White Civility

Commonwealth essays and studies, 2007

SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)

International journal of Canadian studies= Revue …, 2008

Feminist Theory, 2007

International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2008

, provided a wonderful stimulus to my thinking, not just about the book, but about the ongoing project of critically dismantling the assumptions of White supremacy in Canada. 1 What follows is an amalgamation of the comments I offered at the panel session itself and further thoughts sparked by the comments and questions offered by the three colleagues who performed the role of "critics"-George Elliott Clarke, Margery Fee, and Robert Young-as well as by audience members that day. I have written the paragraphs that follow in such a way that those who were not at the session will have some sense of the context of our discussion, and those who were there will, I hope, see how the day's discussion has furthered my own thinking since then. George, Margery, and Robert, too, may have readjusted their comments since we met in Vancouver, but I will have to rely here upon what they said at the session. Although they raised a variety of points well worth pursuing, let me focus, after a brief overview of the book's general project, on three broad topics touched upon in different ways by George, Margery, and Robert. These were elaborated in the ensuing round-the-room discussion, and I think they are crucial for further consideration. The first rises from Robert's attention to the genealogical lines of terms central to the analysis in White Civility-particularly the ethno-national designations of Britishness and Englishness, and the relations between the concepts of civility and civilization. The second rises out of George's and Margery's concern that the book's history of White writers' production and reproduction of White civility can repeat the marginalization and silencing of non-White writers' criticisms of and alternatives to it. 2 The third rises out of all three critics' querying of the book's call for "wry civility." "Why civility?" asks George. If we want a different ethic, furthers Margery, quoting Thomas King, why not "Têll a different story"?

Canadian Journal of Sociology

2004

HE CANADIAN DISCOURSES of power that flow around race and racism infiltrate texts as diverse as a provincial referendum, the Multiculturalism Act, and prominent newspaper ads, and these discourses, both official and popular, are sources for a much wider public perception and sensibility, ones that foster attitudes intolerant of difference. Classroom study of these texts offers an opportunity to unravel the many unquestioned Canadian assumptions regarding ethnicity, visible minorities, and especially, First Nations identity and status. One of the functions of the university environment is to examine ideologies that have been previously accepted and passively consumed, enabling a rejection of these precepts and forging the possibility of radical changes in thinking. In classroom explorations of things as specific as pronouns or as expansive as national credos, one can revise and transform a Canadian ethos that has, since its inception, been founded on racist principles. Such a view of national foundations may disturb students, but it seems essential to the kind of social justice that Canada purportedly espouses that we address and reconsider this groundwork. The language of postcolonial study, while often mired in the Canadian tradition of looking elsewhere in the world for injustice, and bound by the academic tendency to distance and generalize, does offer a resource with which to describe the intricacies of racist discourses. Alongside such writers and theorists as Smaro Kam-T

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2012

2012

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022

In Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada, Jennifer Elrick maintains that Canada’s shift to an immigration admissions regime premised on human capital considerations was (a) spearheaded by high level bureaucrats, (b) did not eschew racial considerations (as is generally assumed) but rather recast them by moving from a biological to a class-based conceptualization of race and national identity, and (c) has served as a model for other countries experimenting with managed migration policies. I am persuaded by Elrick’s arguments but argue that her discussion of racial recasting could be enhanced by thinking of the process as a reconceptualization of whiteness. I also note that Elrick underestimates the role of non-bureaucratic, political drivers of liberalization in the 1960s. Similarly, her discussion of policy formation in the 1990s and 2000s, in Canada and other states, understates the influence of neoliberal populism in the development of managed migration regimes.