An Aged White Whine/Chirps From a Racist Nest
Above: A fall splash of colour on the Alberta Legislature grounds – seemingly firmly rooted, but, like many cultural truths, unsupportable when you look at them in a different context.
In this post you’ll find:
- Opening an aged white whine.
- Chirps from the racist nest.
- Shouting At…Who?
- Awareness Tips
Opening an Aged White Whine
When you study history, or watch the news, you’ll find many nations or groups that attack, murder, plunder, and destroy other nations or groups, but only once, in the known history of the world, has a geographical area like Europe stretched out its might to all the inhabited continents, killed and enslaved so many people, destroyed so much of cultural value, stolen so much wealth, and claimed so much territory. Yes, that’s England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Spain, and many of Europe’s smaller countries, and the U.S. and Canada are an active and ongoing part of that destructive legacy. Canada was founded as a colony and a racist state, confining Indigenous people to ‘reservations’ and conducting organized cultural genocide ever since.
So, us white folk of European ancestry are good at a lot of things, and injustice is one of them. Not that we’re the only unjust people in the world, but those of us living in Canada, and in Edmonton, Alberta, like I do, live within a society built and structured around injustice and racism. We’ve also inherited much of value: money, property, a society built around our language and culture.
So what can you do? You can try to separate yourself from the system you’re part of, or you can try to understand it.
Following are two attempts at understanding.
Racial Privilege
After a heated discussion with someone close to me about white privilege in Canadian society, particularly Alberta, I was stuck with the binary that white people were bad and everyone else was good.
- Are us white folk stuck feeling shitty about ourselves for the rest of our lives because we were born into the privileged side of a racialized society?
- What percentage of a person’s success in a racially constructed society is due to their race?
- How can we take individual responsibility without being overwhelmed by collective guilt?
- How do we deal with living in a nicely feathered nest?
Shouting at…Who?
I admire protestors, people with the guts and energy to yell at the world. I’ve attended many protests, including several in Edmonton against the genocide in Gaza. However, I always felt uncomfortable, which was inexplicable to me because the cause was so obviously legitimate. Then one day:
At a Palestinian Protest
Awareness Tips
I see suffering and poverty on the streets of Edmonton every day. Not all the people are racialized, but a relatively high percentage of them are. Not every white person in Edmonton is doing great either. Half of the people living under the poverty line are neither a visible minority nor Indigenous.
What can I do beyond sharing this aged white whine?
- For one thing, I can use the benefits of any privilege or success I might have in this system, be that resources or social capital, to help the people who have suffered from it the most.
- For another, I can acknowledge that when I protest, I’m protesting a system built for myself and those just like me.
- For another, it’s not my fault for being born at this time and place with this system. Original guilt based on our birthplace and race is an unacceptable burden to place on racialized and white people alike.
- Finally, I, and you, can be aware.
- Aware there are no easy solutions for the social problems of injustice and inequity, but when somebody starts pointing at Indigenous or racialized individuals as the problem, they’re not only incorrect, but they’re also perpetuating a racist system.
- Aware, more than anything, that if you’re a comfortable white person like me, in Alberta, that you and I, my friend, are the dangerous ones.