On Reconciliation Day I’m thinking about the reason we need it. Perhaps, simply put, it’s because Canada was built on the principles of white supremacy and as a country we are at risk of forgetting.
If you Google “white supremacy” you will likely find the following definition:
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. The belief favours the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
Or you may, as I did this morning, find this definition front and centre:
The term white supremacy is used in some academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred.
It’s easy to see the difference in these two definitions. The first states that white supremacy is a belief. The second states that white supremacy is a term used by certain group of scholars. The first says that it is rooted in the doctrine of scientific racism. The second says it is imposed on a system that could have no racial hatred whatsoever. The first defines white supremacy as a fact of history. The second defines it as a construction of academics.
I don’t know about you, but I find this not only significant, but concerning.
Why the slide?
My sense is that the deliberate dilution of white supremacy is part of the larger narrative designed to both target “woke” academics, who are being actively discredited by many conservative leaders and influencers, as the source of a falsehood and a fabrication and to silence the voices of the historically oppressed…brown people, women and Indigenous people. This is part of creating a new population of oppressed…white men, anti vaxxers (as Premier Danielle Smith said “unvaccinated people have received the worst discrimination of any group in more than 50 years”) and white people in general.
I don’t find this slide surprising. I find it appalling.
A large part of my white life has been spent inside the First Nations world. My career has been spent pushing and pulling government to try and improve First Nations housing. My academic life has been spent writing (not rewriting) the history of the relationship between First Nations and Canada.
It is from my academic perspective that I find the muddling of white supremacy to be particularly galling. For decades (centuries?) white supremacy co-existed alongside and informed academics who wrote racist histories of black and Indigenous people. These are the histories most of us old folks were taught in school. The histories that said Indigenous people have all but vanished. That colonialization was a triumph. That white people had a right to North American. That “Indians” should be thankful for everything they are “given.” You know the history. Academics were complicit with and were effective disseminators of white supremacist ideology.
Until they weren’t.
When academics stopped working for the cause of white supremacy, white supremacists began targeting them. Belittling them. Attacking their institutions. And let’s not get mixed up here. This is not just a problem in the States. My history of First Nations housing on reserves in Canada has been criticized for being negative. “At a time,” I am told, “when we need to hear good things about our country why would you be so critical of Canada?” One of the reasons these comments don’t work for me is that I was not raised by a mother who said, “If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.” My mother said, “If you can’t say what’s true don’t say anything at all.” And I tell my children and grandchildren, “Just because they don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean you don’t say it.”
Let’s be clear. White supremacy is not a term used by some academics. It is a movement that dates back to the 18th century. It’s a movement that was designed to oppress certain people (and continues to oppress certain people) in ways that the rest of us have never experienced.
On Reconciliation Day let’s not get mixed up. Reconciliation, in spite of its shortcomings, is meant to help us remember our history of white supremacy as demonstrated by the existence of nearly 100 years of residential schools.