The Problem With White Liberals

As a white liberal, I genuinely believe there is a need for a more critical analysis of my peers’ influence on current social debates, such as institutional racism. Are we (white liberals) doing enough and are we doing the right thing? These are totally legitimate questions. We are, however, often reluctant to acknowledge our flaws, using our aura of ‘progressive’ as a shield. It is difficult to question ourselves when we do not see our wrongdoing. We already praise diversity and speak up against inequalities. There is, therefore, no need to rethink the way we advocate or interact with our fellow citizens. In short, we are already good open-minded people.

But are we?

White liberals have a central role within mainstream media, government, and civic society. We teach in colleges, write columns in newspapers, and our voice has an important impact on local and national politics. At first sight, there is nothing wrong with our participation in public life. It is even essential. However, the first problem here is not our participation in itself, but how we decide who is allowed or not to intervene in the public sphere. The second problem is how, despite our position of power, we ignore our own role in the problems that affect the groups that we try to silence.

Nikki Johnson-Huston cannot be closer to the truth when she writes in the Huffington Post that the ‘problem with liberalism is that it’s more concerned with policing people’s language and thoughts without requiring them to do anything to fix the problem.’

We (white liberals) often use our correctness and so-called ‘civicness’ to discredit other groups. We critique them based on the way they protest and the way they talk, instead of taking the time to go deeper in our analysis and perhaps discovering that, beneath their ‘outrageous’ actions and words, there are some legitimate issues that need to be addressed. This is especially true in our relationship with alternative progressive movements and conservatives at large.

Indeed, we are often reluctant to share leadership with people who do not fit what we dictate as the ‘normal casting’. For instance, someone only needs to look at the way some white liberals react to the emergence of different understandings of feminism within the progressive movement. Multiculturalism has brought different visions of women’s empowerment and, by doing so, has cast a chill over the old guard of the feminist movement, such as Susan Moller Okin. Some feminists’ negative view of the effects of multiculturalism on women’s rights is highly influenced by their ‘whiteness’. Like Adrienne Rich said, the white feminists have the propensity to ‘think, imagine and speak as if whiteness describe the world’ (Rich, 1979; 299). In other words, white liberal feminists enjoying the privilege to dictate the boundaries of the debate and to exclude minority women when their opinions are deemed disruptive of the status quo.

This idea of exclusion can also be found again in the way we react to racial issues. For instance, it is common to see from many white liberals some kind of hidden-disdain towards the Black Life Matter protests and an uneasiness towards First Nations activism. Asking us to do more than talking about racism and to do concrete actions against the system that give us privileges seem to strike a responsive chord.

Many people reacted almost violently to the late actions of the BLM movement in Toronto. Yusra Khogali’s, co-founder of the Toronto chapter, comments made national headlines. During a rally, she called Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist terrorist’ and made other questionable remarks. To say that Justin Trudeau is a white supremacist is way over the top and it is my opinion that her intervention was more than unwise. However, it is important to try to understand some of the BLM’s arguments, such as its criticism of the hypocrisy of Canadian society. It would be foolish to not acknowledge that we use our Prime Minister, maybe unconsciously, as a smoke screen to hide our own failure to address systemic racism. We use our image of a well-intentioned post-racial nation to show to the world how white folks in Canada are ahead when it comes to social issues. We love the symbolic and don’t really care when actions do not follow. Indeed, in the last year, most of federal government’s moves towards Native Canadians and other minority groups have been symbolic. It is certainly a step in the right direction. However, during that time, vulnerable communities across the country continue to suffer from dramatic health issues, systemic violence, and chronical inequalities. And we seem just fine with it. As long as our politicians talk about equality and assist to minorities’ cultural events, we feel that we are doing a good job. We do not like when engaged black or indigenous women put in our face that our great white liberal dream is a lie.

We have no choice but to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a post-racial Canada, and that, liberals or not, our passivity is part of the problem. And even more damning than our words, is our silence and how we like to bathe in our own ‘progressiveness’ without really washing our original sins away.

White liberals not only have a problem with dissidents within the progressive movement but with conservatives as well. Once and for all, we need to stop using conservatives as a scapegoat. Of course, we need to hold conservative politicians accountable when they use nationalist and xenophobic sentiments for political gain. However, we need to stop to call out conservatives’ racism with the purpose to avoid facing our own role in the perpetuation of systemic racism. In her research, Sarah Song calls it the ‘diversionary effect.’ While talking about the relationship between minority and majority cultures in the context of women’s rights, Song argues that the fixation of the majority culture on the patriarchal norms of minority cultural groups diverts the majority culture’s attention from their own patriarchy. I argue that the ‘diversionary effect’ can also be applied to political culture. Indeed, white liberals’ fixation with conservatives’ racism is a way to make everyone ignore their own racism and enjoy their privileges.

Thus, in response to the question that I asked in my introduction, we are not doing enough and we are definitively doing it the wrong way. If we want to address the social issues facing minorities in this country, we need to face our own racism and stop hiding behind our liberal mask. We also need to stop delegitimizing entire movements or groups just because they do not respect our ‘civicness’ and because they hurt our feelings. If we really want our liberal agenda to materialize, we first need to listen to create a dialogue with these groups and include them. They have the same goals: justice, equality, and recognition. Without a plurality of voices within the progressive movement, we are not better than the obsolete Democratic Party down south. As Charles Taylor argued in its Politics of Recognition, someone’s identity is shaped by recognition or its absence and ‘misrecognition’ of someone’s identity or even of groups’ identity can harm them. Therefore, by delegitimising minority voices within the progressive movement, we are harming them, and hurting the principles of equality and openness that we claim to protect. Second, we need to acknowledge the consequences of our actions and start to act against the racism of a rigged system from which we profit. Until then, white liberals will create more obstacles than bridges to the progressive movement.

FOR FURTHER READING /and/ REFERENCES

Engler, Yves (2017, February 21), ‘Is It Fair To Call Trudeau A ‘White Supremacist Terrorist’?’, The Huffington Post, Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/yves-engler/justin-trudeau-yusra-khogali_b_14775616.html

Johnson-Huston, Nikki (2016, August 17), ‘The Culture Of The Smug White Liberal’, The Huffington Post, Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nikki-johnsonhuston-esq/the-culture-of-the-smug-w_b_11537306.html

Rich, Adrienne (1979), On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, New York: W.W. Norton Company

Song, Sarah (2005), ‘Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp; 473-489

Taylor, Charles (1992), ‘The Politics of Recognition’ in A. Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press