Human "family?"

 

You and I are probably racists … and will likely continue to be until the words race, racism, racial no longer exist, and children all grow up with the consciousness of humanity as a single, interdependent family.

It’s not surprising that the dictionary I consulted for a definition of racism confines its meaning to harms committed to groups and individuals (prejudice, discrimination, etc.) based on their genetic (racial?) characteristics. I define it more broadly by adding: invoking persons’ or people’s genealogy in situations where genealogy is irrelevant. Call it “soft racism,” possibly. A persisting consciousness around people’s genetic origins that tills and fertilizes the soil in which the blatant, directly harmful kind can grow.

An example: Wab Kinew, a Manitoban, became leader of Manitoba’s NDP Party which won the most recent provincial election, making Kinew the new Manitoba premier. All this occurred through normal democratic processes; the same processes exactly by which all previous premiers were chosen. I was appalled at the emphasis on the fact that an indigenous person had just been elected to the highest political office in the province. Although Kinew verbally downplayed his Indigenous heritage as a relevant to his premiership, he made (to my mind) the colossal error of wearing a traditional Indigenous headdress to his swearing-in ceremony. Genetic heritage is irrelevant to Canadian democracy; that’s its strength … and possibly even, its last, best hope.

Heaven help Wab Kinew and the Indigenous population of Manitoba when the new premier makes his first glaring political mistake and the pictures of him in a war bonnet are cartooned all over reactionary media. Soft racism makes up a comfortable bed for blatant prejudice and discrimination.

This morning I read a justification from the chief editor of CBC News explaining why The Fifth Estate researched and produced a story questioning Buffy Sainte Marie’s claim to Indigenous roots. Genetic roots, that is. Is it accurate to say that people who falsely identify by race represent a hindrance to “legitimate” Indigenous artists? Could be; I don’t know the celebrity culture well enough to judge this. In any case, the story is interlaced with soft racism on all sides: at a very basic level, making music is race-irrelevant unless we insist that it be so; styles vary, of course, but dependent on culture, tradition, not on genetic heritage.

Related to soft racism, of course, is soft ethnicism, (ethnic nationalism)  i.e. invoking persons’ or a people’s ethnic heritage when it’s irrelevant to the matter at hand. I’ve been amused by people who identify as “ethnically Mennonite,” say, but do one of those DNA tests to discover that they’re, say, 8% Spanish, 12% Jewish, 4% indigenous and 76% undifferentiable European. True, the tests purport to shed light on biological, genetic heritage, not ethnicity. But as is the case with soft racism, soft ethnicism makes up a comfortable bed for the Newfie joke, the “Pollack” putdown and, most abhorrently, antisemitism and the practice of ethnocide.[i] Take the radical cleansing of ethnic Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan as an example.

Here in the town, the province, the church community in which I move and rest and write posts like this, the current preoccupation on these matters is with the Truth and Reconciliation project and the subsidiary Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) focus. To make a difference, you’d think individuals and communities could engage in clearly defined actions in answer to the call to “make right a relationship gone wrong.” It’s not happening, and despite yeoman efforts to move the rock of reconciliation, progress so far tends to indicate that nothing substantial is going to change.

I think we all know intuitively that inviting an indigenous family to dinner and patting their children on their heads isn’t reconciliation. When you steal someone’s car, you don’t reconcile by giving him the occasional ride to town in it, you give him back his car! How to do that locally, municipally, provincially and nationally isn’t obvious by any means. When Jean Chretien proposed sweeping changes to the crown/First Nations relationship in his 1969 White Paper, it became immediately clear that settlers and First Nations both visualized a net loss if, for instance, the abolition of the Indian Act were to happen. That reluctance to risk change is still (seems to me) as decisive now as then. Meanwhile, without foundational changes, the “friendliness initiatives” remain gestures, although probably still worth doing locally as tools for building understanding of what the relevant hindrances to reconciliation really are.

But I’m not naïve enough to assume that genetic-heritage differences will be erased from our consciousness, will cease to be significant factors in our species’ varied strategies for survival.  Wiping out that consciousness, probably, would merit as much hope as would a project to teach deer to protect themselves from human predation by climbing trees.

But, there’s hope! As the world becomes more mobile, more interconnected, intermarriage among demographic groups will increase so much that by, say 3030, bigots will complain that they can’t tell who’s black and who’s white anymore, who’s Asian and who’s ‘Merican. And people’s language won’t give them away either, because we’ll all be speaking Chinese, French, Hindi … ENGLISH!

Why English? Well, it’s still 2023 and that’s my racist/ethnicist ego talking.

To respond, click here: gg.epp41@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[i] I made up the word ethnicist to parallel with racist. Ethnicism can be found in dictionaries to mean “ethnic chauvinism.”