Over the past few years, right-wing conservatives have waged war on two concepts that for those on the left (and centrists) have become vital to our understanding of how to live in a white supremacist world. There is the misappropriation of “woke”, and the politicization of empathy.
In her writing for the US Legal Defense Fund, Ishena Robinson explains that the term “woke” dates back to a 1962 New York Times essay, “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” Written by the then Harlem-based writer William Melvin Kelley, the essay tries to make sense of a Black American slang that was being appropriated by white people who often missed or distorted the words’ original meanings, until the idioms were taken over, inevitably transformed, and ultimately abandoned by their original Black creators.
In Canada, during the last federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre gave a lengthy interview to psychologist and right-wing personality Jordan Peterson in which he turned so-called wokeness into a watershed moment that Canadians were supposed to care about in his vision for Canada.
“People are sick and tired of grandiosity,” he said, adding that it’s time to reject “this horrendous, utopian wokeism” [… we need to] put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted.”
Regarding the right-wing takeover of the meaning of empathy, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” as Kathy Young explained in a piece for The Bulwark earlier this year:
“The recurrence of the phrase ‘suicidal empathy’ is no accident: The term is becoming a right-wing buzzword. Apparently coined by Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, an Intellectual Dark Web-adjacent figure, this concept was boosted by Musk in his February 28 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Musk declared empathy to be ‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilization’ and said that ‘we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.’”
When we ignore semantics, we tend not to see the implementation of regimes that are not interested in people coming together or understanding each other in ways that would create a culture of respect and appreciation for our diversity.
This form of white supremacy is maintained not through hard power – the use of force or military interventions – but through soft power – semantic choices, subtle turns of phrase by our political leaders, and the persistent use of media to wage war on the phrases, idioms, and vernacular of those outside the dominant culture. In the western world, this war on language has tended to be aimed at Black people but also racialized immigrants.
In Canada, like in the US and UK, there are increasing anti-immigration movements that are not singularly at the level of rhetoric, but which have entered the public realm by way of large-scale protests under the guise of “protecting” Canadian values and patriotism. And they are doing so in the backdrop of a racial movement that has largely faded from most people’s memory, but which was one of the most consequential moments of this decade.
From racial reckoning to racial backlash
Five years ago, at the same time the world was social distancing and trying to cope with a never-before-seen coronavirus, the public watched the lynching of George Floyd, and the global anti-racism protests that followed. Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau even took a knee at an anti-racism rally, which was eventually labelled the summer of “racial reckoning.” From policing to consumer brands, there was a widespread sentiment of redress for decades (if not centuries) of anti-Black racism.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) made a public statement that read: “The racial reckoning of 2020 has shifted conversations about equality. Across all sectors, Canadian employers recognized that efforts towards racial equity were critical, central, and urgent. A flood of anti-racism statements was released, town halls convened, and training sessions held.”
And yet, this is the same organization that is at the centre of an anti-Black racism Federal Court of Canada case. In 2022, the Black Action Secretariat, a not-for-profit organization committed to addressing systemic discrimination in Canada’s public services, filed a $2.5 billion class action lawsuit in the Federal Court seeking long-term solutions to permanently address what they called systemic racism and discrimination in Canada’s Public Service. In a YouTube video titled, “Four years later and Canada is still fighting Black workers in court,” Black public sector workers outline some of the atrocities they have experienced in Canada’s public service.
If racial equity is so fundamental to the CHRC’s mission, why is it ardently defending against the Black Action Secretariat’s claims? Furthermore, if Canadians were so moved by the reckoning of 2020, why has Justice Jocelyn Gagné of the Federal Court of Canada ruled in favour of the Government of Canada, denying certification of the class action lawsuit? The Black Action Secretariat has since filed an appeal of that decision but it speaks to how we are in the middle of a racial backlash that is emanating from some of the highest offices in the country, but which is felt in our communities.
White supremacy in plain sight
On September 15, a right-wing group calling themselves “Canada First” held a rally at Christie Pitts Park in Toronto. While marching along Bloor St. W. and carrying Canadian flags in a part of the city that in 1933 was also the site of an antisemitic riot, the group’s motto, “Stop mass immigration. Start mass deportations” was on full display. There was a large and vocal counter-protest and arrests, but there was little connection made between this xenophobia, our political climate, or that Ukrainian and Polish street festivals were happening on the same day in neighbourhoods just a few kilometres away from Christie Pitts – both examples of immigration to Canada from Eastern Europe.
One frequent justification for xenophobia that is used by Canada First supporters is that “there is a difference between the immigrants of previous generations and the immigrants coming to Canada today” and that the immigrants of the past were “educated and attempted to assimilate.”
The persons who make these statements can never tell you what period they’re referring to, what immigrant groups, or how they were able to determine their level of “assimilation”, but this is a standard refrain these folks like to spew as justifications for their anti-immigrant outrage.
Like racism itself, their logic is based on spurious observations without any deep understanding of history or knowledge of entire groups of people who they likely don’t know and have never spoken to in substantive ways.
Historical facts on immigration matter
First, today’s anti-immigration “Canada First” movement is not new. The original “Canada First” movement of the late-nineteenth-century was a white supremacist organization composed of young white Anglo-Protestant writers and intellectuals who were part of the country’s elite class, and who were also ardently against immigration, despite the fact that Canada would not have continued to exist but for the exploitative labour of Chinese and Black men, who were all brought to Canada to build the tracks, and to serve white patrons on the railway.
Second, many of these people are simply afraid of losing their standing as the dominant cultural group. According to the population projections from Statistics Canada, about two-in-five Canadians will be part of a racialized group in 2041, accounting for 38.2 per cent to 43.0 per cent of the Canadian population, compared to 22 per cent in 2016. This has people running scared because if they are not in the majority, what will happen to the country (i.e. white supremacy) they have always known? What will it mean to be white in this anticipated future?
There is no question that over the past decade, the Canadian government has made some decisions regarding immigration that have placed strain on certain sectors, such as international student recruitment, which encouraged colleges and universities to over rely on higher tuition fees, and then drastic changes to that program directly caused the closure of several college and university programs.
Instead of having robust debate about government spending, and deeper conversations about immigration as an ongoing historical issue, many people justify their anti-immigration sentiment by pointing to the things that were created specifically because there was a labour shortage and/or a lack of population to support growth. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), started over 50 years ago, is another misunderstood government intervention.
In 1973, TFWP was created by the Liberal government under Pierre Trudeau (and supported by every federal government since) to allow for immigration of temporary workers under an employment visa program, later incorporated into the 1976 Immigration Act, which permitted the use of foreign workers for short-term jobs, especially in agricultural and domestic activities. The TFWP was created because these were (and remain) jobs for which Canadian citizens (i.e., “white settlers”) or even those “educated” landed immigrants were (and are) not available and/or interested in filling.
Twenty years ago, fast food companies were given access to TFWP when low-skilled workers were added to the program, and since then, focus on such workers has only expanded. Instead of asking questions of corporations such as Tim Hortons, a company that has benefited from the TFWP, many Canadians have taken to social media to complain that they “can’t get a job because people from India have taken them all,” such as “Josh,” an artificial intelligence avatar that caused controversy on Tik Tok earlier this summer, or some have been so brazen as to assault Tim Hortons staff, like when an employee at a Tim Hortons in Mississauga, Ontario was the target of racial slurs by a white male customer who also spat at them before leaving.
It does not matter if the social media post was real, or if the in-person hate was an “isolated incident,” what matters is the fact that they reflect real trends, such as the surging rate of violent attacks against the South Asian community, which has grown by 143 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to Statistics Canada data.
This “feels” new to us, but it is not. White Canadians have been voicing concerns about immigration since the 1970s when the “wrong kinds of people” were being let into the country, and some of these concerns even made it into international news.
In 1974, a feature about Canadian immigration ran in the New York Times titled, “A Racial Trend in Immigration Is Troubling Canadians,” and the article featured several white Canadians speaking about what the paper called “an agonizing national debate.”
Throughout the 1970s, anti-South Asian racism was so bad that a February 7, 1977, article in Maclean’s titled, “Racism? You can’t argue with the facts” by Angela Ferrante provided reasons why an American media outlet would frame Toronto as having a race problem.
“The group of about 100 demonstrators seemed oblivious to the blowing snow and bitter cold late last month as they marched somberly through Toronto’s crowded Chinatown toward City Hall,” the article began, “As startled Saturday afternoon shoppers looked on, they chanted: ‘Death to racists. Self defense is the only way’” (p. 18).
The article explained further that beginning in 1975, the South-Asian community had faced humiliation and frustration but that it had finally erupted into anger. Their homes had been vandalized, their temples desecrated, their children pummeled in schoolyards, and they were not going to take it anymore.
This is why we need to be woke and empathic more than ever
While there are attempts in the US to erase the horrors of American history, such as chattel slavery and centuries of Jim Crow segregation, if we are not careful in Canada, such sanctioned acts of forgetting will become part of our zeitgeist, too.
We have an immigration history in this country that is ugly and that, throughout the 20th century, was directly responsible for the mental anguish, pain and suffering of multiple groups. But at the same time, there have been government attempts at redress such as the public apology from the British Columbian legislature to the Chinese community, and Justin Trudeau’s government apologized to the Italian community in Ontario who were interned during the Second World War. Similarly, the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Viola Desmond, and the descendants of Africville, the African Nova Scotia community that was razed in the 1960s, have all received apologies from public officials in recent years.
We can debate whether these apologies go far enough, but we cannot take for granted these public acts of acknowledgement that a wrong has been done to people, and that there must be collective atonement for it because if we do Canada will fall prey to willful acts of forgetting, which simply gives life to people to repeat the playbook of past generations.
For the reasons I’ve outlined, we must stay woke and empathetic to the plight of others to prevent “us versus them” thinking. We cannot control what happens in the world, but if we are to achieve the hope of 2020’s summer of racial reckoning we must lean into seeing through the eyes of others and not through the distorted lens of individuals who masquerade as patriotists.
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