A Fête nationale parade Saturday afternoon in Montreal has lit up the Internet for the wrong reasons, with more than 200,000 views of a clip showing a float pushed by four Black men followed by an all-white chorus that has been criticized as racist. The clip, filmed and posted on Facebook by a bystander, shows singer Annie Villeneuve performing a version of “Gens du pays,” a song often sung on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, on a float followed by a choral group passing the corner of Boucher and Saint-Denis Sts. The people in the chorus appeared to be white and dressed in white clothes, while the four Black men pushing the float were dressed in beige outfits.“I’m not sure the organizers of the parade understand the concept of diversity,” wrote Félix Brouillet, the bystander who shot the video. It has been shared at least 5,000 times in three hours. The parade was intended to depict fifteen scenes from the history of the province, and the float in the video was based around the founding of Fort Ville-Marie, which later became Montreal, in 1642. “It’s fine to tell the history of Quebec, but the subtext given off by the scene and the context in which it put its participants makes no sense,” Brouillet told La Presse.Montreal’s Fête nationale organizing committee posted its own video of the float on its Facebook page, which was deluged with outraged comments. Rachelle Houde Simard commented, criticizing the choice to put four Black men in “slave outfits” and called the float “disgusting.” Administrators of the facebook page later posted, by way of clarification, that all of the parade’s floats were being pushed by members of a Montreal school’s sports team. The video was later deleted. La Presse was unable to reach the organizers by press time.
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