Should you be civil to a racist? Yes, but you should still call them out

2020/09/03 Leave a comment

Right approach but difficult to implement. Requires good faith on both sides, and a willingness to listen and related ground rules:

This summer, Americans’ treatment of marble and bronze statues has exemplified an important divide in how we judge public discourse. In the name of anti-racism, statues of Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, former Canadian prime ministers like John A. Macdonald and colonial murderers like Christopher Columbus have been torn down, supported by the argument that these are painful reminders to many of our citizens.

Are these actions acceptable? Do they cross a line? Why does that line matter? These are the questions of civility, and some of the most urgent of the current moment.

Statues celebrating slavery are an assault on descendants of enslaved people and a reminder of a time when lynching was all too common. If these statues celebrate slavery, then civility — which requires equal treatment of all — demands their removal. Strong civility also demands a public conversation about southern racial history, and how these statues figure into it.

Democracy is a way of life

Democracy is not just a system of government that preserves rights and freedoms and allows for voting and public consultation. It is also a way of life. Democracy requires that we learn how to live well with others who are different from us. Those differences can range from skin colour to religious affiliation and beliefs about progressive taxation.

We build a democracy so that we can find peaceful ways to co-exist in the face of real, deep differences. If we build a democracy well, then those differences, painful as they may seem, can actually be resources for more effective decision-making and innovation.

But we need a way to preserve enough social cohesion, in the face of all of those differences, to create change and work toward an anti-racist future. That means we have to be willing to be made uncomfortable, and to make others uncomfortable. As American comedian Larry Wilmore has pointed out:

Civility isn’t just being nice, it isn’t just showing manners. Civility is coming together as a civil society, and making people uncomfortable, and doing the right thing, and yelling at people who are not doing the right thing when you have to.

Toxic behaviours

Toxic incivility — threatening to assault others and destroy property — threatens the social fabric that preserves democracy as a way of life. Examples include Tucker Carlson’s acrimonious rants on Fox News (“Black Lives Matter is coming for YOU,”) and sociologist James Thomas’s suggestion that students ruin legislators’ lunches because “They don’t deserve your civility.”

We’re in a dangerous moment right now because our social fabric has been so badly strained and torn by partisan incivility, led by a president whose central communication strategy is to insult and demean those who oppose him and a cable news network that profits from the demonization of others.

Deep engagement

Civility matters for democracy because it offers us a set of communication practices for engaging our differences without recourse to violence. Yet sometimes there are ideas at play that undermine a basic sense of equality. Engaging in debates about the humanity of others is uncivil and pointless.

But shunning or cancelling is not the only alternative. Our aim ought to be to persuade others, to change their minds and to transform the social world we inhabit. To do this, we must engage deeply with others that are different from us, which is a risk for any of us.

We’re not talking about “mere civility” as a practice of being polite in order to make people feel comfortable, which can be used as a weapon of oppression. We’re talking about a kind of radical civility, a set of practices that can engage differences in ways that will deepen a sense of community and help create possibilities for change.

Radical civility

This requires careful listening, respect, openness to dialogue and other-centred communication practices. Yes, even with someone who we clearly think is racist, whether it’s a friend, acquaintance or your inappropriate uncle. Often radical civility is most important for those in traditionally privileged social positions.

Meeting people where they are, regardless of how noxious we might believe that place to be, is necessary for persuasion. Any teacher of rhetoric, and we’ve both spent our careers teaching and writing about rhetoric, knows this.

So that brings us to the big question: Why be civil to a racist?

Our willingness to see others, even racists, as multi-dimensional human beings, capable of change and transformation, is central to living in a democracy. Radical civility can, and often does, include conflict. We should call out a racist and challenge their beliefs, but we should do so in a manner that deepens engagement; that is tough, demanding work.

Change through dialogue

Violence toward statues is debatable in the context of trying to collectively figure out how to change a racist system. What matters is the way we choose to communicate with one other, and the methods and practices we use, so that our relationships with others can become resources for change.

Whether on the left or on the right, when communication practices demonize, objectify and belittle others, we forgo the possibility of persuasion or even empathy. The question facing our democracy right now is whether we can find ways to treat others with respect and consideration, draw them into public conversation and change their minds.

This is a task for strong civility, and it will mean that tearing down the monuments to slave owners will produce durable social and political change instead of animosity and division. Strong civility offers us the best set of communication practices for repairing the torn social fabric and making possible what’s next for our democracy.

Without it we’re just deepening the cycles of polarization and anger.

Source: Should you be civil to a racist? Yes, but you should still call them out

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Terry Glavin: The Tories insist racists aren’t welcome in their party. What are they doing about it?

2019/05/09 Leave a comment

Strong commentary, capturing the unfortunate missteps and resulting perceptions:

There’s no way around it: Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have a racist jackass problem.

This is not to say that Scheer or any of his MPs have consciously invited the affections of the country’s racist jackasses, and there are far fewer votes in Canada’s racist jackass constituency than you might think. But it’s a problem. And Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have it, in spades.

The most recent evidence is quite jarring. It comes in Ekos Research Associates’ latest annual findings about Canadian attitudes about immigration. Nothing much has changed in the long-term trends, but for the first time, the proportion of Canadians who say immigration rates are too high has merged with the percentage of Ekos poll respondents who say too many non-white people are coming to Canada. And that bloc is coalescing, for the first time, behind a single political party: Scheer’s Conservatives.

This is what it has come to. Sixty-nine per cent of the “too many non-whites” respondents say they back Scheer’s Conservatives. It only stands to reason that a fairly high number of these people are racist jackasses. And there’s growing evidence that sociopaths from that creepy white-nationalist subculture that congregates in obscure 4chan and 8chan chatrooms are hoping to mainstream their contagion into conservative parties. Scheer’s Conservatives insist they’re not happy about any of this.

“Mr. Scheer is clear. These types of views are not welcome in the party,” Brock Harrison, Scheer’s communications director, told me. “He’s stated that view many, many times. Sure, there are fringe elements who will tell a pollster they support the Conservative party, but, you know, those fringe elements who hold to these extreme ideologies have no place in the party. That’s clear.”

Fair enough. But if there’s nothing wrong with the Conservative message on immigrants and refugees and visible minorities, there sure is something wrong with the signal.

It’s not hard to make the case, for instance, that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have disingenuously attributed racism and xenophobia to public anxieties and otherwise reasonable Opposition criticisms of the way Ottawa has handled the upsurge in “irregular” asylum claimants who have crossed the Canada-U.S. border since 2017. “This kind of rhetoric drives these people [racist jackasses] to us, whether we like it or not,” Harrison said. “The denunciations from Mr. Scheer are clear. Every time something flares up and the Liberals try to pin this on us, we stand firm and we denounce.”

But the issue flared up into a bonfire of the Conservatives’ own making last summer, when Maxime Bernier, Scheer’s primary challenger in the 2017 Conservative leadership race, got turfed from Scheer’s shadow cabinet for a series of weird anti-multiculturalism outbursts that put him in the crosshairs of the Conservatives’ capable immigration critic, Michelle Rempel. In a huff, Bernier founded his own rump political party, of the type that sometimes seems to specialize in anti-immigrant jackassery. It was a golden opportunity for Scheer to purge the party of its jackass wing and invite them to run off with Bernier. It was an opportunity Scheer didn’t take.

During the 2017 leadership race itself, the House of Commons was in an uproar over Liberal MP Iqra Khalid’s arguably outlandish motion to mount a national effort in the struggle against Islamophobia. But back then, the Conservative Opposition’s reasonable objections to Liberal hyperventilation were overshadowed by bizarre and paranoid alarums within the Conservative party itself. Several leadership candidates proved more than happy to cross deep into the territory of an Islamophobia they said didn’t even exist.

There was little separating Stephen Harper’s Conservatives from the Liberals and New Democrats on the issue of opening the door to Syrian refugees by the time voters walked into polling booths and turfed the Conservatives in the 2015 federal election. Even so, there was a bad smell about the party, coming from the fringes, and the occasional burst of air freshener out of Scheer hasn’t done the trick.

We’re only months away from another federal election, and with a spotty record to run on, Trudeau has given every indication that the question he wants on voters’ minds will be the same as it was last time around: what’s that smell?

Canada is changing dramatically. A lot of people don’t like what they see, and among them are voters who are predisposed to simple explanations and conspiracy theories. The rural white males drawn to white-nationalist propaganda are perched precariously on the bottom rung of every ladder the Liberal free-trade vision imagines, with its phasing-out of the oil patch and its preoccupation with gender equity, “political correctness” and the concerns of visible-minority communities.

While the Liberals deserve credit for attempting to craft policy that addresses the strains and stresses of globalization and migration, Team Trudeau has invested its political fortunes in a “liberal world order” that is broken. The losers in the shiny, happy world of the Liberal imagination are too easily written off by Liberal strategists. The New Democrats have lost their hold on voters from the old working class. The Tories have picked them up.

The promise of relatively open borders, the free flow of capital, people and ideas among and between liberal democracies and police states like China and gangster states like Russia and theocracies like Iran—all of this was already losing its sheen when Trudeau won his majority four years ago.

The urban millennials who carried Trudeau into office were already alert to the dismal prospect of a future planet convulsing in catastrophic climate change. Now they’re stuck in low-paying temporary jobs, and they’re dealing with out-of-reach housing, high daycare and transportation costs and university degrees that lead nowhere. Holding out higher immigration rates as some sort of magic road map out of this mess is at best a flimsy political strategy. It’s not convincing, for starters. But more importantly, it’s dangerous, because when the formula fails to fix things, it will be immigrants who take the blame, and Canada’s recent immigrants are overwhelmingly people of colour.

It’s not good enough for Scheer to get better at dealing with the occasional flare-ups that leave him looking like the hillbilly caricature Liberals like to make of him. He needs to openly admit that the Conservatives have a problem. He needs to clearly and emphatically demonstrate that he means what he says, that his party is not open to voters who scapegoat immigrants and hold fast to the view that there are too many non-white people coming to Canada. He needs to do something about it.

He needs to show them the door and invite them to leave. Whatever numbers he’ll lose to Mad Max Bernier, he’ll pick up from more centrist voters who’ve grown weary of Trudeau’s “woke” politics, with its wardrobe of groovy socks and a photo album filled with glamour magazine spreads where a portfolio of policy accomplishments should be.

But whatever the faults that can be laid at the feet of the Liberals, it’s Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives who have the racist jackass problem. And however much they genuinely don’t want it, they’re clearly not trying hard enough to shake it.

Source: The Tories insist racists aren’t welcome in their party. What are they doing about it?

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