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Tommy Chong’s comments of a racist Calgary challenged

Tommy Chong’s comments of a racist Calgary challenged

Tommy Chong has put his foot in his mouth again.

Growing up in Calgary in the 1950s and ‘60s was like living in the racist, segregated U.S. South, the actor, comedian and perpetual stoner says.

“You know my dad’s Chinese, my mother is Scottish-Irish, and we were living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which is like living in Biloxi, Mississippi, as far as racism goes,” he said in an interview with pop culture website The A.V. Club.

Mississippi – where black people were lynched and civil rights advocates were murdered. Where disenfranchisement of African Americans was enshrined until 1965.

Mississippi – which only officially abolished slavery in 2013. (It was the last state to ratify the 13th amendment, in 1995, but didn’t notify the U.S. Archivist until 2013.)

Chong’s comments are sure to inflame Calgarians, who elected Canada’s first Muslim mayor in 2010 and was one of the earliest signatories to the Canadian Coalition of Municipalities against Racism and Discrimination, in 2006.

But not only is it a slap in the face to the city, it’s an affront to everyone who fought for racial equality, says Calgary Sun columnist Michael Platt.

“When Tommy Chong equates racism in his old hometown to the struggles of black citizens in Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s, he’s insulting people who fought for rights in a place where hatred, segregation and murder were a reality,” Platt wrote on Monday.

Chong told the website about the time he was harassed by some neighbourhood kids, suggesting the incident was racially motivated.

“My brother and I were coming home from a friend’s house late at night and this gang of kids — white guys, you know — attacked us and bullied us a little bit, and we went home and told our dad.

“My dad, who was five-foot-four, stocky little Chinese guy, he put on his shoes and went running out after those guys, and I think he caught them. And we never got bullied again.”

The outspoken Chong has never shied away from speaking his mind. And, according to Platt, it’s not the first time Chong has compared his hometown with the only state that still sports the Confederate battle symbol on its state flag.

In a passage in his 2008 autobiography Chong said Calgary in the fifties and sixties was “more like Mississippi than California in the way black people were treated.”

“This is California, where schools were racially segregated and where Chong’s mixed-race parents wouldn’t have been allowed to marry — neither of which was a factor in Calgary when Chong lived here, hanging around with black band mates as a young musician,” Platt wrote.

Chong’s publicist, James Weir, told Sun reporter Shawn Logan that Chong’s comments were not aimed at present-day Calgary.