This week I started a new Udemy workshop by Dr Gerri Budd and Professor Donnalynn Scillieri, founders of the Peace in Action organization, called A Starter Kit to Understanding Social Justice and Diversity. The course covers several different topics that all relate to the primary theme of exploring social justice and diversity, as follows:
Sections 1-6: Racism
Sections 7-12: Sexism
Sections 13-18: LGBTQ+ Inclusion
Sections 19-25: Classism
Sections 26-30: Critical Race Theory
As with other workshops I’ve taken online, I’ll be posting work I do related to this short course on my online journal blog.
Sections 1-6: Racism
Systemic Racism does not say that everyone is racist, rather it says that the system favours certain outcomes over others.
Section 2: Self-Inventory 1
Do you consider yourself to have a race? This is an interesting question. Specifically, Wikipedia states that a race is “…a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society.” It also states how “Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning… Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and loaded terms: populations, people(s), ethnic groups or communities.”
So, given this understanding, it’s likely safer to say that I do have a heritage, related to several different people(s), ethnic groups, and communities. Sources of this information primarily comes from my adopted parents, who shared with me information about my biological Mother. I don’t have information about who my biological Father was, but I’ve been able to trace my biological Mother’s lineage back several generations. Also, over the holidays, my Mother and I picked up a DNA kit from 23 and me, as well as one from ancestory.ca. We will be sending them in next week, and I’m curious to learn about what the analysis from both companies will reveal about myself and my roots.
I also hold close to me the importance of my adopted parent’s lineage. It is a part of me as they are an important part of my life. I do know a lot about my adopted Father’s lineage, but I wish I had learned more before he passed away in October 2004.
If so, what is it? From what I know, by birth, I am primarily a white, Caucasian male, whose lineage by birth goes back to the United Kingdom. My great great grandpa came from Europe and settled in the area that became known as Williams Lake.
Do you have more than one race? Are you combined? I know that, by birth, my great great Grandfather married, and had several children with my great great Grandmother, who was the daughter of the Chief of the local First Nations the town of my birth is named after. This is knowledge that I do consider to be problematic, as it is likely that my 2nd great Grandmother likely had no consent in regards to marrying my 2nd great Grandfather. Usually colonial settlers would take a wife from the local First Nations, but it wasn’t out of any great love or romance, as one might have seen in Hollywood films such as Dances With Wolves. John Belshaw, Sarah Nickel, and Chelsea Horton, in Chapter 10 of their book Histories of Indigenous Peoples and Canada, write:
If the meta-narrative of Canadian history excluded Indigenous peoples’ stories, it rendered Indigenous women doubly invisible. Indigenous women show up at the peripheries of older settler histories, often exoticized by European observers whose understanding of sexual relationships were peculiarly rigid. Individual women slip in and out of the fur trade records if and when they married and then were deserted by European and Canadian men.
I do know they were likely together for many years, until my 2nd great Grandfather returned to England, where he met and married a European woman who would return to Canada with him.
My adopted Father was a Korean medical doctor who had immigrated to Canada in 1952, escaping the horrors of war that divided his own country of birth. He met my adopted Mother in the 1960s, and they would marry in the 1970s. They wanted to have a child, but weren’t able to - eventually fate saw them adopt me, before I was even born. What’s a little sad is I probably know more about my biological Mother’s lineage than I do of my own adopted parent’s. My Dad, his brother did write a memoir, in which he discussed his youth, but it’s printed in Korean, which I cannot read. We have many photo albums too of people my parents knew, but they are all just the faces of strangers to me. My Mum is elderly, and her health isn’t that great - so I know that the time remaining is growing shorter everyday for me to ask her questions about them. I regret that I didn’t insist on going with my Dad on his last trip to Korea in the late 1990s. He said the air quality in Korea was poor, and that it would probably play havoc on my allergies. I could have talked with him more too though, asked him more questions about his life. But in hindsight, I didn’t really know what questions to ask.
Section 3: Definitions Related to the Topic of Racism
Racism: PRIVILEGE + POWER
Privilege: refers to a benefit or an advantage granted to a particular person or group… if you are born a certain way, the system makes it easier for you to be that way.
White Supremacy: is not the idea that white people are bad, or racist, or that it’s bad to be white, or that anyone should be ashamed to be white - rather, it is the name given to the system of privilege and power, where the features associated with whiteness are considered better or more desirable.
Stereotype: A widely held, simplified idea of a group or person. They can be found across various media from books, to television shows, and in the shorthand that helps people to think of entire groups of people as one type of category,
Section 4-5: Legal Constructions of Racism / Birth of Racism
These sections delved into a brief overview of the history of racism, primarily focused on a review of what has happened in the United States of America. A lot of the information was knowledge I was already familiar with, but it did give names to specific laws and movements. But some points I didn’t know - such as how, in 1661, Virginia ruled that slaves were enslaved for life. Nor did I know the specific name of the Indian Removal Act, passed by the federal government of the United States in 1830. The section 5 video specifically stated how the acts that were mentioned all were basically all driven towards organizing people by the colour of people, where if you had darker skin, the laws likely applied to you, leaving you at a great disadvantage in American society. Section 6 argues that the seeds of White Supremacy were planted in the 1820s and 30s in the USA, where there was a value attached to being white, no matter how poor you were. During this time, there were many white people who believed that being white made you a person, and not being white meant you were not a person.
Section 6: Challenge your Thoughts
This section asks people to consider how the information presented can be used and inform people’s lives. Specifically, the video states that we should:
Recognize when racism happens and do not run away from it;
Do not let it be normalized; and
Call it out when you see it and talk about it.
“And we have to be careful, because I sometimes talk about White supremacy, and I say that the operative word is not White, it’s SUPREMACY.
What we have to be really dogged in challenging is the notion of supremacy. Any kind, whether it’s religious supremacy, gender supremacy, racial supremacy, national supremacy—all of those are problematic.”
- john a powell, from his discussion called “Building Belonging: Being an Ambassador for the Earth” with Tami Simon on “Insights at the Edge”