Footnotes for

Don't Label Me

How I interpret my sources may not be how you do, so feel free to challenge my perspective — and to do so with grace. If you motivate me to rethink my view, and convince me to revise it, I’ll update the footnote in question and credit you. To start, click the icon called “Disagree?”

Chapter 52:
Live and Forgive

There are no footnotes for this chapter.

Chapter 53:
Diversity Day at The Office

All quotes in this chapter are taken from the “The Office,” season 1, episode 2, Netflix.

Chapter 54:
Humans Are Groupies

Source: Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 111-144.

Chapter 55:
Should We Celebrate Bad Traditions, Too?

* “But I don’t think enough people asked, ‘Does that include harmful traditions within cultures?'”

Note: This is a question for America as much as for Canada. See, for example, Alene Tchekmedyian, “For the first time in the U.S., a doctor is charged with female genital mutilation. Here’s how the law came to be,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2017.

* “Group honor legitimized slavery and segregation in the Southern states of America…”

Source: Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

* “When it came to identity, he championed ‘individual freedom of choice.'”

Source: Rt. Hon. Pierre E. Trudeau, speech in the House of Commons, October 8, 1971.

Chapter 56:
Even in Canada

* “Canada, he proclaimed, would adopt multiculturalism as a ‘conscious support’ for the individuals freedom to choose.”

Source and note: Rt. Hon. Pierre E. Trudeau, speech in the House of Commons, October 8, 1971. All of Trudeau’s quotes in this chapter come from the same speech.

* “‘If a nation aims to prevent terrorist activity,’ writes Cass Sunstein, ‘a good strategy is to prevent the rise of enclaves of like-minded people.'”

Source: Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 118.

* “When the second referendum failed by a thin margin, the face of the movement blamed ‘money and ethnic voters.'”

Source and note: Andy Riga, “Quebec’s 1995 referendum: 140 minutes of agony,” Montreal Gazette, October 30, 1995.

Pour une couverture de la soirée référendaire d’un point de vue québécois, regardez: “Le Choix des Québécois: Référendum 1995,” TVA, 30 octobre 1995.

* “‘We mean it only for Muslims who are a menace to secularism,’ one of the bill’s supporters said.”

Source: Conversation between me and Charter supporter on March 6, 2014.

* “Its purpose has been revised to ‘preserve and protect’ the cultural traditions of minorities.”

Source: Michael Dewing, “Canadian Multiculturalism,” Library of Parliament, Publication No. 2009-20-E, updated May 14, 2013.

* “He cunningly told a Canadian journalist that ‘[b]eing a minority is very difficult.'”

Source: Avery Haines, “The Canadian roots of white supremacist Richard Spencer,” Maclean’s, November 25, 2016.

Chapter 57:
Ben Franklin, Founding Farter

* “… when Martin Luther King Jr. described Canada as ‘the north star’ for fugitive American slaves.'”

Source: Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 Massey Lectures, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

* “Canada became the site of the first reported race riot in North America.”

Note: The riot took place in Shelbourne County, Nova Scotia. For a thought-provoking treatment of this and related incidents in Canadian history, watch Desmond Cole, “The Skin We’re In,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 1, 2019.

* “Franklin was a fartful, I mean artful, jokester.”

Source: Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 373-374. All quotes attributed to Franklin in this chapter can be found in these pages.

* “Jefferson died embittered and fearful of the future.”

Source: Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 115-116.

* “She originated in – wait for it – Egypt.”

Source: Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), pp. 268-270.