By Neil Armstrong
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| 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.”
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| 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.]
