Mick Hartley

John Kay, in Quillette, brings a Canadian perspective to the debate:

“Indigenous peoples have been stewards of this planet since time immemorial,” tweeted Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault from the Glasgow Climate Change Conference earlier this month. “The fight against climate change is not possible without their knowledge and leadership.”

It was an odd thing to post. In recent years, many Canadian Indigenous groups have become full commercial partners in oil and gas development projects, and so have no particular incentive to apply their “knowledge and leadership” toward assisting white environmentalists such as Guilbeault in limiting carbon emissions. But even if First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples fully answered his call, it’s not clear why they would have any special insights to offer in regard to how densely urbanized nations such as Canada can best shift their industrial base, power generation, and transportation networks to low-carbon fuel sources.

But for Canadian progressives, Guilbeault’s intended audience, his message would have made sense, as it channelled the officially endorsed conceit that Indigenous peoples comprise a sort of oracular caste, whose folk wisdom shall inform the project of planetary salvation (or as one magazine headline writer rapturously put it, “we need Indigenous wisdom to survive the apocalypse”). Canadian progressives, a constituency once defined by fastidious secularism, are now experiencing a sort of Indigenous mystical awakening—a northern variant of the phenomenon described aptly by John McWhorter in his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

There are some important theological differences between the Canadian and US social-justice sects. But both are alike in the way they channel “whiteness” (often applied interchangeably with “colonialism”) as a form of original sin that passes ineradicably from one generation to the next. Any regular reader of Quillette will already be familiar with this theme. But I will include here one particularly vivid example, gleaned from the introduction to ‘They’re Protecting Whiteness and Their Fragility Is Showing’: How Feminist Praxis Disrupts White Supremacy in Neoliberal Predominately White Institutions, a publicly posted postgraduate thesis submitted in 2020 to the Women’s and Gender Studies department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

My whiteness offers a level of inherent violence to this study because of the history of privilege and structural and overt acts of harm my ancestors have contributed to society. This echoes my experience in identifying as an anti-racist racist, who, as a white persxn [sic], is inherently racist, but applies and is accountable to anti-racism in my life through activist, educator, and research capacities … It is irresponsible for me to begin this study without acknowledging the privileges I am afforded in conducting this study, as a white individual, but also the contribution I make to violence … Additionally, I am aware of the inherent racism I pose as a white persxn contributing to anti-racist scholarship … I am accountable to my whiteness and to BIPOC individuals who have invested emotional labor in educating me. By being accountable to BIPOC emotional labor, I intend to prioritize space in this research to elevate BIPOC voices, narratives, and experiences. By naming my whiteness and the implications of doing this research, my aim is to challenge the structure of white supremacy in the university and provide an understanding of how white educators can be more informed of the violence they cause in the university. White educators and university administrators should be accountable for their whiteness to further inform their approach to education as anti-racist racists. Anti-racist racists will be identified as white individuals who approach racial difference with an anti-racist lens, but because of white supremacy are inherently racist.

Such ritualized denunciations of “whiteness,” now common in many academic sub-cultures, are so scathing in tone that they arguably channel the spirit of conspiracy theory as much as religion—with the white race depicted as biologically programmed for evil after the fashion of the imaginary Jewish villains who populate Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet when I googled the author who’d written this self-lacerating text, I was taken to the CV of a well-educated professional who’d spent much of her life teaching English in foreign countries and now was employed at a major university. I asked myself: Does this woman truly believe these claims? Or had she included them in her thesis merely as a matter of political convenience? Or was she co-opting the ennobling language of social justice to channel ordinary forms of anxiety and self-doubt (such as “imposter syndrome”)? Or was it some combination of all of these? It’s hard to know, because in this kind of progressive academic subculture—as in any system of enforced orthodoxy—the risks associated with candor are severe, and the main function of this kind of text is typically to disguise one’s thoughts rather than share them.

In Canada, this performative and artificial style of communication has become institutionalized in academic and corporate settings through the spread of land acknowledgments and pronoun checks—two gestures that originally were presented as a means to signal consideration for others, but which now are being conjoined into increasingly elaborate social-justice mission statements that are read aloud at meetings or appended to digital media. The leader of a student group at a large Ontario medical school, for instance, informs his email recipients that “as a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied settler residing within Township Treaty 6, part of the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapeewak and Attawandaron peoples, my advocacy and privilege must be used to empower disempowered groups in order to realize a more equitable and just society. I commit to this mission and the continuous education, allyship, and unlearning that it will require.” Tommy Mayberry, Executive Director at the University of Alberta Centre for Teaching and Learning, goes further, identifying himself as “a visitor on Treaty 6 territory in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ amiskwacîwâskahikan and the homeland of the Métis Nation,” and confessing to the infliction of “colonial violence” against Indigenous peoples.

One might think that a university administrator confessing to acts of violence against innocent victims might also be inclined to surrender the fruits of his crimes. For surely, there are many qualified and motivated Indigenous Canadian educators who would be quite happy to take on Mayberry’s lucrative post as Executive Director at one of Canada’s biggest universities. Yet this sort of logical next step never seems to play out among the social-justice priesthood, notwithstanding the increasingly dramatic mea culpas emitting from their executive suites. It’s hard not to be reminded of Augustine of Hippo’s youthful prayer, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.”

In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, detailing the Principles of Newspeak, George Orwell wrote that Newspeak’s purpose was “not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [English Socialism],” but also “to make all other modes of thought impossible.” The social-justice movement has accomplished something similar in recent years, by recasting disagreement and critique as forbidden forms of personal violence or emotional abuse. (In recent days, for instance, an Ontario teacher’s union denounced its own members for using the term “reverse racism” at a meeting, a phrase that the union president suggests to be an inherently “harmful” form of “harassment.”) Having thereby insulated themselves from internal critique, absolutists within the social-justice movement have had free rein to promote new dogmas that even most fellow progressives don’t actually believe: Indigenous people are Yoda; biological sex is a colonialist myth; society will be safer without police, and richer without capitalism. It was inevitable that these precepts would eventually take on a religious character because, being too far-fetched to withstand intellectual scrutiny, they are sustainable only as unfalsifiable mantras to be piously endorsed in public, even as they are mocked in private (a form of intellectual double life that will be familiar to anyone who has lived under theocracy, fascism, or communism).

I don't particularly object to the characterisation of all this social justice stuff as a religion, but I'd prefer to call it an ideology – especially given the parallels with Communism. All these mea culpas and overblown protestations of white guilt recall the Soviet show trials, when the accused would rush to acknowledge their guilt, and praise Comrade Stalin for his wise all-seeing vision. Once your integrity is compromised by agreeing to all this nonsense – biological sex is a colonialist myth, 2 + 2= 5 – you're complicit. Your loyalty to the cause – or your fear of becoming an outcast -  has required you to bow down in obeisance to the correct ideology. You have, to return to religious talk, sold your soul.