Toronto Star article, June 18, 2010
Her death sent shock waves through the city — and across the world — prompting heated debate on the hijab, the challenges of integration for newcomers, and whether her death was Toronto’s first crime of honour or a horrible case of domestic violence. …. Media in Toronto and around the world immediately reported and continues to report that Aqsa was killed because she refused to wear the hijab. But it was much more complicated than that.
Her death sent shock waves through the city — and across the world — prompting heated debate on the hijab, the challenges of integration for newcomers, and whether her death was Toronto’s first crime of honour or a horrible case of domestic violence.
….
Media in Toronto and around the world immediately reported and continues to report that Aqsa was killed because she refused to wear the hijab. But it was much more complicated than that.
You know, if one were to never pay attention to feminists, including Muslim feminists, one would be rather perplexed about the horror, fear and isolation that Aqsa had in the last moments of her life, being killed by her father and brother. Nobody in any of the regular state intervention machines (her school, CAS, the police) did much of anything to help her, to listen to her about what she needed.
And since her murder (why the media keeps calling it her “death” is beyond me) the white establishment has been desperately trying to “understand”, from the mealy-center of the Toronto Star to the hard-core right of the Globe and Mail.
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“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.
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.
About me:
Growing up mixed race Asian/white, very light skinned, and encouraged to be as white as possible by both my parents, it was possible for me to identify as white (I think) and pass as white most of the time (I think). Still is. Maybe sometimes sorta.
But like everyone who grows up in the public school system in Canada or the US, the culture that’s taught to us is whiteness. I was marinated in this, as much as any of the non-Anglo culture that was my home life growing up. At home there were pieces and fragments of Chinese culture around the house, pieces that I owned and lived without thinking about them, like not remembering a time when I didn’t know how to use chopsticks, or prepare the rice cooker, or hearing my father speak on the phone and not understand him. My connections to Jewishness on my mother’s side, cultural rather than religious, was also fairly nebulous, including such fragments as “Chanukah gelt” from my Jewish grandmother once a year, which also included chocolate gold coins. That the “outside” world, a vast sheath of oppressive whiteness which I wrapped around myself was so different than the “inside” world of my family was simply a switch I made when traversing between the two. Having one Chinese parent and one white Jewish parent was normal, even while I knew it was not normal to my classmates and friends.
In the “real world” though, I was culturally white, and North American. I learned all the racism, sexism, anti-immigrant trash that is taught, and somehow filtered it into what my lived reality was. Not really sure how I did that, to be honest.
I have to blog about this.
In a certain leftist website, on a certain discussion board, there have been two recent threads on trans issues.
The first, started by a trans ally in the feminist forum, was about the exclusion of trans women from the new Vancouver Women’s Health Clinic.
Link to thread.
The level of discourse on the thread, on which nobody self-identified as trans, went from arguments such as “what’s to stop any man from claiming he’s a woman to access services?” to “women are defined by our woman bits”. Basically, between and amongst the few allies and supporters and anti-oppression people, a bunch of transphobic, trans-ignorant and downright hurtful assholes.
