Of Course We're Racist

We - we Canadians - see ourselves as open, tolerant, and non racist.

I don't know how we manage to hold on to that view in light of the facts.  

Fact 1:  The Idle No More protests seem to have triggered racist attacks.

"A brutal sexual assault of a native woman in northwestern Ontario that is being investigated as a hate crime has thrown fresh fuel on the fires of discontent being expressed in protests and demonstrations by first nations people across Canada. She has told police she was assaulted, strangled and left for dead by two men who hurled racial epithets and denounced indigenous rights.   The Ontario assault was far from an isolated incident. At least 600 aboriginal women and girls have gone missing or been murdered in Canada in the past two decades. Native leaders say the number of victims actually runs into the thousands.  "

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/thunder-bay-sex-assault-hate-crime-probe-sharpen-focus-on-native-womens-plight/article6885373/

 

"But CBC.ca was so troubled by the extreme racism in comments on stories about the Idle No More movement that it asked readers on its Community Blog for advice. .... CBC.ca’s problem is that unless it takes action, it’s going to become a non-paywalled main stage to which racists flock. "http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1314100--mallick-canadian-anti-idle-no-more-racism-grows-online

 

Fact 2:  The brutal assault on a First Nations woman in Thunder Bay is not an isolated incident. 

"Systemic bias within the RCMP and Vancouver police led to “blatant failures” in investigating the disappearance of dozens of women from the Downtown Eastside who became victims of serial killer Robert Pickton, an inquiry found Monday."

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1303461--robert-pickton-missing-women-inquiry-concludes-bias-against-victims-led-to-police-failures

 

Most of the women Robert Pickton murdered were aboriginal.  Do you think if he had killed middle class white women from Point Grey the VPD and the RCMP would have ignored them?

 

Fact 3: Many  First Nation communities lack potable water or decent housing.  

Their community sits on a lake that has been the source of Winnipeg’s drinking water for nearly a century, but residents of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation still rely on bottled water brought in from Kenora, Ont.... Now, a proposal by the City of Winnipeg to sell some of the water it draws from Shoal Lake to neighbouring municipalities has the community frustrated and seeking support from the federal government as it tries to challenge those plans.  

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/winnipeg-native-band-battle-over-water/article7206899/

 

Fact 4:  The conditions First Nations are living in are not improving.  Sheila Fraser (remember her?) lambasted the federal govenment.

"I am profoundly disappointed to note ... that despite federal action in response to our recommendations over the years, a disproportionate number of First Nations people still lack the most basic services that other Canadians take for granted," former auditor general Sheila Fraser says in her parting words to Parliament.  "In a country as rich as Canada, this disparity is unacceptable."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/06/09/pol-ag-first-nations.html

 

We're racist.  

 

We don't have to be  racist.  But each of us must work to realize we're racist - and to exorcise that demon.    Have a look at the tools at the webiste below.  

 

http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/olson.pdf

Racist Sterotypes

Judging by the comments I've read on the Idle No More protests, we need the reminder.

What Privilege Looks Like In Everyday Life

If you have privilege, you can: 

Leave someone  who is  poor and disabled and  to whom you promised a ride  standing on the sidewalk for fifteen minutes while you rush into a family member's  house.  Suddenly,  you remember you were going to take them home.   Whoopsie!  Sucks to be them!  

Refuse to give someone who is on welfare and who is moving to another city  a reference  because their housekeeping isn't up to your standards.    Not that you ever do any housekeeping.......your maid does.  And the person who is moving has been very, very ill - but gee  - their apartment was messy.  Who'd want to rent to them?  

Tell a woman that your grandmother was a strong yet feminine woman and all women should match that standard.    Shrillness isn't necessary!    After all, you get to decide how all women should behave .....

Try to keep the poor and marginalized and old out of your neighbourhood.   Lie about your motives.  After all, this is Little Rhodesia and standards must be maintained!

Kiss your date on the lips ANYWHERE in this country  without ever, EVER worrying that doing so might attract nasty comments or even be dangerous.   

Signal in lots of different ways that people of colour are not welcome in your neighbourhood - including turning your head when you're greeted.  After all, this is Little Rhodesia and standards must be maintained!  

Have a cupboard full of food.  Stare astonished, at a little girl who says "This must be a RICH household! My mom never has enough money to buy extra food.  Sometimes we have nothing to eat but rice! "   (The little girl's mother lives on welfare.)  Explain you're not rich - no, no, not at all.   

Make comments about how First Nations should be PAST all that stuff about residential schools, shouldn't they?  Call First Nations people "Indians." 

Snap loudly and mean it " Who cares about what happens to those Africans and Pakis because of climate change?"

I've witnessed all of the above - or done them myself.

It's great having privilege, isn't it?  We who have it get to set the rules......

Racism and White Privilege

Everyone - everyone who's Canadian, that is -  knows those nasty Americans are racist.  It's one of the  articles of faith we Canadians subscribe to. Moreover,  this knowledge braces up, reinforces, and shores up our feeling of superiority to  Americans.   

After all, look at how they treat Afro-Americans. True, they don't call them niggers anymore. But look at their incarceration rates! 

From Human Rights Watch:

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/race/

Incarceration of Blacks

· In twelve states, between 10 and 15 percent of adult black men are incarcerated.

· In ten states, between 5 and 10 percent of black adults are incarcerated.

· In twelve states, black men are incarcerated at rates between twelve and sixteen times greater than those of white men.

· In fifteen states, black women are incarcerated at rates between ten and thirty-five times greater than those of white women.

And from :

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/


Blacks make up 12% or so of the total U.S. population and  represent more than 40% of inmates:


U.S. population by race and then Us inmates by race:

Tsk,tsk.  Plainly racist, right?  Not like us, right?  We're a tolerant, accepting lot, right?

Right.

From Prisonjustice at (Stats are all 2005/6, unless stated otherwise. Updated Aug 2008:

http://www.prisonjustice.ca/politics/facts_stats.html

Aboriginal Adults (2005-2006)

• 4% of the total canadian adult population - (2006 Census)
• 24% of admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody
• 18% of admissions to federal prisons
• 19% of admissions to remand
• 21% of male prisoner population
• 30% of female prisoner population

Gee, those stats look nastily familiar.  

But  that's all about criminals!    We don't see that out in the "normal" population! We don't ,do we? We're not racist!  That's not what research shows.

"As part of his research, Oreopoulos tailored 6,000 mock resumes to specific job requirements in 20 occupational categories and sent them to employers with online job postings in the Greater Toronto area.  Each resume listed a bachelor’s degree and up to six years of experience but the study found resumes with names like Jill Wilson or John Martin received interview callbacks 40 per cent more often than identical resumes with names like Sana Khan or Lei Li.

Oreopoulos said the findings help to explain why skilled immigrants arriving under Canada’s point system – with university degrees and significant work experience – fare poorly in today’s labour market. I wasn’t expecting the gap by name alone to be so large,” he said. “It defined as much of a gap as another study found between blacks and whites in the U.S.”"

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/05/21/ubc-study-finds-people-with-foreign-names-face-job-discrimination/

Perhaps it isn't surprising that our institutions are racist - even a Unitarian  Universalist fellowship is racist. After all, no white person in North America has lived in a non-racist society - not even we morally superior Canadians.

What to do?

Examine our privilege and admit we benefit from a system that privileges whites. 

From:  
http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/olson.pdf`

"Racism will only end when a significant number of white people of conscience, the people who can wield systemic privilege and power with integrity, find the will and take the  action to dismantle it. "

Not only is racism unjust, eliminating it is important for reasons of self interest - which I'll examine in a future post.

Privilege

I'm naive.  And cranky.  And touchy.  A naive, cranky, touchy  bisexual cis  Unitarian. (If you don't know what cis means, look it up.  Told you I was cranky! )  

I fell in love with a Unitarian Universalist congregation the second Sunday in September 2008.   I remember the date - exactly - because a friend dragged me there against my will - me whining that I didn't want to go to church - and  I found the service and the hymn book so incredibly wonderfully amazingly shatteringly fantastic I fell in love with an audible fleshy thump . 

Nothing in life is permanent though...I noticed a few racist remarks and pushed them out of my consciousness.   Later someone commented they thought homosexuality was a sickness and would , therefore, be curable someday.  That one was harder to push into unconsciousness.  Others disliked the part of the welcome that stated that we lived on the traditional lands of the Secwempec people because they thought we should be over all that stuff - it was ancient history wasn't it?  Nothing to do with modern life was it?  

 I flinched every time I heard these things....I felt flayed. And I said nothing - I waited for long time church members to say something - anything - but they didn't hear those remarks.

I still said nothing.  And ....nothing changed.   

And one day I exploded.   A cheerful member of our Social and Environmental Action Committee said, after our Earth Day Service, "So and so has agreed to sit on the SEA committee!"  So-and-so is a climate change denier.  So-and-so is also the person who made the comment on homosexuality.  And a person who often makes racist comments.

I said - as gently as possible, that I had a real problem with that.   Everyone around me gazed at me as if I'd turned green  .  "We cannot exclude anyone!"  Why not?    Asking a climate change denier to sit on the committee is akin to asking a fervent Nazi to help us save Jews, I answered.   Plus ze is homophobic and racist. 

Then the  shit hit the fan - and mostly spattered me.  The answer to me was "I've never heard him say that."   Louder and louder .....while I got angrier and angrier. Later, the Board president kept shouting that my allegations were COMPLETELY UNBELIEVABLE!  Someone else told me  later  they thought I was making my story up.  

Gee, whiz, I never realized I'm either a liar or  delusional. 

Actually, I'm not.   My congregation is white, mostly older, mostly very straight ......and they have their furry white special ermine privilege wrapped up tight around themselves   right over their ears. So quite  literally , they  didn't hear the comments I heard.  

What's privilege?  Ok, I'll explain that one.   A quote on white privilege from:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

Straight privilege is similar.  

A few points on straight privilege from : 

http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm

• If I pick up a magazine, watch TV, or play music, I can be certain my sexual orientation will be represented.
• I do not have to fear that if my family or friends find out about my sexual orientation there will be economic, emotional, physical or psychological consequences.
• I am not accused of being abused, warped or psychologically confused because of my sexual orientation.

So now what?  I'd like to know - I'd really like to know - what happens next in my congregation.

White Privilege

I found this quiz at :

http://www.mollysecours.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19:pop-quiz&catid=9:blog&Itemid=13

White Privilege Pop Quiz: The Test You Can't Fail by Molly Secours (Copyright Molly Secours 2012) 

A) When was the first time you were made aware of your

racial identity and realized that your 'race' would play a

pivotal role in the challenges you faced on a daily basis.

1) 1-5 2) 6-10 3) 11-present 4) never

Discuss: How old were you? What happened? What kind of Impact did it have on you? How did it change your hopes, dreams and goals?

B) How often are you reminded about being the race with

which you identify?

1) several times a day 2) once a day 3) several times a week

4) once a month 5) never

Discuss: Tell a story about a recent situation where you were reminded of your race. What caused you to think about it?

C) As a child how often were you given safety instructions

on how to walk through a department store or public

establishment in a way that did not foster suspicion or

attract attention?

1) frequently 2) sometimes 3) rarely 4) never

Discuss: Tell a story about feeling watched, followed or suspected of wrong doing and how it affected your sense of safety.

D) How often have you been (or are you now) coached by

parents or guardians or family members on how to behave

or what to say in order to avoid being perceived

as dangerous or menacing when confronted by law

enforcement, teachers or authority figures?

1) frequently 2) sometimes 3) rarely 4) never

Discuss: Describe the last time you were detained by authority figures and felt unsafe. Describe the time before that. And the time before that.

E) How often do you talk with close friends and family

members (or just wonder to yourself) whether or not your

racial identity is negatively impacting your daily interactions

with others.

1) everyday 2) once a week 3) once a month 4) once a year

5) never

Discuss: What was the last situation? Did you feel comfortable confronting or discussing with the other people involved?

F) How often have you wondered if your race negatively

impacted a job interview, a grade, a confrontation with a

co-worker or a friend?

1) too many to count 2) periodically 3) seldom 4) never

Discuss: What were the circumstances? How have you learned to cope with the uncertainty?

G) How often are you the only person (or very few) of

your identified race in daily activities? Including Church,

school, bars, nightclubs etc?

1) always 2) frequently 3) seldom 4) never

Discuss: What are the circumstances and does your behavior change when you are no longer in those environments?

H) Have you ever been tempted to deny your racial identity

in order to feel more comfortable in a particular setting or

to have an advantage?

 1) always 2) frequently 3) seldom 4) never

Discuss: Describe the situation.

I) Have you ever found yourself feeling frustrated, invisible or ashamed in a history class because you felt ‘your people’ weren’t represented (or represented accurately) in “His-story”.

1) yes, always 2) yes, often 3) yes, sometimes, 4) never

Discuss: Describe the circumstances. Were you able to express your concerns with teachers and classmates? Were you penalized for speaking up? How was it received?

J) While watching television or movies do you often feel that people who look like you or are racially/culturally connected to you are not represented (or misrepresented) in the media?

1) yes, always 2) yes, often 3) yes, sometimes, 4) never

Discuss: What was the last movie or program you viewed that left you feeling this way? Why?

K) How often have you been challenged and/or corrected by someone about how ‘you identify’ racially?

1) more than 5 times 2) several times 3) once 4) never

Discuss:

L) How often have you adjusted your behavior out of concern that people might assume or suspect you to be lazy, inarticulate, untrustworthy, criminal, or unintelligent because of your race.

1) more than 5 times 2) several times 3) once 4) never

Discuss: Explain your answer

M) How often do you notice that the majority of authority figures in your school career or work environment--who sign your checks or supervise your daily activities--are identified with another race and/or culture?

1) always 2) often 3) sometimes, 4) never

Discuss: How (if at all) does this affect your performance and/or comfort level?

N) How often do you feel in need of reassurance (or to reassure other family members) you/they are ‘just as good as’ (not better) than someone of another racial group because of a negative experience?

1) Always 2) Frequently 3) Seldom 4) Never

O) How often have you wondered if something you said or did in a public setting might reflect negatively on your identified race?

1) frequently 2) sometimes 3) seldom 4) never

Congratulations! You just took the first step.

Voting and Discrimination

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2010/07/01/north-first-nations-right-to-vote-60-years.html#socialcomments

Fifty years ago, the Canadian government granted First Nations people the right to vote in federal elections without losing their treaty status.

Wow  - within living memory, Canada  discriminated -  legally - agaisnt First Nations peoples.  Changing the law was a good idea.  But,as Americans have also discovered, legislating egalitarinaism does nothing to change racist attitudes.  (Read the comments on the above article for a samll taste.) What does?  I'm not sure -  not at all.  However,  I'm going to push for a series of educational seminars on First Nations history and racism through my church.   I'm hoping that knowledge leads to changed attitudes.
And, as a part of those seminars, i'm going to include the following:

http://www.afn.ca/article.asp?id=4866

•We can agree that Canada has moved forward. We welcome the Apology to residential school survivors. We welcome the commitment to work with us to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

•Yet we can also agree that we need to move much further ahead, and we must travel together. Where we have made gains, it is because we have worked together as partners who both recognize and respect one another.

•The key to all our efforts is active and honest participation by First Nations in setting the direction forward.

•Participation is a founding principle of the UN Declaration. It is a founding principle of the Treaties we signed to forge this country.

•I stand here today to make it clear that First Nations are ready and willing to work with any and all partners on a better, brighter future for all our people and all Canadians.

Happy Canada Day! May ourour future be more inclusive, eglitarian, and sustainable.