Why some are more equal than others
Hamilton has a lot to do to dismantle white privilege; those of us of who are white must acknowledge that systems designed to suppress communities historically marginalized (by racism, classism and gender bias) are being sustained. White privilege and its colonial foundations remain intact, and co-opt the trauma of those oppressed through diversity/inclusion models that are little more than rebranding exercises. This is most apparent in education and in the infrastructure of public history (museums, cultural organizations and monuments).
Hamilton is a city that includes a governing body that voted 12-3 to keep a statue of a racist prime minister, and maintains monuments of Queen Victoria and United Empire Loyalists (both symbols of a society founded on chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide). Hamilton’s publicly funded faith-based school system flies Pride and Every Child Matters flags while preaching homophobic and transphobic values, disrespect for reproductive rights, and fails to address genuine accountability for violence against Indigenous peoples. Hamilton’s public school system has been challenged for its racially biased elected trustees.
In George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945), a moment of radical collective reaction to oppression spirals into toxic hierarchies, with the hoarding of power supported by violence. The farmer expelled, a collective of animals is broken by one species (the pigs) who manoeuvre to re-establish a power structure of a small elite, lording it over those who labour on their behalf by adopting the trappings of the deposed farmer. The once unifying message “All Animals Are Equal,” becomes the infamous slogan, “But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.”
When I review the experience of the exceptional community/student activist Ahona Mehdi, HWDSB student trustee, I hear Orwell’s words. I most strongly associate them with trustees Carole Paikin Miller, Alex Johnstone, Becky Buck and Kathy Archer, who no doubt see themselves as overcoming patriarchy in claiming leadership roles. This points to a critical aspect of Ahona’s experience; at the heart of it, four white women are using their power and privilege against a young BIPOC woman. These trustees used gaslighting as their strategy against the 2021 recipient of the Lincoln M. Alexander Award.
Fundamental barriers to transformative change include the historic behaviours and structures that linger from earlier manifestations of a society. In the case of whiteness, hierarchies of power undermine any potential for change. During moments of reckoning, whiteness will cling to its methodologies and systems, inevitably causing more harm in its efforts at “inclusion” by requiring anyone who does manage to work their way into the system to adopt values and behaviours of whiteness. At the same time, supposed “allies” draw heavily on the support and wisdom of BIPOC persons, extracting energy and credibility through association. Widely applauded efforts to change are usually self-congratulatory, directed at individuals, groups and institutions of whiteness that ultimately retain control, using their many tools and weapons. This is all just window-dressing designed to entrench white privilege through new forms of exploitation and violence.
Ahona deserves better, way better, from whiteness bolstered not only by toxic white masculinity, but also the toxicity of whiteness in all its gendered manifestations. She offered wisdom, knowledge, experience and labour by choice, not to gain power and privilege, but to challenge a system on behalf of all of us.