Audience Gets a Preview of Upcoming White Privilege Conference at Ryerson

By Neil Armstrong

Photo credit: Clifton Li  From left: Jeewan Chanicka, Rinaldo Walcott, Denise O'Neil Green, Eddie Moore, Jr. and Ritu Bhasin at 'Soup and Substance' at Ryerson University on March 12, 2018.

As Ryerson University gets set to host the White Privilege Conference Global –Toronto from May 9-12, interested individuals had an opportunity to participate in a sneak preview of it.

At its regular ‘Soup and Substance’ series on March 12 in POD 250, Jorgenson Hall, the Office of the Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion presented a discussion with some of the speakers at the conference. This will be the first time that the conference is held outside of the United States.

The title of the event was: “Are Canadians Too Polite? Addressing Global Perspectives on White Privilege and Oppression in Canada and Beyond.”

Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. founder of the White Privilege Conference; Ritu Bhasin, president of Bhasin Consulting Inc. and a leadership and diversity specialist; Jeewan Chanicka, superintendent of equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression at Toronto District School Board; and Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, associate professor and director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto fielded questions from Dr. Denise O’Neil Green, vice-president, equity and community inclusion.

“There’s been quite a buzz I would say across the country, in terms of the concept of white privilege and just privilege in general, within our country going all the way to BC, to Ontario. Across the nation and around the world events are occurring that are impacting our campus, our communities in very diverse ways,” said Dr. Green.

The aim of the conference is to explore how Canadian politeness impacts existing challenges with privilege and oppression.

In defining white privilege, Moore said it is an honour and privilege, a perk someone receives simply because of their skin colour.

“At the White Privilege Conference we cover the concept of privilege comprehensively. We believe that everybody has privilege and we’re just affected by it in very different ways. And white is a perk associated simply with skin colour as well as other privileges as far as class, race, gender, so and so forth.”

Moore, who created the conference twenty years ago, said it is something that is far bigger than him and it was a desire to create a space where these kinds of conversations can happen.

He said as a practitioner learning the professoriate and doing a PhD he was going to conferences and presenting at them, but he felt they were all diversity conferences.

“I like entry level 101, 201, but I felt like diversity was the only topic where we were staying at the basic level,” he says noting there was no growth process so he wanted to create a place to grapple with issues at the highest levels when it comes to diversity.

He said what they realized after nineteen years is that white supremacy is actually a global phenomenon.

“I know that there are some differences in the way things play out here in Canada than they do in the States but the fact that people walking around in the US thinking racism doesn’t exist has some strange similarities to what you’re talking about.”

He noted that the fact that even people of colour are afraid to talk about this is not something that’s just happening in the US.

“So we felt like this would be the right time to actually take the White Privilege Conference on a global journey to be in partnership with folks who are really willing to grapple with the highest level.”

Moore said what he has learned putting on the conference is that “when you’re really good at this work people will put your life in danger and so that’s been the greatest threat as the father of a 7 year old and 6-month old.”

“But the one thing I vow for the remainder of my life is I will not be afraid of white supremacy. I’m just not going to let it dominate my life.

“We need more white folks committed to understanding white supremacy and I’m not one that always believes white privilege is bad. I think actually you can do some good things if you understand privilege.”

Photo credit: Clifton Li  In conversation from left are: Eddie Moore, Jr., Ritu Bhasin, Jeewan Chanicka and Rinaldo Walcott.

Bhasin attended the conference, for the first time, six years ago and heard a speaker talk about how white supremacy is the ideology that white people are better than people of colour and people from indigenous communities and white privilege is how it manifests.

“It’s the manifestation or examples that we see in our day-to-day interactions and systemically where white people are given unearned privileges or advantages based simply on the colour of their skin.”

She said there were about 2,000 people, majority of whom were white, who came to understand systems of supremacy, power and privilege.

“By attending the conference it unlocked for me ideas and a spirit and a philosophy I had repressed in me since I did my undergrad and was in school in university. Because I entered into the workplace and corporate world, and in teaching diversity and inclusion to corporate Canada, US, globally, I had started to minimize and sanitize my own message.”

She said the White Privilege Conference “unlocked it, it revealed it, it was always there within me cause I was talking about it on evenings and weekends and it just basically changed my frame of teaching permanently.”

“For me, attending the White Privilege Conference personally has been transformative. It literally has changed the way I teach and think and present my ideas.”

Bhasin said conference presented an avenue where she could finally talk directly and openly and safely about the fact that white supremacy permeates every part of her existence and the existence of the collective – people of colour and people from indigenous communities.

She could do this with people who get it “or may not get it but are wanting to get woke, or wanting to be part of the solution and not the problem.”

The other thing that the conference did for her was to brings into the space “intersections – an area that we don’t explore in a lot of other diversity and inclusion, and equity and equality circles.”

Chanicka focused on the “way that privilege plays out in the context of the systems and structures that govern us.”

“When we think about the fact that this part of Turtle Island that was colonized and today we call it Canada, the people who colonized this part of Turtle Island had particular beliefs about the people and the land that they colonized.

“It included Indigenous People being uncivilized and so they had to take them away from the land and civilize them through residential schools. Interestingly enough, as they took them away from the land that allowed the creation of land as a resource to be commodified as well.”

He said privilege plays out and intersects in many ways and those people who colonized the land created the legislation “that we follow today, those beliefs permeate everything.”

Chanicka said everyone has varying amounts of privilege and noted that he has male privilege and there are things that he will never have to think about that women will always have to think about and people who identify as women.

“The thing about privilege, when we talk about it, is that your privilege does not make you a bad person but recognizing that privilege exists is an important thing.

“I don’t want you to feel bad that you’ve never had to have these experiences but recognize that though we share the same world we do not share the same experiences of the world.  And when we can have these as academic conversations -- which are great because it helps to change things -- I also want you to recognize that for some of us it ain’t academic. We don’t get to check out at 5 o’clock and go home and kick up our legs. We live this every single day, every minute, every moment that we walk down the street we live this.”

Chanicka debunked the myth that having these conversations will divide people.

“We were already divided. All the people who were saying that they are shocked that these things are going on in Canada, there is no shock when you have had to live this -- there is no shock.”

Commenting on a piece he wrote in the Huffington Post about the burden of the oppressed, he said it is “that we have to live the oppression, we have to identify that the oppression exists, we have to then convince you that it exists, we have to worry about your feelings because we’re convincing you that we’re suffering at the hand of the oppression. And then we have to come up with the solutions for it. That is the burden of the oppressed.”

He wants individuals to start from a place of what they bring into the conversation and then “think about how we can centre the most marginalized voices.”

Dr. Walcott said white privilege is about the accretion and the ways in which all of the structures put into place, post-Columbus, come to accrue to a particular way of white people being able to move through the world.

“For me, you can’t really think about white privilege without really seriously combatting the accreted histories of colonialism, of transatlantic slavery, of land theft and of ongoing forms of colonization that continue to force people to move around the globe.”

He said what is important and always difficult is “on the one hand we have to be able to be clear and critical of the structures that continue to support the history of that kind of European colonization, and at the same time we also have to recognize that structures function through people.”

“How do you begin to make sense of how individuals and structures work to reproduce a world where some of us are fundamentally shut out?”

Walcott said there is a particular order and regime of the world that presents itself in white, hetero-identified men and from there the rest of it flows.

“For the kind of question, like how do we think about the benefits of white privilege, we can see them all around us in terms of questions of leadership in our institutions, leadership in our political public sphere. We can see them as I like to say continually in the ongoing commotion of white male mediocrity that gets passed off to us as brilliant, as significantly contributing and so on.”

He said this is also seen in the ongoing ways in which “we’re now involved, especially in universities, as institutions in debates around freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

“The logics of white privilege and white supremacy logics ask us to not notice certain kinds of practices and structures. And the work of those of us who are trying to think these questions do is to make clear how those structures are working. What they put into place? What they ask us to contend with and what they ask us to be silent about.

“And so the work of thinking through this is to excavate how that works, is to turn it over, to open it up in the most glaring fashion to scrutiny and it’s in fact when we open these things up to scrutiny that then the logics comes of we’re into division.”

Agreeing with Chanicka, he said “you can’t divide something that’s already divided, you can’t tell people who are not invited to the table that the table is there for them when the door to the room with the table is locked.”

Both Walcott and Chanicka referenced the election of Doug Ford as leader of the Ontario PC Party in their analysis of white privilege.

Dr. Walcott said human life can be organized differently.

“This is not a work simply about excavating and showing up structures that are exclusive, that are violent and so on. This is work which deeply open the sense that we’ve got ideas of how to organize human life differently.

“Human life doesn’t have to be organized in this way, that we can organize human life in more egalitarian, collective, communal ways and that there are cultures still with us that have done that over time. What we have here is a kind of contest of how we’re going to live together in the present and in the future and what that will mean.”

After a symposium at Brock University in St. Catharines in 2016, the full conference is making its international debut with its first appearance in Canada at Ryerson.

The university aims to lead transformative and solutions-based discussions about the impact of privilege as it relates to issues that focus on, and that go beyond race.

“The colourblindness of how we want to be doesn’t help us really come to grips with being more advanced in the area of equity, diversity and inclusion. We don’t want to be stuck at the level 101, we want to advance further,” said Dr. Green in her introductory remarks.

For more information about the White Privilege Conference Global – Toronto, visit www.ryerson.ca/wpc-global.

[A shorter version of this story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, March 22-28, 2018.]