Dear god why do I glance at the newspaper headlines, why?

So I’m out and about yesterday, just living my life, happy, and I come upon a Toronto Star newspaper box with the headline above. Full article here.

DO NOT under any circumstances read the comments. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

There’s also a snarky column by Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun (I KNOW), and an equally unhelpful column by Marcus Gee in the Globe and Mail.

A sweeping year-long probe into racism at Ryerson University has found a staggeringly diverse campus where some visible minority students say they feel harassed and excluded, where profs don’t always deal with offensive comments made in class and some non-white staff report a “chill” that shuts them out of the power loop.

A year-long probe, that’s great. Good opportunity to be thorough and non-superficial.

I need to state once again for the record that I HATE the term visible minority. Hate it hate it hate it. Almost as much as I hate the term non-white.

Talk about a chill.

The 107-page report, commissioned by the university after a string of racist incidents in 2008, calls for immediate anti-racism training for senior staff, sharper targets for hiring visible minorities, more courses on diversity and the collection of race-based statistics on staff and students so the university can track whether equity is improving.

While training doesn’t really scratch the surface, the later proposal of an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is one way to ensure institutional accountability and have consequences for faculty and students when issues of oppression arise in the future.

“Fostering a racism-free and inclusive environment requires bold leadership, action and vigilance on the part of everyone in the Ryerson community, and there are key gaps the institution needs to address,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by the Star.

There is no such thing as a racism-free environment.

What concerns me, but does not surprise me, is that there is no power analysis, found primarily in the use of words such as “diversity” and “inclusion” and not “anti-oppression”, “power” and “privilege”.

Inclusion, true inclusion, means inclusion at every level or an organization and equity at every level, including leadership, power-holders and decision-makers. It’s certainly easy to rack up the enrollment numbers and take tuition dollars, it’s far more difficult to implement, enforce and maintain standards of anti-oppression and true equity and inclusion.

The Ryerson task force used face-to-face interviews, surveys and forums to uncover a campus where some Muslim students resent having to lift their face-coverings to enter the library, where Jewish students have reported eight incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 18 months and native students say security guards have mistaken them for homeless trespassers.

Others longed for teachers who look like them, especially aboriginal and black students.

Goldstein’s piece, linked above, quotes the second paragraph, and not the first. Actual examples of racism don’t interest him apparently. As for having professors who look like the student population, anyone who’s an ally gets why this matters. Anyone who doesn’t get it, and mocks it, is in fact a racist doofus.

A note on White Folks and “Diversity”

One of the reasons I hate the word diversity is the ways in which it’s used. The Globe and Mail article, as well as Goldstein’s column both state, over and over ad nauseum, how “diverse” the campuses at Ryerson are. Neither author acknowledges in a real way that their being a white person has ANYTHING to do with their observations / experiences of campus life.

Strolling around, gawking at all the POC, is the most superficial and idiotic way to imagine that “diversity” is “working” at the university. Ridiculous.

So, an AR educator joke I just made up:

How many POC are needed for white folks to feel there’s “diversity”?

Answer: The number that’s needed for white folks to feel that POC are “taking over” minus 10, or 100, or 1000.

Yeah I know. It’s not fucking funny.

In the context of Canada, diversity is ALWAYS seen from the perspective of white folks. It’s as though there’s no other way to understand what diversity means except from white positionality and standpoint. Why? Because white folks are the centre of the universe aren’t they? What other position could POSSIBLY be valid?

FFS

A snippet from the Globe article:

What the task force fails to say is why any of this is necessary. There have been no violent clashes between groups of students from different races. The task force produces no evidence that any student was held back or any prof denied tenure because of his or her race.

See this is the problem when a task force is initiated because of reported extreme violent acts. Which dude failed to mention. Shocking I tell you. The emphasis on the individual, and worse, the phraseology “groups of students from different races” reduces systemic racist oppression to the equivalent of gang rivalry FFS. Nothing about a racist and exclusive curriculum, non-inclusive hiring practices, and many more layers that make up a racist organization.

Conclusions and recommendations

• develop a course on anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia and disability that is open to all students and could be considered as mandatory in future;
• have a special faculty-student subcommittee examine the curriculum and recommend the addition of non-Western themes and course offerings;

These are some of the recommendations that The Star has listed. They’re great. Please make the course mandatory and hire effective staff to teach such courses. I know a few people who would be excellent, by the way. (Did I mention I have an M.Ed in anti-racism and anti-oppression education? *wink*) And PLEASE don’t have only POC and Aboriginal people on the subcommittee, I beg of you.