It’s righting wrongs, not ‘reverse racism’
Knock knock. Job opening alert. A senior position coming up at Dalhousie University. Want to apply?
A senior Dalhousie official said in an email to the university community that openings for the position of vice-provost of student affairs would be restricted to “racially visible persons and Aboriginal Peoples.”
Racially visible? Or racialized? As in, anybody who has lived the experience of systemically being perceived and treated as “the other” on account of not being white or passing for white.
But wait, that’s not what the noise is about. The resistance to righting historical and contemporary wrongs is taking its usual well-beaten path of societal sanctimony, with cries of “reverse racism!” and the insulting, “but what about merit?”
The percentage of racially visible employees at Dalhousie stood at 11 per cent in 2016, up from 8.3 per cent in 2015, based on the university’s internal census. But only 1.9 per cent of employees were Indigenous in 2016.
Representation was lower in academic management positions, where 4.7 per cent identified as racially visible and 1.6 per cent as Indigenous.
Here is a Twitter version tutorial of Racism 101: It’s racist if you seek only white applicants. It’s not racist if you seek those who are not white.
Whoa, some might say, hold your horses, hypocrisy. To which one response might be: hold your horses, false equivalencies.
Seeking those who are not white is not about being punished for injustices of the past.
This is very much about levelling the playing field in the present.
Reverse racism exists for those who believe all players arrive on the field with equal power. It also exists if racism is reduced to being simply about an individual’s race-based biases.
But racism isn’t about hurt feelings. It’s about how those negative stereotypes interact with systems of power.
The data-based reality, as opposed to fear-based suppositions, is that race and Indigeneity remain a key indicator of success in Canada. Institutional support of biases allow race-based inequities to show up in outcomes of jobs, incomes, health and incarceration rates.
The job market continues to be ethnically segregated across industries.
The higher paying job openings operate de facto like a call for only white people to apply, but they do so without the “Whites Only” signs. Minorities get a shot if they are exceptionally talented or have proximity to whiteness or if open-minded individuals happen to be hiring.
Seeking applicants who are not white is the equivalent of traffic management officials looking at a highway full of trucks and opening up a lane for the cars that are bunched up at the back. It is no more reverse racism than those traffic managers discriminating against trucks.
This limited analogy edges closer to reality if those cars were awaiting their turn for centuries, if its drivers were being asked to play by the rules even as they got roughed up, and also being told, “What are you complaining about? That Ferrari got a turn.”
Those wondering “but what about merit?” might want to consider why they think merit is oppositional to race. Do they truly believe merit is the main reason white (mostly) men continue to dominate corporate boardrooms, and why racialized people continue to be underrepresented in white-collar jobs?
If so, they might also want to google the definition of “white supremacy.”
Studies have shown that people with names that sound like they could be Black or Middle Eastern or Asian are less likely to get called for job interviews, even with a North American education. Biases run deeper than that — they further privilege those within the employer’s own social networks and least value those with non-Anglo sounding names and non-Canadian education.
Diversity isn’t just about plonking a person of colour into a chair and checking HR-created boxes. Merit is obviously foundational. So what is one consideration of merit in a university vice-provost job?
Amina Abawajy, president of Dalhousie’s student union who also sits on the hiring committee, told the CBC, “When issues of especially equity, diversity and inclusion come up, it’s really great to not have to explain where I’m coming from or where students are coming from — to really know that this person has an understanding of intersectional oppression and forms of oppression and how they manifest on campus.”
In other words, all things being equal, students would like to communicate with a person who is racially literate.
Universities, supposedly lost to far-left ideology, remain playgrounds of racist bile across the country with inadequate understanding or protections for the vulnerable. Seeking racial literacy in a candidate in such an environment makes for a perfectly fair meritbased job opening. Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar