At the seventh annual New College Conference on Racism and National Consciousness last Saturday, speakers presented on this year’s theme, “White Supremacy and the Regulation of Identity.” The Varsity brings you snippets from the conference.
Seeing through the Indian Act
In the keynote lecture, “Genocide, Assimilation, or Incorporation? Indigenous Identity and Modes of Resistance,” York University’s professor Bonita Lawrence argued that Canada’s current policies on indigenous people have inherited the racism of generations past.
The Indian Act, which defines and regulates indigenous identity, grew from a colonial legacy steeped with racism, said Lawrence. She detailed three key historical occurrences during the 19th century that allowed the disempowerment of indigenous communities.
First, the refusal of the Canadian government to deal with Native confederacies, opting instead to engage in dialogue with 620 individual villages, severely hampered any attempts to rebuild a native nationhood.
Secondly, the outlawing of native ceremonies worked to remove strong leadership that might have furthered indigenous causes, replacing them with Christian converts. Lawrence concludes as a result, “Those who have lost their language are struggling with questions related to who is Indian and who isn’t, which is problematic because community membership is everything to the Native culture.”
Finally, cultural genocide stemming from the disempowerment of native women and the forced assimilation of native children encouraged the erosion of native identity. “Eventually, all one could see was the Indian Act,” she said.
An audience member asked why Native communities would continue to comply with a legislation so imbued with racist attitudes. “They are worried that without it, they will cease to exist,” replied Lawrence. “In the poorest Native communities—where all our wealth is coming from extracting natural resources—those are the communities that have everything and get nothing back except charity.
Challenging this involves challenging Canada as a nation and taking on fundamental power relations. That scares people. In this way the Indian Act creates fear.”
—Samya Kullab
21st century colonization
Arnold Itwaru, U of T’s former director of Caribbean Studies, argued that the world is dominated by the culture of white supremacy. In his seminar titled “Master Race Culture: White Supremacy, Liberal Democracy, and the Continuing Colonization of the world,” he indicted Western society of repressive colonization, imperialist wars, and capitalist exploitation. Today, said Itwaru, these ideologies manage to hide behind concepts such as freedom and liberal democracy.
Itwaru suggested that real progress away from imperialism is always being co-opted to support the Western Eurocentric system. For example, although the Canadian government claims to enshrine multiculturalism with such outward displays as Governor Generals of visible minority status, the office is still a representation of British monarchy.
He polarized the audience when he said Barack Obama, if elected, would inherit a white supremacist institution.
—Jared Ong
Who invented ‘moderate’ Islam?
Why do we still see white, imperial hegemony in predominantly Muslim countries? Dr. Sedef Arat-Koc asked her audience. In the lecture that followed, she explained just that. America and Europe, said Arat-Koc, both have a new invigorated fetish for “Orientalist writing and speech which often focuses on women’s rights abuses or the lack of democracy [and] help rationalize Western superiority and intervention.”
However, Arat-Koc also placed part of the blame on attitudes of certain sections of Muslim societies as well. She said that Muslims often subscribe to the Western notion of a “moderate” Islam. In many predominantly Muslim countries, like Turkey, governments create policies in line with capitalist or neo-liberal logic in which Western supremacy is unchallenged and even normalized.
