I think a lot about what it is to be white in a diverse
society. I believe that whiteness is a lot more complicated than simply the
colour of my skin, or what part of Europe my ancestors hail from. Theorists
call it a “socially-constructed identity”, not something that simply is, but
something that has evolved slowly throughout history and that is constantly
changing. I don’t believe there is just one white story either. We whites do
share many common privileges, in Canada, and around the world, this is I do not
deny. European colonialism carried its power and privilege everywhere it went,
and its legacy is a powerful White Paradigm that sits deep in the sub-conscious.
But there are a thousand and one histories wound up in the label of “white”,
and anyone who sees herself as white has a story of her own. I am going to
start unraveling my white story with my ancestors.
Rail fenced farm land |
I was born on a farm near Peterborough, Ontario, and we Harrisons
can trace our family tree back to Richard and Jane Harrison, the original
settlers who left Tosside, England in the 1850's. Tosside was in a poor region
of Lancashire in northern England, on the edge of the Gisburn Forest, and not
far from the place where the infamous Pendell witch trials took place in 1612.
Richard’s ancestors were farmers and trades people, and 5 generations of his
descendants have farmed in Smith and Emily Townships since he immigrated here. Jane
was Irish, but little else is known about her origins. My paternal grandmother
also had Irish ancestors, but when the family came to Canada, they are said to
have changed their name from Kerr to Carr to mask their Irish heritage and “pass”
as Welsh. Curious, these silent Irish women in my family tree. And they are not
the only women in my family tree with forgotten ancestries, but I will talk
about Francis later.
Irish settlers figured prominently in the establishment of
the City of Peterborough, but land west of the city was largely farmed by English
settlers-descendants when I was a child. The dominance of British culture was
everywhere at that time, and is still very strong in me. When I am at family
reunions, I can feel its presence, reminding me of where I come from. Their
reserve, their love of manners, and so many other deep cultural traits that are
hard to define all started to come into focus for me when I lived in Montreal.
I felt the surface of my British heritage take on more definition there, as I
became a minority in a French Canadian context. The “two solitudes” were still
fairly separate from one another then, and I was one of the few bilingual
Anglophones (English speakers) who worked in French Canadian networks in the early
90’s. I can remember conversations with Québécois colleagues about the nature
of working between French and English communities, how they differed, how
English Montrealers were more task oriented and practical, the French taking
more time to dialogue and establish larger frames of reference before moving to
action. I lived there for 14 years and my deep interactions taught me a lot
about who I was and where I came from in a way that was completely invisible to
me when I lived in Toronto.
Before Montreal, I think I saw myself quite simply as
Canadian, WASP at best, and I knew nothing about cultural diversity. Of course
growing up in the 1960's where I did, farming people still led very
traditional, insular lives. I have memories of relatives and neighbours getting
together to help harvest, men going on the moose or deer hunt, the women
and children gathering in one household till they returned, growing and raising
most of the food we ate, and attending the little United Church my
great-grandfather built, sitting in the same pew every Sunday. Television had
little place in our lives, as we mostly played outdoors, in the fields,
forests, and hills, and in fact media in general seemed to have very little
influence on my early life. I grew up a family-centred child, even
community-centred child, in a fairly small world. Anthropologists might define
my culture as “collectivist”.
2-headed doll, black and white |
This is Deborah, the two-headed doll that Francis, my
American maternal great-grandmother, made for my grandmother Doris at the turn
of the 19th century. She is representative of the dolls made by progressive
families at that time to show their support for desegregation. However, the
faded cloth of the white doll compared to the black doll, and the dainty white facial
features compared to the somewhat gruesome smile on what is supposed to be an
African face, these things tell me a deeper story about perceptions of African
Americans in the early 1900's.
I was always told my mother's side of the family was
Scottish, but some unusual events led me to discover some years ago that the
woman who made this century old doll wasn't born in the U.S. Adopted, Francis
Rosenberg was actually born in Germany, and was Jewish descent. It explained a
few things, like the lactose-intolerance that is shared by my grandmother,
mother, myself, and my daughters. Or my Palestinian boss who used to swear I
was Jewish - he was from Jerusalem and said he should know! And perhaps why
someone painted “Jews go home!” on my mother’s house on Waterford St.,
Peterborough when she was a child. Yet not one word had ever been spoken to me
about her identity before. And so I call the doll Deborah, the original Jewish
spelling of the name I carry. My mother wanted to name me Deborah, she doesn’t
know why, but my father registered me with the Anglicized version, Debra, on my
birth certificate.
This doll teaches me about the dominance of whiteness, not
only in my family tree, but in Canadian society. She is my first step in
unraveling how I learned about race - the story of how one identity slowly
consumes others until the others fade away, hidden under skirts, names changed,
ancestries suppressed. I think of all the lessons I have been taught about
Aboriginal peoples and how their identities were suppressed, oppressed. I
understand this process better when I look at Deborah.
I remember vividly the first time I learned about how the
concept of whiteness took shape throughout colonial history. I was always very
interested in the history of African American people, slavery, and the civil
rights movement. I was in my 30's, doing some work in race relations in
Montreal, and was reading a book about how whiteness evolved in the U.S. from
an original reference to British and Germanic peoples, to gradually include
other European settlers coming to the new land.
I was shocked to learn the Irish weren't originally accepted
as white, nor were Jewish Europeans (Ashkenazi), not until much later. Irish
and Jewish, my own ancestors, not part of the white club, hidden under
Deborah's white skirts. I was shocked! I felt betrayed, wondering how this had
been kept from me all those years. I had one of those "disorienting
dilemma" moments that transformational theorists cite, the 'aha' moment
when a whole block of preconceived ideas become suspect, and leave us open to
new ideas.
Deborah is a symbol of my white consciousness. She reminds
me of how privileged I am, even though I come from Omemee, a somewhat marginal
place. And she reminds me of the ancestors in my own family tree who lost (or
maybe gave up) their ethnicity (and maybe their faith) to belong to white,
British society, and to the Harrison family. There is nothing to be done about
it now and I have no intention of going around saying I am Jewish. I think that
would be dishonest. I am proud of who I am, but I am a sad that some of my
ancestors got lost along the way. This is one story of white Canada.
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