You're a racist!

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I was in the midst of a very heated conflict between a local black community agency and the white mainstream agencies who partnered with them to deliver services to black youth in the neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grace (NDG), Montreal. NDG has a historically rooted black community and middle-class English-speaking Black families tended to live there, or in the West Island. Racial integration was the norm and my daughter was always surrounded by other biracial children at school, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems.

I remember sitting at a community roundtable with 5 or 6 other organizations, my big belly unmistakably announcing “baby!”, when a rep from the black community leveled a charge that my team was racist. I took it very personally, like an attack on my own integrity. I didn’t understand. This man had known me for years. He knew the father of my child was black. How could he do this to me in front of all my peers?

Of course it was strategic, not personal. My agency, the YMCA, had numerous well-funded youth programs full of young black participants, while their agency was fighting for survival. His attack was part of his hope that the community would help draw government resources to his agency, not to the Y. I can’t say I blame him, their organization was at stake, but it made for one explosive argument in the alley that afternoon! I have had so many experiences of either being told I’m a racist, catching my own racism, or watching other whites experience this, that I don’t react so emotionally now. I don’t like it, it never feels good, but I can usually stop and take in some of what the other person is saying. I try to stop my desire to flee, ask questions, learn from what they are saying and feeling, or decide that what they are saying is really about another issue that we need to explore.

But I know that many white people don’t feel this way when their actions are questioned. Calling a white person a racist is a sure way to send them right off their rails. Fight or flight, you can be sure to get a reaction. It is an unthinkable position. No civilized white person is racist (just the rural rednecks)! I think this is what white society programs into whites: “You’re better than others, therefore you should always be one step ahead of them with a greater consciousness, a more sophisticated world view, the right view.” But I try to actively deprogram my whiteness. That’s what it means to be an anti-racist white to me; actively watching my self, reflecting on my actions, listening to what others have to say. Sometimes I can’t do it all in the moment, when tension is high. I go away and process it, try to continue the discussion another time when I am more aware.

I have found racism and ethnocentrism in myself (and continue to find it) and I see it in others around me, all the time. Not because I’m in Peterborough and there are a lot of rednecks up here, but because we are white, and we are constantly moving inside our own white consciousness. With two-thirds of the Peterborough population declaring British ancestry, and only 3 percent from visible minority/racialized communities, we have few opportunities to interact with people who would challenge our subtle and not so subtle biases, the words we use, and the actions we take.

I expect to keep discovering my own biases for the rest of my life.