The contemporary world overflows with examples of racism, from the “War on Terror” to new immigration controls, to white supremacist anti-Arab riots on Australian beaches.
The recent Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and sexist reverberated in mass demonstrations across the globe. British radical writer Tariq Ali argues that the cartoons are a “crude racist stereotype” that Muslims have every right to protest. Nonetheless, he sees the cartoon controversy as a diversion from the real tragedy. “Did the Danish imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These are issues that anger me.”
How do we understand and respond to anti-Muslim racism? How should people on the Left react to the racist dynamics of global capitalism today? How can socialist struggle best incorporate anti-racism? This issue of New Socialist takes up some of these issues, with a focus on racism and anti-racist struggles within the Canadian state.
How is Canadian society racist? To start, the Canadian state that exists today developed out of a white settler colony built on the subjugation of indigenous peoples. As Deborah Simmons recently pointed out in the pages of New Socialist, historically the expansion of capitalist agriculture required the displacement of indigenous peoples from arable lands.
It’s important to point out that this dimension of racism is not a thing of the past. In recent years the Canadian state has responded with military or police repression to indigenous resistance at Ts’Peten/Gustafsen Lake in British Colombia, Oka, Quebec, and Ipperwash Provincial Park in Ontario. Meanwhile, the Canadian state is acting to accelerate access for capitalists who want to extract natural resources from the lands of indigenous peoples.
The racism of the Canadian state is also reflected in its latest immigration and “anti-terrorist” legislation. Together, the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the “anti-terrorist” Bill C-36, and Bill C-18, The Citizenship of Canada Act represent moves to increase the power of state officials to detain immigrants and refugees, to rule refugee claims ineligible, to make it easier to turn back refugee claimants coming to Canada through the US, and to deny, revoke or annul the citizenship of people born outside Canada. These are but a few examples of a trend that has developed rapidly with the Right’s opportunistic manipulation of 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Finally, the Canadian state’s racism is reflected in its imperialist practices. Referring to the “Somali affair” in 1993, academic Sherene Razack had this to say about the racial characteristics of Canada’s imperialism: “White people believe that they are ‘good’ and therefore capable of managing and taking care of the ‘bad’ conflicts generated within ‘black’ societies. In peacekeeping operations, white nations think of themselves as brave knights rescuing themselves and black people from the dark threats of the Third World.” This ideology permeates the mainstream media’s reporting on Canada’s current occupation of Haiti. If we substitute “Muslim” societies for “black” ones, what Razack says gives us insight into the role of Canada in Afghanistan.
Despite the fact that a late February Globe/CTV poll found 62% of Canadians against sending troops to Afghanistan, 2200 Canadian troops recently arrived in Kandahar as Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser got set to take over command of an international brigade comprised mainly of Canadian, US, British and Dutch troops. Frothing-at-the-mouth Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier is famously keen to kill terrorist “scum bags.”
At the same time, there are some positive signs of anti-racist resistance. Toronto’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell campaign, a broad coalition of groups formally launched by No One is Illegal Toronto in March 2004, won what one activist with the campaign described as a “qualified victory”. The campaign is centred around providing protection for people without legal status in Toronto who fear discovery and deportation in any interaction with the municipal government. The Toronto Police Services Board recently voted unanimously in favour of a policy that dictates that officers will not ask witnesses and victims of crime about their immigration status. This was an acknowledgement of the fact that many victims of crime who lack status fear speaking to police.
New Socialist is commited to developing anti-racist socialist analysis of Canada and the world. Socialist politics can only be rebuilt in Canada and elsewhere on a clear, sharp anti-racist basis, where racism isn’t seen as occurring externally to class exploitation and therefore being of secondary importance. Racism is central to the workings of capitalism and imperialism, and this must be a starting point of our analysis and struggles.H
