Chapter 7: The Politics Of Race F2024 UP

# Chapter 7: The Politics of Race ## 7.1 Introduction * Canada has been slow to realize the importance of race in our country’s past. * But this has changed as questions of races have disrupted political debates and “politics as usual” in Canada. * Idle No More * Truth and Reconciliation C...

# Chapter 7: The Politics of Race ## 7.1 Introduction * Canada has been slow to realize the importance of race in our country’s past. * But this has changed as questions of races have disrupted political debates and “politics as usual” in Canada. * Idle No More * Truth and Reconciliation Commission * Black Lives Matter * 2020 Ipsos poll - 60% of Canadians say racism is a serious problem in Canada. * Anti-Asian racism and COVID-19. * Canada on the cusp of a racial reckoning and a “Great Social Transformation” * Hyper-diversity in urban centers. * Majority-minority - multiplicity of minorities constituting majority of population. * Leads to backlash - “Whitelash;” “white rage;" Great Replacement conspiracy theory. * Two main questions: * Is there a distinctive Canadian politics of race, racism and racialization? * How has political science engaged with the “race question"? ## 7.2 Canadian Myths of Racelessness * Racism denial and Canadian racelessness have long persisted as Canadian myths. * Especially among dominant social groups, political leaders, leaders of police forces. * Expressed as outright denial; as “polite” racism (individual not structural); and minimized (not as bad as the US). * Racism denial has shaped the discipline of political science; Canadian politics and public policy. * Yet race is one of the central organizing concepts of European Enlightenment, imperialism, colonialism and enslavement. * Race and race-making as discursive and political objects. ## 7.3 The Politics of Race Science * While the core claims of race science have long been disproven, scientific racism persists. * Promotion of forced sterilization by Dean of Medicine Charles Kirk Clarke. * Eugenecist and psychology professor J. Phillipe Rushton. * Rushton's work not formally discredited by Western University until 2020. * Racist thinkers like Kant and Hegel continue to be taught in political philosophy. * These ideas have been used to promote white normativity and racial classifications. * Interwoven into academic thinking and writing. * Used to justify Empire building, colonialism, elimination of Indigenous peoples, Black enslavement. ## 7.4 The Making of a White Settler Society * Racist typologies produced and reproduced by the state, Canadian universities. * Subsequently informed political leaders, public policies. * Race-making as integral to White settler project of nation-building. * Pursuit of a “White Canada” policy approach until 1960s. * Treatment of Black slaves fleeing the US into Canada. * John A. Macdonald and “Aryan race;” residential school system. * Exclusion of Asians and Blacks from Immigration policy, citizenship, voting. * Stephen Harper's 2015 comments on “old stock" Canadians. * The legacies of these discourses and racial hierarchies largely are hidden from the political stories Canada tell about itself. ## 7.5 Writing Race and the Political * Ideas about race deeply interwoven in how Canadians think of themselves, the state, citizenship and belonging. * How political science engages with the race concept. * The Two Founding Races Framework * Andre Siegfried’s 1906 two race theory of Canada (English and French). * Persisted in Canada’s emerging social sciences. * “Two founding races” institutionalized in the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism * White Europeans foundational to nation-state. * Erased Indigenous peoples. * Subordinated everyone else into an Other (“other ethnic groups”). * Incorporated into political science journals and academic writing. * Three tendencies - race and ethnicity used interchangeably; “other” groups seen as problems; racialized discourses framed in geopolitical terms. * Race and Ethnicity * Race first used interchangeably with ethnicity then slowly replaced by it. * Bernard Meltzer on ethnicity and crime 1952. * From two races to two founding peoples. * Word “racism” first appears in CJPS 1974. * Racism Denial in Politics * 1960s questions shift to ones of social differentiation, stratification, ethnic representation in politics, party organization and government. * John Porter's Vertical Mosaic 1965. * Racial thinking and belief in Aryan superiority has remerged in new forms such as Great Replacement Theory. * Paradox - fighting Nazis while racism and segregation continued to permeate post World War II US, Canada. * UN efforts to advance human rights and combat racism 1950s. * Efforts to name and combat racism in Canada has a short history. * Bill of Rights 1960; Canadian Human Rights Act 1977; Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982. ## 7.6 Conclusion * Race and the coloniality of racial classifications and hierarchies continues to shape the politics of race in Canada. * Disrupts enduring myths about racelessness and race denial not only in society and government, but also in the discipline of political science. * Political science has and continues to play an important role in race making. * Canada's race pecking order endures. * Systemic nature of White supremacy endures in every major Canadian institution. * Political science in the 2020s must also welcome a racial reckoning. * The shape of Canadian politics will revolve around which competing narrative of race and diversity - the Great Social Transformation or the Great Replacement – will prevail now and into the future. ### Key Terms * **Cultural racism:** Rather than biological or genetic differences, it relies on cultural, religious, or civilizational differences in customs and traditions as markers of superiority and inferiority. Also referred to as new racism, neo-racism, and color-blind racism. * **Ethnicity:** After the 1950s, it often replaced the term “race” in public discussions and political science. This term claims to be an objective/neutral category delineating a person's origins, language, and cultural practices. However, critical race theorists and others have noted how it still retains embedded notions of White superiority and normativity and serves to create distinct categories of people in relation to political debates surrounding issues such as inequality and immigration. * **Institutional racism:** Refers to the ways in which biological and cultural concepts of race are interwoven into political, economic, and social institutions, policies, and practices and operate in ways that disadvantage specific individuals and groups. * **Race:** A socially constructed category that divides people into distinct types and hierarchies in which White European is constructed as “pure” and every other racial category as an impure deviation from White normativity. * **Racialization:** Refers to the political and social processes and actions through which a person is classified. Racial meaning and belonging are assigned to that person's identity in ways other than how that person self-identifies. * **Racism:** Refers to the belief that human differences - including biological, genetic, and cultural - produce immutable races that are superior or inferior, and these beliefs shape prejudice, unequal treatment, and even violence. The beliefs can be institutionalized through policies and practices that effect disadvantage. * **Systemic racism:** Refers to the ways in which societal ideologies, laws, systems, programs, practices, and norms interact at the macro-level to produce or reinforce racial disadvantage and a pattern of adverse effects for racialized minorities. # Chapter 8: Genders and Sexualities ## 8.1 Introduction * Our gendered and sexual lives are profoundly affected by politics. * People continue to be excluded from politics on the basis of their gender and sexuality. * Gender and sexuality are at the root of foundational questions in politics: * What is political? * Who is allowed to participate? * Where does politics occur? ## 8.2 Who is Included? Who Can Participate in Public Life? * **The Social Contract** * Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau - legitimacy is based on adults freely consenting to the state authority in exchange for civil, political, and social rights. * But these rights are not allocated equally to everyone in Canada. * Long history of exclusionary policies and laws based on gender, race. * Indigenous Women’s Rights. * Citizenship denied to Indigenous peoples until 1960. * Gendered provisions of the Indian Act. * Lavell, Bedard and Lovelace cases and Bill C-31. * **The Gender Binary** * Women excluded from the social contract because they were “unfit”. * Women framed as too emotional, uncivilized and weak-minded for rational and civil political debate. * Therefore denied citizenship and attendant rights. * Reinforced the gender binary. * Divides people into two opposing sex categories, male or female. * Assigns gender characteristics, abilities and roles. * Binaries oppositional and mutually exclusive. * **Transgender and Queer Peoples' Rights Beyond the Binary** * Binary denies, delegitimizes and conceals rights of people who do not conform to its terms. * Parliament stonewalled on gender identity and expression rights until the passage of Bill C-16 in 2017. * Gender binary remains powerful in Canadian political life. * More diversity but formal politics remains male, cisgendered, heteronormative. * Barriers faced by Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people in formal politics. * Targets for federal and provincial governments. * Laws against “homosexual sex;" denied employment, marriage and spousal benefits; adoption rights; donating blood. * **Feminist and Queer Activism** * Feminist and queer activists have politically organized and formed communities of support to have voices and issues heard. * How has gender and sexuality exclusion shaped politics, rights and resistance? * **Intersectional Feminism** * Intersectional feminist theory - gender analysis must also include questions of race, class, and sexuality. * Gender, class, and racial oppression intersect to construct hierarchies of power and privilege among women. * Kimberlè Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde. * How gender and sexuality are differently constructed, regulated and experienced on the basis of other identities. ## 8.3 Why and How is Our Political System Built on Gendered and Sexual Relationships? * **The Sexual Contract** * Women excluded from the social contract through the sexual contract. * Women's citizenship rights are directly tied to martial status with a man. * Women could not be citizens or access rights on their own. * Sexual contract depends on and reinforces heteropatriarchy. * Privileging of marriage remains today. * **Indigenous Genders and Sexualities** * Gender binary, heteropatriarchy and the sexual contract are integral parts of settler colonial project. * Indigenous peoples labelled inferior and uncivilized because they did not adhere to settler beliefs. * Denial of matrilineality, Indigenous women’s property rights, Two-Spirit people. * Disrupted structures, cultures, strength of Indigenous communities. ## 8.4 Where Do Politics Occur? What is Political? * **The Public and Private Spheres** * Under the sexual contract, society is divided into public and private spheres. * Women relegated to the private sphere. * Private sphere constructed along gender lines - natural, corporal, and emotional. * Public sphere where politics occurs framed as man-made, intellectual, rational. * Private sphere supposed to be apolitical. * **The Private Sphere as Political** * Challenged by feminist and queer academics and activists. * Two spheres are not separate - the private is political in four ways: * **1. Private Relationships are Political** * Members of the private space are engaged in power relationships. * These relationships are integral parts of political life. * **2. Political work is carried out through private channels.** * Politics doesn't just occur in formal ways but in informal, “private” ways. * Indigenous, Black and racialized women sought out alternative means of political engagement. * Community building and advocacy. * Black Women’s Collective. * Idle No More * **3. The government regulates the private sphere.** * Regulation of individual bodies and sexual activities. * 2019 50th anniversary of the “legalization of homosexuality". * But still problematic - Two-Spirit and LGBT community-building and activism. * Required to be sexual beings in ways sanctioned by state. * Punished or rewarded on the degree of compliance. * Sexual citizenship - how rights and responsibilities as citizens differ based on sexualities. * Mid-20th century emergence of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ social movements. * But queer theorists and activists question whether same sex marriage is the actual path to freedom. * **4. Public and private spheres are mutually dependent.** * Social reproduction - necessary for women to be in the private sphere to reproduce future workers and citizens. * Women’s work is vital to sustaining economy and governance but undervalued and unpaid labour. * Racialized women historically had no choice but to work for others. * Domestic workers remain largely racialized and immigrant women. * Women integral to political and economic life, but the share of unpaid work has remained largely the same since 1960s. * Childcare remains a burden for women entering politics. ## 8.5 Conclusion * Current political system remains grounded in a heteropatriarchal sexual contract. * Creates and depends on gender and public/private binaries. * People are still excluded on the basis of gender, sexuality and race. * Expanded understanding of where politics transpires and thus where and how change can be realized. ### Key Terms * **Cisgender:** The gender identity of a person matches their birth sex. * **Civil rights:** Rights that protect individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly, association, and religion. * **Gender:** A socially, politically, and economically constructed social code that refers to prescribed binary ideal-type male and female identities, notions of masculinity and femininity, gendered social roles and relations, and gender identities. * **Gender binary:** The division of people into the two opposing sex categories - male or female - and assignment of gender characteristics, abilities, and roles. * **Heteropatriarchy:** An unequal distribution of power based on heterosexual relationships, wherein men are deemed to be superior to women and rightfully hold authority over women. * **Intersectional feminist theory:** An analytic approach that insists that the study of gendered oppression also must include considerations of race, class, and sexuality because these factors powerfully influence experiences of gender identity, power, oppression, and privilege. * **Political rights:** A term that includes citizen rights to vote, run for political office, and peacefully protest. * **Public and private spheres:** These concepts are integral to liberal political imaginaries that separates social organization into public spaces, where people debate and find solutions to collective problems, and private spaces of individual freedom and belief that are protected from interference by the collective or state. These terms, in contrast, are typically used to distinguish between governmental or collective activity versus privately owned and marketbased activity. * **Sexual citizenship:** A concept that focuses on how citizen rights and responsibilities are distributed, enacted, and experienced differently based on diverse expressions of sexuality. * **Sexual contract:** A concept that asserts that a woman's citizenship rights vary according to her marital status with a man. * **Social contract:** A term first used by political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke to refer to the idea that people enter into a mutual agreement to observe each other's rights and responsibilities, agree to select an impartial magistrate to adjudicate disputes, and give up their right to punish to the magistrate. In subsequent centuries, it was expanded in many advanced democracies to include state obligations to provide citizens with minimum levels of social security. * **Social reproduction:** A concept that focuses on the ways in which individuals, families and societies are sustained biologically and socially. It typically foregrounds the unpaid reproductive and care work provided by women in the home and broader community which enable adult men to be full-time workers and political agents. * **Social rights:** Entitlements typically claimed by citizens in advanced democracies which, although not entrenched in constitutions, guarantee citizens a modicum of economic welfare and social security, often in the form of social insurance and welfare programs. # Chapter 6: Indigenous Peoples, Land, and the UNDRIP ## 6.1 Introduction * United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) * Signed in 2007 by the UN General Assembly. * Recognizes Indigenous peoples as distinct “peoples.” * Includes human rights protections; land rights; relationships with land; duty to consult and cooperate; free, prior and informed consent for resource development. * Initially rejected by Canada, Australia, New Zealand and US. * Canada - Aboriginal rights already protected in s. 35 of the Constitution Act. * Trudeau Liberals agree to implement UNDRIP in 2015 but progress remains slow in the face of provincial resistance. * Reluctance to fully implement UNDRIP is not accidental, but reflective of ongoing colonialism in settler states. ## 6.2 Colonial Pasts and Colonial Presence * Canada is a product of European colonialism. * Colonialism - invasion and assertion of control over lands and peoples by European empires; subjugation and elimination of Indigenous forms of governance, knowledge systems, cultures and life. * As a result of colonial genocide, Indigenous Peoples once made up 20% of the global population in 1490; a century later, only 3%. * Accompanied by developing the system of global colonial capitalism, commodification of lands, resource extraction, European settlement. * Colonialism justified on the basis of terra nullius; the need to “civilize” and save Indigenous peoples. * Not just in the past but a continuously unfolding process. ## 6.3 Territoriality and Extractivism * The drive for territory is at the heart of settler colonialism. * Dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands, livelihoods and cultures. * Embedded in the Constitution Act - 1867 - union of 3 colonies; settlement of the West; s. 91(24) federal power over “Indians and lands reserved to the Indians” * Numbered treaties extinguishing Indigenous title to land; provided colonizers with land, raw materials and new markets. * Indigenous peoples forced onto reserve lands; further marginalized and dispossessed through the Indian Act 1876. * Indian Act regulated every aspect of life on reserves. * State control over Indigenous lands. * Imposed band system of governance. * Mandated education through residential schools. * Restricted Indigenous participation in settler economy. * **Policy of extractivism:** * Removal of raw materials from the earth for profit (resource rents). * Built on dispossession and subordination of environment to human exploitation and gain. * Bolstered by terra nullius, European entitlement, rise of capitalism. * Extractive industries such as forestry, mining, oil and gas drilling and fracking have damaged Indigenous food chains, ways of life, and relationships to land and ecosystems. * Resource extraction projects are a source of conflict between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. * Ongoing encroachments on Indigenous lands, environmental impacts of extraction activities, treaty rights, poverty led to the Trudeau Government's White Paper 1969. * Met with resistance from Indigenous peoples and leaders. * Also tensions in regions where no treaties had been signed. * The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement 1975. * Berger Commission 1974. * Calder case 1973. * Led to modern land claims agreements. * Involves extinguishment of Indigenous title in exchange for self-government. * Tensions over land intensified during Harper years (2006-2015). * Attempts to maximize resource extraction for export to international markets. * Environmental regulations and Indigenous peoples seen as barriers to this. * Construction of new pipelines. * Bill C-45 2012. * Opened new spaces for resource extraction in absence of Indigenous consent and ecological considerations. * Led to the birth of Idle No More movement. * Trudeau’s promises of reconciliation, rights and recognition framework. * But only a limited form of self-government within a larger settler state. ## 6.5 Consent versus Consultation * The Courts have interpreted s. 35 constitutional rights as including the right to be consulted and accommodated. * State has a duty to consult when their treaty rights are impacted. * But Canadian law is more limited than UNDRIP. * Trans Mountain pipeline and Tiny House Warriors. * Lack of meaningful consultation remains an issue. * Government responds to protests and court challenges by purchasing pipelines. * Raises the question of how the gap between Canadian law and UNDRIP principles will be closed. ## 6.6 Conclusion * Canadian history is defined by settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and extractivism. * Displacement through coercion and treaties replaced by ongoing encroachments on Indigenous lands and extractive policies. * Heightened conflicts as Indigenous peoples mobilize to protect and defend their lands in the face of ongoing extractivism. * Territoriality and extractivism continue to define the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. * How UNDRIP will be implemented in Canada remains to be seen. ### Key Terms * **Aboriginal:** A term and legal category used to refer to Canada's Indigenous Peoples. * **Colonialism:** A practice of appropriating, dominating, and, in some cases, settling other territories and peoples. It is usually associated with European imperialism and expansionism of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. * **Extractivism:** An economic practice that removes natural resources from their point of origin on a large scale, producing physical land changes, for profit and typically for international markets. * **First Nations:** A term used to describe diverse peoples who are descendants of the original inhabitants of Canada who are neither Métis nor Inuit. * **Indian:** Legal identity of First Nations person registered under the Canadian Indian Act. * **Indian Act:** An Act of Canadian Parliament that has regulated registered Indians and reserve lands since 1876. * **Indigenous:** A term often used in national and transnational contexts to describe diverse nations and peoples who have long standing connections to territories and have been affected by colonialism. * **Inuit:** Indigenous Peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions, primarily of Greenland, Denmark, Canada and the United States. * **Land claims agreements:** Also called modern treaties are mechanisms that bring unceded Indigenous territory under Canadian sovereignty, in exchange for limited powers of self-government and financial benefits for Indigenous signatories. * **Métis:** Indigenous Peoples whose origins are traced primarily to unions between Indigenous women and European fur traders in Canada. * **Native:** A term used to describe people from a particular place. * **Settler colonialism:** A form of colonialism in which the original inhabitants colonized and displaced by a new society of settlers. The term is commonly associated with the age of European imperialism and the conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. * **Unceded lands:** A term used in settler colonial countries to refer to traditional Indigenous territories that were never surrendered to the settler state through law, treaties, or other formal agreements.