Speer: As Canada’s diversity increases, anti-racialism becomes essential

We are more than individuals and outcomes reflect a mixture of individual and group characteristics and experience, along with intersectionality within and between groups. Not one or the other, but need to consider both aspects as the various datasets indicated:

…As an epistemological framework, it represents a way of thinking that systematically organizes individuals into group categories based on race and then grants it explanatory power for virtually everything.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every “pretendian” cited in Pete’s article is a progressive. As the principal purveyors of identity politics, progressives are distinctly predisposed to racialist thinking. They’re more inclined to think in terms of racial identity and attribute value to membership in certain racial groups.

It’s logical therefore that within progressive circles claiming a particular group identity has greater upside than among conservatives who are more instinctively anti-racialist. Does anyone for instance doubt that progressive figures like Turpel-Lanford or Boissonnault realized status gains from adopting fake Indigenous identities?

Which brings us back to Pete’s case against affirmative action and its perverse incentives. His argument is well taken—but one can argue that we actually need to go deeper. We should aim to address the racialist thinking that underpins those policies and the political culture that enables them. Herein lies Salam’s case for anti-racialism.

The good news is that he believes that in the U.S. context, anti-racialism may represent a powerful political proposition across a multi-ethnic coalition. Donald Trump’s election victory is evidence that he’s right.

There’s a strong case to think that the same is true in Canada—particularly in the coming years. As the country becomes more diverse, the distinction between majority and minority populations will necessarily become far weaker. Defining one’s identity in contradistinction to the so-called “white mainstream” will presumably have less resonance in a world in which “racialized” Canadians represent as much as half of the population as early as 2041. Racial salience may counterintuitively decline in a polity composed of a growing multiplicity of racial identities.

If so, we may look back at this era of identity politics and the “pretendians” that it has produced as a regrettable yet temporary waystation on the path to the meritocratic culture that Pete envisions.

Source: As Canada’s diversity increases, anti-racialism becomes essential