Power Within Our Groups

Ricia over at Impetus Java House has an ongoing series that she calls About Power. Recently, she decided to open the series up for contributions from other writers, and she asked me to submit something. I have done so: "Power Within Our Groups."

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as a teaser to get you over to the Java House to read the rest!

I've always sort of pictured it as something as big as the sky that gets squeezed down to a point and then spills from that point like vomit, to pollute everything it touches.

I'm talking about power and how it messes with our social change groups from within, makes them less functional and less pleasant, makes them exclude or silence or shatter to bits. The origins of that are society-wide, so we can't stop it completely -- we can never create complete health in one microcosm while our society remains so sick. But we can take responsibility for knowing what's going on, for expecting it, and for developing skills to navigate it and nudge the spaces we co-create in more liberatory and effective directions. We need to see the nurturing of such awareness and skills, in ourselves and others, not as something to worry about when we have time and energy left over at the end of the day, not as an add-on to the "real work," but as a core, fundamental task in our quests for radical social change.

Read more!

Go check it out!

Sudbury Star: "Coloured People"

I spotted an interesting article at the top of the front page of today's Sudbury Star -- interesting because it talks about something that the dominant media usually avoids in this country, which is the racist nature of Canada's legal system, and also because there are some important ways in which it does so quite poorly. Here is the link to the article in the Star's online version, but they do not archive content online so it will expire quickly.

The title of the article is very direct: "Colour of justice in Canada is white, panel told."

It begins:

The criminal justice system is failing aboriginal people in Canada, a group of professionals who work in the system said Tuesday.

That's a decent lead. It is perhaps a little euphemistic, but it is still a fairly strong statement. The article then spends a few paragraphs explaining that this was an event by the local university's Native Studies Department, and involved professionals from the criminal justice system.

Then it continues:

Defence lawyer Robert Topp read an excerpt from The Colour of Justice by David Tanovich, a new book that argues the colour of justice in Canada is white.

Sounds like it might be an interesting book. Again, the article avoids using the dread "r" word, and makes sure that it attributes the statement as opinion rather than letting it stand on its own as a fact, but it is still quite blunt.

Topp agreed and said there is no “true justice” for coloured people in our country.

Uhhhhh...excuse me? "Coloured people"? Did I actually just read that?

Yes. Yes, I did.

The expression "coloured people" has been regarded as racist and generally not used by racialized people in North America for decades. The journalist is paraphrasing Topp, and I would bet he used the expression "people of colour." Though there are individuals who object to that expression as well, it is widely accepted among anti-racist activists and writers in North America. It may seem like a small, semantic difference, but the significance is the difference between a name forced on racialized people by white people and white power structures, versus one that originated from leaders and activists and writers in racialized communities themselves. Though it does not explicitly recognize the immense diversity that it encompasses, "people of colour" does indirectly make the point that it exists because of a (differentially) shared experience of racism.

All people, but especially people and institutions that make their living based on the use of words and the conveyance of information, have a responsibility to understand that words have power, and that words have histories. While it is good that racism in the criminal justice system is getting front page treatment (even if the article never uses the word), what does it say about the Sudbury Star that it, as an institution, is unaware of this semantically small but politically very significant difference?

Of course the added complication to that is that the term "people of colour" as I have learned to understand it is not generally used to include the people of the indigenous nations of North America. Though both groups experience racism and suffer at the hands of white supremacy, it is my understanding that indigenous groups have been quite insistent historically on a separate label because being included under "people of colour" would obscure their particular relationship to the land and to the colonizing and genocidal forces that have brought the Canadian settler state into existence. The article seems to treat them as interchangeable.

And on a related note, I suppose it would be useful context for non-local readers that there are more people of indigenous nations in the Sudbury Star's readership area by far than racialized people of other backgrounds, so a primary focus on their issues is understandable. Still, there are small communities of colour in Sudbury as well, and even if theire weren't the issue still impacts people of colour in the rest of Canada. If this author and this expert were connecting the issues to the experiences of people of colour as well, as they seem to have been, surely it would have been appropriate to mention that connection, even if only briefly, in the article.

The article continues:

If Canada is ever to arrive at “true justice,” then it has to abandon the “insane notion” that white people have all the answers, said Topp.

“It’s time, in my ... opinion, that matters of legal questions be returned to the aboriginal community,” said Topp.

Again, some solid stuff. I think to really convey to people what it might mean to return control over legal matters to indigenous nations would require a lot of unpacking -- true self-determination requires changes in this area that are a lot more radical than the very limited kinds of devolution of a limited subset of responsibilities that is currently on the radar for the Canadian state. But, still, this is only a newspaper article.

Next:

Assistant Crown attorney Philip Zylberberg shared his experience of travelling to the remote northern community of Kashechewan to appear in court. While “trying to do what’s fair,” there was something bizarre about the situation, he said.

White people were being flown in to administer justice to the Cree. After court adjourned, planes were ready to take the lawyers and judge away.

Okay, sure, that's worth pointing out as a problem. It would be good to point out that five hundred years ago the Cree were perfectly able to handle their own legal issues, and that there is a whole bunch of history between then and now that has lead to white folk coming in by plane to dispense settler state "justice." Some mention of that history would probably provide useful context for readers. But even the basic idea that maybe it's not cool for this to be happening isn't one that would be universally understood by white readers, so pointing out that it is a problem is a useful thing.

And the rest of the article:

Liza Mosher, a native elder, walked into a woman’s federal penitentiary for the first time in the early 1970s.

“I was terrified to go into the women’s prison in Kingston,” she told the audience.

But what was more alarming was how the spirituality of the aboriginal women imprisoned there was violated.

Mosher said she heard their cry for help. Many of the aboriginal offenders were sexually abused and the confines of the prison offered no healing.

The women needed a healing lodge, a place to deal with their pain and “walk the good life.”

Corrections Canada later established a healing lodge at Maple Creek First Nation in Saskatchewan and subsequent jails such as the Sudbury District Jail have adopted similar aboriginal practices.

The Sudbury jail has incorporated a teepee and sweat lodge into the lives of aboriginal prisoners, thanks to the determination of its native liaison officer.

“I spent a couple of years putting people in jail and the last nine years getting them out,” said Vince Pawis.

Pawis worked as a police officer for a couple of years before working at the Sudbury jail. The aboriginal program has had a positive effect within the aboriginal prison community.

“They’ve changed their lives and walk in a different way,” said Pawis.

The aboriginal program has created a ripple effect across the province, acting as a model for other jails, said Pawis.

And so has Greater Sudbury Police’s Mkwa Opportunity Circle, said Pawis, a program spearheaded by Police Chief Ian Davidson, which works to improve the relationship between police and the aboriginal youth while encouraging them to pursue careers in policing.

A few more points: First, you'll notice it wasn't until half way through the article that someone identified as being Native themselves was given space to speak. And while it is good to talk about the history of denial of indigenous spiritualities in the prison system, and that change is happening, this whole last segment -- even as it quotes Native people -- undermines the initial strong words about a racist criminal justice system by making it all about indigenous people who have "changed their lives" (or that need to), thereby focusing attention on the victims to avoid talking about the power structure and people that are the problem, and being able to emphasize changes that have been made and give the impression, "Don't worry. We got it figured out. It'll be fixed in no time."

There is no use of statistical evidence to show that the assertions about a racist justice system at the top of the article are, in fact, more than a handful of professionals spouting off. This material is easy to find. There are lots of studies, including one by the Ontario provincial government in the early nineties, which demonstrate racially disparate (i.e. racist) outcomes at every stage of the criminal justice system. This absence, and the absence of any mention of the history of struggle by indigenous communities and communities of colour against racist policing and a racist judicial system, is a failure to adequately explain (and therefore to adequately support) the assertions by experts early in the article.

The article also fails to explain that while lack of control of legal mechanisms by First Nations on reserve and denial of indigenous spiritualities in prisons are two mechanisms by which the "colour of justice" is made "white," there are also lots of others. Even a vague sentence about how this permeates almost every function of the judicial system is not included.

In fact, though I still think it is good to have this issue make the front page, it is indicative of how the public consciousness is constructed as "white," and the privilege of that whiteness is completely naturalized, that the idea of a racist criminal justice system is news at all and that no statement is included acknowledging that this is really only news to white people.

Anyway, I have no snappy closing. I just wanted to make the point that it is good that this article was present, but that it was present in some pretty messed up ways.

LA Immigrant Rights March

While living in Los Angeles, I attended a couple of anti-war marches on those periodic days of action that the U.S. anti-war movement has. I was disappointed that a city of 13 million people would only get a few thousand out to oppose the war. That's why it was very heartening to see photos like this and this -- there is a horrid anti-immigrant bill making its way through the U.S. Congress at the moment, and somewhere between half a million and a million people showed up in Los Angeles recently to oppose it. Here is a link to more photos and some reports of the action.

I especially like the message in this photo.

Feral Scholar » Gulf Coast Peace Train

To balance out the unfortunate revolutionary machismo in the report on the local Sudbury action I borrowed and pasted into my post yesterday, and because I encouraged people to support it even though it happened half a continent away from where I live, here is a report from Stan Goff on the Veterans and Survivors March along the Gulf Coast to New Orleans.

An excerpt:

And there was dancing. We danced down the Gulf Coast. Ask anyone who was there. We danced in Prichard. We danced along the highway during breaks when the Iraq vets would pull out their drums. We danced in a relief worker camp and in a soccer field. We danced down the streets of Slidell to drums, a tuba, and a tenor sax. We danced in Congo Square. We swayed and clapped to the sounds of church choirs.

Sounds like it was an amazing action.

Sudbury Anti-Poverty Action Report

As posted earlier, the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee in Sudbury, of which I am a part, held an action yesterday demanding that the province raise social assistance rates by 40% and reinstate the previous version of the Special Dietary Supplement. L and I attended the rally and food serving at the beginning. We lasted about 40 minutes -- it was cold, and the puppy that had been distracting L from how cold he was getting went home, so he demanded to head out as well and we did. Unfortunately, we did not get to participate in the little visit to the offices of the Ministry of Mines and Northern Development, whose Minister is our local MPP.

Here's an action report from the Tenant Action Group in Belleville, members of which came up to Sudbury and participated in the action:

Yesterday, members of Sudbury's Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee (HCOC) led a militant occupation of Liberal MPP Rick Bartolucci's Ministry offices in Sudbury. The entire office building was in "lock-down" mode as approximately 60 people occupied the seventh floor of Bartolucci's Ministry of Northern Development headquarters to give his government a mere taste of what awaits if today's provincial budget does not result in a 40% social assistance increase.

Ontario Common Front (OCF) comrades from Kingston and Guelph's Guelph Union of Tenants and Supporters, the Kitchener/Waterloo Youth Collective, the anarchist ROAD Collective, Peterborough Coalition Against Poverty and Belleville's Tenant Action Group showed solidarity by participating in yesterday's action. Members of Mine Mill/CAW Local 598 were also on hand to provide labour muscle.

Having made our point that the people can strike wherever and whenever we choose, our rowdy and spirited delegation left the Ministry offices promising to return in an escalated strategy of disruption if social assistance rates are not increased.

Anti-poverty groups from across Ontario were buoyed at the presence of poor people politicized for the first time and determined to carry the struggle forward, despite police over reaction but encouraged and humoured by the helplessness of the state. This action follows on the heels of Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal disruptions across the province (Toronto, Kitchener, Guelph and Peterborough) and other militant actions by Ontario Common Front groups in Kingston and Belleville.

Unless justice for poor people is orthcoming we will continue our fight to beat back the liberal attack!

Hostages Released!

According to the Globe & Mail, the surviving Christian Peacemaker Team hostages in Iraq -- including James Loney, whom I met a few times doing anti-war and anti-militarism stuff in Hamilton, Ontario -- have been released.

I'm not a religious man, but if I were, I would be thanking God right about now.

Anti-Patriarchal Men Unite!

Another great post from Darkdaughta. This one is called "Anti-patriarchal movement yet to find its stride...". She talks insightfully and compassionately about the ways in which patriarchy damages men, and relentlessy about the responsibilities that we (men) have for acting to undermine patriarchy.

The comment thread has some interesting stuff too. Here is my contribution to the discussion:

Amazing post, Darkdaughta. Like Hugo said, "powerful and compassionate."

I've been aware on a certain level that dealing with the ways in which patriarchy has damaged me is inseparable from whatever personal/political responsibilities I have towards people whose oppression gives me (damaging) privilege. But the masculine tendency that you mention to deny or downplay our own experiences of hurt -- to follow the path of that knight in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail who insists "It's just a flesh wound!" no matter how many limbs have been hacked off -- tends to nudge me towards treating considerations of my responsibilities towards others as the "real" political work, but dealing with my own damage as somehow less real, less political, less important. And shameful to have to do, of course. And probably scarier, if I'm being honest with myself.

I know intellectually that really it is one integrated kind of work, not discrete "inside" and "outside" responsibilities, of course, but often enough that recognition of unity doesn't make the trip from my head to my gut. I think the radical compassion in your post has, at least for now, given me a jolt in the right direction. Thanks.

And now back to talking theory... ;)

At least on an intial read through, my biggest question about the post is around the idea of a movement, and what that might mean. I mean, I definitely agree that the idea of politicized pro-feminist men supporting each other and acting collectively to oppose patriarchy is a good one -- that isolation you talk about is very real, and I think it's important (though still scary...thank-you, masculinity!) to support each other instead of depending entirely on the feminist women in our lives.

But how would those needs and possible activities turn into a movement? Mostly when that word is used unadorned, people with politics that go beyond liberal in some sense tend to think of liberation movements -- people unified based on some shared experience of oppression who work together to oppose that oppression. Movements based on ideas of "worker" or "woman" or "queer" or whatever have all tended to replicate other oppressions within their own functioning, of course, so even that model isn't as simple as the more privileged proponents of each like to think. But negotiating that complexity is not the same as trying to create a movement that is centred on an identity that, while it may be damaging, is a source of privilege.

What would that look like? How would it function in ways that maintained accountability to women? How could we be sure it would not end up sucking energy from feminist spaces rather than supporting them, or making itself the centre of attention and talking when it should be listening, or keeping safely quiet when it should be raising a ruckus?

Answering those kinds of question is essential, as you say. And obviously I'm not asking you to answer them...like you say, we need to start figuring some of that stuff out for ourselves.

A few years ago I read a book by an academic whose name escapes me at the moment -- an Australian guy, I think -- who talked about some of the history of pro-feminist men's movements. He was very pessimistic about the possibility of such a thing being effective, based on the ways in which most attempts by men to do that sort of thing coming out of the second wave of feminist movement eventually degenerated into apolitical self-help groups, which can be helpful to individual men but are not a movement, or into entities that are actually passively or actively anti-feminist. His attempt at an answer was based on the idea that men coming together as men was not a good idea, but that men gathered as, say, workers or as gay should seek to form alliance with collectives of feminist women, and that in the context of that alliance (and as a condition for it) there might be the possibility of men working on their experience of patriarchy at an individual level and beginning to work to end it at a collective level. Not sure I entirely bought that...just judging by the tone, I'm not sure the guy who wrote it entirely bought it either...but he was at least taking a stab at figuring some of this stuff out. And, like you say, it is essential work to begin. The world needs it.

And, personally, I wouldn't mind having a well to draw from.

That last line is based on something she says in the original post:

This is not to say that individual men or small groups of men aren't trying for something different. But they function as independent misunderstood and oftimes harried cells with no massive anti-patriarchal resources collectively studied and shared so as to sharpen critiques of masculinity, maleness, gender, sex, sexuality, relationships to self and familiy and whatever else impacts on their lives.

They don't draw from a well in ways that even the youngest girl child may be able to at some point in her life at this herstorical moment in time.

Give it a read!

Review: Sisters or Strangers?

[Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, Frances Swyripa, editors. Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.]

After a stressful parenting day and some (admittedly therapeutic) collective vegetable chopping in preparation for tomorrow's action, with brain running at only about 20% and a glass of whiskey in hand, he will attempt to write...

Collections of academic essays are always difficult to review. Usually the theme uniting the works is fairly diffuse, with no clear narrative thread tying them all together, and you have to be an expert to really appreciate such a volume as a deliberate intervention with a particular agenda to shift or disturb an existing field of knowledge.

In addition, academic disciplines tend to have their own rules about constructing texts. These rules are often not particularly concerned with enhancing the experiences of the reader, and are rather focused on accruing legitimacy to the writer by transforming or presenting knowledge in ways that will meet with approval from fellow specialists. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but by the strange logic of academic professionalism, enchanting writing in spaces in which the discipline of the discipline is operating is often either a calculated risk by someone low in the hierarchy or an indulgence by someone with high status within the field.

Many of the books I review on this site I have read with a particular end in mind, and so I frequently review them in light of their usefulness towards accomplishing that end, as well as how I think other people interested in this general area might respond to the book.

And with all of that in mind...

This was an important book for me to read. It isn't one that provides me with much in the way of concrete information for a concrete chapter in the book I am attempting to write, however. There were perhaps three or four of the essays that will translate into small points scattered throughout what I'm writing. I can imagine making referece to the essay on the role of Methodist missionaries in colonialism in Upper Canada, the one about the radical consumer movement of the late '40s, the one that talks a lot about the role of separate educational institutions in a larger discussion of Japanese Canadians' resistance to racism in the early twentieth century, and the one that talks about Black immigrant nurses in Canada.

But the book was more important to me as a source of general context. My work is focusing on aspects of resistance that are most likely to include collective and public elements -- social movements -- but it is a serious mistake to treat that as the sum total of what "struggle" and "resistance" mean. The central identities for these essays were all women who were oppressed because of their skin colour or their ethnicity or their citizenship status or some combination of those things, and basic social history focusing on those identities is also inevitably history of resistance. In my work I may not have direct use for, for example, a history of intermarriage in Armenian Canadian and Armenian American communities in the twentieth century, but in learning about that I learned about the ways in which genocide and diaspora can impact a nation and can impact individuals even multiple generations later. And, however fascinating I found this essay, I probably will not have occasion to talk about the negotiations around food-related practices among newcomers to Canada, white anglo Canadians already living here, and the Canadian state in the middle of the twentieth century -- but dynamics of adaptation, cultural appropriation, state meddling in cultural practices, and the impact of the physical and social infrastructure that is inescapable in North America are important to have a clue about in doing the writing I'm doing.

This book was a slow read, and the unpleasant imprint of the demands of the academic discipline of history left its mark on at least some of the essays. But you will learn if you read it.

And you will also probably have moments of shaking your head and thinking, "Yep. This sure is Canadian." For me that moment came in the essay about the race riot in Linday, Ontario, in 1919. Yes, Lindsay, a town that even today has fewer than 20,000 inhabitants, had a race riot. The situation was complex, with important dynamics related to racist Canadian immigration law and gender within racialized communities and gender within white Canadian society and wife abuse and mental illness and white Canadian (notably including a few of the first-wave feminists in the town) racism, and the essay does a good job (as far as I can tell) in teasing out the nuance. But it ended up with several hundred white people destroying the handful of Chinese-owned businesses in the town.

The Candianness? Well, first of all there was the involvement of the hockey fans:

At 11 P.M., a tide of several hundred Lindsay hockey fans, rejoicing in victory over the rival Peterborough team, bolstered the angry crowd. Shouting racial taunts, five hundred men and boys shattered the windows of the Chuong Sun Laundry with a barrage of bricks, stones and ice. They demanded that Lee come out so the crowd could rough him up... When the rioters heard that Lee had escaped, about four hundred went home, satisfied that their mesage was heard. The remaining seventy-five to one hundred rioters avenged their loss by attacking two other Chinese businesses, starting with a cafe where Lee's co-workers from the laundry had taken refuge. The rioters smashed fixtures, looted, and threw Chinese personal possessions into the street. At daybreak Lindsay newspapers evoked images of war-torn Belgium to describe the property damage. ["The Tale of Lin Tee: Madness, Family Violence, and Lindsay's Anti-Chinese Riot of 1919" by Lisa R. Mar, pp. 108-109 in the above volume.]

The other particularly Canadian aspect was that the author went to Lindsay to investigate, and extensive interaction with current inhabitants of the town showed the complete erasure of the disgusting violence described above from the local historical memory.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Come To Sudbury Anti-Poverty Action!

If you are in Sudbury or can make it here on March 22, please consider participating in the following action that seeks an increase to the criminally low social assistance rates in Ontario.

RAISE SOCIAL ASSISTANCE RATES NOW!
Anti-Hunger/Anti-Poverty Rally and March

Wed. March 22
Feeder March 11:30am from the Samaritan Centre
Rally: 12 noon. Provincial Building (corner of Larch and Paris). Free Food.

It is time to show the Ontario Liberal government they cannot take food from poor families without facing popular unrest. We need an immediate raise in social assistance rates by 40% just to get back what they took from us since 1995. They recently slashed the Special Diet Supplement making it harder for people to get the money they need to survive.

Come out and participate in the rally and in a women and children led march highlighting the impact of poverty in the lives of women and children. The government must be told it cannot get away with starving people and the families on welfare or disability. It is time for action, its time to take our message to those who are continuing the Tory war on the poor.

HUNGER CLINIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Supported by Mine Mill/CAW Local 598 and many others.
Bus tickets and child-care funding support available at the rally.
Contact: hcoc@riseup.net Website: http://scap.revolt.org/

Hope to see you there!

OPIRG Memories

The first social change organization I connected with back when I was a university student was the McMaster University chapter of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group. It is a student funded, student run group for promoting social change. The exact issues and kinds of action taken vary from campus to campus and year to year based on what students themselves want to do. It's a structure that has limitations, as every structure does, but its role as a provider of infrastructure to allow groups of students to pursue whatever issues happen to interest them has always struck me as a model with a lot to recommend it. (And for U.S.-base readers, I think the PIRGs in Canada tend to be less focused on lobbying and legislation and more focused on grassroots activism than the PIRGs in the U.S.)

I went on to do other kinds of political stuff with one of the staff there after I graduated, and he and I still keep in sporadic touch. (He's also a regular reader of this blog -- Hi Randy!) He asked me to write some brief reminiscences about my time involved with OPIRG McMaster for them to put up on their web site. The idea is partly to promote the organization, and partly to provide a broader picture of what social change can and does mean by getting former OPIRG activists to talk about their experiences. What I wrote is longer than he wants, so I may end up having to change it before it goes up on their site, but I thought I'd post this draft here...I haven't exactly been diligent about producing original writing for the ol' blog in the last week or two, and this was quite fun to write, so I thought I'd share it.

I first met OPIRG when OPIRG first returned to McMaster, and we got along famously from day one. My very first "activist" meeting of any kind was filled with tired, happy people overjoyed at just having won funding to bring OPIRG to campus and strategizing about what to do next. It was the end of my second year of a biochemistry co-op degree, and I had been doing some reading and thinking and decided I wanted to see what this whole social change thing was about. Somehow, a few meetings later, I was on the committee charged with hiring OPIRG McMaster's first staff over the coming summer.

At the beginning of the next school year, still very new and unsure of how I wanted to be involved, I signed my name to a list for the Waste Reduction Working Group. A few weeks went by. I dropped by the OPIRG office to see if maybe my name had somehow dropped off the list and I wasn't getting the emails that had surely been circulating about the meetings that had surely been held. It turned out that nothing at all had happened yet. By the time I left the office -- completely unsure about how introverted, neophyte me had been convinced that this was a good idea -- I had a list of contact information in my hand and had committed to doing what I could to make sure things got rolling. I was heavily involved in Waste Reduction for the next three years.

I also have very fond memories from that first autumn of the weekly Get Up, Stand Up! Film Festival -- every week I helped out with it; every week I was rewarded by some fascinating and new-to-me blast of information and ideas; and every week I had the pleasure of walking part of the way home beside someone a little older and a little more experienced, and getting to mutually process what we had just seen. I also plunged into the print resources that the OPIRG office provides, and in my two-year term on the Board of Directors took great delight in overseeing the spending of money to broaden and deepen the collection. I got involved in other working groups, in doing other tasks, and when I graduated and drifted from a geographical identity centred around "McMaster" to one grounded in "Hamilton," I stayed in touch.

University can be a time when some of us who didn't grow up facing them in our daily lives are first confronted by ideas and writing about the brutal realities of our society. These realities get named in lots of partial ways, but they add up to interlocking hierarchies of privilege and oppression based on class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, and more, in a political economy that depends on death and suffering not only to enrich the most powerful elites but to reward those of us who have more mundane forms of privilege as well. For me, OPIRG provided some tools to start learning about bits and pieces of that, and opportunities to start taking action around those corners of the beast that I was starting to see. OPIRG is just one organization, just one set of tools, and many folk might find other choices that would better suit their consciousness, their experiences of oppression, their desires to act. For me, however, OPIRG McMaster was an important ingredient in kicking off an ongoing journey of consciousness and action.

That journey has taken me lots of other places, of course, and all of them have shaped me further, but having OPIRG available when I was in a crucial stage of questioning and searching was an important catalyst. I'm still not sure how well I understand much of anything, and make no great claims for the decisions I make about acting in the world, but my journey of political consciousness informs how I function as a parent, as a partner, as a person. It is a major part of my work as a writer, both in my informal personal/political ramblings on my blog, and in my central project based on oral history interviews with fifty long-time Canadian activists. And it still takes me to meetings -- thanks in part to learnings begun with OPIRG, at last night's direct action anti-poverty group meeting I think I was a little less clueless, a little more sure of myself and my role, a little more able to contribute, than so many years ago.

Ontario Alternative Budget and Poverty

Here is an article from The Toronto Star about research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for this year's alternative Ontario budget. It quotes extensively from Hugh Mackenzie, a CCPA researcher and Steel Worker.

Some excerpts:

"The fact that Ontario's most disadvantaged citizens are worse off now than they were when the McGuinty government was elected is a disgrace," writes economist Hugh Mackenzie in a seven-page "technical paper" entitled Destination Unknown: The McGuinty Government Into the Home Stretch.

"The most telling gap between rhetoric and reality, however, is in the government's policies to deal with poverty and homelessness," the economist writes.

"In opposition, the Liberals were quick to attack the Harris and Eves governments for their decisions to cancel Ontario's affordable housing programs and to download responsibility for an aging public housing portfolio on to local governments without adequate compensation, and for those governments' savage treatment of people forced to rely on social assistance," he says.

"Yet, now that they are in power, the Liberals have done nothing in housing beyond finally allowing federal housing dollars to be spent in this province. The social assistance situation is even worse. Shockingly ... social assistance rates are lower today — in real terms — than they were when the McGuinty government took office."

Mackenzie is urging Duncan to pour more money into such things as social benefits, affordable housing and child care.

Because the money is there — the province has collected between $1 billion and $2.5 billion more in corporate taxes than forecast — there is no excuse for leaving the poor behind, he says.

"As the government scrambles to hide the budgetary gains it made in 2005-6, it can no longer credibly claim that it cannot afford to make a start on the changes Ontario needs."

It is gratifying that despite the NDP being largely AWOL on poverty issues in Ontario these days that this social democratic think-tank sees how critical it is to so many Ontarians to increase social assistance rates. It is disappointing that it does not (as far as I could tell in a quick scan) recommend a particular level of increase. But other groups and other research have shown that an increase of 40% would be necessary to return social assistance rates to what they were in 1995, so that would be a good start.

Movement History Site Updated

As I occasionally mention in posts on this site, the central focus of my productive life at the moment is not actually blogging but in fact trying to produce a book and perhaps other things with oral history interviews I did with 50 long-time activists in various social movements across Canada. In the last six months I have not done a good job at all of keeping that project's web site updated. Today, finally, I have changed that. Here is the text from today's long overdue update:

After the longest gap in site updates in the history of the project, we're back. The gap in updates has not meant a lack of work, however. Back in the fall the project received a thumbs down from the publisher I'd been talking to so far -- not exactly happy news, but not exactly uncommon when you're trying to get a book published, either. Much of the time since then has been spent developing a new vision for the book and then trying to put it into practice. This meant about half of what had so far been written as of my last update had to be discarded. The rest plus a bunch of new stuff has been cut, pasted, stitched, and sewn into a new model intro and three new model chapters. This material is out with trusted colleagues and allies and friends for comment on the new structure. Once I have their input I will make decisions about further changes, produce an updated book proposal, and send it off to a different publisher. In the meantime, I am following some advice from my partner and putting thought and effort into thinking about other, smaller and less involved outputs that could be created from all this wonderful interview material -- I'll be sure to post to the site when/if anything comes of those efforts!

Please visit the site to learn more about the project!

Racialized Poverty in Toronto

There is a new report based on the 2001 census that looks at the racialization of poverty in Toronto -- the "growing economic apartheid" in Canada, as an earlier report on related themes once described it. It's author is York University academic Michael Ornstein, who did similar work with the 1996 census. The current report looks at the worsening of the racial divide between 1971 and 2001. You can read a summary of the report or the whole thing (in PDF).

From the summary:

The census reveals that 40 per cent of African ethno-racial group members lived below the poverty line in 2001, compared to about 30 per cent of the members of the Arab and East Asian groups, and 20 per cent of the Aboriginal, South Asian, East Asian, Caribbean, and South and Central American groups. By comparison, only 10 per cent of European group members were below the poverty line, and for some European groups the figure was only about five per cent.

(From an email on the PAR-L list.)

Language Quote

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

-- Mikhail Bakhtin

Review: Gramsci Is Dead

[Richard J. F. Day. Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2005.]

Recently, someone I'm just getting to know came across a piece of writing in which I identified in passing as an anarchist. It was written a few years ago, so he asked if I still identified that way. This took me aback.

Partly, that's because of a flash of insecurity that my political practice was somehow inadequate or unworthy of the label in the eyes of this other person, who meets a much more conventional picture of what "anarchist" means in current activist subcultures. But that's just me being insecure: all political labels are flexible enough to relate to a broader range of practices than might be conventionally recognized, and I think "anarchist" most of all.

But mostly, I was taken aback because I actually had to think about it. I tend to shy away from applying labels to myself, especially high-twitch labels like "anarchist," because such terms have been so filled with emotionally laden and completely incorrect content by those who oppose them that their appearance in conversation often serves to shut down discussion before it begins.

As M. Junaid Alam says, often in a tongue-in-cheek way, in an article I've linked to before called "Why I Am No Longer a Radical":

Once you tell folks you’re a radical leftist of some sort, they’ll either smile at you slightly like you’re trying to save the dinosaurs from extinction, or stare at you in deep puzzlement as if you’ve just announced that you applied for death row....For to let the Right claim the very mantle of “mainstream” for themselves, as they have increasingly tended to do, to let them spin off basic values like social equality, human rights, religious tolerance, and peace as the byproducts of a bygone era of amoral “radical” hippies, would be a total catastrophe....So the way I see it, if we are to be real radicals, we need stop acting like our agenda is, well, radical. We need to focus on the fact that even though our aims have been depicted in such distorted ways that they are not even popular among our target audience -- ordinary people -- we are not just standing up for unpopular justice. Rather, we are standing up for justice that has been unpopularized, because the Right has popularized injustice. [emphases in original]

Of course an ability to openly claim labels that apply to you is very important as well, and it had been awhile since I last really evaluated how well this claimed identity fit me. And I came to the conclusion that:

• it still very much fits my gut feelings about the world;
  
• how it relates to my analysis of the world has probably shifted somewhat since I wrote that, as I have learned more from Marxism-derived sources and from anti-oppression-based sources (which, admittedly, can have a strong anarchist flavour to them, though often don't directly claim that influence and often, at least the more theoretical ones, do claim a Marxist or more broadly socialist heritage) in the last few years;
  
• how it relates to my political practice is probably not best judged by me.

Gramsci Is Dead is a wonderful piece of anarchist theory that is helping churn up some of that stuff and make me rethink and think in new ways. It might even be helping to provide me with some theory to help me connect my gut, my head, and my practice in new ways.

The main purpose of this book is to contrast two different logics of social change, which the author names "hegemony" and "affinity." Hegemony he links to both the liberal and the Marxist traditions which dominated much political thought and action throughout the twentieth century. In this understanding, a single order, a single centre, a single system, dominates (has hegemony over) a geographical area, often a nation state but increasingly at the global level. When applied to social change, the idea is that in order to effect change you must shift or transform the forces exerting hegemonic control, but keep the hegemonic nature of such control intact.

Affinity, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with change that is transient or incomplete, with struggles that are ongoing, with decentralized networks of nodes of collectives that come together, partially liberate some time and space, that say "this is what we want for us, what do you want for you?", and perhaps dissipate and reform and resurge in another guise elsehwere, elsehwhen, but do not seek to impose a single model of change on everyone and every thing. He sees this as a logic with a history in anarchist thought that is coming to the forefront in the newest social movements, from the Zapatistas and other indigenous struggles to the Independent Media Centres and the Italian autonomous zones.

The book uses a technique borrowed from Michel Foucault called "geneology" to examine the paths that these two logics have followed in Western political thought. He examines texts of classical Marxism, liberalism, and anarchism, and on through to neoliberalism, academic postmarxism, postanarchism, autonomist marxism, and poststructuralism. Which is perhaps an intimidating listing of labels, but it needn't be. One way that this text was very useful was in its examination of these various traditions, and its explanation of at least a few of the key features of each -- I have read bits and pieces of various items on that list, but my reading of theory (and everything else) has tended to be very self-directed and therefore very incomplete and fragmented, so even his partial summaries were useful to me.

My biggest learning about classical anarchism was that most of the big names in the canon (a problematic and unanarchist idea itself) were not really anarchists as we would understand the term today. Anarchism has had a curious tradition of each generation being very selective in how it reads the preceding generation, and then following generations largely just accepting that.

I also learned a lot about poststructuralism. I have tended to follow the trend of dismissing such theory as being arcane and depoliticizing, but Day emphasizes that there is a difference between a certain set of French theorists who founded poststructuralism and who were themselves very concerned with practical social change, and the trend in the North American academy towards postmodernism, which is often purely careerist and very disempowering. I don't know enough about poststructuralism myself to assess what he says about it, and he admits that his discussion of some of these thinkers is even more partial than in the other traditions, but I am more convinced than before that these thinkers have things of value to offer people trying to make practical change in the world, even if the accessibility of their writing remains a serious issue.

I am unwilling to pass a final judgment on the central thesis of the book, for a number of reasons. There are a few points I remain unconvinced of, but mostly I just need to let it settle for a year or two.

One thing with which I was unsatisfied was the climax of the discussion of hegemonic logic. He argues that in both its liberal and marxist or postmarxist forms, social change based on this logic cannot grant the demands of the pluralistic actors in social change that must be considered if you are going to end up with a system that is not just replicating oppression. He uses liberal multiculturalism as a detailed example of this, which is perhaps too easy a target, and was convincing on that side of things. My instinctive reaction is to agree with the idea that such a problem is inevitable with any radical marxist restructuring of the state, but I don't think he did enough to demonstrate that such problems are inherent in all articulations of hegemonic logic rather than just a problem of liberalism and some marxisms.

I am also, as I said, a little unsure about some of the post-structuralist stuff. He did say he was aiming to reach activist academics and theoretically inclined activists, and I appreciate that because I think I fit in that group. But I'm not sure that all of the post-structuralist stuff was explained as clearly as it could be. I mean, all language is metaphor, but it was not always clear to me how the more deliberately deployed abstracted metaphors from some of these theorists were really relevant to doing stuff on the ground. That may be my problem, not the text's, but then if it's my problem, it is probably other people's problem too.

I am also curious about how this framework, and Day's obvious desire to have people give struggles based in the logic of affinity more serious consideration and support, might relate to the horrific environmental crisis that is in the works (whether George Bush and some segments of the left admit it or not). While people liberating themselves in different ways, in different places, with different end goals in mind sounds wonderful, right now the hegemonic logic in control of most institutions on the planet is killing the planet, and I wonder whether a vision for changing this that is non-hegemonic is really sufficient. I suppose the counter-argument would be that hegemonic approaches don't seem to have done so well so far, and what we need to aim for is a critical mass of different affinity-based counter-projects that are sufficient to disrupt the dominant hegemony without replacing it. Not sure I completely buy that, though.

Anyway, I need to let it all settle more. It has succeeded in convincing me that the main concepts used in the argument are useful ones, and ones that I will assess against what I see in the world and what I read in the future. I think the distinction between social change based on a logic of affinity and that based on a logic of hegemony is a real and useful one, even if I have not completely bought all of the details.

And I like the logic of affinity. That shouldn't be the only way we evaluate analyses of the world and ways of intervening in it, but I think it is important.

I like it because it escapes the reform/revolution dichotomy, something I've thought was a dumb way of thinking about social change since I first saw it in I.S. materials back as an undergrad. No millenial moment of traditional revolution will make it all better, but no supplication to our rulers will make them nicer no matter how cleverly argued, so surely there must be a different framework. And perhaps there is.

I have also been thinking for awhile that what we need, practically speaking, are nodes of activity (i.e. groups of connected (inter)active resistant people) grounded in logics of behaviour that are something other-than-the-neoliberal-market. Their collective nature would hopefully make these nodes more stable and more able to exert power than purely individual decisions to act in some way differently. In a way, this is what Taiaike Alfred argues for in his grounding of social change by indigenous peoples in indigenous cultures and ways of being that are collective, distinct, but non-hegemonic. I also see some similarities to anti-integrationist queer writers like Michael Warner and his advocacy of a radical embrace of shame as a political grounding. Of course, it is important that we not prove the traditional marxists right in describing this affinity-based logic as a flight of fancy by having illusions about how different it can be -- it won't always be permanent, it won't always shed its ties to oppressive ways of being as completley and immediately as we might like, and it will always be "in process." Our argument has to be that, even when "the revolution" wins or, at least, is winning as in places like Venezuela, it is still just as much "in process" as struggles that explicitly disavow the seizure of state power, like the Zapatistas, albeit in different ways. In any case, one useful insight for me is that the "collective" that is necessary for constructing meaningful opposing to and difference from the currently hegemonic neoliberal capitalist atomized individualism (etc., etc.) just needs to mean "some," it doesn't need to mean "all" to have some value. That idea isn't new to me, but I haven't always connected that fact to an approach to social change that this book would class as being about affinity rather than hegemony.

So am I an anarchist? Yeah, I think so. It definitely remains an important strand in how I think about the world and how I want to act in it. But I definitely don't see the traditions most directly associated with that label as having all the answers. And I refuse to let a label, with all the baggage such things drag along even when used by those who apply it to themselves, place arbitrary limits on my personal and analytical and political-practical growth. (Is that an anarchist answer to that question or what? ;) )

This book certainly has implications for my political practice, but I don't know yet what they are. For the time being, I am thankful that it has given me a few new conceptual tools.

And, lefty book nerd that I am, I am both thankful and wearied at the very thought that my already seemingly endless need to read more about 20th century Canadian social movements has just been augmented by an amplified interest in reading areas of theory that I never knew existed or previously chose to pass over.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Canada's Racist Immigration Policies

Here is an excellent article by Harsha Walia called, "Colonialism, Capitalism and the Making of the Apartheid System of Migration in Canada."

Review: The Heart of Whiteness

[Robert Jensen. The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. San Francisco: City Lights, 2005.]

This is a short, direct book that adds to the growing literature of white people (taking careful cues from writers and activists and other people of colour) trying to take some responsibility for theorizing our own privilege and strategizing about how to undermine it. Jensen is a professor of journalism in Texas. He has written lots of good stuff on racism, sexism, U.S. foreign policy, and the media, and he is a voice worth listening to.

There is a certain necessity for books like this to always start at the beginning. After all, they are generally aimed at educating fellow white people, and most of us need that. And I'm not just talking about people who have never thought about it before, I'm talking about those of us who claim to have done so as well. Nonetheless, it does mean that books by white people that attempt to talk about racism from an anti-racist perspective -- or, at least, the non-academic subset of such books -- do tend to go over rather similar territory again and again. Over the years I have read books on similar stuff by Paul Kivel, Anne Bishop, Tim Wise, and Inga Muscio as well as this one, and however different the specific approach taken in each book, the basic conceptual area covered is much the same. But there is something useful about this redundancy, I suppose, because I think the diversity of approaches helps those concepts percolate down from the analytical area of the brain, through the wisdom-resistant barrier provided by commonsense grounded in our experience of privilege, and into the gut.

In any case, I can't help but compare this book to the related book I have read most recently: Inga Muscio's latest. Both deal with whiteness, with white supremacy, through the filter of their own experiences of the privileges it bestows and of working to oppose it. Where Muscio's book is long and lush and stylistically creative and funny and sarcastic, Jensen's is short and arid and traditionally informal and sober, almost bleak. Yet both are blunt and engage unflinchingly with history and with the social and psychoemotional realities of white supremacy and whiteness for white people. Both put their ongoing personal journeys on display, painful as those sometimes are. It is embarassingly essentialist to say this, but I can't help but wonder if some of the differences in style might be related to their socialized connection to their own emotions as, respectively, a queer white woman and a straight white man. Anyway, Muscio's lively and passionate prose drew me in and inspired me, but something about Jensen's approach -- sombre but passionate in his own way -- resonated with my own pattern of emotional responses to these issues, even if I did not find it quite so instinctively compelling in some ways.

Anyway, the instructions are the same: Go out and read a bunch of books about racism by Aboriginal people and people of colour. Then maybe read this one. Or do it the other way around. But definitely do both.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Literary Prize

Earlier today I received an email from someone I worked with on an anti-racist political/community development project for a couple of years saying that he has won a prestigious writing award. It makes me happy to promote fellow writers that I know, so here are the details:

Ahmad Saidullah won $4000 as the second prize for his short story "Happiness And Other Disorders" in the 2005 CBC Literary Awards held at La Grande Bibliothéque in Montréal, Canada on 26 February 2006.

The story was commended by the jurors for its experimental style, humour, and empathetic breadth. "Happiness" will be published in the June 2006 edition of enRoute, Air Canada's flight magazine, which is a partner in the awards, and is expected to reach a million readers.

The story will also be read on CBC Radio Canada at a later date and the CBC Literary Awards will be broadcast too. Ahmad is the third Canadian South Asian writer after Michael Ondaatje and Shauna Singh Baldwin to be recognized by Canada's top literary short story prize and the first since the awards were redesigned in 2001.

Here is a listing of the winners.

Ahmad Saidullah was born in Ottawa in 1958. He has worked as an editor and a lexicographer and is now a policy research consultant. In 2006, he launched The Village Green Rag, an e-zine for new and emerging writers from all over the world. Ahmad started writing fiction seriously in 2004. The "Happiness" story is taken from his first novel Fifteen Sketches of Rumi. He wrote the book in ten months mostly at night and on weekends while laid up with a bad back. He is looking for an agent and publisher for Rumi. Ahmad is working on another novel.

Congratulations Ahmad!