National Post Article: Are White Privilege Anti Racism Workshops Really An Effective Tool For Social Change?
News
White & guilty: ‘Whiteness’ workshop helps expose your inner racist
J.P. Moczulski for National Post
The sign at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore at the Toronto landmark store
Johnathan Kay, National Post · Friday, Apr. 2, 2010
Sandy, Jim and Karen work at a downtown community centre where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism (she and Jim are both white). On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?
If you answered that Sandy’s first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim’s behaviour made her feel, you are apparently a better anti-racist than me.
That, for what it’s worth, was the preferred solution offered by my instructor at “Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism,” a four-part evening workshop for community activists, presented earlier this year at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.
My own answer, announced in class, was that Sandy should approach Jim discreetly, explaining to him how others in the office might perceive his actions. Or perhaps the manager of the community centre could give a generic presentation about the need to treat clients in a colour-blind manner, on a no-names basis.
The problem with my approach, the instructor indicated, lay in the fact that I was primarily concerned with the feelings of my fellow Caucasian, Jim. I wasn’t treating Karen like a “full human being” who might have thoughts and worries at variance with the superficially friendly workplace attitude.
Moreover, I was guilty of “democratic racism” — by which we apply ostensibly race-neutral principles such as “due process,” constantly demanding clear “evidence” of wrongdoing, rather than confronting prima facie instances of racism head-on. “It seems we’re always looking for more proof,” said the instructor, an energetic left-wing activist who’s been teaching this course for several years. “When it comes to racism, you have to trust your gut.”
I felt the urge to pipe up at this. Racism is either a serious charge or it’s not. And if it is, as everyone in this room clearly believed, then it cannot be flung around casually without giving the accused a chance to explain his actions. But I said nothing, and nodded my head along with everyone else. I’d come to this class not to impose my democratic racism on people, but to observe.
Most of the other 13 students were earnest, grad-student types in their 20s — too young to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness first took root on college campuses. The jargon I heard at the bookstore took me back to that age — albeit with a few odd variations. “Allyship” has replaced “solidarity” in the anti-racist lexicon, for instance, when speaking about inter-racial activist partnerships. I also heard one student say she rejected the term “gender-neutral” as sexist, and instead preferred “gender-fluid.” One did not “have” a gender or sexual orientation; the operative word is “perform” — as in, “Sally performs her queerness in a very femme way.”
The instructor’s Cold War-era Marxist jargon added to the retro intellectual vibe. Like just about everyone in the class, she took it for granted that racism is an outgrowth of capitalism, and that fighting one necessarily means fighting the other. At one point, she asked us to critique a case study about “Cecilia,” a community activist who spread a message of tolerance and mutual respect in her neighbourhood. Cecilia’s approach was incomplete, the instructor informed us, because she neglected to sound the message that “classism is a form of oppression.” The real problem faced by visible minorities in our capitalist society isn’t a lack of understanding, “it’s the fundamentally inequitable nature of wage labour.”
The central theme of the course was that this twinned combination of capitalism and racism has produced a cult of “white privilege,” which permeates every aspect of our lives. “Canada is a white supremacist country, so I assume that I’m racist,” one of the students said matter-of-factly during our first session. “It’s not about not being racist. Because I know I am. It’s about becoming less racist.” At this, another student told the class: “I hate when people tell me they’re colour-blind. That is the most overt kind of racism. When people say ‘I don’t see your race,’ I know that’s wrong. To ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.”
All of the students were white (to my eyes, anyway). And most were involved in what might broadly be termed the anti-racism industry — an overlapping hodgepodge of community-outreach activists, equity officers, women’s studies instructors and the like. Most said they’d come so they could integrate anti-racism into their work. Yet a good deal of the course consisted of them unburdening themselves of their own racist guilt. The instructor set the tone, describing an episode in which she’d lectured a colleague of colour about his job. “When I realized what I was doing, I approached him afterward and apologized,” she told the class. “I said to him. ‘I’m so sorry! I’m unloading so much whiteness on you right now.’ ”
Another woman described her torment when a friend asked her to give a presentation about media arts to a group of black students — an exercise that would have made a spectacle of her white privilege. “Should I say yes? Or is it my responsibility to say no?” she said. “But then [my friend] may say, ‘I want you to do it — because you have a particular approach …’
“But wait! Could it be that the reason I have that ‘particular approach’ is that I’ve been raised to think that I could have that particular approach, that I have the ability, that I am able to access education in a particular way? All these things are in my head, in my heart, not really knowing how to respond. On the other hand, I also recognize that the person asking me has the agency to decide that I’m the right person … so I say yes! … But then I’m still thinking ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing.’ I still struggle with this all the time …”
An especially telling moment came when someone raised the subject of Third World nannies who immigrate to Canada under government-sponsored caregiver programs. The instructor told the class that the practice was inherently “super-exploitative.” She also pointed us to an article included in the week’s reading, “Black Women and Work,” in which Canadian author Dionne Brand argues that cynical employers use appeals such as “You know that you’re part of the family” to emotionally blackmail nannies, housekeepers and elder-care workers into the continuation of abusive work relationships.
One of the students — I’ll use the name “Chris” (having promised not to identify any attendee by name) — interjected, apologetically. Chris couldn’t help but confess that her own family had employed just such a nanny, who truly did seem “part of the family.” For several minutes, Chris gave details, describing all the touching, intimate ways in which the nanny’s family had become intermingled with Chris’s own.
This speech from the heart caused a ripple of discomfort. One woman suggested that the nanny has adopted a “coping mechanism” to deal with her subordinate situation. This led to a discussion about how we must recognize the nanny’s “agency” — a popular buzzword signifying that minority members must not be seen as passive victims. The instructor listened attentively — but didn’t offer much more except that the example demonstrated the “contradictary-ness” of anti-racism studies. We moved on while Chris sat there, looking somewhat confused, and attracting my sympathy.
In fact, I felt sympathy for just about everyone in that class. In private conversation, they all seemed like good-hearted, intelligent people. But like communist die-hards confessing their counter-revolutionary thought-crimes at a Soviet workers’ council, or devout Catholics on their knees in the confessional, they also seemed utterly consumed by their sin, regarding their pallor as a sort of moral leprosy. I came to see them as Lady Macbeths in reverse — cursing skin with nary a “damn’d spot.” Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths.
While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, I realized, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar — combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.
As I watched, I tried to detach myself from this spectacle, and imagine what this unintentionally comic scene — a group of students sitting around, self-consciously egging each other on to be ashamed of their skin colour — would look like to, say, civil rights protesters from a half-century ago. If the instructor and her students ever allowed themselves to laugh, they might have found it funny.
National Post
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2758198#ixzz181wCt9uN
National Post Article: Are White Jewish Canadians An Ethnic Minority Or White People Refusing To Acknowledge Their White Skin Privilege?
Jonathan Kay on Jennifer Peto and
the new breed of self-hating Jews
Jonathan Kay December 8, 2010 – 11:31 pm
Larry David has delivered too many great punch lines to count. But I’d say my absolute favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm zinger was the one he spat out at a friend who heard him whistling Wagner outside a movie theatre, and accused him of being a “self-hating Jew.”
“Yeah, I hate myself,” David responded, “But it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m Jewish.”
Nor should it. The old paradigm of the self-hating Jew — the social-climber consumed by morbid fear that the shape of his nose or the extra syllables in his last name would arrest his ascent — went out with Woody Allen’s heyday. Where high society is concerned, you might as well be a self-hating Sagittarius, or a self-hating lefty.
Yet a new breed is upon us. And they look nothing like Larry David or Woody Allen. Far from Hollywood moguls on the make, these self-hating specimens are young, militantly anti-racist, pro-Palestinian leftists — mostly female, heavily gay, draped in kafiyehs and sanctimony. They don’t whistle Wagner, but you can detect a hint of his musical influence when they rail against the sins of “Israeli Apaetheid.” In Toronto, they march under the name “Independent Jewish Voices” (IJV), a group founded by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and out-of-work college professor who once tried to formally adopt an accused terrorist. Every year, the IJV crew hoists their “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” banners at Gay Pride, which more or less functions as their Santa Claus Parade.
Jennifer Peto is the new rising star at IJV, for she’s found a way to turn her existential anguish as a lapsed Jew into a Master’s Degree (titled The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education) — a story first broken by the blog Eye on a Crazy Planet. We are talking about the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), of course, a place where, no doubt, you can get course credit for setting up an anti-Israel Facebook page. But still.
Peto’s thesis — which can best be described as a confessional essay with footnotes — tells the story of her gradual transformation from religious Jewish Zionist running dog to out-and-proud pro-Palestinian activist. Many leftist Jews have gone this route, of course. What distinguishes Peto is the purity of her vision. Western anti-Zionists typically make a pious effort to firewall their hostility to Israel from their affection for Judaism and its defining historical traumas. Not Peto: To the extent Holocaust education creates a sense of victimhood among Jews, she reasons, it feeds support for Israeli warmongering.
What’s worse, she argues, it feeds the conceit that Jews may lump themselves in with truly marginalized groups. The Holocaust was horrible, Peto acknowledges. But it happened many years ago. In 2010, White Jews must remember their place in the politically correct victimhood pecking order: They are whites first, Jews second.
This doctrine isn’t new to me. A few months ago, readers may remember, I wrote about an anti-racism course I took at Toronto’s Women’s Bookstore, where my fellow students and I were taught to be appropriately ashamed of our “white privilege.” The textbook for that course — which also happened to be written by our instructor, a union activist named Sheila Wilmot — flatly declared that fighting anti-Semitism was not part of her agenda. This is because, “in Canada, today, Jewish people of European origin have a relationship to racism that is much closer to that of -white non-Jews than to that of people of colour.” Like most militant anti-racists, Wilmot divided people into presumptively oppressive Whitey and presumptively oppressed non-Whitey — and being Jewish, she reasoned, doesn’t move you from category A to category B.
Peto has taken this idea to the next level, as they say. Throughout her thesis, one is struck by her implicit notion that there is some fixed quantum of sympathy and tolerance in our world — and that it should be reserved for gays, blacks and Palestinians as opposed to wealthy Jews. The idea that the lessons of the Holocaust should be learned for the simple sake of developing an educated and humane outlook on life seems remote to her, since it interferes with her zero-sum approach to victimology.
I have met enough people like Peto to know that, on some level, they still consider themselves to be good Jews; or at least faithful to the Jewish tradition of social justice. Yet when one reads their militant tracts about “Hegemonic Holocaust Education” and what not, it is impossible to escape the feeling that they have found an entirely new religion — a religion that takes anti-racism as its holy writ, Rachel Corrie as its Madonna, Muhammad al-Dura as its Jesus, and OISE as its local church.
A person may have many beliefs — but only one faith. Jennifer Peto has found hers. And no one should confuse it with Judaism.
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/24619/1/Peto_Jennifer_201006_MA_thesis.pdf
Calgary Herald Article: Is Prostutution Still A Morality Issue Or Is It Just A Regular Job That Should Be Taxed?
Society has a right to try to limit prostitution
Those who theorize that striking down laws surrounding prostitution will make Canada a safer place to sell sex overlook a crucial countervailing truth.
While there is no doubt the so-called sex trade is fraught with physical perils, the first and unavoidable harm for prostitutes is prostitution.
Normalize it as some will by calling it the world’s oldest profession, prostitution remains an inherently dehumanizing activity.
Prostitution is, effectively, rental slavery in that its very nature reduces human beings purely to the dollar value of their genitals or their ability to rent themselves out for sexual gratification.
Laws crafted to discourage prostitution should not be dismissed because they are deemed the detritus of sexual prudery. They go the root of how we view our society and should be determined and upheld based on a democratic discussion of how we wish to protect Canadians’ basic human dignity.
Unfortunately, the greater harm of prostitution is the essential point Ontario Justice Susan Himel disregarded when she struck down Canadian laws against keeping a common bawdy house, living off the avails of prostitution (pimping) or communicating for the purposes of prostitution.
Justice Himel accepted the claims of three women charged under those sections of the law that the first two provisions violated their Charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person. The women had argued that violence against prostitutes would decrease in indoor settings such as brothels or when they can retain “managers” or security personnel.
She also agreed with their challenge to the communicating provision on the basis of Charter guarantees of free expression, finding that allowing communication for the purpose of prostitution enhances safety by letting prostitutes screen customers. The Ontario Court of Appeal has given the federal government until next April to counter Justice Himel’s ruling.
The time given Ottawa to organize its arguments is also an opportunity for Canadians to remind ourselves of what prostitution actually entails, and to reassert Parliament’s prerogative to legislate on wider social harms that outstrip overly narrow definitions of individual freedom.
There is no question arguments exist from a libertarian perspective in favour of permitting prostitution. The libertarian impulse creates an antipathy toward any “morality” laws including those dealing with illicit drugs, pornography and prostitution. Perhaps most Canadians wish Canada to become like Amsterdam with its window prostitutes and Nevada with its brothels. If so, it should be for that majority to convince parliamentarians that our society should be that permissive.
What all Canadians must remember is that those foundations are the reason Parliament has always chosen to combat prostitution indirectly by making most acts associated with it criminal offences, though the act itself has never been illegal.
While prostitution may not be a criminal offence, the provisions impugned in this case are clearly intended to severely restrict its practice. In complex social matters involving community values, deference to Parliament’s social objectives is essential. In our system, the legislative branch is better able to react to the needs of Canadians and weigh the benefits and harms of current social practices and their impact on society.
These provisions are designed to limit prostitution and therefore can be expected to interfere with the business of prostitution, even to the point of making it practically impossible.
In her ruling, Justice Himel defined the legislative objectives too narrowly to such concerns as limiting nuisances in the street. Such legal narrowness makes it much easier to undermine the provisions based on the countervailing “harm” to prostitutes who engage in a “legal” business.
While the courts have previously held that preventing “dirt for dirt’s sake” is not a legitimate objective that would justify violating the Charter, the wider social objective of limiting or eliminating prostitution is legitimate. The harm caused by prostitution is considered by many Canadians (and by Parliament) to go beyond minor issues of nuisance, and is much greater than simply the legislation of morality.
This is a view previously held by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1990 Prostitution Reference.
“The fact that the sale of sex for money is not a criminal act under Canadian law does not mean that Parliament must refrain from using the criminal law to express society’s disapprobation of street solicitation,” wrote then Chief Justice Brian Dickson.
None of us lives in splendid isolation. The moral disapprobation of prostitution is connected with our society’s deep beliefs pertaining to dehumanizing acts associated with the rental of bodies for sexual gratification. Focusing on the barriers to safely practicing prostitution caused by prohibiting brothels, pimping and soliciting fails to weigh such “harm” against the broader legislative aims and societal benefits of limiting prostitution.
A significant resulting problem is that the government’s objectives and the harm it seeks to avoid are measured by different standards than the “harm” caused to prostitutes. In demanding substantial social science “proof” from the government of the harm avoided, Justice Himel requires Parliament to prove the negative.
Parliament is thus precluded from relying on its legitimate broad objective based on human dignity and is instead required to prove the benefits of the provisions in narrow and mundane “avoidance of nuisance” terms. How can Parliament prove that its laws preserve human dignity by discouraging prostitution?
Parliament will need to make arguments from a social values perspective and looking at negative impacts of prostitution more generally. Before dismissing the government’s expert evidence of social harms of prostitution, Justice Himel ought to have borne in mind the Supreme Court of Canada’s admonition that context, deference and a flexible and realistic standard of proof are essential aspects of the constitutional analysis.
There are limits on social science evidence and when it comes to issues like these, Parliament needs some leeway to determine what should be a legitimate mode of living. It cannot constitutionally justify such laws without reference to the wider social structures under which Canadians choose to live.
The issues involved in this case go far beyond what regulations on an economic transaction are justifiable from a “safety” perspective. Ideas concerning the value of humans and limits on how they treat their bodies remain relevant and important to the dialogue, but that dialogue is a democratic one effectively undertaken in legislatures, which are designed to formulate perspectives on controversial social practices.
Kevin Boonstra is a constitutional lawyer who writes LexView, a legal publication of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. The above is adapted from his most recent LexView available at http://www.cardus.ca.
ABC News Article: Why Is Society So Obsessed With Female Friendships & Lesbianism?
Why Can’t Oprah and Gayle Just Be Friends?
Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King Highlight Lesbian Speculation About Certain Female Friendships
“Why can’t we be friends? Why can’t we be friends?”
It’s tempting to think that Oprah Winfrey is playing War’s 1975 hit on loop after making like one of her guests, breaking down in tears, and insisting to Barbara Walters that her relationship with Gayle King is strictly platonic.
So goes her now-famous quote: “I have said we are not gay enough times. I am not gay. I am not lesbian. I’m not even kind of a lesbian. And the reason why it irritates me is because somebody must think I’m lying. That’s No. 1. No. 2, why would you want to hide it?”
Let us suggest No. 3: Why are we so eager to read into some female friendships more than others?
Winfrey and King, Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna — at one point or another, all have been regarded as maybe just a little bit too close. Why are Winfrey and King always out and about, not Winfrey and her man, Stedman Graham? Did Aniston incite Cox’s recent divorce? Are Madonna and Paltrow plotting some kind of macrobiotic, Tracy Anderson-engineered world take over?
Some of the gossip is facetious, to be sure. But it may stem from the thinking that these relationships would be more saucy, more scintillating, more sexy if they involved more than mere shopping sprees and mani-peddis.
Case in point: When Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson were clubbing buddies, they blended into the pack. But when Lohan revealed they were more than just friends (with a kiss onboard a yacht in the south of France, no less), they turned into media darlings, the hot new Hollywood couple no one could stop talking about.
“As lesbian relationships and bisexual relationships among women have become more accepted, people have tried to put two and two together,” said psychologist Wendy Lee Walsh. “We see two women who are close friends it’s like, ‘Oh, well! Maybe there’s more to it!’
It should come as no shock that for many, the PG-13 female friendship also paints a pleasing picture.
“I think with Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston it’s, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be hot if they got together?'” said Jessica Wakeman, a blogger for the female-focused pop culture blog TheFrisky.com.But Winfrey’s is a special case. She shunned the road most traveled. She didn’t get married, she didn’t have children. Instead, she built an empire. As Wakeman said, she “arouses suspicion.”
“People love to speculate about Oprah and Gayle because Oprah’s never married, because Stedman’s rarely around, because she’s a survivor of child sexual abuse, because she’s got this very close female friend, and because on top of it, most of her other peers are gay — Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres,” said Walsh.
Will Winfrey’s teary testimonial silence the speculation about her sexuality? Because of the way “we associate power with masculinity,” according to Walsh, unless the talk show queen dons a big, white, frilly gown and marches down the aisle to meet her king, probably not. Expect that people will be picking away at Winfrey’s personal life for years to come.
“The phenomenon of perhaps not giving the truth and then saying something and crying over it is not at all unfamiliar,” said E! Online columnist Ted Casablanca. “The public knows that Hollywood lies all the time as a matter of course and a matter of business. There is a new level of sophistication — and I credit the web with that — where people know when something’s up.”
Poem: Desire By Orville Lloyd Douglas
Your mind is like a library, since I am learning about new art, cultures, and philosophy it is very stimulating.
Flipping through the pages of your hemispheres allows me to enter a chapter.
It is a voyage like crossing the Atlantic Ocean and discovering a new world.
I can sit for hours, staring into your brown eyes and feeling very effervescent and loquacious.
I dream of this hurricane of passion, this cyclone of lust.
A torrential downpour of comfort is racing towards me.
I can feel this moment of happiness.
It wasn’t temporal, it developed gradually.
Gayblackcanada 