Twenty Years of Writing thru “Race”: Then and Now
I can only write about now so I will write about now. In the current moment, being racialized in Canada takes many forms and demeanours. Everyone is Canadian, until we are not. We are governed a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, until we are not. It remains a struggle for many minds to fathom that some Canadians do not look like a direct descendent of the British colonial empire. Anyone who is visibly not from a Western European heritage is a hyphenated Canadian, unless you are speaking about the French-Canadians, and well, that is another story.
The most negative racialized experience I have witnessed and experienced is the perpetual go-to cat call from some sourpuss and almost always white person telling you to "go home." This is the grossest insult, because it is entitlement incarnate. This place we understand as Canada belongs to neither of us, and yet, we have made a home here.
I've said this before and I'll continue to say it again: if we are going to talk about race in this country we call Canada, we have to talk about decolonization and Indigenous self-determination.
What does this mean?
For me, it means an awareness of my position within settler colonialism. On the most basic level, it means finding out which Indigenous territory I am currently living in. In Edmonton I was largely in Cree territory. In Vancouver, I was more conscious of living on unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, and the city just recognized this officially in 2014. In Toronto, from the various events I have attended in the past six months, I have heard land acknowledgement recognizing: the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Saugeen Ojibway Nation Territories, The Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of the Anishinaabe, and the treaty of the dish with one spoon agreement. I can start from here to begin researching and learning about the agreements and histories of how these distinctions came to be, and it doesn't just mean asking someone who is Indigenous to explain everything to me.
Race, along with all the intersections of class and gender, are positions that we have to individually think through for ourselves. The twentieth anniversary of Writing thru "race" was an academic historicization of Canada's systematic racism. The race relations that fuelled the first conference appear to haunt us today, but they are more nuanced through intersectional and intergenerational thinking and being that does not necessarily follow the same institutionalized binaries. For a conference on race, I found there to be very little difference uttered.
I am writing from the belief that multiculturalism and diversity are more words than truths, and that nation-states along with academic institutions are false idols. I am writing the words I wanted to hear.