Having read and listened to a host of articles and interviews on racism in the past few weeks, I am impressed by the strength, clarity, and passion of the voices I am hearing. I see acts of compassion. I hear impassioned pleas. I see and hear cogent arguments and a range of ideas on how to fix the current social problems. But I am struck by the difference between the voices of white policy makers and the voices of Black activists and researchers. Of course, that is a huge generalization – people of all colours are all over the map on this topic. But I see policy makers calling for more of the same – we need exposure, both personal and cultural, and love, and acceptance. We need awareness, education, and quiet listening to the voices of previously unheard and unrecognized voices. We need to make space for Black voices. But what I hear Black activists saying is that this problem – racism – this is a white problem and we need to take care of it, not as allies, but as a matter of duty. That this isn’t about not liking Black people or Black culture – it’s about white culture and self-preservation. I believe in education. I believe in exposure. I believe in acceptance. But I don’t believe that those things on their own will change anything, other than maybe a few new cross-cultural relationships, and maybe the adoption and mainstreaming of new trends in areas like fashion and music. At best, we might inspire the next generation to do better – perhaps today’s children would be inspired to change the world for their grandchildren. But we have the power to make change NOW and we have a moral responsibility to do that.
I don’t think racism is the big problem here, actually. I think racism is mostly a symptom. I think white supremacy is the problem. And that’s a lot harder to change, because we are INSIDE it. It’s hard to see the shape of a ship when you’re comfortably ensconced in a cabin. And it’s hard to identify ourselves as white supremacists. That sounds BAD. But we live in a society that has historically seen whites as the top of a hierarchy. A hierarchy where Blacks are at the bottom. And that, by definition, IS white supremacy. We don’t have to feel guilty. WE didn’t make those laws. WE didn’t condone slavery. We did not make this problem. No one is asking us to feel guilty. We are being asked to feel RESPONSIBLE. It can be hard to choose change for the benefit of others, especially when we have little to gain from the change ourselves. But the RESPONSIBLE choice is to see accurately what is going on around us and to make changes to improve society for everyone. And there are benefits to all of us when society works more justly, but that’s a whole other blog post.
Ibram X. Kendi is a leading scholar of racism. He talks specifically about how “the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” He basically says that racism was mindfully invented as rationalization for atrocities that helped create prosperity for the architects of the racist ideology. He starts with slavery.
One cannot love and respect someone while enslaving them. Rationalizing that type of behaviour REQUIRES one to think of the other person as different, and necessarily less than. It follows that one cannot love and respect someone while insisting that they go to a different school, that they must give up their seat on the bus, or that they cannot vote in elections that directly affect their lives just as much as those who ARE allowed to vote. In order to keep the status quo, white people had to fabricate reasons to hate and disrespect those who didn’t enjoy the same freedoms they did. Believing that skin colour divides those who should and should not have those freedoms is the definition of racism, and favouring whites is the definition of white supremacy. White supremacy is not synonymous with Nazi-ism, but when we hear it, we react as though we’ve been accused of war crimes. It refers only to believing that the white race is better than or more ‘normal’ than other races. When default setting make avatars white and we call others ‘racialized’, as if we don’t have a race, that’s normalizing whiteness. If the policies in place support that viewpoint, then people are forced to manufacture reasons to support them. It becomes a cycle that is hard to break.
Unless…
Unless we could just change the policies. That would make space to heal the wounds caused by hundreds of years of racism. It would even the playing field and empower People of Colour to begin to rebuild their communities in ways that feel safe and prosperous.
What might that look like today? We no longer allow slavery. We no longer support segregation. Anyone can sit down on the bus. All citizens can vote in elections. But Black people are still the face of poverty in Canada. And to keep them there, we have to convince ourselves that they don’t deserve what we have. They don’t deserve what we’ve worked hard for. Why do we feel like we’ve worked harder than Black folks? Because look what we have that they don’t – see that cycle? Lifting Black families out of poverty would help a whole lot. Basic income. Affordable housing. Changes to loan policies. Those would be a start.
There’s a stereotype in Canada that Blacks are more violent than whites. The proof? Jails are full of them – and so we look more closely at their behaviour, we are quicker to report them to police, and the police are more likely to escalate incidents. And you know what happens? More Blacks end up in jail. See that cycle? Lessening mandatory minimum sentences, reducing or eliminating time for minor offences, a focus on rehabilitation BEFORE jail time – these would have a disproportionate benefit for Blacks, because they make up a disproportionately larger part of the prison population doing time for minor crimes. Why? Because as a group, they are charged more often, and have fewer resources to bail themselves out and find good defense lawyers. Then, once they end up in court, they’re significantly more likely to be convicted and to get longer sentences. That’s racism at work.
Black mothers are no more likely to BE on drugs when their children are born, but they are 1.5 x more likely to be TESTED and 10 x more likely to be REPORTED for this. The result? A higher proportion of Black children in foster care. Indigenous numbers are even higher. Guess what that proves? Certainly not that Black and Indigenous children are less cared for, since it’s the reporting rates and not the drug rates that are different. What It proves is racism.
For most of my life I have been aware of a particular kind of racism – it was the one form of racism I saw all by myself. I didn’t need master’s level courses on anti-oppression and an accurate accounting of racial history to understand that I am not who they are looking for. When I cross a border, I am not suspected of criminal behaviour. When a store alarm goes off, I am not suspected of shoplifting. When something goes missing, I am not the obvious suspect. And I am aware that those examples of white privilege are at someone else’s expense. I am not who they are looking for because they are looking for somebody else. If they were looking at everyone equally, then I would be searched or questioned some random percentage of times. I would be treated the same as everybody else. But in fact, what keeps me exempt from those indignities is that the people who inflict them are actively ignoring me. I do not trigger their sense of danger. That’s white privilege at work. I’m not saying I should be stopped more often at the border, or tackled at the store entrance when a clerk forgets to remove the sensor, but I AM saying that my freedom isn’t worth the harassment of people who don’t look like me but are equally innocent. I know people personally who have been stopped, questioned, searched, and followed simply because of the colour of their skin. That’s not probable cause – that’s racism.
Why should a woman of colour with a white child be assumed to be the nanny, while a white woman with a child of colour be assumed to be an adoptive saviour?
Why should a white man running in his neighbourhood be considered an athlete, while a Black man running in the same neighbourhood be suspected as an escaping criminal?
Why should struggling white students get extra tutoring, while struggling Black students get counselled into applied courses, with the assumption that they won’t go to college or university anyway?
None of these circumstances make sense, but stereotypes and long-standing myths support them. We need to change the policies that allow or require us to keep believing, and therefore acting on, our biases. We need to work top down and make space for good, compassionate people to even out the rest.
When historical laws have kept certain groups from getting ahead, the obvious answer is to give them a boost. Many people react to that with a knee-jerk reaction of “Wait, that’s not FAIR!” But what’s not fair about it? If Black people have had fewer opportunities for hundreds of years and many of them were put into that situation by forcible confinement and mistreatment, then what isn’t fair is leaving them at the bottom. If Blacks are disproportionately affected by poverty, poor education, and an unfair application of the justice system, then we need to target those systems and give Black families, students, and petty criminals a better chance. Dismantling white supremacy does not require guilt or shame, or feeling badly for what we have. It involves acknowledging that some of us have privileges and opportunities that aren’t universally available, and then readjusting so they are.
When I was growing up, my mother had a strategy for making things fair between my brother and me. It was the “I cut, you choose” rule. When there was something to be shared, one person cut and the other chose which piece to take. That ensured that the cutting was fair, because the cutter never wanted to get left with the smaller piece. To make a fair system, we need rules that would work for everyone, where there was no real advantage to being born into a white family, or an affluent family, or a conventional family. Imagine the rules we would make if people were only assigned their positions in society AFTER the rules were made…
What rules would you change?
Out of the Well 