Category Archives: racism

Whose fault is that so many indigenous children are in care?

Indigenous Issues, racism

 

Some people  say it is clearly the “fault” of Indigenous peoples that so many indigenous children are “in care”. But even if it is true, what is the context of that “fault”?  I would suggest the context is the colonial history of Canada and its powerful legacy, in which Indigenous people have been subjected to colonialism for generations in a system in which they were systematically disrespected, marginalized, and taught to disparage their own child caring abilities and self-worth, while undermining their cultures, independence, and capacity to for care for children. Children were taught that their parents were incompetent parents. It cut the bond between parents and children with immeasurable harm that flowed from generation to generation.

So the children were taken away “into care” as earlier they were taken away from their parents and put into residential schools. It really is not that different. For generations, many of the children were taken away from their parents and sent to Residential schools where indigenous youth were not allowed to speak their own language, or to participate in their own culture, while they were separated from their families. Often they were not allowed to speak to other members of the family. They were taught that their parents were not worthy parents.

As a result, the children lacked role models for parenting as a result. Therefore, later, when they in turn became parents they did not know how to be good parents. Most of us in white society had good models. We were lucky. We benefited from the system. Indigenous children were victims of that same system. At the same time, as if that rupture was not enough, in residential schools the indigenous children often suffered debilitating effects of abuse, exploitation, and resulting trauma. The results have again cascaded through the generations and all of us are paying the price for that trauma.

The modern system of putting children “in care” is not a big improvement over the residential schools. Some people even think it is worse. Often the children are not put with loving parents or family members. They are given to the custody of people who are paid to care for them. As former federal minister of Indigenous Services Jane Philpott said,

“This is very much reminiscent of the residential school system where children are being scooped up from their homes, taken away from their family and we will pay the price for this for generations to come.”

This is not what commonly happens to white children. White children are treated differently in the system than indigenous children. That is what a racist system is all about. It exists. It is real. But many whites don’t see it. We don’t see our own racism. We take for granted a system that benefits us. It seems natural. It is not.

Children in Care

Indigenous Issues, racism

 

One of the scandals of Canadian society is the number of indigenous children in care in Canada. “In care” means that the children have been taken away from their parents on the basis that the parents are unfit to care for their children. In other words those children are taken from their parents and given over to foster parents, or in some cases, civil servants who take them to hotels. Often those children are taken to homes where they are not loved or even “cared” for. They are just there.

Of course sometimes this is necessary. It can happen to white parents and it can happen to indigenous parents. It should be rare. For white children and their parents it is rare. For indigenous children and their parents it is not rare.

About 50% of the total children in care are indigenous children! In a country where 4.9% of people in Canada self-identified as aboriginal in the last census that is an astonishing proportion of the children in care. in other words the rate of indigenous children in care is 10 times what one would expect based on population! More than 40,000 indigenous children are currently “in care” in Canada. This is more than the number of indigenous children were put into Residential schools.

Another shocking fact is that 25% of these indigenous children in care are in Manitoba. A small province like Manitoba has a quarter of the indigenous children in care.

Another surprising statistic is that 4% of indigenous children in care who are suffering from mental illness receive no treatment for their illness.

According to the former federal minister of Indigenous Services Jane Philpott, “The disproportionate number of Indigenous children currently in the child welfare system has created a “humanitarian crisis” in the country.”

Minster Philpott sent a letter to her provincial and territorial counterparts calling for “an emergency meeting” on indigenous children and family services. CBC News reported on it this way:

“We are facing a humanitarian crisis in this country where Indigenous children are vastly disproportionately over-represented in the child welfare system,” said Philpott in an interview Thursday with Power & Politics.

Philpott said in Manitoba, there are a total of 11,000 children in care and 10,000 are Indigenous children. Statistics Canada census data released last week revealed 4,300 Indigenous children under the age of four are currently in foster care.”

 

Here is another shocking statistic from Stats Canada: Aboriginal children accounted for 7.7% of all children aged 0 to 4, and about one‑half of all foster children in this age group.

 Think about these stats for a second. What do they signify? Such facts cannot possibly be explained on the basis of racist individuals. Such stark facts speak of a vast system of racism. In Manitoba 10 out of 11 children taken away form their parents and put “in care” are indigenous children. More than 90%. Too often where nobody actually cares about them.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Books, racism

 

 

Toni Morrison returned to the subject of self-hatred and racism in her profound novel about slavery—Beloved. This is surely one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. It is also one of the most shocking novels you will ever read.

I want to give a warning here as I will spoil the ending for those who want to read it. I find that unavoidable. In that book a mother—Sethe—escaped from slavery with her two daughters Denver and Beloved. But when the slavers who were tracking them found them, Sethe did the unthinkable—she tried to kill her daughters. She took Beloved to the shed and cut her throat with a saw to save her from slavery, by killing her. Here is Morrison’s incredibly powerful description of that scene:

“Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it…Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning—that Beloved might leave. That before Seth could make her understand what it meant—what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life—Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that—far worse—was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dream about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled the daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.”

These are things that a system of racism can accomplish. No individual acts of racism could do this.

The Bluest Eye: The terrifying Logic of Racism

Books, racism

 

In the Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, Pecola’s mother and father, the products of a racist society that created people without self-worth, had epic fights. They were poor and black. Yet those fights, “relieved the tiresomeness of poverty, gave grandeur to their dead rooms.” As a result her mother—Mrs. Breedlove—what a name—and Cholly her husband had an incredible relationship. They started out loving each other, but over time that love curdled into something contaminated. Yet, they needed each other. “If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus. She needed Cholly’s sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became. In the name of Jesus.

         Yet Cholly needed Mrs. Breedlove just as much. They were not complete without each other. “No less did Cholly need her. She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact.”

That is what the impotent black man in America was reduced to. He could not fight back against his powerful white oppressors. He had to accept the domination and the hurt because as Toni Morrison said, there was nothing he could do about it. The only thing he could do was turn on those who were less powerful than him. Even though he loved them—his wife and his daughter—he could only try to quench his abject self-hatred by hurting those he loved the most.

Half-remembered injustices that were “humiliations, defeats, and emasculations… could stir him into flights of depravity that surprised himself—but only himself. Somehow he could not astound. He could only be astounded.”

When Cholly was young he loved Darlene a lovely young black girl. One day they were having sex—loving sex—when they were interrupted by a group of young white men bent on harm. They forced them to continue the sex as they watched shining flashlights onto the bodies of the disgraced couple. As a result, Cholly came to hate Darlene instead of the white boys. That is the terrifying logic of racism. The victim comes to hate himself and those he loves the most, instead of the lethal white predators. Morrison described that process this way,

“Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed, men. He was small, black, and helpless. His subconscious knew what his mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up, like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover the hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence, but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight.”

 

What Toni Morrison, like James Baldwin before her, realized, and so many of us, like me in particular have not realized, is the astonishing visceral power of impotent rage. It is helpless before overwhelming power so it turns on itself and those the victim loves the most. It is irrational of course, but that does not matter. Somehow, in some twisted pathological logic, it is better to hurt those you love than do nothing but accept the injustice.

In Canada we are often told, by the comfortable privileged, that the “aboriginal problem” is exactly that—an aboriginal problem. Most violence against aboriginals is inflicted by other aboriginals. It is entirely their fault. That may be, but that changes nothing! That is exactly the deadly awfulness of racism. It can impel the victim to turn on himself or herself and turn on others, even more vulnerable, loved ones, in a cruel metamorphism that bespeaks generations of abuse and imposed self-hatred. The vulnerable ones are then attacked from all sides. There is no refuge, no safe haven. Racism is much more powerful and much more awful than I ever imagined. It is thanks to writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin that I have come to realize that. Thanks.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

racism

 

 

In 2015 I read 3 of Toni Morrison’s novels–The  Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Jazz. I called this the year of reading dangerously. One of the reasons was I got to read novels like these. At age 66 I read some of the best novels I have ever read.

In The Bluest Eye, the protagonist, a young black girl received a Christmas gift of “a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” It was assumed she would love it. Isn’t that what every young girl wanted? Yet she had no interest in it. None at all. She was physically revolted by it and frightened of “those round moronic eyes.” She “had only one desire: to dismember it.” When I read that sentence I was shocked. What kind of a young girl would want to dismember a beautiful little baby doll? There must be something perverted about that young girl.

The reason she felt that way was that she could not identify with the doll. It had beauty that escaped the little black girl. The doll had nothing to do with her, even though it represented what the world thought was the most beautiful thing in the world—a white baby girl. As she said, “all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” Note the 3 colours in each case followed by a hyphen and adjective. Colours are important in this novel. That is because the colour of skin is so important. Important at least to the people in the novel, to the people in the United States, a country far from colour blind. The same goes for Canada of course.

The young girl, Claudia, had never been asked what she wanted. Had she been asked she said, this is what she would have said,

“I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of peach, perhaps, afterward.”

 

Instead she got what others thought was right and appropriate for her, even though it made no sense, really, to give a white baby doll to a black girl in racist America. It might have if America had been a different country, but it was not. It was racist to its rotten core. Claudia said, she “destroyed white baby dolls.”

Claudia did not realize that she was beautiful. Instead, as Morrison says in a wonderful afterword or commentary on her own novel, “implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing.” Imagine a young vulnerable girl who has no idea that she is beautiful! Instead she wants to look like white girls. How powerful must a racist society be to turn a young innocent girl against herself?

Another thing Claudia hated was the unnatural lack of dirt or grit in the house of the black family. She recalled, amazingly, a “humiliating absence of dirt. The irritable, unimaginable cleanliness.” Again another standard, not her own. Claudia was a young rebel. She defied for a while the traditional order that made white girls beautiful and black girls much less desirable. She could not accept that standard of beauty. It had nothing to do with her.

As a result little Claudia prayed for “pretty blue eyes…Blue-sky eyes…Morning-glory-blue-eyes.” She wanted to be pretty like little white girls. “Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.” This was doubly sad because she could never see her own beauty. That ability had been destroyed by racism. As a result, “she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.” And, of course, those eyes could not see her beauty. They too were shredded by racism.

What horrified her was that she felt the same way about white girls! As she said,

“But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, “Awwwww,” but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them.”

 

Yet, in time, Claudia lost the spark of rebellion. She caved in. She accepted her lot. She felt ashamed of her attitude to the doll. This was the result,

“…my shame foundered for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.”

Claudia was the girl whose black father, so pinched and transformed by racism that he turned on his own wife and beat her, and then raped the young girl. She knew the effects of racism. It could transform a man into a rapist of his own daughter, and a young black girl into a destroyer of white baby dolls or, perhaps, even white girls. Racism is an incredibly powerful force—a powerful force for evil that cascades through generations of perpetrators and their victims.

The whites in America have the power over the blacks. They have always had it, ever since they dragged them kicking and screaming from Africa to America. Those black people rarely thought of their power. They did not have to. They assumed that power. It was always there. As Morrison, said, the whites were “thrilled by the easy power of a majority.” It is so easy for the dominant group to not even see the victims of their power.

One of the insidious and fiendish aspects of racism of a minority by a dominant majority is that the minority is made to feel that the dominance is justified. The victim comes to believe, over time, that she is inferior. She deserves to be discriminated against. As a result black people believed whites were superior. As Morrison described it,

“It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They dance a macabre ballet, around the victim, whom for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.”

That is what racism is all about.

 

A system of Racism

racism

 

 

Toni Morrison

I have been challenged by some of my friends about my claim that there is in Canada and the United States a system of racism. I stand by my claim. In fact I believe the evidence of systemic racism is overwhelming. It is all around us. Sometimes it is hard to see because it is all around us. At least it is hard for whites to see. As I have said, it is the water in which we swim.

It is particularly difficult for white people to see the system of racism. That is because they don’t see race. To people of colour race is everywhere. To whites everything is natural and comfortable. That is because they are part of the dominant group. To the group being dominated it is not so natural nor comfortable. Far from it.

I want to look at some examples but this will take a few posts. But before I do that I want to consider a person who really understands racism—Toni Morrison. She has lived racism since she was a little girl and she is wise—wise beyond belief. She is certainly one of the top 5 American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

When my friends challenged me, I thought of her when I considered how I would respond to their criticism. Then I remembered I had recently recorded a documentary on her and had not watched it yet. It was called The Pieces I am. So I did. And was I ever glad I did.

I thought she shed some powerful light on a very dark subject—systemic racism or the system of racism. She spoke about anti-black racism in the United States, but much of what she said applied equally to anti-indigenous racism in Canada.

In the documentary I watched she commented on her first novel, The Bluest Eye. To my surprise I realized I had written a review of this book for inclusion in my blog about a year ago but had  never posted it. Me bad. I will post it soon, because it is so topical.

In the documentary film she noted that she wanted to write seriously about a young girl. She thought no one had ever done that before. Her novel is decidedly not a novel targeted for young adults. She said, “In every book I ever read about young black girls they were jokes or props. For example, Topsy, the young black slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No one looks at them seriously, Morrison said, and that is what she wanted to do in her novel. And she certainly accomplished that.

Morrison said that in The Bluest Eye she wanted to explore how a child learns self-loathing. Where does that come from? Who enables it? And what might be its consequences? I must admit I never considered that before.

She said the book was based on an actual incident in her own life. As a young girl she met another young black girl who was walking home from school. As these 2 black girls walked, they were arguing about whether or not God existed. Imagine that conversation. Her friend said no. Toni said yes, God existed. The other girl said she had proof that God did not exist. What was that, Toni asked. The girl said that she had been praying hard—very hard—for 2 years for God to give her blue eyes and she did not get them. So God did not exist. For Morrison though the real point of the conversation was something different. Toni said, this girl was very black and very beautiful, and yet she wanted blue eyes. Can you imagine the pain of that, Toni asked? “I wanted to write about that kind of racism and how it hurts. This is not lynchings or murder or drowning. This is interior pain. So deep that an 11 year old girl believed that if she only had some characteristic of the while world she would be OK.”

What could make such a young girl think that to be worthwhile she had to be more like white girls? The answer, she implied, without saying it, is a system of racism. That system is able to turn  a young girl into despising who she is because she cannot meet the standards of white beauty all around her. She begins to hate who she is. And she begins to hate those who made her black. Like her own family. What kind of a system can do that?

According to Morrison, “She surrendered entirely to the master narrative. The whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family. She got it from school. She got it from the movies. She got it from everywhere!” That is precisely what a system of racism is all about. Morrison changed the scenario slightly in her novel, but that is what she wrote about in her own unique and powerful style. And frankly I had never before thought about racism like that before reading her book. She wrote about a system of racism so deep, so powerful, and so invisible that it can make a young beautiful girl hate herself. And her family. And her own race. It is a system with incredible power, and part of its power is that it hides itself from the whites that benefit from it. They don’t even see it. I had never seen it, even though it was and is all around me!

In the film she added this commentary:

The master narrative is whatever ideological script is being imposed by the people in authority on every body else. The master fiction. And history. It has a certain point of view. So when a little girl sees that the most prized gift she could get at Christmas time is a little white doll [with blue eyes] that is the master narrative speaking. This is beautiful. This is love. And you’re not it.

The master narrative is the system of racism. Toni Morrison understood what it’s all about like no one else I have ever read before or since. It was through reading her book that I came to learn something very important about racism. White supremacy is the master narrative. That is the system of racism. We have it too in Canada. It is pervasive. It can make people who are not white hate themselves so much they can harm their own children, their own family members, their own race. It helps explain for example, why indigenous people are so often abusive to themselves and their own families. That is what self-loathing can do and it is a horrible crime. It is hard to think of one worse, and yet it is completely invisible. We whites don’t even believe there is any such thing. What could be worse than that?

Is Racism in our DNA?

Police, racism

 

President Obama in 2015, the last full year of his presidency, finally started to buck up the courage to speak about racism. He pointed out how the United States had ““the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination” was “still part of our DNA” as Americans.” Remember I am not pointing my finger at Americans from the perspective of us here in Canada being clean. We have the same problem here. Both countries have the same original sin namely racism and male supremacy. This is what Condoleezza  Rice called “a birth defect”.

Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Dubois both understood this as well. As Todd and May explained in their New York Times article,

Both men emphasized how the word is part of the institutional fabric of black oppression, that individual racist acts are not aberrations but the products of a larger systemic set of practices that, as the feminist scholar Barbara Applebaum argues, “hold structural injustice in place.” Central to those practices is policing, and the “bad apple” framing fails to confront its role in structural injustice.

If you just look at bad apples you fail to see or do anything about the tree, the structure, that holds them in place. People who are part of an unjust system may be good people, they may not appear to be exploiters or bad, but if they are part of a system that oppresses they are part of the problem.

The philosopher Iris Marion Young wrote this:

“Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individual and institutions acting in pursuit of their particular goals and interests, within given institutional rules and accepted norms. All the persons who participated by their actions in the ongoing schemes of cooperation that constitute these structures are responsible for them, in the sense that they are part of the process that causes them. They are not responsible, however, in the sense of having directed the process or intended its outcomes.”

Everyone who is part of an unjust system—including me and you—have an obligation to dissent. We must voice our objections to that system or   we are part of the oppression. There is no way around this uncomfortable fact. The least we can do—we should do more—is to voice our objections. If we don’t do at least that, we are complicit—we are aiding and abetting—and in law that makes us just as guilty as the perpetrator. 

In 1987 in the Stanford Law Review, Charles Lawrence wrote this way about the bad-apple metaphor: “the bad-apple metaphor suggests a “perpetrator” model that fails to give an account of just how systemic racism is “transmitted by tacit understandings” and “collective unconscious.”

 The philosopher Charles Mills argued, “the perpetrator [of racist actions or beliefs] perspective presupposes a world composed of atomic individuals whose actions are outside of and apart from the social fabric and without historical continuity.”

The police—just like all of us—are part of a system for which we are partly responsible. We know that system harms a lot of people. Let’s face it for once. We all know that system harms a lot of people. It is time for all of us to object to that system or we are culpable too.

Michael Eric Dyson, in his influential book, The Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” explained it well:

“That metaphor of a few bad apples doesn’t begin to get at the root of the problem. Police violence may be more like a poisoned water stream that pollutes the entire system. To argue that only a few bad cops cause police terror is like relegating racism to a few bigots. Bigots are surely a problem, but they are sustained by systems of belief and perception, by widely held stereotypes and social practice.”

So what do we do about it? It is important for all of us to understand this. As Todd and May said,

 

To truly confront problems of racist violence in our society, let’s not once again begin with the question of how to reform the police. Let’s instead start with the question of how to build healthy and safe communities of mutual respect and see which institutions we need to reach that goal. If anything that is to be called policing emerges from that inquiry, it should be at its end rather than assumed at the outset.

Only such an approach can possibly lead to deep reform. That is the reform we need.

 

Bad Apples or a Rotten Tree?

Police, racism

 

A lot people—particularly white people—believe that the problem with policing in Canada and the United States is a few bad apples. Others think it is a lot of bad apples. Both of these beliefs miss the point. It is not just that some police are bad apples; the point it that the tree is rotten. The system is rotten. And from a rotten tree you get poisonous fruit.

Most people believe that most police officers are doing a good job of protecting people. Todd May and George Yancy have argued in a powerful New York Times piece that this is too simple. They put it this way:

It is a mistake not because it underestimates the number of police officers who are racist and violent, but because the problem of racist policing is not one of individual actors. It is a mistake because the role of the police in society must be understood, not individually but structurally.

 

Like an organ in a human body, a Police Department is part of a structural whole. It functions to perform a certain task in the body politic; it is an organ in that body. Seen this way, each police officer is then like a cell in that organ. Before we can identify any problem in that organ, we must first understand the job that organ performs.

 

In the case of the police, the answer might seem obvious. Their function is to protect the citizenry from crime. At least that’s what we’re told. But as any good student of biology or politics knows, it won’t help to ask what an organ is said to do. It is better to observe what it actually does.

 

To merely accept the claim that police forces, since their inception, have protected law-abiding citizens from crime involves the neglect of several crucial factors. It neglects the long history of police abuse and the specific intentional abuse of people of color; it neglects the role that the police have played in breaking strikes, in silencing dissent and in keeping the social order safe from resistance or change. It also neglects the early history of policing in the United States that took the form of slave patrols in the 1700s and the enforcement of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Since police forces were created, they have been the instruments whereby those in power have inflicted their will on the less powerful. And in countries, like Canada and the United States, where race has been, and continues to be, such a powerful force, that power has often been imposed on people who are not white.

Remember everything here applies to Canada too. The early history of the vaunted RCMP was to put down indigenous people in the west. which they did–brutally.

The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault said most of us look at the problem in the wrong way. He said we should not ask why the criminal justice system fails so often, but rather we should ask at what does it succeed? If it succeeded at nothing it would have been defunded a long time ago.

May and Yancy answered that question this way:

Once we ask that question, the answer is entirely clear. They succeed in keeping people in their place. They succeed in keeping middle-class and especially upper-class white people safe, so long as they don’t get out of line. They succeed in keeping people of color in their place so that they don’t challenge the social order that privileges middle- and upper-class white people. And, as we have recently witnessed in many violent police responses at protests, they succeed in suppressing those who would question the social order.

This brings me back to the point I tried to make about racism. The deadliest racism is not the obvious racism; it is the invisible system of racism. It is relatively easy to tackle the overt racists. The invisible racism is much harder to root out. So too with police. We must look at the police system. Or as May and Todd explained,

If we look at individual police officers divorced from the structure in which they operate — if we simply look for the “bad apples”— we fail to see the role of the police as a whole. Whether individual police officers are racist is not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is whether the police — the institution of policing as it exists in the United States — is racist. And once we look at this clearly, we understand that the answer must be yes.

 

So let’s not focus on the  Minneapolis cop who put his knee on the neck of George Floyd. Or the cops in Winnipeg who held down Finn Nolan Dorian near the Winnipeg Centennial Concert Hall. As long as we concentrate on bad apples we will miss out on the more serious problem—the system. In Canada and the United States that system is fused with white supremacism.

It’s really a lot worse than a some bad apples.

Defund the Police?

Police, racism

The issue of race in both Canada and the United States is intimately connected to policing. Racism has been at the centre of the relationship between people of colour and the police in both countries. In a society in which race has played such an important role for centuries that would be unavoidable. That is particularly true when for so long the dominant group has denied that racism is real and has a profound effect.

Some things are obvious. There are good cops and bad cops. The bad cops must be eliminated. The good cops should be encouraged. The underlying system of racism in both countries must be attacked because it has poisoned both countries. I think most people now agree with that statement.

As a result of incidents that have happened recently there is now a strong movement, that some consider insane, to “Defund the Police,” but what exactly that means is less clear. It is clear that even whites are beginning to doubt that the police are blameless. Until recently, most whites took it for granted that the people of colour were at fault. Not any more. There is no longer such an assumption. So far, that is a good thing. But where does that leave us? We must not leave reason out of the picture. This is a time when we need critical thinking, not just emotion. Most of us believe that we need a police force to keep the peace. Are we wrong?

Andrew Sullivan a columnist for New York Magazine delivered a powerful rant on this topic on Real Times with Bill Maher. He was reacting to an incident that happened in Berkeley University in California—Liberal Land if there ever was any. The College of Music there apologized for allowing police officers to use their washrooms during a protest. That does sound pretty crazy. OK, it is pretty crazy.

This is more or less what he said (though) I have left out parts:

There are very practical things we can do to help police reform and we can get bi-partisan support for many of those things, but what has happened with the debate over the last couple of weeks is that fervour and moral panic has taken over and has helped people to lose their reason. This is all emotion. This is mob frenzy. This is precluding any kind of nuance, any kind of practical point. When I hear the cops in general, without any kind of distinguishing between the good and the bad cops, being described as “all cops are bastards,” when I hear the kind of rhetoric you are getting from people on the left about defunding the police, treating the police constantly as the enemy this is not how most Americans feel about them. (Or Canadians I would add.) They want reform. They don’t want to hear this kind of rhetoric of real hatred of the cops. The cops are doing a really hard job and in the past 25 years there has been an extraordinary decrease in crime. The most successful period of crime reduction ever and no one gives them any credit for that. It seems sometimes they just can’t win. I’m not excusing bad behavior in any way nor the misconduct of the few. But the left has gone nuts over the last couple of weeks and they need to calm down and stop demonizing the cops and stop running a campaign on defunding the police and stop this excessive rhetoric about how we all live in white supremacy and all white people have to confess their guilt. This kind of moral panic and orthodoxy that is taking place is unhealthy for democracy. We need to have open debate. We need to respect one another and there is a real McCarthyist feeling in the air right now in which dissenting opinions are not respected.

This is wise. Well at least some of it is wise. We need reason; not name-calling. We have to call out wicked cops. And there are many of them. More than most of us whites now realize. But we need rational debate or any change we achieve will not be good. It is clearly time for the attitude of cops not to change when they go from an all white neighbourhood to an African-American or Indigenous neighbourhood. Clearly that has not been happening. As Malcolm Nance, another guest on the show, said, “They can’t go into these neighbourhoods and treat it like Fallujah.”

According to Sullivan at this time there are a bunch of Woke activists who are holding the media by the throat and we have to sever that grip. This is not good for the left or the right. It will alienate the citizenry. It will destroy the noble cause. In the United States this could help elect Trump. Sullivan worries that the current left will lead people to abandon their current just cause and then, America can have a repeat of what happened in 1968. Anti-Vietnam War Protesters got so extreme that they helped get Richard Nixon elected. That would be unfortunate just when there seems to be a growing consensus for reform. Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

America and Canada both have done some wonderful things. They have brought in the vote for women and blacks and indigenous people, though with horrible deficiencies. The rights of the LGBTQ community have progressed astonishingly in the past 30 years. Both countries need deep reform but they are not hopeless.

Malcolm Nance said it well, “Forget the extreme voices on both sides. We don’t need militia men and we don’t need to defund the police.” But—and this important—the police need to treat African Americans and Canadians  and Indigenous people like they treat white people. And that is pretty extreme too. It’s clear people of colour and their allies won’t put up with anything else much longer. The time for change has arrived. And it must be real change. Deep change.

The racial System

racism

 

Some racism is worse than others. At least, I think that is true. We shudder at the racism of a white cop holding a hand-cuffed black man on the ground by placing his knee on the man’s neck. Or as happened in Winnipeg a few years ago an indigenous man left in an emergency waiting room for more than 24 hours before he died without being attended to. If the cop does that because the man is black that is racism. Or the hospital staff neglect the man in the waiting room because he is indigenous that is also racism. In both cases, it is bad. It’s wickedness is easy to see. Because it is easy to see it is easier to address. Subtle racism is harder to see and therefore its effects can be more pernicious. That is why I think it is much more dangerous.

 

When a group in a position of power holds prejudicial views of another race and those views are supported by the power of legal authority and institutional control, that racism can easily be transformed into a system of racism that might be difficult to discern exactly because it is so common and so pervasive. The reason it is so powerful is that such racism does not require an intentional act on the part of the racist. It just happens. In such a system racial prejudice functions implicitly without anyone consciously deciding to act on the basis of the prejudice. People function independently of their intentions or their own self-image. They don’t realize they are acting out racism. When that stage is reached it is incredibly dangerous. That is the stage that we are at in Canada and the Americans in the U.S..

That is why J. Kēhaulani Kauanui said, “Racism is a structure not an event.” Institutional power by people of influence can transform prejudice and discrimination into what Robin DiAngelo calls “structures of oppression.” Such structures are so important because they can inflict harm without anyone doing it intentionally. None of us look like we are racists, but we operate inside a racist system.

And then, as if that is not enough, such structures are often invisible for exactly the same reason–one does not see anyone intentionally doing a bad thing. This is what I called invisible racism in an earlier post. It all seems so normal, so natural. What could be wrong with that? The answer, of course, is that everything is wrong with that. As DiAngelo said, “Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals.” That is because institutions have so much capacity to inflict serious harm. Power converts minor havoc into irreparable harm.

An example might help explain this. A good friend of mine constantly and rightly that me reminds me that women are guilty of discrimination too. Not just men. This is obviously true. But it is also a fact, that very few women have the ability to inflict as much harm as the institutional system that is controlled by men. Women cannot match that power. That usually makes discrimination by the system much more effective and hence more heinous than the discrimination by women. Men have been able to deny women their human rights for a long time because men controlled the institutions.

That is why systemic racism is so powerful and leads to so much harm. That is what we have to be on the look-out for.