‘What is a white person? And what is this “whiteness” you speak of?’ Since the full-day Cultural Safety and Respect workshop I recently attended was touted as an opportunity to understand how ‘whiteness’ impacts the lives of Aboriginal Australians, I thought this a reasonable question. Not so, it seems.
The brochure went so far as to promise a personal transformation, seemingly of the road to Damascus type. I voiced my concerns to my manager: ‘Work shouldn’t have anything to do with my transformation, and the framing seems racist.’ She asked me to attend just for the optics. Clearly, this was another example of corporate virtue signalling. So, I decided I’d treat this as an opportunity to better understand the basis for arguments that I have long considered neither compelling nor reasonable.
A few days before the workshop, we received a communication from the facilitators alerting us that ‘a range of emotions’ might be evoked by the workshop, including ‘a desire to deny what you are hearing’. ‘Odd,’ I thought, ‘the possibility of disagreeing doesn’t seem like an emotion to me.’ We may not have the right to deny someone’s experience, but we can certainly challenge their interpretation of it. I took this as an unsurprising sign that the workshop would be rooted in the sort of blind commitment to ideology that frames the world in terms of the simple dichotomies of right and wrong, white and black, Woke and ignorant.
This was evident when I asked the question, ‘What is a white person?’ The facilitators looked at each other, before the Aboriginal member of the duo responded with: ‘Why do you ask? That’s the sort of question a white person would ask?’ Evasive, to say the least. But I felt I could press my point, buoyed by the extra protection I felt from having been identified as a ‘person of colour’ by the Aboriginal facilitator (I’m Italian, and I suppose olive is a colour other than pink, which apparently is not a colour).
The answer I got was a hodge-podge of inconsistencies. One dimension of whiteness seemed to be a legacy of colonialism (though that could just as easily apply to modern China or ancient Arabia as to the UK). Another was ‘belonging to the group that has the power’ (but, what is this ‘power’, and is it groups or individuals and perhaps institutions that hold it?). Yet another was geography (European – though Italians, I was told, were not ‘of whiteness’, whatever that meant). In the end, I was told that all would become clear as the workshop progressed.
So, I buckled down for the next enlightening bit of propaganda …uhm… I mean enlightening presentation. This turned out to be on the dimensions of racism, of which there are supposedly four (racial prejudice, racial discrimination, cultural and ideological racism, and institutional racism). Racial prejudice was defined as: ‘Attitudes held towards those classified on the basis of physical or cultural characteristics. People are identified as members of a group and then judged according to presumed characteristics.’ Hold on a sec… I raised my hand. ‘Isn’t that the definition of what I’m hearing about ‘white’ people in this workshop?’ Quiet gasps from the audience. But no gasps about this inane response: ‘There are four dimensions. They all work together. You must wait to hear the others.’ My question, however, remained unanswered.
Having heard all four definitions, I was left with two possible conclusions: either racial prejudice does not entail racism unless one also behaves in racially discriminatory ways, subscribes to cultural and ideological racism, and benefits from institutional racism, or what I was hearing was utter nonsense. Were one to accept the first conclusion, I suppose we could dust off some old-fashioned racial stereotypes for our jokes, since that wouldn’t be racist.
The workshop continued along some sort of blind spiral, feeding on its own bogus internal logic to arrive at the only possible (and pre-determined) conclusion: white people are bad. The workshop turned into something akin to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for guilty ‘white’ people. ‘Hi, I’m so-on-and-so-on, I’m white, and I’m racist.’ I even heard the possibly wokest person in the entire company describe herself as a ‘perpetrator’. I only hoped that such catharsis would make my colleagues feel less like the horrible white people that they clearly (believe they) are.
I could recount other examples. But suffice it to say that as the day concluded it became clear that only one thing was consistent in this workshop: inconsistency. The facilitators and most participants confused ‘culture’, ‘ideology’, and ‘race’ (ignoring, of course, that race has long been a biologically discredited notion). They also seemed to use the term ‘racism’ to refer to all biases. There was an implicit claim that all biases are to be eradicated and that holding any of them makes a person racist. I fail to see how such a claim can be considered reasonable. After all, humans have biases. It seems Utopian to expect people to ever be free of these. What is reasonable is to expect us to exercise our capacity for critical thinking to assess the accuracy of our biases rather than blindly assenting to them.
But this isn’t enough for the ideologues of extreme identity politics. For them, anything short of a comprehensive behavioural and mental purging of bias is inadequate. Their demand, much like those of dictators across history, is for an ideological purity that is total and complete. It’s not enough to regulate people’s behaviour; we must regulate their innermost thoughts. This is why those of us that value free thinking and consider reason and not ideology as the correct basis for argument must combat these ideas until they are relegated to the dustbin of history.
