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Fathers, Fatherhood, Father’s Day and Patriarchy
Jun 19th, 2010 by maysie

“What I Learned from Preston Manning and William Shatner”

Given that I’m neither a father nor a son, my understanding of issues facing fathers is pretty miniscule.

But yesterday, Friday June 18, the Globe and Mail featured two articles, one written by Preston Manning, the other about William Shatner. As my more devoted readership would already know, reading the newspaper almost always enrages me, and no good can come of it, except maybe a new blog post.

1.

So, first, Preston Manning’s father-worship piece.

Deep cleansing breath.

I haven’t read such an emotional, yet fascinatingly cold-hearted suck up/ praise/ celebration of white ruling-class masculinity in a very long time. Certainly not something at least mediated by quotes and footnotes and a feminist/ anti-racist/ post-modern critique.

This undiluted stuff is pretty harsh, astringent. Like Old Spice mixed with Liquid Drano. Basically, a bio-hazard.

Preston mentions, rather off handedly, that he was one year old the year his father was first elected premier. What follows is a sad, disconnected piece praising his father’s political “achievements”, but demonstrating nothing about who his father was as a person, since of course, Preston doesn’t have any access to that information or experience. Nor did he care to, apparently.

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Rebick versus Wente on the Q show on cbc
Jan 13th, 2010 by maysie

Judy Rebick (author and founder of rabble.ca), Margaret Wente (columnist for the Globe and Mail) and John Cruickshank (publisher of the Toronto Star) were on Jian Ghomeshi’s show Q on Friday Jan 8 2010.

Link here to the segment. 

The panel begins at about the 4 minute mark, but it’s a prelude to the title topic question.

If you have any compassion, have a heart or other working apparatus in the area of “caring”, please be prepared. Wente is a dreadful person who has a national platform to spew hatred, plain ignorance, as well as she’s just rude!

The topic is “Are Canadians Too Moderate” a tired trope that is grounded in whiteness as a basis for a Canadian identity. Rebick points out that the question that frames this panel is about 25 years out of date, after Wente has answered it straight, which is kinda funny. Wente takes the classic conservative position of “you can’t say anything these days for fear of offending someone.” Another tired trope that conservatives have been whining about for close to 20 years as well. My response to that is, and has always been, well, how about you think about why that is? Perhaps you have some undealt with assumptions that you spew as “facts” and “real” when in fact they’re based on your own biases and your privileged position, Ms. W? Maybe being offensive shouldn’t form a huge part of your identity. Argh.

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“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
Jun 20th, 2009 by maysie

Teaching ARAO to women who work in women’s services is something to dread. Not only because of the phenomenon of white women “owning” this work, in the ways that white women “own” much of social work, and work with people who can be termed “sub-citizens”: children, the elderly, abused women, immigrants, welfare recipients, others that are too numerous to name. Pretty much anyone who’s not an able-bodied white straight middle class man. Meaning the rest of us, yes?

But also because the levels of entitlement, overt racism and classism and deliberate exclusion that says very clearly, “I belong here, you don’t”. 

And “how dare you imply that I’m racist/classist?”

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Toronto Star: Breaking News! Stop the Press! People who are darker skinned experience More racism!
May 15th, 2009 by maysie

Jebus H Cripes on a raft.

I need to warn my readers that after reading this article and the first comment by mistake (My eyes! My eyes!) my brain short-circuited and I needed to whack myself in the head a few times to get the circulation going back to my cranium.

For the love of all that is good and groovy in the world, are you people FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!

Headline: Darker the skin, less you fit Vanessa Kirunda is the last person you’d expect to be looked down on. Poised, articulate, educated and confident, Kirunda, a black woman, can dissect and analyze why Canadians treat her differently.

Okay let’s stop right there.

1. Racism is NOT ABOUT people looking down on you! Although it’s often expressed that way, and worse. Racism is a systemic social problem that systematically [Mr Rogers voice] That’s why we call it “systemic”, can you say “systemic” byos and grils?[/Mr Rogers voice] encourages, allows and approves of violence, social discrimination, pathologizing and negative assumptions about people of colour and Aboriginal people. Racism won’t just go away once white folks just start behaving better. Although, you know, that would be a good fucking place to start you doofuses! And a start would be don’t write moronic articles like this one!

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Racism and the myth of the “get-out-of-racism free” card, or the “stamp” of the non-racist white person
Mar 29th, 2009 by maysie

PART I

So, it all started with this article in the Toronto Star on March 25 in which a man named Percy Whiteman [I really can't make this shit up] is suing the Canadian government for not doing any screenings for HIV on new immigrants before 2001. Why? Because he alleges that his wife (who’s originally from Thailand), who he met in the 1990s and married in 1997 while she was a stripper and a dancer at the Zanzibar, was HIV positive when she came to Canada, knew this, and infected him.

There are many ways a discussion of this could go, and some of my thoughts posted on a discussion board elsewhere include: “(can people who think that white folks who get involved with people of colour are not racist please remember this story?)” because of the anti-immigrant racism, as well as the regular run-of-the-mill racism Mr. Whiteman (…giggle…sorry) was exhibiting in his lawsuit.

It wasn’t a hugely appropriate line to pop in there, since it wasn’t the topic, but I’ve heard it* said so many times, as if it’s a “get out of racism free” card, that for a white person just having a partner (or having had on in the past) who is a POC or a FN person is enough to stamp that white person “non-racist”.

But I received a message from a regular poster, indicating his confusion at that phrase, and his non-identification with the label of “racist”. He was sincere and I was in a mellow mood. So this is what I replied to him, some identifying details changed:

The level of understanding of race and issues of race and racism on [the discussion board we both post on] tends to be very simplistic. Here’s a list of “truths” that are generally agreed on at [this discussion board] that, in my opinion, experience, and learned education, are incorrect. Why I know them to be incorrect is because I live as a mixed race person, I facilitate anti-racism and anti-oppression education at the consultant level and have done so for 12+ years, and I’ve read many works by different people of colour: academic and personal, from a wide variety of ethnic, racial and language backgrounds, as well as talked extensively with people who experience far worse racism than I ever have.

So-called “truths” about race that aren’t true:
1. If a white person thinks that racism is wrong, then that person isn’t racist. 
2. People who are racist are KKK types, neo-nazis, “rednecks” (I hate that word because it’s classist) and “white trash” types (ditto)
3. If a white person is romantically involved with a person of colour and/or sexually attracted to people of colour this *automatically* makes that white person not racist. Therefore, in an argument whether something is racist, such a white person can legitimately say “My partner who is (black, asian, etc) says you are wrong” or “I’m not racist because my partner is (black, asian, etc)”
4. Everyone can be racist, including people of colour

Re #1 through #3. Being mixed race, and growing up with one white parent, and one whole side of my family who are white, I lived racism from that side of my family growing up, every day. As I grew older, read more, and talked more to mixed race people, I found this to be the norm. Perhaps subtle, but there, always there.

White folks who are lefties have a very hard time “painting themselves with a racist brush”. I understand. “Not being racist” is a very significant factor in the identity of good hearted lefty white folks. I know. My (white) mom is one of them.

I don’t know if you’ve read my other posts on systemic racism, but systemic racism is imbedded in our society. Anyone brought up here in Canada has internalized these racist values, “truths” and other parts that we just don’t think about. No matter who we’re involved with and have children with. Having internalized racist values and behaviours makes all white folks racist. This isn’t negotiable. And it isn’t a bad thing to know; it’s a *good* thing to know, because once you know it and recognize it, only then can you break it down, examine your own privilege, and fight against the system, on a small day-to-day basis, and in larger ways, like becoming an ally. This leads to societal change.

Once one understands systemic and institutional racism, one won’t ever believe #4 on the list.

* “My boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife is black/asian/latin@/Arab/Aboriginal so there’s NO WAY I can be racist!”

PART II

There seems to also be this mythology that if someone is engaged in anti-racist action, such as say, writing a book about the racism of the far-right fringes in Canada, that somehow this makes this person an “anti-racist” person. I’m saddened, but not surprised at the low-level of this analysis. This hypothetical person (who is hypothetically a fairly high-up person in the ranks of a particular major federal political party) was recently in the news for making racist remarks about Asian food. What I read was a sincere and downright naive level of shock and surprise that this man, let’s call him Wally, would be racist! “Isn’t he the finest example of anti-racism there possibly is?” “If anyone gets a stamp of non-racist aka get-out-of-racism free card, isn’t it him?”….etc.

Even if he hadn’t been caught saying those remarks I would say no, writing a book about extreme fascistic right-wing neo-nazis is not fine anti-racism. It’s pointing out the frikkin obvious and making money off it. Maybe it’s one step up from white folks who visit countries in the global south, take pictures of brown people and sell those pictures for profit back home. Maybe.

So, hypothetical dude said some classic, regular, I would even venture to say, since this is my blog, unremarkable anti-Asian racist bullshit. My bar is so low, this doesn’t surprise me. For the love of cats, if I freaked out everytime this sort of vanilla racism happened I wouldn’t have time to do anything else!

So some rhetorical questions about this hypothetical person: Has he been active in grassroots movements that are fighting racism on the ground? Even from his position, has he been working at the policy and governance level to enact changes that would benefit POC and families of colour and immigrants of colour? No? Oh, he only wrote a book about those bad bad leroy brown neo-nazis? Sorry, that ain’t no get-out-of-racism-free card, or a stamp of the non-racist. In fact, those cards don’t exist, those stamps don’t exist and we really should stop talking about them.

The problem with talking about the neo-nazis is it focusses on the individual, and again reinforces that racism is about bad behaviour and bad people. There’s no systemic analysis, nothing to indicate that the fringes are on the fringe of a larger continuum, the other end of which isn’t “non-racism” or “anti-racism” but “striving to rid ourselves and our world of racist bullshit for the rest of our lives”.

It’s the equivalent of Godwin’s rule, you know, the rule on discussion boards that if you invoke the name “Hitler” you automatically lose to argument, as hyperbole proves nothing.

Well, there you go. Hyperbole proves nothing.

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