Good white, bad white

Before I learned about race, I learned about sexism and classism. Even when I was 16, my cousins would tease me about being a feminist and a socialist. I don’t know where I got those ideas from. School? The media? Not at home though. Dinner table confrontations were frequent then.

When I was 19, I started working summers for a Christian outreach mission in downtown Toronto and most of our clientele were homeless youth. We had to raise our own salary by finding donors, and so most of us lived pretty meager lifestyles. I remember a group of us complaining once to our boss that we were even poorer than the squeegee kids we worked with. We had a raise on our minds, but what we got was the political lesson of our lives! The director helped us deconstruct what poverty really is and helped us locate ourselves as coming from, by and large, loving, intact, middle-class families. From that point on, I understood something about privilege, that there was more to it than money. We had social assets that these abused and homeless kids would never have.

Then I started to notice different classes of racialized people and they stopped being one group to me. I started to meet poor Jamaican Canadian kids on the street, middle class, university educated Jamaican Canadians at school, professional Jamaican Canadians in the workplace, and so on, and I began to realize how complex culture was, how complex race was, that these identities that first seemed so startlingly distinct and homogenous to me now took on different shapes depending on where people were from, when they or their ancestors immigrated here, what they did for a living, the neighbourhoods they lived in, who their kids played with. It was a very long time before I turned this lesson back on my own ethnic white roots though.

The farming people I come from consider themselves very upstanding, moral people, even righteous at times. I am not sure where this comes from in the culture, perhaps in very old blood memories of having resisted their own oppression throughout Celtic history. Certainly living in remote northern communities far from London, living off the land, they had very little materially, and this may have transformed into a kind of stoic pride. My mother’s Scottish side of the family does not manifest this same kind of upright judgment upon the world, but I realized by the time I was in my 30’s that I carried a great deal of righteous Harrison pride. Perhaps even daring to write this autoethnography is a reflection of it. I KNOW! LISTEN TO ME!

There was a long-standing history of perceived Protestant superiority over Irish Catholics that hummed in the background of our community. Even in the 70’s, I could go to mass with my friends from Ennismore, but they were not allowed in my little United church! Moral superiority, pride in knowing right from wrong, the right way to live, these are attitudes I still feel when I look at Peterborough today. I can feel it in my daily interactions at work, visiting family, waiting in a bank teller line-up. If I feel uncomfortable under their gaze, I can only imagine what it must be like to be from another cultural context and feel those silent eyes watching your every move.

Cover of 2006 exhibit catalogue

Some years ago, JoEllen Brydon, a local artist in this region had an exhibit of her paintings portraying an event that I think still has a lot to say about how people here react to difference. “Lost Histories: The Gypsies of 1909” recounts the story of Kalderash Roma people who travelled through Peterborough, Bobcaygeon, and even Omemee and Fowler’s Corners where my relatives lived at the time. Her vivid paintings and newspaper clippings from that time portray how locals responded to these immigrants with curiosity, fear, and anger. They found them “exotic”, “lazy”, “gaudy”, “lawless”, and “pagan” (“Lost Histories: The Gypsies of 1909”: Exhibit catalogue. The Art Gallery of Peterborough, 2006). I hear my own ancestors’ voices in those descriptions, there is no doubt about that. Harrisons valued hard work and being rooted to one place, where one would be accountable for their actions within a community. Family on my mother’s side valued property and quality possessions, and the education you needed to acquire these things. How the Roma lived would have been unthinkable to them.

Many local people here still respond to newcomers like that. Some are completely excited by the encounter, like my mother who loves her “handsome” Indian physiotherapist. Others are quietly fearful, unsure of the words they should use, worrying they will offend, and so they just avoid anyone who is different. And then there are a few who just don’t care, like the local DJ’s who labeled Tiger Woods a half-breed on prime-time morning radio, but who wouldn’t publicly apologize for what they’d said on radio when I confronted them. They are all here, like they are in Toronto and in Montreal. All good people, loving parents, faithful neighbours, and hard workers. But carrying deeply racist ideas. I know my own family has a hard time thinking of themselves as being both racist and good people, it does not compute. I have also struggled with it. This is a barrier, this white goodness thing. But rural people aren’t the only ones walking around with a hierarchy of goodness in their heads.

Living as I have in large Canadian urban centres, it is disturbing to observe how people there view rural Canada, as if everything outside Toronto is all as homogenous as I used to see Italians or Jamaicans. No longer in the centre, I can feel the distain. The way Toronto college colleagues address my concerns at meetings leads me to think they assume I know nothing about immigration because I represent Peterborough and Lindsay. Urban whites make fun of rural Whites when they wouldn’t dare make a joke about other ethnicities, not in public anyway. They have mastered the adept cross-cultural façade. But I have lived in those spaces and I know how they really are. Yes, of course, there are a lot of white people in big cities who are very comfortable with racial diversity, but there are also a lot of urbanites who simply mask their prejudices and design their lives so as to live in a white world as much as possible. My 25 years in Toronto and Montreal hasn’t convinced me they have worked out their racism either.

I have cousins who are quintessential rednecks, complete with longhaired mullets, handlebar mustaches, and big trucks. I think they are resisters. They aren’t prepared to follow the rules of being white the way urban professional culture defines it. They make jokes about the big city and educated people the way some people make jokes about minorities. They shift the whole paradigm when they do this, and make me realize, “oh yeah, they are fighting back”. The more they feel judged for their economic status or their way of life, the more they push back.

I can feel myself doing the same thing now that I’ve been back here a while. My daughter came home one day complaining that a neighbour had strung up a deer in his backyard, in full view of the schoolyard. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “It’s disgusting!” she retorted. “Really? Grandpa used to hang cattle or wild game in the yard when he was cleaning it. How do you think meat gets to the store anyway?” She refused to be convinced that it was anything but savage. After she left, I went into the kitchen and hung a frozen chicken over the sink to thaw. Secretly I hoped it dripped blood all over the place. Right back at you, city girl!

Poor rural white, bad white. Educated city white, good white. This bias needs to get deconstructed before rural people can open themselves to new perspectives on race and racism.