Canada's anti-racism industry never quits

Canada's anti-racism industry never quits, Robert Fulford
National Post, 11 January 2003

No decent human being approves of racism, but if it vanished we might miss it. Many Canadians depend on racism as their main source of righteous anger and would be bereft without it. Denouncing it gives purpose to their lives. For others, it's a living. Where would university harassment officers be without racism? Where would the Canadian Race Relations Foundation be if it couldn't publish Racist Discourse In Canada's English Print Media, which uses "discourse analysis" to prove that "racialized discourse" is routine in Canadian newspapers? What would human rights commissions do, or post-modern literary theorists?

These people don't want to know that racism has been in decline for decades. In 1996, Richard Gwyn remarked in the Toronto Star that Canadians, white or non-white, are probably the world's least racist people. He challenged his readers to name any country in the UN less afflicted by racism, but of course there were no nominations. Even so, some readers considered Gwyn racist just for mentioning that things were going fairly well; there's thought to be something unseemly about celebrating such an accomplishment. Meanwhile, his editors have continued their merciless campaign to prove that racism blights the Canadian (or anyway the Toronto) soul.

Those who report on racism sometimes sound desperate, as if they had trouble uncovering enough of it to make an impression. That's the case with the January-February issue of This Magazine, focused on race relations. A special-interest journal, This Magazine does for the Canadian left what Mortuary Management Monthly does for the death-care industry. This Magazine especially cherishes its young audience and strives to be cool. It tries to bring sophisticated irony to racism. The result makes me think of Joe Clark telling a joke.

In one article, "I Chink Therefore I Am," Kate Rigg, a part-Indonesian and part-white comedian, says: "I say chink a lot. I also say gook, nip, jap." She tries to take the curse off racial slurs by ridiculing them, but doesn't mention that black comedians have been working this vein for many years, with mixed and often discouraging results.

Elsewhere in the issue, Jeremy Gans takes a different approach. He provides a glossary of race-related terms that sensitive readers will strive to avoid. Don't say Gypsy (the word is Roma), don't use gyp, don't call a money-lender a Shylock (refers to that unpleasant chap in Shakespeare), and never call people welshers -- even Bill Clinton had to apologize when he tripped on that one. You can't be too careful. Never say paddy wagon, for instance. It probably refers to police arresting Irishmen more than a century ago. On the other hand, you'll be relieved to know that scot-free is OK, referring not to Scots, but to a tax or fee paid in England several hundred years ago.

In the unrelenting search for bigotry, researchers are digging ever deeper into public consciousness. A press release announcing the current issue of This Magazine says that studies by Mahzarin Banaji indicate that "an astonishing number of people (90-95%!) have racist attitudes -- and don't even know it." Banaji, a Yale psychology professor, deploys something called the Implicit Association Test, which goes beyond what people say and claims to uncover their feelings by measuring the speed with which they associate pleasant or unpleasant items with names and faces. Used on a simpler, non-racial question in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, IAT showed (or claimed to show) that many who expressed a preference for Bill Bradley or John McCain were unconsciously leaning toward Al Gore or George Bush. It makes more startling claims about race. Banaji told This Magazine that when she herself took the race-related version of the test, it frightened her: Even she showed hidden bigotry! Incidentally, what will she say when she reads her interview in print? This Magazine has misspelled her first name three times in two different ways. Will that "error" look suspiciously like the typical carelessness of unconscious bigots confronting a name from a non-Western culture?

Raghu Krishnan, who makes it clear that his credentials are all-purpose lefty (pro-Sandinista, anti-apartheid, pro-Palestinian, anti-free trade, etc.), writes about the good old 1980s and 1990s in "Remembering Anti-racism." He used to wear a T-shirt lettered "No Sandinista ever called me Paki," which, he admits, "resonated more" in those days than now. Krishnan helped start his share of alphabet-soup protest groups, such as the United Coalition Against Racism (UCAR) at the University of Toronto, and the Toronto Coalition Against Racism (TCAR). Like many others, they flowered briefly and died -- and Krishnan, with unusual candor, explains why.

Apparently the mere fact of "marginalization" wasn't enough to draw disparate ethnic forces together. More important, many potential recruits began enjoying too much success to be interested. Krishnan is particularly appalled by one South Asian outfit, grounded in leftist politics, that ended up as a Web site catering to "the middle-class conformism that asserted itself over the organized South Asian community." He doesn't say it, but the meaning comes through. These dynamic, progressive organizations foundered because, sadly, Canada let them down. The country simply couldn't produce enough racism to keep them in business.