Blatchford on the sin of free speech in Canada
Ihave checked my white privilege, which may be balanced somewhat by the fact I’m a woman and thus a member of a group which on paper is chronically oppressed, which may in turn be offset by my relative age and affluence, which may be softened just a smidge (Note: not smudge) by my blue-collar roots and experience, which is almost certainly erased by my status as a cisgendered female, and can we all agree to just stop this nonsense now?
I refer of course to the latest twitstorm about Hal Niedzviecki, the editor of Write magazine, a quarterly published by The Writers’ Union of Canada.
According to a history written in 2007 on the occasion of TWUC’s 35th anniversary, the union then had 1,639 members, from which I draw the not unreasonable inference that its magazine, a professional-type journal alternately dreary and precious aimed at professional book writers, similarly is not read by millions.
Anyway, in the current edition, otherwise devoted to indigenous writers and writing, Niedzviecki wrote an editorial entitled Winning the Appropriation Prize, in which he began by saying: “I don’t believe in cultural appropriation” and suggested that writers should be able to imagine and write about, well, anything and anyone — “other peoples, other cultures, other identities,” as he put it.
“I’d go so far as to say that there should be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him,” Niedzviecki said.
Naturally, he joined the growing list of people who have committed sins against the modern orthodoxy and who for their troubles have been silenced or bullied and in some cases forced into abject apology.
(This is by no means a complete list, but includes Andrew Potter, the director of McGill University’s Institute for the Study of Canada, who in a Maclean’s column observed an extraordinary traffic jam in Montreal caused by a blizzard and wrote that it revealed Quebec as “an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society” and who subsequently resigned or was voluntold to resign as director; the Toronto artist Amanda PL, a non-indigenous woman whose gallery show was cancelled last month after she was accused of appropriating aboriginal culture by painting in the style of Anishinabe artist Norval Morrisseau; Candis McLean, author of a book that critically examines the 1990 freezing death of an aboriginal youth and whose speaking and signing events were cancelled in the face of protests organized by a University of Regina associate professor named Dr. Michelle Stewart; University of Toronto psychology prof Dr. Jordan Peterson, who had his knuckles rapped by his own university when he vowed not to use genderless pronouns.)
Niedzviecki was immediately denounced on Twitter — after self-promotion and various branding exercises, this seems its prime purpose — with TWUC quickly issuing an unequivocal apology for “the pain and offence” caused by the column, a pledge to do better and an offer of “the magazine itself as a space to examine the pain this article has caused.”
Niedzviecki in his resignation regretted “that my words failed to acknowledge the profound and lasting adverse impact of cultural appropriation on indigenous peoples” and said he was sorry for being glib (shades of Andrew Potter, who apologized for his “sloppy use of anecdotes” and for his column’s tone).
Nikki Reimer, a member of the magazine’s editorial board, also resigned, saying she “would have strongly objected to this piece had I seen it prior to publication,” but, alas, she hadn’t.
But none of that was good enough for the TWUC Equity Task Force, whose members issued nine demands, calling for the magazine to be “turned over” for the next three issues to indigenous and other racialized editors and writers, that the next Write editor must be not only be an indigenous writer or writer of colour, but also “active and respected in indigenous sovereignty or anti-racist cultural movements for at least three years,” affirmative action hires for future TWUC office staff, with priority given to indigenous or racialized writers and “writers with disabilities and trans writers,” anti-racist education for all staff and editorial committee members and “a paid equity officer position housed in the main TWUC offices.”
If it looks like Pride, and walks like Pride, and talks like Pride, it’s Pride redux — in other words, as with the Toronto Pride Parade, this is the thuggish attempted takeover of a public (and publicly funded) organization by a single aggressively aggrieved group of activists.
The samples of Write available online, and Niedzviecki’s own Broken Pencil, the quarterly he founded for “zine culture and the independent arts,” reveal as a constant the regular thanks given to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
That’s lovely, but as with the Pride Parade, it means there’s real public money at stake here and a real public issue — the fundamental freedoms guaranteed all Canadians in the Charter of Rights, to think, believe, and express opinions, even if insensitive, inappropriate, unpopular or glib.