Just Looking ...

Though the cessation of racism is an admirable goal, I find that I'm fairly pessimistic that it is attainable in the 21st century, or perhaps ever. Ultimately, tacit forms of racism that I observe, and sometimes unthinkingly subscribe to myself, are too productive to be simply ceded. As long as race/ethnicity function as meaningful axes of social identity, it is unhelpful, or even detrimental to suggest that we have entered an era free of racism.

I am wary of claims that race is, or should be a non-issue. We have discussed in class and tutorial the consequences of depoliticizing issues such as gender/sex or ethnicity/race; in rendering them as merely cultural differences indexing primordial natural categories, they become reified and incontestable, power dynamics and historicity are obfuscated, and everyone is assumed to have equal opportunity. At a family gathering this past Christmas, one of the members of my extended family expressed contempt for those Blacks who "just buy beer and Nikes with their welfare cheques." Her general feeling was that since white people have historically been able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so too should black people, and any inability to do so now is construed as simple laziness or irresponsible behaviour on their part. "Black culture" is here positioned as inferior to "normative Western(white) culture," and judged as somehow uncivilized/immature/irrational. Regardless, the fault lies squarely on the individual who refuses to enact a bourgeois neoliberal subjectivity, eliding any contextual factors that may exist as a result of social inequality.

Culture and religion are also frequently invoked in place of race as a means of critiquing the Other. A common theme that I have seen in various municipal and national magazines (Toronto Life, Mark Steyn in Macleans) is the overly tolerant nature of Canadian multiculturalism. However, culture is frequently essentialized in these contexts, and portrayed as immutable. In particular, Muslim culture in all its variety and ambiguity is condensed into a unified whole; thoroughly misogynistic, uncritical, emotionally volatile, and pathological. To me, this is essentially racism in the form of "ethnicism." Thusly, "Islamo-fascist"(as opposed to brown-skinned) hordes are pouring onto our pristine shores, where they are breeding like rabbits, with the express desire to take over our governmental apparatus, replacing our "civilization" with their own base "culture." Please hear the sarcasm in that last sentence! Here, cultural difference is polarized and made irreconcilable, and so Muslims are seen as something less than full citizens. Perhaps as less than fully human as well - if they are unthinking zealots, then it is that much easier to "neutralize" them.

Ultimately, I hear lip service paid to the mitigation of racism, but for the so-called Western world, we have far too much staked on structural or global inequality to actually work to end it. As long as race/ethnicity and socio-economic class are so intricately confounded with one another, maintenance of the status quo necessitates ideologies that hierarchize and stigmatize on the basis of culture, at least covertly.

Ugh! I didn't intend to make this post so depressing. Maybe I just read too much trashy fear-mongering tripe to know how people actually feel about these issues.