A Canadian post-racial moment. Or was it?
Cornell Belcher, a former pollster for the U.S. Democrats, said this week that he was seriously thinking about relocating to Toronto. He was on a swing through Canada, promoting his book A Black Man in the White House, and from what he was seeing, this country looked a lot more sane than his own.
Belcher was sitting directly in front of the stage on Wednesday night at the annual Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa when the Shaughnessy Cohen prize was awarded for the best political book of the past year.
The prize went to Ryerson professor Kamal AlSolaylee for his book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone). It was a neat coincidence — two authors, one Canadian, one American, drawing acclaim in Canada’s capital this week for their books on what it’s like to be nonwhite.
One might be tempted to call it a post-racial moment for the Canadian book-publishing industry.
Belcher was also impressed that the co-hosts for the evening came from two different political parties — Treasury Board President Scott Brison, a Liberal, sharing the podium with interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose.
“Can you imagine Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi doing that in Washington?” Belcher said as he was leaving. “I may be looking for a place in Toronto.”
But Belcher would not have been using words like “post-racial” to describe his day in Ottawa (which included a public interview with me before the Politics and the Pen event). He is acutely aware of declaring victory too soon.
Much of Belcher’s book is about how Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 was not the moment when the United States shed its problems with race relations. In fact, Belcher writes, Obama’s time in the White House may have made things worse, and created a “racial-aversion crisis” that helped to elect Donald Trump.
It’s a sobering read, filled with statistics (as you’d expect from a pollster) and cool-headed analysis of America’s continuing race-relations problems. Trump, who wasn’t even elected when Belcher finished his book, is blamed for whipping up white nationalism by expanding white Americans’ view of the “others” to include Hispanics and Muslims.
He talks about how racism wears a thin disguise under slogans such as “take our country back.”
“When you get to the heart of it, what — or who — are they taking their country back from?” Belcher asks in his book. “They want to take their country back from former minorities who are in the process of finding their power in growing numbers and exercising it in the voting booth.”
Rapid diversification means that minorities are becoming the majority in the United States, Belcher documents, and wishing for the America depicted in Leave it to Beaver or I Love Lucy won’t make it so.
“Though the United States was never an all-white nation, we played one on TV.”
Al-Solaylee’s book casts a more global view on colour differences, but if he and Belcher had a chance on Wednesday night to compare their home countries, both would have had some uncomfortable truths to trade, coloured black or brown.
“In my own Canada, I saw how a decade of Conservative rule tore apart the country’s reputation as a fair and progressive society, largely by casting its Arab and Muslim populations as enemies of the state,” Al-Solaylee writes in Brown.
Born in Yemen, raised in Beirut and Cairo, AlSolaylee describes how the 2015 election, with its “ugly” debates over refugees and the niqab, “felt too personal, too close to the skin.” Justin Trudeau’s victory came as a relief, he writes: “I felt better that night about my future in Canada than I had for the previous decade.”
Al-Solaylee was feeling pretty good on Wednesday night, too, after the prize was awarded, as well he should have been.
But Belcher’s book warns that racial aversion (a term he prefers to simple “racism”) doesn’t go away with simple declarations or even political victories (presumably book prizes either). Obama’s victory lulled many Americans into complacency and halted some difficult conversations that the country still needs to have, Belcher says. He wonders why there’s never been serious talk, for instance, about a national apology for slavery or segregation laws and policies.
Al-Solaylee’s book also warns against complacency, saying that some of the uglier sentiments whipped up during the last federal election are not an “aberration” in Canada, but “an indication of a specific, anti-brown feeling that has been gaining momentum, even in liberal Canada.”
So while that was a good moment on Wednesday in Canada’s capital, one that may have tempted a lifelong Southern American to move north, we’d be wise not to consider Canada “post-racial” yet. sdelacourt@bell.net
But winner of Politics and the Pen prize warns against complacency