One month is hardly enough, but it’s a start
“And I ride ride I ride on to the end –
Where glowers my continuing Cavalry.
I,
My fellows, and those canny consorts of
Our spread hands in this contretemps-for-love
Ride into wrath, wraith, and menagerie
To fail, to flourish, to wither or to win.
We lurch, distribute, we extend, begin.”
– From Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath,” 1963
In the spirit of the “decolonizing” I am writing about in this editorial, I would thus like to acknowledge that The Ontarion is published on, and the University of Guelph stands upon, the ancestral land of the Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe peoples.
I’m decidedly uncomfortable writing about Black History Month. Maybe I shouldn’t be, maybe I should absolutely be. I’m going to stress the latter because, bottom line, these are not my stories to tell. They resoundingly cannot be. It almost seems obvious, but it’s important for me to remind myself that no story of oppression or marginalization can be mine to tell, though I’m in a position as a journalist that almost presupposes such.
My line of work doesn’t really allow me to be totally silent on these sorts of things. I have a duty to inform, to entertain, and at times, to provoke. How do I acknowledge my own privilege while writing on narratives of violence and subjugation that are more broad-reaching, more prescient than I can comprehend on a first-hand basis?
My ongoing coverage of Musagetes’ and Postcommodity’s People of Good Will project here in Guelph, among other learning experiences, has afforded me some new venues of looking at how oppressive behaviour and frameworks operate in society, the arts, culture, and our own discursivity. Racism, as a framework, isn’t just being or acting racist, it is a framework that has been instilled in us from the start, one that is present in most aspects of our lives – a framework that we need to actively resist and unlearn in every way. Being inclusive and anti-oppressive, on a personal and public level, cannot just be lip service. We must be active participants in the un-learning process within the intersections of sexism, racism, and ableism. We must educate ourselves about oppression and privilege while being proactive in abolishing them from our daily lives and thinking.
But there’s a problem there – oppression and privilege cannot be wholly abolished because they fester in the basic predicate of our society. So, where do we go from there?
Let’s clear the air here for a moment. I am a white, straight, university-educated, able-bodied, male-identified person of (mostly) European descent, aside from some Métis heritage on my father’s side of the family. By default, I should probably be burying my head in the sand instead of writing an editorial focused on privilege in the context of Black History Month. I am the embodiment of a privileged person. I can’t even begin to experience the prescient topics, aggressions, and histories we’ll be discussing as part of this memorial period.
As a poet, journalist, and student of literature, I find myself at odds with this framework just about every day of my life. What does my voice matter when there are so many whose voices are, by default, not as audible as mine? It’s frustrating. It makes me uncomfortable. That’s the only way things will get better for all of us. That’s the only way our culture, bred of a settler-colonist history, can challenge the patriarchal, homogenized discourse of “being” in this society. Through acknowledging that we do not live in some sort of pipe dream of equality, we can take the first steps to decolonizing our perspectives on race, history, and the operation of these oppressive frameworks, though we may not experience them directly. The audience I’m writing to right now – mostly people around my age, more or less – can’t revert the histories of violence we seek to remember and memorialize, but can stop them from repeating themselves. It’ll probably take a few lifetimes, but it can be done.
People are so quick to jump to the defense of, “Well, I didn’t have anything to do with that. I wasn’t even born!” But white people, realistically, reap the benefits of colonial conquest in countless ways. Just because you didn’t directly partake in those injustices, doesn’t mean you aren’t still living in a society founded on these values of supremacy and exceptionalism and, often times, aren’t reinforcing it with an attitude like this. This colonial culture takes on many forms, in the psycho-affective sphere, economic stature, representation, and how the state views race, heritage, and history. But I don’t feel these forms are entirely monolithic, either – by striving to be more inclusive, empathetic, and aware of marginalized struggles, positive change is possible.
Simply acknowledging these oppressive frameworks isn’t enough; actively remembering is significantly more important. Through remembering, we can become more aware of how these violent histories still impact the world, and we can work towards more proactive change even on the micro level.
Take my penchant for traditionally Black music and art, in particular. I’ve been a huge jazz, hip-hop, blues, and soul fan for most of my life. The music I listen to and enjoy, as a person of white-Euro heritage, has been appropriated by my people, demonized by the normativities of mass media, and largely commoditized as “cool” by the same socio-cultural narrative that normalizes and legislates racism on nearly every level of its ideological apparatus. We need to acknowledge this and engage, empathetically and proactively, with these problems.
All this isn’t to say that I’ll stop enjoying it, but through my vested interest in Black culture, I feel I am able to understand better, if not wholly (the latter of which is indeed impossible), the struggle from which this incredible, vital culture is born and subverts. So, when I listen to Sam Cooke’s riveting “A Change is Gonna Come,” or Billie Holliday’s chilling “Strange Fruit,” or Charles Mingus’ ferocious composition The Black Saint and Sinner Lady, I need to acknowledge the sociohistorical spaces in which this music operates, now and historically.
But when that happens, it seems as though struggle is being fetishized and commoditized. There seems to be a fine line, when dealing with cultures of historically (and currently) marginalized identities, between standing in solidarity and fetishizing the core of the history of oppression, violence, and hatred it is bred from.
At any rate, as this article comes to a close, it’s not about what I feel. It’s about restlessly consolidating the past with the present and doing something with our memorializing. On top of dedicating a month to Black history, we must remember all histories of oppression in order to transgress these oppressive frameworks, both in a personal and public sense. This means inclusivity, empathy, and understanding in all facets of social life.