavery protester made a mockery of a Westminster Abbery ceremony to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade 200 years ago. The protestor's antics were an insult to the Queen, who was in attendance, among other dignitaries. But James' subtext is that the protestor's decision to ruin a solemn ceremony aimed at marking the suffering of millions of innocent blacks was somehow justified by Tony Blair's refusal to formally apologize for something that happened 200 years ago.
James knows full well that such an apology would open the door to multi-trillion dollar law suits. (In the current legal climate, who knows, such suits might prevail.) Good on Blair for resisting the call to facilitate this shakedown. As for those of us here in Toronto, I hope this is the last anti-Whitey headline I have to see on the Toronto Star for quite some time.