Until a couple of years ago, I had been under the
impression that the vast majority of white Canadians were against fascism. It
appears that I was wrong.
When I think about it, the manner in which fascism and
Nazism more specifically were discussed when I was growing up was very much
about absolving regular people of responsibility. When questions arose as to
how the people could have allowed the rise of Hitler, we were told that
charismatic people can easily persuade an anxious public, or how the Holocaust
could have been carried out, we were reassured that fear kept people silent. We
needed to believe in the innocence of the common person just as some of us need
this now when we frame discussions of racism in individual terms: “Here is
proof that individual x is racist,
but here is also proof that individual y is
not, so you can’t say that there is a racism problem.” The same can be said for
when our leaders frame the discussion in terms of choosing love over hate or
“calling out” individual racist incidents while keeping the racist power
structure intact. Culturally, we think in individualistic terms, and yet we
accuse those who want to challenge the status quo as being divisive and
creating disunity, as if there were some pre-existing unity to disrupt.
For years now, with the rise of far-right governments
throughout the world, ongoing antisemitism and Islamophobia, continued
anti-Black violence on the part of police, increased anti-Asian bigotry and
violence, and reactions to the current protests in the United States that seem
more concerned about respectability and capital than people being killed and
maimed by police, it has seemed like “Never Again” is just a slogan. And it
isn’t due to fear of fascists that we largely remain silent and continue on
this path. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be enough fear of fascism. Rather, it is indifference that is enabling the rise of the far right.
Something that no one talked about either in school or
at home when I was growing up was whiteness.
There is a good reason for that: the education system and my home were both
presided over by white people. And white people do not tend to see ourselves as
“white” so much as “people.” Thus, the term “racialized people” is used
expressly to highlight that others are racialized in relation to whiteness. But
white people are finding it increasingly difficult to distance themselves from
conversations about race, and thank goodness for that. Nonetheless, when the
topic of racism is raised in Canada, someone will jump at the opportunity to
shout out ignorant “All lives matter” types of platitudes, which do nothing but
derail the conversation to keep white people comfortable.
If you grew up in a white liberal household like I
did, you were probably taught that colour blindness was the right approach to
looking at the world. As well-meaning as that sentiment is, as a friend of mine
once said, “I don’t see colour” translates
to “I don’t see racism.” If you falsely believe that everyone is on an
equal footing, then anything negative that happens to someone must be of their
own doing, and anything positive must be the result of their merit. To put it
another way, colour blindness is a way of saying “I don’t see whiteness and the
problems it causes.” The fact that white people simply take themselves as
default human beings shows an unwillingness to recognize that other people
might have different experiences, again reinforcing the idea that whatever
happens is your fault. More than that, it shows a lack of interest in engaging
with people who are different and building real communities and societies where
people really are just people.
Whiteness is also seeing evidence on a daily basis
that we live in a white supremacist society—where upper-middle-class white
voices dominate the media; where our predominantly white politicians talk about
“illegal immigration”; where opinionators on social media plant false ideas
that Canada treats asylum seekers better than Canadian citizens; and where
Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people are discriminated against and in
some cases criminalized—and feeling indifferent about it. If you are
indifferent to the experiences of others, then you cannot claim to see/treat
everyone equally.
In Canada, we tend to think of colonialism as
something that happened in the past rather than an ongoing project. What’s
more, since it enabled our ancestors to settle here, for our own comfort we side-step
the horrors of this fictitious place called “Canada” and focus instead on
things that make us feel good, like multiculturalism. And as people who inhabit
particular borders tend to do, we raise our flag—that ostensibly non-threatening
maple leaf—and claim it as a symbol of our unity or our “nation.”
We do not live in a nation. We never did. Our state
was created by enacting violence against nations and giving those who survived
the option of assimilating or being forever enemies of the state. The word
“nation” is often used interchangeably with “country.” They are not the same
thing. A quick search will show you that. But our lexicon is full of words that
have deliberately been misused. Take “anarchy” as another example. This word is
being thrown around quite a lot right now in response to the protests in the
United States. Culturally, we have long been comfortable with the popular
definition that includes lawlessness, violence, and chaos. Again, a quick
search will show you that anarchy actually means the absence of a state. In
effect, it is a utopian ideal where people create communities for which they
are responsible as opposed to the state model we live in. But it serves
politicians and capitalists well to fear monger about anarchy because the world
that anarchists envision has no place for those people and the violence for
which they are responsible.
And that leads me to this: whiteness is violence. It
wasn’t long ago that wealthy white people, like Brett Wilson (you might know
him from CBC’s Dragon’s Den), were
calling for pipeline protesters representing and standing in solidarity with
the Wet'suwet'en Nation to be killed by the state. The RCMP were quite clear
that their job was to protect the oil companies and their shareholders, not the
people of this country. And this has always been so. Canadian history is not
something you will learn in school; you need to do your own reading to
understand what has happened and continues to happen here. The current calls to
defund the police scare a lot of white people because we’ve been conditioned
from childhood to believe that the police are the good guys, who catch the bad
guys and keep us safe. Much like our warm, fuzzy folk tales about enslaved
people escaping to freedom in Canada, these are carefully crafted stories that
do not come close to providing the whole picture. We cannot continue to sit
comfortably with such narratives and pat ourselves on the back for being an
inclusive country even as the ever-growing list of names, like Regis
Korchinski-Paquet, D’Andre Campbell, Andrew Loku, Sammy Yatim, Abdirahman Abdi,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
continue to tell us otherwise.
Resources
for Further Reflection
Interview with Sandy Hudson: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1745746499555/
List compiled by Desmond Cole: https://www.pyriscence.ca/home/2020/5/29/cdnpolice
Ronald Gamblin’s explanation of Land Back: http://4rsyouth.ca/land-back-what-do-we-mean/
