National Post (National Edition)
Inside federal anti-racist training
Monday's federal budget included a massive expansion of race-based programming, including a new drive for race-focused data collection, funding earmarked for what Ottawa is calling “equity deserving groups” and even a plan to prioritize government procurement from “Black-owned businesses.”
It's a ramping-up of an initiative first begun in 2019, when the Government of Canada began rolling out anti-racism training within its departments in a bid to combat a federal bureaucracy that they asserted was shot through with “systemic racism.” Ottawa's focus on anti-racism training became all the more acute after worldwide Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd in police custody, which was reflected in the more than $300 million put towards “equity” programs in the 2021 budget.
Through a freedom of information request, the Toronto Sun recently obtained one of the results of this new push: The official anti-racist training materials for Global Affairs Canada.
The literature is markedly different than Canada's official antiracism training of only a few years ago, which stressed tolerance and accommodation for an increasingly multicultural workplace. These new course materials explicitly cite as their inspiration “critical race theory,” a growing movement which posits that Western society is immutably tainted by white supremacy, and must be confronted and managed by conscious “antiracist” thinking and policies.
Unlike the anti-discrimination movements of the past — which sought only equal opportunity untainted by prejudice — critical race theorists hold that government and society is so immutably slanted towards white people that ignoring race is itself an act of white supremacy designed to maintain an inequitable status quo. Or, as a protest sign included in the Global Affairs materials put it, “if you aren't an antiracist, you are complicit.”
Promoted by public intellectuals such as Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi, it's an approach that in recent years has found its way into the highest echelons of power in the United States, and now features in mandatory training for tens of thousands of U.S. bureaucrats and corporate employees. And now, it's required training for Canada's diplomats. Below, a taste of what antiracism training looks like at the sharp end for Government of Canada employees.
`IF YOU AREN'T AN ANTIRACIST, YOU ARE COMPLICIT'
The materials take care to note the very real difficulties of being a person of minority ethnicity working within Global Affairs. “Managers might freely tell a staff that they won't get posted to a particular country because the country won't see them as being Canadian or because their ancestry is from that particular country,” reads an excerpt from a 2020 Antiracism Environmental Scan and Climate Review.
It also includes a thoughtful open letter by career diplomat Daniel Quan-Watson in which he attempts to catalogue the unpleasant incidents in his life that he believes can be attributed to racism against his Asian heritage. “I have not spent my life curating a list of injuries,” he writes, but adds they help illustrate to a non-minority reader the “prevalence and centrality of these experiences in Canadian lives.” Among dozens of examples, Quan-Watson describes repeatedly being mistaken for a cab driver or bellhop, and having his Canadian citizenship regularly questioned while abroad. “I have been told at Canadian missions abroad that I couldn't use certain parts of the facilities because only Canadians had access to those particular areas,” he wrote. (The letter was written in a response to a column in the National Post by Rex Murphy that claimed Canada “was not a racist country”).
In remedying these problems, the course materials stress the concept of racism as a systemic problem that cannot be expunged entirely through education and will persist even without any examples of overt discrimination; the lack of “antiracist” policies will in themselves precipitate a racist system. “It is not just the absence of discrimination of inequities, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity,” reads the literature.
The Global Affairs materials cite heavily from Dismantling Racism, a widely used workbook that was one of the earlier proponents of critical race theory. “Racism is ordinary, the `normal' way that society does business,” reads Dismantling Racism, adding that “every institution in this country was and is used to prove that race exists and to promote the idea that the white race is at the top of the racial hierarchy and all other races are below, with the Black race on the bottom.”
Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi is one of the leading proponents of this new view of antiracism, and his book How to be an Antiracist is recommended by the Global Affairs materials for further reading. Kendi has argued that any policy that does not explicitly counteract white supremacy with favourable policies toward non-white people will inevitably return to a racist mean. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle ... there is no in-between safe space of `not racist,'” he writes in How to be an Antiracist.
ONLY WHITE PEOPLE
CAN BE RACIST
A major tenet of critical race theory is the idea that racism is not just a prejudice, but is a complex, omnipresent system designed to keep people of colour down for the benefit of white people.
In a “Myths and Facts” section opening the document, it is called a myth that non-white people are capable of racism, which is defined as exclusively being the domain of white people. Non-white people can express “racial prejudice,” to be sure (the example provided is “white people can't dance”) but this doesn't qualify as racism because of the “systemic relationship to power.” “In Canada, white people hold this cultural power due to Eurocentric modes of thinking, rooted in colonialism, that continue to reproduce and privilege whiteness,” it reads.
This may be one of the reasons that anti-Semitism — a prejudice with a long and ignoble history within Canadian federal policy — is not mentioned once in the Global Affairs materials. While the Global Affairs materials make no mention of Jews, Dismantling Racism, for one, has explicitly stated that critical race theory holds that Jewish people have “become white” and are thus beneficiaries of systemic racism.
`PERFECTIONISM' AND `WORSHIP OF THE WRITTEN WORD' ARE IDENTIFIED AS
MARKERS OF `WHITE SUPREMACY'
The course materials state that while most people associate the term “white supremacy” with hate groups such as the KKK and neoNazis, it can equally be applied to any system that affords disproportionate advantage to white people. A glossary accompanying the materials extends a broad definition to “whiteness,” saying it is “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels.”
A chart outlining examples of “white supremacy culture” includes the principles of “objectivity,” “individualism” and “worship of the written word.” The materials also brand the concept of “pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps” as an example of “covert white supremacy.” The term “covert white supremacy,” which Global Affairs adopts from the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, is defined as any white supremacy that is “socially acceptable.”
This view has manifested itself in Canadian public life most notably in October, when B.C. Premier John Horgan was pilloried for saying in an election debate that he “does not see colour.” In an apology the next day, Horgan said “I'm sorry. I'll never fully understand, as a white person, the lived reality of systemic racism.” Indeed, the Global Affairs materials cite the phrases “but we're all just one human family” and claiming to be “colourblind” as additional markers of “covert white supremacy.”
`RACISM IS JUST AS BAD IN CANADA'
The above quote appears in the “myths and facts” section opening the document, in which it is deemed a myth that “Canada race issues are not like the United States.” Participants are then encouraged to read a Huffington Post column explaining further. “It's true that Canada did not have the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the U.S.,” reads the column. “But the absence of a law doesn't mean segregation wasn't rampant here too.”
As stated above, critical race theory holds fast to an idea of an enforced system of race hierarchy that places Black people at the bottom. This is apparent in the Global Affairs literature, even to the exclusion of inequity problems that are more unique to Canada. There is little mention of what is arguably Canada's greatest act of oppression: Indian Residential Schools. The century-long assimilation of Indigenous children is mostly mentioned in passing as a government policy of “forcefully removing Indigenous children from their homes.” There is no mention whatsoever of Japanese-Canadian internment during the Second World War. The materials stress that they “are not a history course,” but aside from the letter by Quan-Watson, the longstanding history of anti-Asian racism in Canada appears only in a course chart that includes the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act as an example of “overt white supremacy.”
Slavery, by contrast, is mentioned more than a half-dozen times. While chattel slavery did indeed exist for more than two centuries in colonial Canada, with about 3,000 estimated slaves in pre-Confederation Canada, Black historians have argued that it was never the institution that it became in the United States, which had four million enslaved Africans on the eve of emancipation.
So, too, is secondary attention given to what is, by any metric, Canada's most immediate racial problem. From infant mortality to hate crimes to representation in the incarcerated population, Indigenous communities in Canada see rates that aren't even close to those of non-Indigenous populations of virtually any colour. Nevertheless, course materials repeatedly take a view more in tune with U.S. realities. “Racism specifically and intentionally dehumanizes nonwhite — and especially Black — peoples,” reads the Global Affairs literature.