There is specific historical resonance in the concept of apartheid within Canada. Not only did Canadian immigration policy selectively encourage White settlement and prohibit immigration from racialized group members for many years, using a logic similar to that of the apartheid regime in South Africa, but also when the minority White South African regimes officially instituted the apartheid system of Bantustans or homelands for indigenous Africans, they looked to Canada's system of segregation of Aboriginal peoples and use of reserves to conceive the eventual model for their racist project. Further, while apartheid South Africa's use of domestic and migrant racialized labour was distinctive in the intensity of its exploitation, there are parallels to the historical exploitation of racialized labour in the Canadian labour market.
-- Grace-Edward Galabuzi
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Quote: Canadian Apartheid
Saturday, February 24, 2007
35 Ways to Take Action
Soon enough, whenever you are talking about the world and about social change, the question arises, "Well, okay, but what should I do?" Influential public intellectual Noam Chomsky has said he gets this question all the time when he does talks, albeit mostly from audiences in the rich countries of North America and Europe -- in the global south, people seem much more able to answer it for themselves and tend to be more interested in sharing what they're already doing.
This post is an attempt by the people over at Insurgent American to provide a generic answer to that question in its most generic form, in response to repeated queries of this sort from people who have come across their site. Normally, I'm a bit dubious about attempts to answer a question so broad in an abstract kind of way, given how much a good answer really depends on each individual's experiences, resources, social location, talents, and desires.
However, the way the IA people have gone about answering it is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, you usually see attempts to produce generic answers to the question of what to do coming out of liberal politics, but this is very clearly coming from a place of revolutionary politics. At the same time, great care has been taken to make it actually meaningful to actual lives, rather than any sort of dogmatic or abstract irrelevance. They write:
I am also interested in it because of the obvious priority it places on increasing the capacity of individuals and collectives to expand their potential for autonomous action. This is based not only on the IA folks valuing autonomy per se, but also on their analysis of the centrality of the pending end of cheap energy and what that will do to our lives and our world. So lots of their suggestions have to do with the development of capacity that increases our scope for autonomy -- if not exactly extracting us from the web of dependency and control that characterizes industrialized societies, then at least putting us in a position to act with greater agency with respect to it.
Perhaps another way to say this is that it recognizes that one way in which we are kept pacified by ruling relations is through the many ways in which they remove, constrain, erase, and deaden our capacity to do, again both as individuals and as communities or other sorts of collectives. There are some aspects of that global denial of capacity to act autonomously that will only be regained through massive struggle. But there are other aspects, smaller but still very important aspects, that we can actually do something about here and now. Sometimes it's as simple as trying and doing -- I know that I wrestle all the time with barriers to acting in the world in ways that would make me more effective as an agent of change and that would result in a me more genuinely in tune with my own wants/needs/desires, and often those barriers have more to do with what's going on in my own head than anything external preventing me from acting. Sometimes it's a matter of investing effort in developing skills that will make us less dependent, more able to act. Sometimes it's a matter of creating simple, social infrastructure. In any case, as the block of text quoted above implies, the authors of this list recognize that one of the most important aspects in fostering radical, autonomous, political doing in search of liberation is the deceptively simple goal of fostering habits of doing, but doing that is decidedly not habitual.
I also enjoy the deliberately eclectic nature of the collection, though I suppose almost all could be categorized as either fairly conventional political action or as capacity and community building. Still, the attention the specifics show to actually considering where a fairly broad and diverse chunk of ordinary North Americans are at is a good lesson in what radical politics have to be, I think. Personally, I don't think I'm going to follow either of the suggestions related to firearms. I am also distressed to notice there are at least four that I have done in the past but no longer do (grow my own food, vermiculture, own/ride a bike, frequent a farm market/Community Shared Agriculture farm). I think I might think about going back to one or all of those, to the extent that I can. The ones related to organizing in a more conventional sense make me a bit sad because of the relative lack of opportunities to do such things in my current location. But the one on doing a communtiy access cable show, with community radio mentioned in the explanatory text, has given me a bit of a jolt -- since reading it, I've actually been giving some thought to the idea of getting back involved in community radio, and I have a disturbingly practical idea for a show I could do. And as for the idea of deliberately setting out to learn new, practical, fix-it and build-it skills on a set schedule...well, speaking as someone with almost no such skills to speak of, this suggestion is both profound and intimidating.
Anyway. I have said often before to friends and loved ones that I am almost always in a state of low-level existential crisis, and I have a feeling that at the moment I am in the early flutterings of what will end up being a fairly significant transitional period for me, so "What to do?" and its myriad possible answers are feeling very close to home. But I think part of the point of a list of this sort is that invites all of us to be critical of the ways we are complicit in our own barriers to doing, and to do something about that.
This post is an attempt by the people over at Insurgent American to provide a generic answer to that question in its most generic form, in response to repeated queries of this sort from people who have come across their site. Normally, I'm a bit dubious about attempts to answer a question so broad in an abstract kind of way, given how much a good answer really depends on each individual's experiences, resources, social location, talents, and desires.
However, the way the IA people have gone about answering it is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, you usually see attempts to produce generic answers to the question of what to do coming out of liberal politics, but this is very clearly coming from a place of revolutionary politics. At the same time, great care has been taken to make it actually meaningful to actual lives, rather than any sort of dogmatic or abstract irrelevance. They write:
New practices create new forms of consciousness; and here are a few ideas on some practices. Anyone can do one, two, or as many as are workable in present circumstances. The mental test we use in trying to determine the what’s appropriate is woman-burb-hood. Is this something that can relate to the capacities of a woman who lives in either a suburb or an urban neighborhood?
I am also interested in it because of the obvious priority it places on increasing the capacity of individuals and collectives to expand their potential for autonomous action. This is based not only on the IA folks valuing autonomy per se, but also on their analysis of the centrality of the pending end of cheap energy and what that will do to our lives and our world. So lots of their suggestions have to do with the development of capacity that increases our scope for autonomy -- if not exactly extracting us from the web of dependency and control that characterizes industrialized societies, then at least putting us in a position to act with greater agency with respect to it.
Perhaps another way to say this is that it recognizes that one way in which we are kept pacified by ruling relations is through the many ways in which they remove, constrain, erase, and deaden our capacity to do, again both as individuals and as communities or other sorts of collectives. There are some aspects of that global denial of capacity to act autonomously that will only be regained through massive struggle. But there are other aspects, smaller but still very important aspects, that we can actually do something about here and now. Sometimes it's as simple as trying and doing -- I know that I wrestle all the time with barriers to acting in the world in ways that would make me more effective as an agent of change and that would result in a me more genuinely in tune with my own wants/needs/desires, and often those barriers have more to do with what's going on in my own head than anything external preventing me from acting. Sometimes it's a matter of investing effort in developing skills that will make us less dependent, more able to act. Sometimes it's a matter of creating simple, social infrastructure. In any case, as the block of text quoted above implies, the authors of this list recognize that one of the most important aspects in fostering radical, autonomous, political doing in search of liberation is the deceptively simple goal of fostering habits of doing, but doing that is decidedly not habitual.
I also enjoy the deliberately eclectic nature of the collection, though I suppose almost all could be categorized as either fairly conventional political action or as capacity and community building. Still, the attention the specifics show to actually considering where a fairly broad and diverse chunk of ordinary North Americans are at is a good lesson in what radical politics have to be, I think. Personally, I don't think I'm going to follow either of the suggestions related to firearms. I am also distressed to notice there are at least four that I have done in the past but no longer do (grow my own food, vermiculture, own/ride a bike, frequent a farm market/Community Shared Agriculture farm). I think I might think about going back to one or all of those, to the extent that I can. The ones related to organizing in a more conventional sense make me a bit sad because of the relative lack of opportunities to do such things in my current location. But the one on doing a communtiy access cable show, with community radio mentioned in the explanatory text, has given me a bit of a jolt -- since reading it, I've actually been giving some thought to the idea of getting back involved in community radio, and I have a disturbingly practical idea for a show I could do. And as for the idea of deliberately setting out to learn new, practical, fix-it and build-it skills on a set schedule...well, speaking as someone with almost no such skills to speak of, this suggestion is both profound and intimidating.
Anyway. I have said often before to friends and loved ones that I am almost always in a state of low-level existential crisis, and I have a feeling that at the moment I am in the early flutterings of what will end up being a fairly significant transitional period for me, so "What to do?" and its myriad possible answers are feeling very close to home. But I think part of the point of a list of this sort is that invites all of us to be critical of the ways we are complicit in our own barriers to doing, and to do something about that.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Sudbury Event: Repression and Revolt in Oaxaca
To learn more about the recent uprising and repression in Oaxaca, Mexico, please come to the following event in Sudbury on March 1:
If you need more information, let me know and I can put you in touch with the right people. If you are in Sudbury on March 1, please come to one of these events!
State Repression and Popular Revolt in Oaxaca, Mexico
On June 14th 2006 the Mexican National Guard attacked an encampment of striking teachers in Oaxaca City in southern Mexico During the eight hour onslaught the National Guard used tear gas spraying helicopters, and goon squads to attack unarmed teachers and supporters. This state attack produced a popular revolt sparking the formation of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) which included 350 social organizations and unions. APPO set about making this Mexican state 'ungovernable' in an unprecedented mass mobilization calling for the resignation of the corrupt Governor Ulises of the PRI Party and beginning to establish a new popular direct democracy across the state. Since then there has been a police and vigilante campaign against APPO leading to disappearances, assassinations, and the holding of APPO members as political prisoners. All of this occurs in the broader Mexican context of the Zapatista inspired Other Campaign, and the massive electoral fraud against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD party.
Speaker: Sherry Guppy is an activist and an artist. She lived in Oaxaca, Mexico from August 2004 until September 2006. She went to work in Oaxaca, Mexico to teach ESL. She arrived in Oaxaca days before the state election which resulted in the fraudulent victory of Governor Ulises; and she witnessed the first months of the popular uprising to oust Governor Ulises.
DVD: Never Forget: Oaxaca City University Students footage of the June 14th Attack.
Thursday, March 1st
*2:30 pm Room C-114 in the Classroom Building at Laurentian University.
*7:30 pm Fourth Floor Resource Area, St. Andrew's Place, 111 Larch Street, Downtown Sudbury.
Both locations are wheelchair accessible.
If you need more information, let me know and I can put you in touch with the right people. If you are in Sudbury on March 1, please come to one of these events!
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Review: Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean
[Brian Douglas Tennyson, editor. Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988.]
This book is a collection of essays previously published in academic journals, and according to the book's introduction it includes most of the work published to that time on Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean. The scant scholarly attention this area has received is attested to not only by this volume's modest size but by the fact that its introduction opens with a quote from and them proceeds to draw heavily on a non-academic book written more than a decade earlier (and recently reviewed by me).
I had expected this to be a rather boring read but was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the least interesting pieces in the collection were those that were most contemporary in their focus, while those that were more purely historical tended to tell more interesting tales.
One of the more interesting essays, for example, focused on the Canadian Presbyterian mission to the South Asian community in Trinidad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I actually found it kind of difficult to know what to make of the essay's tone -- it presents ample foundational information to construct a stinging indictment of colonial Christianity, yet it does not quite manage to do so in a direct way. It demonstrates that the success of the mission was in part due to its support by the Crown Colony government and the white planter class in Trinidad, support given because the mission provided benefits to them in return in terms of supporting rather nasty social relations from which they gained. Another factor to the advantage of the mission was summarized as "the achievements of contemporary white society", which seems to be a more academically acceptable way of talking about the impact that global white supremacy had on the choices and subjectivities of the colonized. In any case, it quite nicely demonstrates, perhaps without really intending to, the ways in which this exercise in Canadian so-called philanthropy fit in as one piece in the overall oppressive imperial/colonial project.
A number of essays touched on ongoing scheming for political union between Canada and some or all of the West Indies. This was raised as early as 1884 and I remember hearing something about it on the news (and being quite mystified by the whole thing) when I was a teenager, probably in the late 1980s or so. Most Canadian elites have always been ambivalent about this possibility, though early on the objections seemed to have been most strenuous from the British Colonial Office because of potential commercial impacts on the "mother country" and a bureaucratic investment in not surrendering their part of the "white man's burden". The closest it came to happening was in the late years of World War I, when Prime Minister Robert Borden was firmly convinced of the idea. Initially, though the Colonial Office continued to object, Prime Minister Lloyd George of Great Britain was favourable as were a few other powerful members of his Cabinet, but making it happen was never a priority for any of these imperialists, as busy as they were with imperialist war and its aftermath in Europe, and so momentum was lost. Canada also stationed troops in the Caribbean during both World Wars, ostensibly to guard against German attack but also to put down any uprising or agitation by disgruntled locals were it to occur, though this did not really arise in practice. By the end of World War II elements of the British government were asking Canada to keep its troops there and to assume "colonial responsibilities" for the West Indies, but at that point Canadian political elites had no interest whatsoever in taking on such a role.
A final essay of interest focused on immigration from the Caribbean to Canada in the early 20th century. It is a fine illustration of how selective enforcement, informal understandings, and straight-up deception can make race-neutral written rules work in racist ways. There was an order-in-coucil written and signed by the minister in 1914 but never put into effect that would have banned Black immigration. Despite this lack of formal textual authority, the Immigration Branch spent the next forty years doing whatever it could to keep African Caribbean people out of Canada. One common mechanism was by invoking a section of the regulations which allowed them to bar people that they judged might end up depending on public assistance of some kind -- the higher-ups in the department made it quite clear to the agents on the ground that all African Caribbean people were considered to meet this criterion. They also attempted to invoke the "continuous journey" clause that was used to keep immigrants from South Asia out of Canada, though this particular device did not hold up because of the much shorter distances involved. It is doubly fascinating to see that an element of this racist determination seemed to be a bureaucratic calcification of cultural prejudice that did not necessarily reflect immediate material interests of powerful people. For example, there were times when the coal mines in Cape Breton were short of workers and the mine owners wished to arrange for immigration from the West Indies, but they were denied permission. During World War I, there was even a nasty note from the Colonial Office, but to no effect. Throughout, the Immigration Branch continued to deny that this was its policy, but to nonetheless enforce it vigorously.
I doubt too many people will be interested in this book unless their work or some particular combination of personal experiences draws them to it. Nonetheless, it does have plenty of material that is interesting and useful to me, and helped shed light on a few more obscure corners of Canadian history.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
This book is a collection of essays previously published in academic journals, and according to the book's introduction it includes most of the work published to that time on Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean. The scant scholarly attention this area has received is attested to not only by this volume's modest size but by the fact that its introduction opens with a quote from and them proceeds to draw heavily on a non-academic book written more than a decade earlier (and recently reviewed by me).
I had expected this to be a rather boring read but was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the least interesting pieces in the collection were those that were most contemporary in their focus, while those that were more purely historical tended to tell more interesting tales.
One of the more interesting essays, for example, focused on the Canadian Presbyterian mission to the South Asian community in Trinidad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I actually found it kind of difficult to know what to make of the essay's tone -- it presents ample foundational information to construct a stinging indictment of colonial Christianity, yet it does not quite manage to do so in a direct way. It demonstrates that the success of the mission was in part due to its support by the Crown Colony government and the white planter class in Trinidad, support given because the mission provided benefits to them in return in terms of supporting rather nasty social relations from which they gained. Another factor to the advantage of the mission was summarized as "the achievements of contemporary white society", which seems to be a more academically acceptable way of talking about the impact that global white supremacy had on the choices and subjectivities of the colonized. In any case, it quite nicely demonstrates, perhaps without really intending to, the ways in which this exercise in Canadian so-called philanthropy fit in as one piece in the overall oppressive imperial/colonial project.
A number of essays touched on ongoing scheming for political union between Canada and some or all of the West Indies. This was raised as early as 1884 and I remember hearing something about it on the news (and being quite mystified by the whole thing) when I was a teenager, probably in the late 1980s or so. Most Canadian elites have always been ambivalent about this possibility, though early on the objections seemed to have been most strenuous from the British Colonial Office because of potential commercial impacts on the "mother country" and a bureaucratic investment in not surrendering their part of the "white man's burden". The closest it came to happening was in the late years of World War I, when Prime Minister Robert Borden was firmly convinced of the idea. Initially, though the Colonial Office continued to object, Prime Minister Lloyd George of Great Britain was favourable as were a few other powerful members of his Cabinet, but making it happen was never a priority for any of these imperialists, as busy as they were with imperialist war and its aftermath in Europe, and so momentum was lost. Canada also stationed troops in the Caribbean during both World Wars, ostensibly to guard against German attack but also to put down any uprising or agitation by disgruntled locals were it to occur, though this did not really arise in practice. By the end of World War II elements of the British government were asking Canada to keep its troops there and to assume "colonial responsibilities" for the West Indies, but at that point Canadian political elites had no interest whatsoever in taking on such a role.
A final essay of interest focused on immigration from the Caribbean to Canada in the early 20th century. It is a fine illustration of how selective enforcement, informal understandings, and straight-up deception can make race-neutral written rules work in racist ways. There was an order-in-coucil written and signed by the minister in 1914 but never put into effect that would have banned Black immigration. Despite this lack of formal textual authority, the Immigration Branch spent the next forty years doing whatever it could to keep African Caribbean people out of Canada. One common mechanism was by invoking a section of the regulations which allowed them to bar people that they judged might end up depending on public assistance of some kind -- the higher-ups in the department made it quite clear to the agents on the ground that all African Caribbean people were considered to meet this criterion. They also attempted to invoke the "continuous journey" clause that was used to keep immigrants from South Asia out of Canada, though this particular device did not hold up because of the much shorter distances involved. It is doubly fascinating to see that an element of this racist determination seemed to be a bureaucratic calcification of cultural prejudice that did not necessarily reflect immediate material interests of powerful people. For example, there were times when the coal mines in Cape Breton were short of workers and the mine owners wished to arrange for immigration from the West Indies, but they were denied permission. During World War I, there was even a nasty note from the Colonial Office, but to no effect. Throughout, the Immigration Branch continued to deny that this was its policy, but to nonetheless enforce it vigorously.
I doubt too many people will be interested in this book unless their work or some particular combination of personal experiences draws them to it. Nonetheless, it does have plenty of material that is interesting and useful to me, and helped shed light on a few more obscure corners of Canadian history.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Sudbury Police Violence Update
On this site, I have been periodically following developments in a local case in which two youth were subjected to police harassment and violence last summer and then charged with absurd things. It looks like those charges are about to be dropped. If you are in Sudbury on February 21st, please stop by the court house to help us make a strong final statement against police violence!
Here is the latest from Ander:
Here is the latest from Ander:
Hi Everyone.
After nine months of filling courtrooms, holding community
gatherings, handing out ‘know your rights’ pamphlets,
postering the city, holding rallies, snickering and
giggling inside courtrooms, doing media work, and lots of
personal support, it looks like the charges against Ander
and Shawn are going to be dropped on February 21 at 1:30
in courtroom B!
This is the result of huge amounts of work on the part of
S-CAP, communities and individual people mobilizing around
this case to denounce routine police violence and put
pressure on the courts to drop the charges.
I am asking that people come out and fill the courtroom
to the brim- wall to wall! After this, there is going to
be an S-CAP rally on the steps of the courthouse for a
media conference.
Being the final ‘episode’ in this particular (criminal)
court, it’s important that we make a strong last stand to
speak out against routine police violence and harassment
directed towards marginalized peoples.
Ander
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Urgent Action: Innocent Aboriginal Man Seeking Judicial Review for Wrongful Conviction
I would urge all readers to take a few minutes to engage in this action. If you are bloggers, it would be great if you could post this material on your own site or link to it. In many situations, writing letters is a sufficiently pointless exercise that I would not recommend wasting your energy on it, but in circumstances like that of John Moore's, showing the government that people around the country and even around the world are watching is one key way to ensure that justice might actually be done. I've gotten to know John a little bit in my time in Sudbury, because he has been involved in anti-poverty struggles and the group that I have been participating in has been involved in supporting his struggle for justice. He has lots of support locally, but we need to put some pressure on at the national level. I would encourage everyone to write a letter or two (or use the sample letter at the bottom of this post) in support of his request for a judicial review of his wrongful and racist conviction.
Please note, if you are a little uncomfortable with the idea of intervening in a case that you have only just heard of, that you are not asking for some sort of arbitrary overturning of the conviction, but rather that the federal government take action that is well within its power to ensure due process in the case by starting a judicial review.
Here is some background:
Here are a few politicians that you could send your letter to. The first one is probably the most important, so if you are only able to send one then send it to him. It would also be useful to send it to your own MP. If you are feeling really ambitious, why not CC: the national media?
And here is the sample letter:
Please write!
(Thanks to CF and GK for the background material and the sample letter.)
Please note, if you are a little uncomfortable with the idea of intervening in a case that you have only just heard of, that you are not asking for some sort of arbitrary overturning of the conviction, but rather that the federal government take action that is well within its power to ensure due process in the case by starting a judicial review.
Here is some background:
John Moore, an Ojibway man from Serpent River First Nation, spent 10 years (from 1978 to 1988) in Millhaven, for a murder he did not commit. John Moore is asking the Justice Department to review his unconstitutional 2nd degree murder conviction.
After being sentence in 1978, the law under which he was tried was repealed in 1987. “If he were to go to trial today on exactly the same facts and evidence, the murder charge would never get past the stage of a preliminary inquiry. He wouldn’t even have to stand on it today”, said lawyer Glenn Sandberg.
John Moore has petitioned the federal justice department several times to clear his name in the 1978 murder of a Sault Ste. Marie taxi cab driver (Regina versus Moore). Court records show Moore was not present at the crime scene, yet he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for second degree murder because, the Crown argued, he spoke to the two killers about the premeditated crime before it happened.
At the time of his conviction, Canadian law held that even though there was evidence to show Moore was not at the murder scene but in fact with other people, he could be found guilty of the crime because, on an objective standard, he ought to have known the crime could have happened.
Moore argues that his conviction was a case of guilt by association. Not only an association with the men who actually took a man’s life, but judicial prejudice that come with being a native man in a non-native justice system. “There is no doubt in my mind that I was convicted because of racism,” said Moore, who was tried by an all-white jury.
Although Moore has exhausted all his avenues of appeal, there is a section in the Criminal Code, which gives special powers to the Minister of Justice to order an appeal or a new trial in special circumstances.
Considering that several people convicted of murder were later found to be innocent - David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin - the justice department should review cases such as Moore’s.
Despite his release from prison, Moore stresses that punishment continues with the stigmatization of a conviction of murder charge. He continues to serve a sentence of life of parole reporting to officers on a monthly basis and asking permission to leave the city of Sudbury to return home.
While he was in jail, Moore also lost several important people in his life, including a son, his father, and grandmother. Further, he faces inability to find meaningful work due to his conviction.
Please write a letter of support (see sample below) for John Moore calling for a judicial review of his case leading to exoneration.
For more information or to support John directly, please contact:
John Moore, 3 Eyre Street, Sudbury, Ontario, P3C 4A2, 705.673.9576
Denis Michel, John Moore’s Lawyer, 36 Elgin Street, Sudbury,
Ontario, P3C 5B4, 705.674.1976
Here are a few politicians that you could send your letter to. The first one is probably the most important, so if you are only able to send one then send it to him. It would also be useful to send it to your own MP. If you are feeling really ambitious, why not CC: the national media?
The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, 239 Kent Street 306 Justice Building, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4621
Fax:613.990.7255
Email: webadmin(at)justice.gc.ca
The Honourable Mr.Jim Prentice, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4275
Fax: 613.947.9475
Email: infoPubs(at)ainc-inac.gc.ca
The Right Honourable, Mr. Stephen Joseph Harper, The Prime Minister of Canada, The House of Commons, Prime Minister’s Office, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4211
Fax: 613.941.6900
Email: pm(at)pm.gc.ca
Mrs. Diane Marleau, The House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 705.673.7107
Fax: 705.673.0944
Email: info(at)dianemarleau.com
Mr. Raymond Bonin, The House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 705.897.2222
Fax: 613.995.9100
Email: boninr(at)parl.gc.ca
And here is the sample letter:
(DATE)
Robert Douglas Nicholson
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
239 Kent Street, 306 Justice Building
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA, K1A 0A6
Dear Honourable Minister Nicholson,
Re: Judicial Review of John Moore’s Case
I am writing to ask for an immediate judicial review of John Moore’s 2nd degree murder case. John Moore is an Ojibway man from Serpent River First Nation who spent 10 years (from 1978 to 1988) in Millhaven Penitentiary for a murder he did not commit.
John Moore was convicted of 2nd degree murder in 1978 under a law which was later repealed in 1987. The same evidence for which he spent time in jail would no longer stand up in a court of law. Many also believe there is ample evidence to indicate that racial profiling was a key factor leading to his false conviction.
His wrongful conviction continues to follow him today as he reports to a parole office on a monthly basis and must be granted permission to leave the city of Sudbury. This is impeding his freedom of movement and capacity to find meaningful work.
Mr. Moore has repeatedly asked for a review of his case, but these requests have not been granted. I believe that you have a duty to grant a judicial review of Mr. Moore’s case, particularly considering that several people convicted of murder were later found to be innocent, including David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, and Guy Paul Morin.
Please uphold principles of justice and equality in our legal system, and promptly grant a review of John Moores’ case. I will continue to follow this issue with great interest and look forward to hearing of progress.
Sincerely,
(YOUR NAME HERE)
Please write!
(Thanks to CF and GK for the background material and the sample letter.)
Buffy the Anarcho Syndicalist
I am somewhat embarassed to admit that, in the past, I have occasionally been known to decompress by indulging in reading fanfiction -- that is, creative writing in which ordinary people seize characters, imagery, and narratives originating in mass-produced cultural "franchises" and use them for their own purposes. In principle, I see a productive tension there between the origins of the characters and stories in dominant media and the inevitable impact on storytelling possibilities that such a hegemony-infused inheritance will bring, on the one hand, with the potential for mass recognizeability and following to be used by ordinary people telling stories in subversive ways, on the other hand. In practice, it is often a bit disappointing because the vast majority of fanfiction is not only of dubious quality in terms of writing, it is also usually not subversive in the least, and the only consistently norm-challenging area that I've encountered (and, admittedly, I'm not claiming that my past explorations have been at all exhaustive) is around dissenting sexual and relationship practices and occasionally in limited ways around gender.
However, there do seem to be occasional exceptions. The good people at AK Press have published this delightfully silly-looking yet dominant-narrative-bending comic, which I have ordered but not yet received. Their web site describes it as follows:
However, there do seem to be occasional exceptions. The good people at AK Press have published this delightfully silly-looking yet dominant-narrative-bending comic, which I have ordered but not yet received. Their web site describes it as follows:
Buffy the Anarcho Syndicalist
A wonderful situ-inspired detourned comic, featuring our young anarcho-syndicalist hero; Giles, a hardened revolutionary who is one of Buffy's closest comrades; Carlos, an old wobbly who has't forgotten his passion for social justice; Jim Orwell, a black activist who has been stirring up trouble amongst Sunnydale's minority workforce, and Maria, the evil CEO of Blood Red Enterprises.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Review: The Caribbean Connection
[Robert Chodos. The Caribbean Connection. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1977.]
Canadian delusions of our country having a purely benign role in the world are incredibly difficult to dispel. As I have searched for a certain type of source in doing research to produce contextual material for my chapter focusing on a Trinidadian Canadian activist lawyer in Toronto, it has become clear to me that one of the reasons why it is difficult to dispel this myth of Canadian innocence, at least when it comes to the Caribbean, is that relatively little has actually been written on the subject.
Though this book is three decades old, it is a very effective introduction to some of the less positive roles that Canada has played with respect to the Caribbean. It contains lots of information to help me write the two or three related paragraphs that I need to write. Moreover, though it is not an easy book to find and has long been out of print, its age would not stop it from serving as a good introduction to the area for any early twenty-first century Canadians wishing to educate themselves on the subject. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this book being so old was that my copy is extremely fragile so I could not easily read it as one component of multi-tasking, as I so often do, and even so it literally fell apart as I read it.
(Before I go any farther in commenting on the book's content, I should probably issue a disclaimer: I have never met him myself, but the author lives in the same part of the country that I grew up in, and his wife is a good friend of my mother. Don't think that has affected my opinions any, but it's always best to be up front about such things!)
The book is written in a journalistic rather than an academic or otherwise excessively analytical style. Chodos has a good eye for detail and a good ear for anecdote, so the text moves along quite briskly, is filled with colourful characters, and is an easy and entertaining read. He begins with some general discussion of Caribbean history and politics, and then moves into an item-by-item consideration of Canadian involvement in the region. Much of that involvement (beyond the basics of being willing long-term participants in an imperial and colonial order run from London, largely to the benefit of white Canadians and the detriment of racialized Caribbean people) has been commercial in nature. At the time the book was written, three of the four largest banks in the Caribbean were Canadian banks. Canadian capital has also been involved in the bauxite extraction and aluminum production industry in the region and in tourism, as well as a number of smaller ventures. Canadians have also been religious missionaries and the Canadian state has been a source of aid for the region.
When presented unadorned, it would be easy for most Canadians to read the above list and consider themselves affirmed in their belief in Canada's positive role: It's all about investing in the region, helping it out, being supportive, that sort of thing, so what could be wrong? But in each case, though there are arguably positive impacts as well, Chodos explores the down side. The banks, for example, accepted deposits but did not provide loans in the region for many, many years, with the result that Caribbean money was loaned and invested elsewhere in the world. At the time the book was written they were giving loans, but mostly consumer loans to purchase imported goods rather than business or agriculture loans to stimulate local economic growth. In fact, that is one of the most consistent criticisms of all of the areas of Canadian economic investment in the Caribbean, from banking to tourism: It almost universally has supported a modern version of the traditional colonial relationship between metropole and periphery, with little support for independent economic development that might decrease dependency.
In the chapter on Canadian missionaries in the Caribbean -- and the Canadian Presbyterian mission, particularly in Guyana and Trinidad, was a powerful presence for decades -- Chodos quotes a passage from a novel by a Trinidadian who later lived in Toronto. In it, the author (Harold Sonny Ladoo) writes of hypotehtically turning the tables and setting up Hindu missionary schools in Canada. His stark descriptions of what they might be like are taken from his own experience of Canadian Presbyterian missionary schools growing up, and they sound eerily like things I have read about the hated residential schools to which indigenous peoples in Canada were subjected between 1898 and the 1980s.
Even Canadian aid programs to the region seem to have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, at least when this book was written, the Caribbean continued to be a region of particular focus for Canadian government aid programs. From Chodos' descriptions, the Canadian aid programs do not seem to have been quite as deliberately nefarious as those of certain other industrialized states, but they have still usually come attached to all sorts of conditions and provisos that end up benefiting Canadian capital more than Caribbean people, or that are clearly about pushing North American ways of doing things onto other cultures.
Perhaps the most interesting part of reading this book was being immersed in its tone. It was a much different era. The global reaction later labelled "neoliberalism" had begun, but it seems clear from this book that the left was not yet aware of it. The efforts of Caribbean nations to foster national self-sufficiency and gain control of their economies by one means or another are presented as facing all sorts of obstacles but as making progress and as being fundamentally possible. This was still an era of nationalizations and capital export restrictions and import substitution and commodity producer cartels. It was a time of much greater optimism than the present.
For most people, this is not a book you are going to encounter without exerting some effort to find it. However, along with being interesting and entertaining in its own right, it appears to be a rare place to learn about one particular aspect of Canada's less than savoury participation in global social relations. If that is something you wish to learn about, perhaps it might be worth searching through used book stores or getting the gears of interlibrary loan churning to get your hands on this book.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Canadian delusions of our country having a purely benign role in the world are incredibly difficult to dispel. As I have searched for a certain type of source in doing research to produce contextual material for my chapter focusing on a Trinidadian Canadian activist lawyer in Toronto, it has become clear to me that one of the reasons why it is difficult to dispel this myth of Canadian innocence, at least when it comes to the Caribbean, is that relatively little has actually been written on the subject.
Though this book is three decades old, it is a very effective introduction to some of the less positive roles that Canada has played with respect to the Caribbean. It contains lots of information to help me write the two or three related paragraphs that I need to write. Moreover, though it is not an easy book to find and has long been out of print, its age would not stop it from serving as a good introduction to the area for any early twenty-first century Canadians wishing to educate themselves on the subject. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this book being so old was that my copy is extremely fragile so I could not easily read it as one component of multi-tasking, as I so often do, and even so it literally fell apart as I read it.
(Before I go any farther in commenting on the book's content, I should probably issue a disclaimer: I have never met him myself, but the author lives in the same part of the country that I grew up in, and his wife is a good friend of my mother. Don't think that has affected my opinions any, but it's always best to be up front about such things!)
The book is written in a journalistic rather than an academic or otherwise excessively analytical style. Chodos has a good eye for detail and a good ear for anecdote, so the text moves along quite briskly, is filled with colourful characters, and is an easy and entertaining read. He begins with some general discussion of Caribbean history and politics, and then moves into an item-by-item consideration of Canadian involvement in the region. Much of that involvement (beyond the basics of being willing long-term participants in an imperial and colonial order run from London, largely to the benefit of white Canadians and the detriment of racialized Caribbean people) has been commercial in nature. At the time the book was written, three of the four largest banks in the Caribbean were Canadian banks. Canadian capital has also been involved in the bauxite extraction and aluminum production industry in the region and in tourism, as well as a number of smaller ventures. Canadians have also been religious missionaries and the Canadian state has been a source of aid for the region.
When presented unadorned, it would be easy for most Canadians to read the above list and consider themselves affirmed in their belief in Canada's positive role: It's all about investing in the region, helping it out, being supportive, that sort of thing, so what could be wrong? But in each case, though there are arguably positive impacts as well, Chodos explores the down side. The banks, for example, accepted deposits but did not provide loans in the region for many, many years, with the result that Caribbean money was loaned and invested elsewhere in the world. At the time the book was written they were giving loans, but mostly consumer loans to purchase imported goods rather than business or agriculture loans to stimulate local economic growth. In fact, that is one of the most consistent criticisms of all of the areas of Canadian economic investment in the Caribbean, from banking to tourism: It almost universally has supported a modern version of the traditional colonial relationship between metropole and periphery, with little support for independent economic development that might decrease dependency.
In the chapter on Canadian missionaries in the Caribbean -- and the Canadian Presbyterian mission, particularly in Guyana and Trinidad, was a powerful presence for decades -- Chodos quotes a passage from a novel by a Trinidadian who later lived in Toronto. In it, the author (Harold Sonny Ladoo) writes of hypotehtically turning the tables and setting up Hindu missionary schools in Canada. His stark descriptions of what they might be like are taken from his own experience of Canadian Presbyterian missionary schools growing up, and they sound eerily like things I have read about the hated residential schools to which indigenous peoples in Canada were subjected between 1898 and the 1980s.
Even Canadian aid programs to the region seem to have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, at least when this book was written, the Caribbean continued to be a region of particular focus for Canadian government aid programs. From Chodos' descriptions, the Canadian aid programs do not seem to have been quite as deliberately nefarious as those of certain other industrialized states, but they have still usually come attached to all sorts of conditions and provisos that end up benefiting Canadian capital more than Caribbean people, or that are clearly about pushing North American ways of doing things onto other cultures.
Perhaps the most interesting part of reading this book was being immersed in its tone. It was a much different era. The global reaction later labelled "neoliberalism" had begun, but it seems clear from this book that the left was not yet aware of it. The efforts of Caribbean nations to foster national self-sufficiency and gain control of their economies by one means or another are presented as facing all sorts of obstacles but as making progress and as being fundamentally possible. This was still an era of nationalizations and capital export restrictions and import substitution and commodity producer cartels. It was a time of much greater optimism than the present.
For most people, this is not a book you are going to encounter without exerting some effort to find it. However, along with being interesting and entertaining in its own right, it appears to be a rare place to learn about one particular aspect of Canada's less than savoury participation in global social relations. If that is something you wish to learn about, perhaps it might be worth searching through used book stores or getting the gears of interlibrary loan churning to get your hands on this book.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Sunday, February 11, 2007
"Hannibal Rising"
[BEWARE! SPOILERS BELOW FOR "HANNIBAL RISING"!]
Evil has always been one of the most powerful of explanations that does not explain. It captivates our attention, taps into the stories of sin and saints and devils that still lie deep beneath our culture, and distracts us from causality. In the simplicity of its "just because" handwaving, of the mystical, inalterable essence it assumes, evil as explanation enchants us away from the messy job of linking a horrific present to a very real past. The confusing tangle of "she did", "I did", "they did", and "we did" is so easily swept away by a boldly proclaimed "He is!" or "They are!"
On a superficial level, "Hannibal Rising" attempts to go beyond this. The adaptation of Thomas Harris' latest Hannibal Lecter book, it takes one of the most chilling fictional murderers of recent decades and refuses to be satisfied that he does what he does simply because of what he is, insisting that he must have come from somewhere. Yet it does not even come close to escaping the notion that evil is its own explanation and this results in a far less compelling film than the original "Silence of the Lambs".
Though there is also something ridiculous about it, in terms of the psychological impact it would have had, the original trauma proposed as the source of Lecter's monstrousness is plausible enough. He is a seven or eight year-old boy at the beginning of the film, scion to an aristocratic Lithuanian family. It is 1944 and the Red Army is on the verge of pushing the Nazi Wehrmacht out of Lithuania. The front is about to pass over his family's lands, so they retreat from their castle to a small lodge in the woods. Random war violence kills his parents. A band of local men who had been collaborating in genocide with the SS comes across him and his four year-old sister in the lodge, where they are all promptly stranded by war danger and weather. There is no food. So, of course, the Lituanian quislings kill and eat his sister. We next see him as a teen, nightmare-stricken and mute, in the "people's orphanage" that has been made of his family's castle, and soon after he escapes to Paris, finds his rich uncle's widow, and eventually goes to medical school and wreaks bloody vengeance on the men who ate his sister.
Okay. Sure. That'd mess a person up.
Unfortunately, in its exploration of the origins of evil, the film does not get beyond the rather banal idea that trauma is traumatizing -- that horrifically traumatizing circumstances will lead to horrifically traumatized individuals, some of whom will respond to their trauma by doing messed up things (albeit relatively few to anything approaching the spectacular excess exhibited by Lecter across his career). Rather than say anything interesting or subversive, the film taps into some already existing and quite pat narratives about evil and instead of playing with them or even challenging them, it just does its best to harness them for maximum dramatic effect and gore value.
The first warning bell was the World War II setting. Even six decades later, the narrative of the "good war" is, in North America at least, one of the most easily mobilized and hard to counter public mythologies that divides the world cleanly into essential good and essential evil. The wealth of scholarship showing this clear division to be utter hogwash has done little to change the fact that a core component of any effort today to publically demonize the official enemy of the moment still involves heavy-handed use of WWII-based imagery, from comparisons to Hitler to invokation of words like "axis". Basing an exploration of the origins of evil in this millieu is indicative of something of a lack of imagination and hints, even before any other evidence is presented, at a lack of much interesting to say.
The lack of imagination goes from scent on the wind to unpalatable reek when it turns out that the film is largely populated by cartoon Nazis. I am perhaps being unfair, but the one actual SS officer that appears briefly in the film was sufficiently caricature-like that he made me think of Herr Flick from the British sitcom "'Allo, 'Allo". The Lithuanian fascist collaborators could have been taken straight out of some 1950s U.S. comic book they were so one-dimensional. Though I doubt many comics in that era had even their villains eating small children, but you get my meaning.
And so, everything is explained: Hannibal is evil because of what these cartoon Nazis did to him. They are evil because -- well, because they are cartoon Nazis, who are evil by definition. Quod erat demonstrandum. It is a rather short trip to go from the destabilizing place of actually seeking explanations and back to the safe ground of "They are!", isn't it?
Part of why this very flat portrayal of evil is so disappointing cinematically and not just intellectually is that you cannot watch the film without thinking aboput Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of the much older Hannibal Lecter at the other end of his cannibalistic career (and however uneven the quality of the films made after "Silence of the Lambs", he is always a powerful presence). I suspect there is something uncool, some sort of desensitization to violence and internalization of the objectification of human beings, implicit in any fascination with a monster like Hopkins' Lecter, but I confess to finding him very compelling. A part of that for me is his ability to see inside those around him with uncanny accuracy -- something that has always drawn me to fictional characters, from Lecter to Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe" and beyond. But it is also the overall package, the striking combination of aristocratic cultural refinement with inhuman violence, of powerful perception with absence of empathy, of over-the-top evilness with the sense of three-dimensionality that Hopkins' considerable talents bring to the part. It is this sense of three-dimensionality that is absent from the most recent film. It is perhaps understandable that Gaspard Ulliel's portrayal of the young Lecter not only couldn't combine those elements as Hopkins does -- he's alright, but his capabilities are not in the same league -- but that it shouldn't. After all, we are looking to learn where the mature Lecter came from, so he should not already exist fully formed. However, I think there could have been greater skill employed (and I blame the screenwriting more than the acting for this) in showing these things in embryonic form, but things like his exquisite manners, his distinctive affect, and hints of his future ability to read Clarice Starling at a glance are dropped in rather clumsily. For all that this exercise is about providing Lector with more depth by giving him a history, he does not actually come across with nearly the same complexity as his future self -- he is not a complete cut-out, but he is still quite flat. And the evil that made him evil, the cartoon Nazis, seems even more ridiculous than they otherwise would because they exist in the shadow of the older Lecter of the other films.
Another disappointing element in the portrayal of Lecter's path to evil, and another demonstration of a lack of anything resembling a critical imagination, was deliberate exploitation of racialized/racist narratives already existing in the audience's imagination to give a dramatic boost to the story. Lecter's rich aunt-by-marriage is a Japanese woman, Lady Murasaka Shikibu, played by Li Gong. I was actually on a trip to the bathroom when the character was introduced so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out who she was when I resumed my seat. At first, I was pleasantly surprised -- there have been small numbers of people of colour in the West for centuries even though they are not allowed any space in the popular projections of European and North American history (other than slaves) until the 1960s or so, so the choice to have a main character in 1950s Europe played by a woman of colour is plausible and, though hardly revolutionary, still unHollywood-like, unconventional and mildly positive when a white actor could fill the part just as well.
Except, of course, a couple of minutes further along it became clear that his aunt was Asian not incidentally but to give the story access by the presence of her body to certain racialized/racist narratives in the European and EuroAmerican cultural repertoire associated with Asian-ness. Her "otherness" and her "exoticness" as constructed in the white imagination could then be deliberately used to add particular kinds of intensity and "flavour" to Hannibal's story. For example, soon after he moves in with her, he comes upon her as she prays at a shrine to her ancestors somewhere in the bowels of her palatial home. I have no idea how accurate the shrine and her relation to it may or may not be, culturally speaking, but that is really of secondary concern. What matters is its deliberate use to create a sense of "different", of "other", of "not normal, not right." This was helpfully illustrated by the two older white people sitting behind me, one of whom commented a few seconds into the shrine's first appearance, "She's a devil worshipper!" Hannibal develops a connection to the shrine. It inclues some antique samurai armour and blades, and in one shot he tries on a mask-like piece of the armour that foreshadows the hospital restraints worn by the older Lecter in other movies, and he uses the blades in his killing. The shrine is clearly an important part of his journey away from "normal" and towards monstrosity. And to take all of this deliberate and mercenary deployment of Orientalist imagery from the gross to the ridiculous, they actually have a short series of shots implying that Lady Murasaka taught martial arts to Lecter. Not only is this the tired old Orientalist bit in which the "wise Asian" grants the "secrets of the East" to the worthy or beloved white man, but it also strikes me as laughably unrealistic. My knowledge of Japanese culture and history is pretty shallow, but was it really a natural and unremarkable thing for an upper-class Japanese woman born in the 1920s (more or less) to have warrior training, or are we just supposed to go along with this without question because, y'know, she's Asian and all, so of course she knows kung fu?
On the other hand, given the fact that most of the rest of the screen time belongs to Lecter himself, to the cartoon Nazis, and to a Nazi-hunting French police inspector who was scarcely less cartoony than his prey, Lady Murasaka was presented as the most humanized major character in the film, except perhaps child-Lecter and his pre-consumption sister in the first few scenes. In a dominant media environment where the bodies of racialized women tend to be presented most often as objects when they aren't ignored completely, this is a positive thing, I suppose.
The climax of the film seems to confirm the rejection of explanation and the embrace of evil as essence rather than consequence. Just as Lecter is about to kill the chief of the cartoon Nazis that dined on his sister, said fascist thug shares the tidbit that Lecter too gained sustenance from her flesh in the form of broth fed him while semi-conscious and delirious. It is this unsettling news that forces him to complete his journey of transition from child traumatized by war to man ready for decades of remorseless cannibalism. Obviously you can read this as further trauma completing the damage, but it is also a metaphor of essential taint ingested and incorporated. This piece of news transforms his activities from vengeance (which tends to be understood much more sympathetically in Hollywood-land than in the real world even when it is taken to extremes, and is therefore treated as human) to pathology.
Therefore: He is. The others who made him did not so much create him as infect him. Evil is incomprehensible and divorced from history, the film tells us, and any attempt to look at history to understand evil is doomed sooner or later to run aground upon the rocks of Satan's presence, the horrid Other who cannot be explained but must simply be feared and fought at all costs, so we might as well not bother asking "why". Moreover, we see this essential evil in the film, we see its symbolic markers of excess and depravity, and we know that it is not us, therefore we must be good and any who accuse us of anything that might be remotely considered evil are themselves alien and other and need not be listened to. We are titilated while at the same time reassured that hard questions serve no purpose.
Yet I cannot keep my mind from returning to the widespread fascination with the older Lecter, Hopkins' Lecter. He is, really, us, or an ideal of us. He is highly capable, cultured, brilliant, and aristocratically polite -- most of us who are somewhat privileged but are not all of those things have been trained, deep down even if we disdain them on the surface, to see them as markers of real worth, of importance, of all the things we are supposed to desire in life. What makes him fascinating is not that his killing makes him different and inhuman. Not at all. Because I think on some level, most of us in North America recognize that our comfort is built in very direct ways on suffering -- we are too squeamish to eat anyone's tongue ourselves, but the social relations that make us who we are require, at a nice deniable distance from us, a steady supply of bodies. Our designer couches are drenched in blood and our wealth rests upon stacks of corpses. What is fascinating about Lecter is that he has found a way around the repression and denial (the tools most privileged North Americans use most of the time to deal with this discomfiting knowledge) and the paralyzing guilt (a supplementary tool for liberals who still don't actually want to deal with the reality when forced for a brief time out of denial) and is so comfortable that his pleasures are based on the suffering and deaths of others that he can just get on with life, and still have all of those qualities that we have been trained to admire. He is the perfect man of privilege. He is fascinating because he has solved a dilemma that lurks deep in the privileged North American unconscious, yet he has done so in a way that stories about him not only do not challenge the collective denial of the viewer, they help reinforce it -- evil is essence, we are told, and we are not cartoon Nazis. Therefore, we must be essentially Good. Therefore, we must continue to fear the Other, while avoiding any examination of our own roles in the world.
He is. We are. They are.
[BEWARE! SPOILERS ABOVE FOR "HANNIBAL RISING"!]
Evil has always been one of the most powerful of explanations that does not explain. It captivates our attention, taps into the stories of sin and saints and devils that still lie deep beneath our culture, and distracts us from causality. In the simplicity of its "just because" handwaving, of the mystical, inalterable essence it assumes, evil as explanation enchants us away from the messy job of linking a horrific present to a very real past. The confusing tangle of "she did", "I did", "they did", and "we did" is so easily swept away by a boldly proclaimed "He is!" or "They are!"
On a superficial level, "Hannibal Rising" attempts to go beyond this. The adaptation of Thomas Harris' latest Hannibal Lecter book, it takes one of the most chilling fictional murderers of recent decades and refuses to be satisfied that he does what he does simply because of what he is, insisting that he must have come from somewhere. Yet it does not even come close to escaping the notion that evil is its own explanation and this results in a far less compelling film than the original "Silence of the Lambs".
Though there is also something ridiculous about it, in terms of the psychological impact it would have had, the original trauma proposed as the source of Lecter's monstrousness is plausible enough. He is a seven or eight year-old boy at the beginning of the film, scion to an aristocratic Lithuanian family. It is 1944 and the Red Army is on the verge of pushing the Nazi Wehrmacht out of Lithuania. The front is about to pass over his family's lands, so they retreat from their castle to a small lodge in the woods. Random war violence kills his parents. A band of local men who had been collaborating in genocide with the SS comes across him and his four year-old sister in the lodge, where they are all promptly stranded by war danger and weather. There is no food. So, of course, the Lituanian quislings kill and eat his sister. We next see him as a teen, nightmare-stricken and mute, in the "people's orphanage" that has been made of his family's castle, and soon after he escapes to Paris, finds his rich uncle's widow, and eventually goes to medical school and wreaks bloody vengeance on the men who ate his sister.
Okay. Sure. That'd mess a person up.
Unfortunately, in its exploration of the origins of evil, the film does not get beyond the rather banal idea that trauma is traumatizing -- that horrifically traumatizing circumstances will lead to horrifically traumatized individuals, some of whom will respond to their trauma by doing messed up things (albeit relatively few to anything approaching the spectacular excess exhibited by Lecter across his career). Rather than say anything interesting or subversive, the film taps into some already existing and quite pat narratives about evil and instead of playing with them or even challenging them, it just does its best to harness them for maximum dramatic effect and gore value.
The first warning bell was the World War II setting. Even six decades later, the narrative of the "good war" is, in North America at least, one of the most easily mobilized and hard to counter public mythologies that divides the world cleanly into essential good and essential evil. The wealth of scholarship showing this clear division to be utter hogwash has done little to change the fact that a core component of any effort today to publically demonize the official enemy of the moment still involves heavy-handed use of WWII-based imagery, from comparisons to Hitler to invokation of words like "axis". Basing an exploration of the origins of evil in this millieu is indicative of something of a lack of imagination and hints, even before any other evidence is presented, at a lack of much interesting to say.
The lack of imagination goes from scent on the wind to unpalatable reek when it turns out that the film is largely populated by cartoon Nazis. I am perhaps being unfair, but the one actual SS officer that appears briefly in the film was sufficiently caricature-like that he made me think of Herr Flick from the British sitcom "'Allo, 'Allo". The Lithuanian fascist collaborators could have been taken straight out of some 1950s U.S. comic book they were so one-dimensional. Though I doubt many comics in that era had even their villains eating small children, but you get my meaning.
And so, everything is explained: Hannibal is evil because of what these cartoon Nazis did to him. They are evil because -- well, because they are cartoon Nazis, who are evil by definition. Quod erat demonstrandum. It is a rather short trip to go from the destabilizing place of actually seeking explanations and back to the safe ground of "They are!", isn't it?
Part of why this very flat portrayal of evil is so disappointing cinematically and not just intellectually is that you cannot watch the film without thinking aboput Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of the much older Hannibal Lecter at the other end of his cannibalistic career (and however uneven the quality of the films made after "Silence of the Lambs", he is always a powerful presence). I suspect there is something uncool, some sort of desensitization to violence and internalization of the objectification of human beings, implicit in any fascination with a monster like Hopkins' Lecter, but I confess to finding him very compelling. A part of that for me is his ability to see inside those around him with uncanny accuracy -- something that has always drawn me to fictional characters, from Lecter to Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe" and beyond. But it is also the overall package, the striking combination of aristocratic cultural refinement with inhuman violence, of powerful perception with absence of empathy, of over-the-top evilness with the sense of three-dimensionality that Hopkins' considerable talents bring to the part. It is this sense of three-dimensionality that is absent from the most recent film. It is perhaps understandable that Gaspard Ulliel's portrayal of the young Lecter not only couldn't combine those elements as Hopkins does -- he's alright, but his capabilities are not in the same league -- but that it shouldn't. After all, we are looking to learn where the mature Lecter came from, so he should not already exist fully formed. However, I think there could have been greater skill employed (and I blame the screenwriting more than the acting for this) in showing these things in embryonic form, but things like his exquisite manners, his distinctive affect, and hints of his future ability to read Clarice Starling at a glance are dropped in rather clumsily. For all that this exercise is about providing Lector with more depth by giving him a history, he does not actually come across with nearly the same complexity as his future self -- he is not a complete cut-out, but he is still quite flat. And the evil that made him evil, the cartoon Nazis, seems even more ridiculous than they otherwise would because they exist in the shadow of the older Lecter of the other films.
Another disappointing element in the portrayal of Lecter's path to evil, and another demonstration of a lack of anything resembling a critical imagination, was deliberate exploitation of racialized/racist narratives already existing in the audience's imagination to give a dramatic boost to the story. Lecter's rich aunt-by-marriage is a Japanese woman, Lady Murasaka Shikibu, played by Li Gong. I was actually on a trip to the bathroom when the character was introduced so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out who she was when I resumed my seat. At first, I was pleasantly surprised -- there have been small numbers of people of colour in the West for centuries even though they are not allowed any space in the popular projections of European and North American history (other than slaves) until the 1960s or so, so the choice to have a main character in 1950s Europe played by a woman of colour is plausible and, though hardly revolutionary, still unHollywood-like, unconventional and mildly positive when a white actor could fill the part just as well.
Except, of course, a couple of minutes further along it became clear that his aunt was Asian not incidentally but to give the story access by the presence of her body to certain racialized/racist narratives in the European and EuroAmerican cultural repertoire associated with Asian-ness. Her "otherness" and her "exoticness" as constructed in the white imagination could then be deliberately used to add particular kinds of intensity and "flavour" to Hannibal's story. For example, soon after he moves in with her, he comes upon her as she prays at a shrine to her ancestors somewhere in the bowels of her palatial home. I have no idea how accurate the shrine and her relation to it may or may not be, culturally speaking, but that is really of secondary concern. What matters is its deliberate use to create a sense of "different", of "other", of "not normal, not right." This was helpfully illustrated by the two older white people sitting behind me, one of whom commented a few seconds into the shrine's first appearance, "She's a devil worshipper!" Hannibal develops a connection to the shrine. It inclues some antique samurai armour and blades, and in one shot he tries on a mask-like piece of the armour that foreshadows the hospital restraints worn by the older Lecter in other movies, and he uses the blades in his killing. The shrine is clearly an important part of his journey away from "normal" and towards monstrosity. And to take all of this deliberate and mercenary deployment of Orientalist imagery from the gross to the ridiculous, they actually have a short series of shots implying that Lady Murasaka taught martial arts to Lecter. Not only is this the tired old Orientalist bit in which the "wise Asian" grants the "secrets of the East" to the worthy or beloved white man, but it also strikes me as laughably unrealistic. My knowledge of Japanese culture and history is pretty shallow, but was it really a natural and unremarkable thing for an upper-class Japanese woman born in the 1920s (more or less) to have warrior training, or are we just supposed to go along with this without question because, y'know, she's Asian and all, so of course she knows kung fu?
On the other hand, given the fact that most of the rest of the screen time belongs to Lecter himself, to the cartoon Nazis, and to a Nazi-hunting French police inspector who was scarcely less cartoony than his prey, Lady Murasaka was presented as the most humanized major character in the film, except perhaps child-Lecter and his pre-consumption sister in the first few scenes. In a dominant media environment where the bodies of racialized women tend to be presented most often as objects when they aren't ignored completely, this is a positive thing, I suppose.
The climax of the film seems to confirm the rejection of explanation and the embrace of evil as essence rather than consequence. Just as Lecter is about to kill the chief of the cartoon Nazis that dined on his sister, said fascist thug shares the tidbit that Lecter too gained sustenance from her flesh in the form of broth fed him while semi-conscious and delirious. It is this unsettling news that forces him to complete his journey of transition from child traumatized by war to man ready for decades of remorseless cannibalism. Obviously you can read this as further trauma completing the damage, but it is also a metaphor of essential taint ingested and incorporated. This piece of news transforms his activities from vengeance (which tends to be understood much more sympathetically in Hollywood-land than in the real world even when it is taken to extremes, and is therefore treated as human) to pathology.
Therefore: He is. The others who made him did not so much create him as infect him. Evil is incomprehensible and divorced from history, the film tells us, and any attempt to look at history to understand evil is doomed sooner or later to run aground upon the rocks of Satan's presence, the horrid Other who cannot be explained but must simply be feared and fought at all costs, so we might as well not bother asking "why". Moreover, we see this essential evil in the film, we see its symbolic markers of excess and depravity, and we know that it is not us, therefore we must be good and any who accuse us of anything that might be remotely considered evil are themselves alien and other and need not be listened to. We are titilated while at the same time reassured that hard questions serve no purpose.
Yet I cannot keep my mind from returning to the widespread fascination with the older Lecter, Hopkins' Lecter. He is, really, us, or an ideal of us. He is highly capable, cultured, brilliant, and aristocratically polite -- most of us who are somewhat privileged but are not all of those things have been trained, deep down even if we disdain them on the surface, to see them as markers of real worth, of importance, of all the things we are supposed to desire in life. What makes him fascinating is not that his killing makes him different and inhuman. Not at all. Because I think on some level, most of us in North America recognize that our comfort is built in very direct ways on suffering -- we are too squeamish to eat anyone's tongue ourselves, but the social relations that make us who we are require, at a nice deniable distance from us, a steady supply of bodies. Our designer couches are drenched in blood and our wealth rests upon stacks of corpses. What is fascinating about Lecter is that he has found a way around the repression and denial (the tools most privileged North Americans use most of the time to deal with this discomfiting knowledge) and the paralyzing guilt (a supplementary tool for liberals who still don't actually want to deal with the reality when forced for a brief time out of denial) and is so comfortable that his pleasures are based on the suffering and deaths of others that he can just get on with life, and still have all of those qualities that we have been trained to admire. He is the perfect man of privilege. He is fascinating because he has solved a dilemma that lurks deep in the privileged North American unconscious, yet he has done so in a way that stories about him not only do not challenge the collective denial of the viewer, they help reinforce it -- evil is essence, we are told, and we are not cartoon Nazis. Therefore, we must be essentially Good. Therefore, we must continue to fear the Other, while avoiding any examination of our own roles in the world.
He is. We are. They are.
[BEWARE! SPOILERS ABOVE FOR "HANNIBAL RISING"!]
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Quote: Canadian Imperialism
In fact, it is arguable that, far from being in contradiction, the domination of Canada by foreign interests and Canada's own activities abroad are the two sides of the same coin. For as Draimin and Swift suggest, imperialism is a complex system and Canada's position in it is itself complex. To the extent that Canada is an imperial power, it is so only within this wider imperial system, in which certain activities are allocated to it. And to the extent that it is a colony it is a privileged one, which gets to share in the fruits of its colonizers' adventures in less fortunate countries.
-- Robert Chodos (written in 1977)
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Review: Racial Profiling in Canada
[Carol Tator and Frances Henry. Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of 'A Few Bad Apples'. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.]
I had read about racial profiling before, but the first time I was really made aware of it in a personal way was while on a whitewater rafting trip at a fairly cushy, decidedly not-wild portion of the Ottawa River. We were a large group of mostly young people who were either part of the same workplace or had friends in that workplace, so some people knew each other well and others not at all. One evening, in amongst various sorts of partying-related activities, about ten from this larger group were sitting around a camp fire, talking -- eight young white women and men, and two young Black men.
The conversation turned to past interactions with the police. Can you guess who were the only two people to have ever experienced unsolicited harassment of one sort or another from the cops? Yes, of course you can. A number of those of us socialized into whiteness had encountered not-so-nice things with the cops, of course, but without fail that was in situations in which our actions could easily have been predicted to attract negative police attention, whether that was engaging in particular kinds of political action, doing dumb stuff while underage, or whatever. Neither of the young racialized men had ever had that sort of interaction with the cops but both had been targeted for spontaneous harassment because of their skin colour. One talked about a classic "driving while Black" situation -- he was in his late teens at the time, driving his mother's car in the mostly white middle-class neighbourhood in which they lived, and got pulled over and given an extremely rough time for no other apparent reason than he was a Black youth driving a nice car in a white neighbourhood. The other related an incident that was more of a "meeting the description" kind of scenario, in which he was just hanging out in a park in Toronto with some friends and out of nowhere this cop appeared and tackled him. Apparently, the cop had been running after a fleeing suspect who had a good head start, saw dark skin, and decided that was reason enough to bring the owner of that skin down and then into the station.
Now, lots of people -- lots of white people, that is -- will claim that this is a statistical anomaly and that it proves nothing, that white people have unsolicited problems with the cops too. On a certain level, of course that's true. I have posted items from time to time on this site related to a case of police violence here in Sudbury against two youth, one of whom is racialized (he's Metis) and the other white, where the visibility that resulted in targeting appeared to be (based on things overheard at the scene) the incorrect assumption by the police that they were homeless and therefore easy prey. But that does not take away from the fact that the evidence that racialized people, particularly those racialized as Black and Aboriginal, disproportionately experience profiling and targeting is overwhelming (unless you take refuge in denial). This book does not take its primary project to be convincing resistant white people that racial profiling happens. Nonetheless, the fact that every Black person who participated in qualitative research for this book, and everyone that participated in qualitative research for the book I reviewed recently, had had similar experiences should be extremely compelling evidence. How they labelled their experiences, how they contextualized them, and what they thought should happen to change things varied from individual to indvidiual, but every single one had experienced such negative police attention -- including, in their off-duty hours, those few African Canadians who were officers in the Toronto Police Service.
This book traces its origins to a series of articles that appeared in the Toronto Star starting in late 2002. The Star, Canada's highest circulation daily newspaper, had obtained a massive police data base detailing 480,000 incidents and nearly 800,000 charges laid over six year. They analyzed the contents of this database in consultation with a statistician from York University and demonstrated
This series sparked both intense negative reaction from powerful elites in the police, government, and the media, as well as a flurry of activity from the affected communities and human rights bodies. This book is an academic treatment of the issue, and a very effective one, for the most part.
It begins by outlining the four theoretical perspectives which inform its analysis: Whiteness studies, Blackness studies, danger and racialization theory, and discursive analysis. It emphasizes that racial profiling is not just something done by the police but by all dominant institutions in Canada, though the police/judicial manifestations are of particular interest to the authors. In fact, a broad understanding of the kind of ubiquitous monitoring and responding in racialized ways that are at the heart of racial profiling allows them to be seen as fundamental to overall processes of racialization, i.e. the social processes whereby social relations that empower white people and oppress the people who are racialized (that is, social relations of white supremacy) are created and maintained.
Contributing author Charles Smith then compares statistics and histories of racial profiling in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He finds some specificities, of course, but also great similarities across the three societies.
Then comes a fascinating chapter on the culture of policing. It has, in fact, been a heavily studied phenomenon -- more so in the U.S. and U.K., but with Canadian studies showing that things are much the same here. I quote at length from the chapter's conclusion:
Much of the rest of the book is devoted to discourse analysis. This includes a chapter defending the choice to use this approach, one looking at the discourse produced by elites in the aftermath of the Star series, and one looking at discourses emanating from racialized communities themselves, in particular African Canadian communities in Toronto. Overall, I think, this was a useful approach, though I have some reservations I discuss below. Certainly the careful dissection of elite discourse at the time was both damning and illustrative of some of the ways that white supremacy is put together, at least at the level of discousrse. Some of the gems from crypto-fascists Craig Bromell, the head of the police union at the time, and Julian Fantino, the chief of police (who cut his teeth oppressing gay men as the chief in London, Ontario) were enough to make me want to throw the book across the room. The discourse from the community, mostly amassed through qualitative research by contributing author Maureen Brown, is even more powerful. It's hard to even imagine someone being able to find a way to respond to such overwhelming shared experience by African Canadians in Toronto in a way that manages to claim there is no racial profiling while simultaneously avoiding supporting that claim with reasoning that is, at its root, racist; I don't think it's possible.
I had some reservations, as I said. I didn't feel them so much with the chapter on the community discourse, but more in the one on elite discourse. I'm not sure I'll be able to explain why, exactly -- something felt not-quite-right, as good as the content was, and I don't think I will take the time to give the chapter a second, closer reading to really pin it down. I think it has to do with what this particular approach to discourse analysis does and does not do, however. I'm used to seeing such things (often not explicitly labelled "discourse analysis" but the same basic idea) done in conjunction with more obviously activist kinds of analyses -- like of the institutions producing or propagating the discourse as socially organized human relations through which power is constituted and expressed. Also, though the chapter did some of this, I'm used to seeing more attention paid to where elite discourse is wrong, or at least weak and vulnerable to attack. The approach is, as I said, explicated in a chapter all on its own, and it is quite open about seeing social change as being about competition between discourses in some amorphous public consciousness. I think that's really important, but it is far from everything -- it is necessary to understand discourses in such situations, but it is hardly sufficient.
It is probably good that I finished the book over a week ago but didn't have a chance to write the review until now, because it has given me a little bit of distance from the unfortunate fact that the weakest chapter in what is otherwise a compelling and important book is its conclusion. The focus on a "competing discourses" model of social change is restated. Such a perspective is not useless, of course. In a situation in which state relations are liberal-democratic in character, especially at the less openly oppressive end of that range, and social movement mobilization is fairly low, such a model can approximate reality in some cases -- media-focused struggle can push an idea or agenda into a kind of scattered, inactive, but still real (and detectable via polling) public consciousness, and lead to institutional response. Change can be seen as being connected in important ways to ideas and images propagated by the media. The problem is not so much the analysis of discourses -- however much expressions like "the duel between dominant and oppositional narratives" and "dominant and counter narratives are now contesting each other" [p. 195] might misplace agency onto abstractions and erase human beings -- but how it is contextualized. And the conclusion to the book reveals a shockingly shallow frame. The limits of the competing discourses model are not examined. A benign essence to the liberal-democratic state form is assumed (even cheerfully declared) despite th fact that the development of "race" as a basis for oppression and the liberal-democratic state evolved historically in tight relation to one another, and in connection with the development of capitalism and of the European empires that bequeathed us much of our current world. Change originating in the mobilization of actual human beings organized into communities and movements is not directly considered.
On a more practical level, I think the authors take far too much encouragement from shifts in political climate at the municipal and provincial level towards the less blatantly reactionary end of the mainstream spectrum between the initial publication of the Star series an the writing of this book. Certainly there are some modest signs of movement on the profiling issue, but the assertion that "Clearly, Ontario is abandoining the neoconservative/neoliberal politics that had dominated it for nearly a decade" [p. 194] demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of what neoliberalism actually is and/or of what the McGuinty provincial government in Ontario and the Miller regime in Toronto have actually been doing. Which isn't to say that the space their presence opens up in very real ways for at least some oppressed people in some limited ways is unimportant in terms of human suffering. But neoliberal politics have not been disturbed in any basic way.
Another issue that is dealt with but not adequately is the range of different experiences of racialized people who are racially profiled. There is nothing wrong with a book that focuses on the Black experience of racial profiling, and leaves the experiences of other groups to other books. This book by and large does exactly that. What I wish, however, is that it was a little bit more explicit about its focus and its reasons for making those decisions. It does not deal at all with the profiling of people read as South Asian, West Asian, Muslim, or some combination thereof, which has been an increasingly serious issue since 9/11. That's fine, but I don't remember reading an explicit statement in the book owning and explaining this. Of course, it is by and large Black and indigenous people who have been most affected historically by racial profiling by law enforcement in Canada. But even the presence of indigenous experience in the book is very inconsistent without really explaining what and why -- it is treated substatively in a couple of places, in a token way in a few more, and completely ignored in much of the book. Again, it is not a problem for authors to choose a focus, but it should be more open (perhaps even in the title).
I want to begin the end of this review by stepping back from some of the criticism in the last few paragraphs and reaffirming my belief that this book is very useful and important. It is still all too easy for liberal white Canadians to believe that racial profiling happens in New York and LA but not even consider that it might happen here, and this book makes it much harder for anyone who reads it with an open mind to maintain that semi-willful blindness.
Finally, I want to close by quoting a couple of paragraphs about the views of a group who probably, on the whole, are much more sympathetic to police services than I am, and have rather different understandings of what needs to be done with respect to how policing is socially organized, but whose wholehearted affirmation of the oppressive reality of racial profiling I still found powerful:
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I had read about racial profiling before, but the first time I was really made aware of it in a personal way was while on a whitewater rafting trip at a fairly cushy, decidedly not-wild portion of the Ottawa River. We were a large group of mostly young people who were either part of the same workplace or had friends in that workplace, so some people knew each other well and others not at all. One evening, in amongst various sorts of partying-related activities, about ten from this larger group were sitting around a camp fire, talking -- eight young white women and men, and two young Black men.
The conversation turned to past interactions with the police. Can you guess who were the only two people to have ever experienced unsolicited harassment of one sort or another from the cops? Yes, of course you can. A number of those of us socialized into whiteness had encountered not-so-nice things with the cops, of course, but without fail that was in situations in which our actions could easily have been predicted to attract negative police attention, whether that was engaging in particular kinds of political action, doing dumb stuff while underage, or whatever. Neither of the young racialized men had ever had that sort of interaction with the cops but both had been targeted for spontaneous harassment because of their skin colour. One talked about a classic "driving while Black" situation -- he was in his late teens at the time, driving his mother's car in the mostly white middle-class neighbourhood in which they lived, and got pulled over and given an extremely rough time for no other apparent reason than he was a Black youth driving a nice car in a white neighbourhood. The other related an incident that was more of a "meeting the description" kind of scenario, in which he was just hanging out in a park in Toronto with some friends and out of nowhere this cop appeared and tackled him. Apparently, the cop had been running after a fleeing suspect who had a good head start, saw dark skin, and decided that was reason enough to bring the owner of that skin down and then into the station.
Now, lots of people -- lots of white people, that is -- will claim that this is a statistical anomaly and that it proves nothing, that white people have unsolicited problems with the cops too. On a certain level, of course that's true. I have posted items from time to time on this site related to a case of police violence here in Sudbury against two youth, one of whom is racialized (he's Metis) and the other white, where the visibility that resulted in targeting appeared to be (based on things overheard at the scene) the incorrect assumption by the police that they were homeless and therefore easy prey. But that does not take away from the fact that the evidence that racialized people, particularly those racialized as Black and Aboriginal, disproportionately experience profiling and targeting is overwhelming (unless you take refuge in denial). This book does not take its primary project to be convincing resistant white people that racial profiling happens. Nonetheless, the fact that every Black person who participated in qualitative research for this book, and everyone that participated in qualitative research for the book I reviewed recently, had had similar experiences should be extremely compelling evidence. How they labelled their experiences, how they contextualized them, and what they thought should happen to change things varied from individual to indvidiual, but every single one had experienced such negative police attention -- including, in their off-duty hours, those few African Canadians who were officers in the Toronto Police Service.
This book traces its origins to a series of articles that appeared in the Toronto Star starting in late 2002. The Star, Canada's highest circulation daily newspaper, had obtained a massive police data base detailing 480,000 incidents and nearly 800,000 charges laid over six year. They analyzed the contents of this database in consultation with a statistician from York University and demonstrated
significant disparities in how Blacks and Whites are treated in law enforcement practices. Specifically, they showed that a disproportionate number of Black motorists are ticketed for violations that only surface following a traffic stop. Furthermore, Black people who are charged with simple drug possession are taken to police stations more often than Whites facing the same charge. And once at the station, Blacks are held overnight for a bail hearing at twice the rate of Whites. [p. 5]
This series sparked both intense negative reaction from powerful elites in the police, government, and the media, as well as a flurry of activity from the affected communities and human rights bodies. This book is an academic treatment of the issue, and a very effective one, for the most part.
It begins by outlining the four theoretical perspectives which inform its analysis: Whiteness studies, Blackness studies, danger and racialization theory, and discursive analysis. It emphasizes that racial profiling is not just something done by the police but by all dominant institutions in Canada, though the police/judicial manifestations are of particular interest to the authors. In fact, a broad understanding of the kind of ubiquitous monitoring and responding in racialized ways that are at the heart of racial profiling allows them to be seen as fundamental to overall processes of racialization, i.e. the social processes whereby social relations that empower white people and oppress the people who are racialized (that is, social relations of white supremacy) are created and maintained.
Contributing author Charles Smith then compares statistics and histories of racial profiling in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He finds some specificities, of course, but also great similarities across the three societies.
Then comes a fascinating chapter on the culture of policing. It has, in fact, been a heavily studied phenomenon -- more so in the U.S. and U.K., but with Canadian studies showing that things are much the same here. I quote at length from the chapter's conclusion:
Our analysis has identified a number of dispositions that characterize police culture and that as a whole provide a fertile environment for both deviant behaviour and racism. These dispositions include social isolation; a siege mentality; high levels of cynicism and pessimism; and the need to maintain invisibility ('stay low and avoid trouble'). Another prominent feature of police culture is its paramilitaristic, authoritarian, hierarchical structure. Police view codes of secrecy and silence as necessary to protect fellow officers from management as well as the public.
These cultural traits and norms reinforce deep ruptures in the interactions between largely White police forces and racialized communities. These relations are characterized by constant tension and conflict. Much of police work provides significant opportunities for individual officers to exercise discretion in decisions about whom to stop, search, and arrest; this has had a grave impact on many law-abiding citizens. This discretionary power is informed by racially constructed stereotypes that can lead to racially biased practices against those identified as the 'other.'
Our analysis has been sharply critical of police culture. So it is appropriate to end this chapter by reminding readers that this subculture does not exist in isolation from the racialized beliefs, values, and norms of the dominant culture. The cultural dispositions in policing are reinforced every day by the social, cultural, political and legal institutions and systems within which police officers work and live.
Much of the rest of the book is devoted to discourse analysis. This includes a chapter defending the choice to use this approach, one looking at the discourse produced by elites in the aftermath of the Star series, and one looking at discourses emanating from racialized communities themselves, in particular African Canadian communities in Toronto. Overall, I think, this was a useful approach, though I have some reservations I discuss below. Certainly the careful dissection of elite discourse at the time was both damning and illustrative of some of the ways that white supremacy is put together, at least at the level of discousrse. Some of the gems from crypto-fascists Craig Bromell, the head of the police union at the time, and Julian Fantino, the chief of police (who cut his teeth oppressing gay men as the chief in London, Ontario) were enough to make me want to throw the book across the room. The discourse from the community, mostly amassed through qualitative research by contributing author Maureen Brown, is even more powerful. It's hard to even imagine someone being able to find a way to respond to such overwhelming shared experience by African Canadians in Toronto in a way that manages to claim there is no racial profiling while simultaneously avoiding supporting that claim with reasoning that is, at its root, racist; I don't think it's possible.
I had some reservations, as I said. I didn't feel them so much with the chapter on the community discourse, but more in the one on elite discourse. I'm not sure I'll be able to explain why, exactly -- something felt not-quite-right, as good as the content was, and I don't think I will take the time to give the chapter a second, closer reading to really pin it down. I think it has to do with what this particular approach to discourse analysis does and does not do, however. I'm used to seeing such things (often not explicitly labelled "discourse analysis" but the same basic idea) done in conjunction with more obviously activist kinds of analyses -- like of the institutions producing or propagating the discourse as socially organized human relations through which power is constituted and expressed. Also, though the chapter did some of this, I'm used to seeing more attention paid to where elite discourse is wrong, or at least weak and vulnerable to attack. The approach is, as I said, explicated in a chapter all on its own, and it is quite open about seeing social change as being about competition between discourses in some amorphous public consciousness. I think that's really important, but it is far from everything -- it is necessary to understand discourses in such situations, but it is hardly sufficient.
It is probably good that I finished the book over a week ago but didn't have a chance to write the review until now, because it has given me a little bit of distance from the unfortunate fact that the weakest chapter in what is otherwise a compelling and important book is its conclusion. The focus on a "competing discourses" model of social change is restated. Such a perspective is not useless, of course. In a situation in which state relations are liberal-democratic in character, especially at the less openly oppressive end of that range, and social movement mobilization is fairly low, such a model can approximate reality in some cases -- media-focused struggle can push an idea or agenda into a kind of scattered, inactive, but still real (and detectable via polling) public consciousness, and lead to institutional response. Change can be seen as being connected in important ways to ideas and images propagated by the media. The problem is not so much the analysis of discourses -- however much expressions like "the duel between dominant and oppositional narratives" and "dominant and counter narratives are now contesting each other" [p. 195] might misplace agency onto abstractions and erase human beings -- but how it is contextualized. And the conclusion to the book reveals a shockingly shallow frame. The limits of the competing discourses model are not examined. A benign essence to the liberal-democratic state form is assumed (even cheerfully declared) despite th fact that the development of "race" as a basis for oppression and the liberal-democratic state evolved historically in tight relation to one another, and in connection with the development of capitalism and of the European empires that bequeathed us much of our current world. Change originating in the mobilization of actual human beings organized into communities and movements is not directly considered.
On a more practical level, I think the authors take far too much encouragement from shifts in political climate at the municipal and provincial level towards the less blatantly reactionary end of the mainstream spectrum between the initial publication of the Star series an the writing of this book. Certainly there are some modest signs of movement on the profiling issue, but the assertion that "Clearly, Ontario is abandoining the neoconservative/neoliberal politics that had dominated it for nearly a decade" [p. 194] demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of what neoliberalism actually is and/or of what the McGuinty provincial government in Ontario and the Miller regime in Toronto have actually been doing. Which isn't to say that the space their presence opens up in very real ways for at least some oppressed people in some limited ways is unimportant in terms of human suffering. But neoliberal politics have not been disturbed in any basic way.
Another issue that is dealt with but not adequately is the range of different experiences of racialized people who are racially profiled. There is nothing wrong with a book that focuses on the Black experience of racial profiling, and leaves the experiences of other groups to other books. This book by and large does exactly that. What I wish, however, is that it was a little bit more explicit about its focus and its reasons for making those decisions. It does not deal at all with the profiling of people read as South Asian, West Asian, Muslim, or some combination thereof, which has been an increasingly serious issue since 9/11. That's fine, but I don't remember reading an explicit statement in the book owning and explaining this. Of course, it is by and large Black and indigenous people who have been most affected historically by racial profiling by law enforcement in Canada. But even the presence of indigenous experience in the book is very inconsistent without really explaining what and why -- it is treated substatively in a couple of places, in a token way in a few more, and completely ignored in much of the book. Again, it is not a problem for authors to choose a focus, but it should be more open (perhaps even in the title).
I want to begin the end of this review by stepping back from some of the criticism in the last few paragraphs and reaffirming my belief that this book is very useful and important. It is still all too easy for liberal white Canadians to believe that racial profiling happens in New York and LA but not even consider that it might happen here, and this book makes it much harder for anyone who reads it with an open mind to maintain that semi-willful blindness.
Finally, I want to close by quoting a couple of paragraphs about the views of a group who probably, on the whole, are much more sympathetic to police services than I am, and have rather different understandings of what needs to be done with respect to how policing is socially organized, but whose wholehearted affirmation of the oppressive reality of racial profiling I still found powerful:
In October 2003, at the height of the racial profiling crisis, while Chief Fantino was still in a state of total denial that racial profiling was happening, he authorized a focus group of thirty-eight Black officers, led by four of the service's most senior Black officers. The group came together to discuss what it was like to be a Black officer on a force that was facing allegations of racial profiling. They also discussed how racial profiling influenced their own professional and personal lives.
The documents and notes generated by this focus group were obtained by the Star [in 2005]; overall, they demonstrated that racial profiling was consistently experienced on the force. In fact, most of the focus group's participants said that they themselves had been inappropriately stopped while off duty. Three said they had been stopped more than once in a single week. There was a strong consensus within the group that racial profiling was a serious problem and that the Toronto Police Service would have to deal with it internally if anything was to change.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Quote: Law and Social Relations
The study of law in abstraction from social relations and the social system it purports to regulate will always be idealistic, artificial and inherently biased. The legal system produces and reproduces the essential character of law as a means of rationalizing, normalizing, and legitimizing social control on behalf of those who hold power and the interests they represent.
-- Carol Tator and Frances Henry
Guantanamo North Hunger Strike Update
Here is an update from the good folks at Toronto Action for Social Change on the hunger strike by the security certificate detainees being held in "Guantanamo North" in Kingston:
Please follow some of the links above and learn about the issue, then put some pressure on the government however you are able!
UPDATE ON HUNGER STRIKES AT GUANTANAMO NORTH
SITUATION CRITICAL WHILE "PUBLIC SAFETY" MINISTER LOST IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE
"I saw large chocolate sauce." -- Stockwell Day, sounding like a B-movie actor in a 1950s sci-fi dud, Radio interview about the hunger strike, CINW, Montreal, Feb. 1
UPDATE ON THE SITUATION AND NEXT STEPS
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2007
The Secret Trial Security Certificate detainees - held without charge or fair trial for up to six and a half years under threat of deportation to torture - are in their third month of a hunger strike at Canada's Guantanamo North. Today is day 75 of the hungerstrike for Mahjoub, and day 64 for Hassan Almrei and Mahmoud Jaballah. The three are demanding minor improvements in prison conditions, including medical care and the appointment of the Correctional Investigator, an independent ombudsperson, to investigate complaints.
Despite a mounting public outcry (see letters referred to above), the government continues to expose the men to the risk of death by denying them daily medical monitoring during the hungerstrike. Rather than intervening urgently to find a solution, Day and Harper prefer to propagate misinformation and spin campaigns (see response to six false claims by Harper and Day here).
VICTORY AT HOUSE COMMITTEE
Thanks in part to the pressure exerted by people across Canada, a resolution was passed Tuesday, February 6 by the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration calling on the federal government to respond to the crisis by appointing the Office of the Correctional Investigator, a federal prison ombudsperson, to assume control over Guantanamo North. All Tories on the committee shamefully voted against the motion.
The same motion will go before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness on Thursday. It is crucial that calls go to those committee members calling on them to support the resolution (See list at bottom of this email: focus, in priority, on Liberals and Bloc before the Tories -- the NDP member is on side)
Links to developments in this email:
1. Reality Check: A Six-Point Guide to Countering the Lies and Deceptions of Stockwell "Chocolate Sauce" Day with respect to the hunger strike, here.
2. Amnesty International writes to Day, here.
3. Letter from Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance, here.
4. NDP MP Bill Siksay Questions Stockwell Day in the House of Commons, here.
5. Rotating Solidarity Fast Gets Underway, here.
6. Senator Hugh Segal [who is, by the way, a Conservative -- SN] Calls on Government to Negotiate,
here.
==> ACT NOW - THE SITUATION IS CRITICAL
In the next days we are calling for :
1. PUBLIC ACTIONS
There will be numerous actions February 7 protesting the callous and cruel manner in which Stockwell Day is refusing to negotiate a solution. While on the one hand he says (falsely) he cannot intervene because the matter is before the courts, on the other he has invaded the men's privacy by looking into a fridge and trying to make it sound like the trampling of their rights is okay because he saw "large chocolate sauce" in that fridge.
Ongoing actions, however, are needed. Actions could take the form of delegations to present letters to officials, pickets, or theatrical media actions (orange jumpsuits and chocolate sauce: chocolate sauce in Guantanamo! or Let Them Eat Chocolate Sauce!) at relevant government offices.
Actions should highlight the following demands:
a) Begin providing regular medical monitoring of these three men IN THE LIVING UNIT, immediately and without conditions.
b) Immediately appoint the federal Correctional Investigator to negotiate a solution to the hungerstrike.
c) After the hungerstrike, act without delay to address the underlying reasons for the hunger strikes: indefinite detention, denial of a fair trial, and deportation to torture.
2. CALLS AND FAXES to "Public Safety" Minister Stockwell Day, demanding:
a) Begin providing regular medical monitoring of these three men IN THE LIVING UNIT immediately and without conditions.
b) Immediately appoint the federal Correctional Investigator to negotiate a solution to the hungerstrike.
c) After the hungerstrike, act without delay to address the underlying reasons for the hunger strikes: indefinite detention, denial of a fair trial and deportation to torture.
* Write or call to:
The Honourable Stockwell Day
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
Phone: (613) 995-1702
Fax: 613 952 2240 and Fax: (613) 995.1154
day.s@parl.gc.ca, communications@psepc.gc.ca
*Send a copy of your letter and reports of your actions by email to the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, tasc@web.ca.
3. CALLS TO MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC SAFETY STANDING COMMITTEE, urging them to support the resolution to appoint the federal Correctional Investigator to negotiate a solution to the hungerstrike.
Public Safety Committee Members
Name, Party, Constituency, Phone Number
Gary Breitkreuz C, Yorkton-Melville, Sask., 613-992-4394
Gordon BrownC, Leeds-Grenville, Ontario, 613-992-8756
Pat Davidson, C, Edmonton Centre, 613-957-2649
Dave MacKenzie, C, Oxford, Ontario, 613-995-4432
Rick Norlock, C, Northumberland-Quinte, Ontario, 613-992-8585
Sue Barnes, L, London West, Ontario, 613-996-6674
Raymond Chan, L, Richmond, B.C., 613-995-2021
Roy Cullen, L, Etobicoke North, Ontario, 613-995-4702
Irwin Cotler, L, Mount Royal, P.Q., 613-995-0121
Serge Menard, BQ, Marc-Aurele-Fortin, 613-992-2617
Maria Mourani, BQ, Ahuntsic, 613-992-0983
Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor-Tecumseh, Ontario, 613-947-3445
Breitkreuz.G@parl.gc.ca ; comartin.J@parl.gc.ca ; Cullen.R@parl.gc.ca ; Barnes.S@parl.gc.ca ; Brown.G@parl.gc.ca ; Chan.R@parl.gc.ca ; Cotler.I@parl.gc.ca ; MacKenzie.D@parl.gc.ca ; Menard.S@parl.gc.ca ; Mourani.M@parl.gc.ca ; Norlock.R@parl.gc.ca; Davidp@parl.gc.ca
Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, tasc(at)web.ca, (416) 651-5800
Please follow some of the links above and learn about the issue, then put some pressure on the government however you are able!
Monday, February 05, 2007
Call For Article Proposals
I have been mentioning this publication favourably since I stumbled across the first issue while we were still living in Los Angeles. In addition, I have recently become a member of its advisory board. Not sure exactly what that is going to mean for me, but it is an interesting project that has published interesting things, so if you have any relevant and radical ideas that are burning in your brain and trying to get out, then please submit a proposal as described below!
UPPING THE ANTI: A Journal of Theory and Action
Call for Article Proposals for Issue 4
Dear friends and comrades,
The editors of Upping the Anti invite you to submit proposals for articles to be published in Issue 4 of Upping the Anti, which will be launched on May 1, 2007.
Upping the Anti is a radical journal published by a pan-Canadian collective of activists and organizers. We are dedicated to publishing radical theory and analysis, as well as debates, roundtables, and interviews about struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and all forms of oppression.
Our first three issues have been distributed widely across Canada and the US. People have also picked us up in Australia, Argentina, Cuba, England, France, Germany, India, Kenya, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Singapore, Spain, and Venezuela.
If you have an idea for an article or interview, we invite you to submit a 200-300 word proposal. The proposal should identify the main question you plan to explore and how this question relates to the political vision of our journal.
We are particularly interested in publishing articles pertaining to the development of revolutionary perspectives, as well as to the problems and promise of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-oppression politics within the Canadian state today.
The final deadline for submitting articles is Monday March 5th.
Interested in writing an article but don't think you can meet our March deadline? Don't worry: it's never too early to submit an abstract for issue #5, which will be released on September 1st, 2007.
Please send all abstracts, submissions and inquiries about our project to uppingtheanti(at)gmail.com
Content from our previous issues is available online at
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1084.
Guidelines for submission are available at
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/2403
If you have any questions about the journal and the upcoming issue, or if you want to help out by doing distribution or promotion, please let us know.
In solidarity,
Aidan C., Tom K., Sharmeen K., and Andrew T.
Ahhhhh....
...I know I'm getting close to home, at the end of a trip to southern Ontario, when I drive past the poetically named "Provincial Government Offices Road" on my way back into Sudbury.
Anyway. Got back last night, but have a sick toddler today, so it may take a day or two longer to get back into the swing of substantive updates.
Anyway. Got back last night, but have a sick toddler today, so it may take a day or two longer to get back into the swing of substantive updates.
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