Whiteness

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/