Race, Canoes, and Astonishing Ignorance
John Baglow writes in response to Margaret Wente’s recent column in The Globe.
Three Canada Days ago, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente (a naturalized American) wrote a column citing Pierre Berton’s definition of a Canadian: “someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.” She admitted to having tried this on, and then wondered aloud if “today’s immigrants” would attempt the feat.
As a result of her comments, Wente has now been called a racist – not, it must be said, for the first time. But by well-respected academics.
Three geographers of some international repute have just published a book called Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada (UBC Press). Here is what they have to say about Wente’s light-hearted confessional quipping:
The implication is that somehow Canada might become less Canadian unless measures are taken to ensure that immigrants are taught the j-stroke. Against a backdrop of imagined wilderness, [the love-in-a-canoe comment] privileges the universality of Canadian canoe culture, marginalizes dark-skinned bodies as peripheral to national origins, and positions white heterosexual procreation in a canoe as the highest achievement of national identity.
Truth to tell, I laughed out loud when I read that. The way that Wente frames these comments in her rebuttal makes them sound so goshdarned earnest. But are the professors wrong?
The main point about racism that some folks seem to miss is that it is not merely a moral term of disapproval, but a descriptive one – so while the academics are pointing out the underlying racism in Wente’s (and Berton’s) comments, they are not necessarily saying that those individuals are to blame, or that they are making such “racist” comments intentionally. It is possible to express racism without intending to do so. In fact, given our socialization, it’s likely impossible to avoid expressing it altogether, at least implicitly. It’s also possible to uncover and describe its forms and structures without being bluntly accusatory.
Take a second look at what the professors are actually saying. They aren’t calling Wente a KKK sympathizer. They’re simply pointing to assumptions and implications in what she (and Pierre Berton) wrote. Are they incorrect? We must ask where such “Canadian” images come from, and what they, by necessity, exclude. Does Wente implicitly agree with Berton? And does she imply – by making direct contrasting reference to today’s immigrants, and by raising the notion of patriotism – that she is of a different breed?
If Wente and Berton are implying these things, that doesn’t make them evil. It makes them people of certain backgrounds who look at the world more or less unselfconsciously through one lens instead of another. It’s worth unpacking that worldview (just as one might want to examine more closely my use of the phrase “naturalized American,” above, in reference to Wente), but that doesn’t mean it is inherently bad.
What It Means To Be Black in Canada
Part of the problem, of course, is that it’s easy to juxtapose academic writing with Wente’s breezy style of journalism to the disadvantage of the former. Virtually any selection from the academy, in whatever discipline, will appear ponderous, dull, and opaque in comparison. This sort of thing is always good for a cheap laugh.
And cheap it is. Parading her astonishing ignorance of the field of human geography is just another example of rube warfare, the sort of thing we see on the right all the time –Keats’ “standing aloof in giant ignorance.” It’s inverse snobbery: Look at those dumb intelleckshuls with their fancy words ‘n’ all. One can imagine these folks sitting at a lecture by Einstein and snickering about “curved space.”
When Wente almost inevitably gets around to arguing from authority, she’s plain sloppy. She cites the education critics Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, who seem, it is true, to hold a jaundiced view of postmodernism, but almost en passant. The book that Wente cites is really about the academic industry, and the deterioration of teaching. (See a review of Hacker and Dreifus’s book in the Wall Street Journal, and another in The New York Times.) There seems to be little or nothing in their work criticizing the use of technical terms – terms that one should actually take the trouble to master, as is the case in any field, not just academia.
Meanwhile, the puff, fluff, and guff of Canadian journalism is on parade once again. But unlike the not-always-unjustly maligned academy, it’s apparently no worse than it was 60 years ago, when Adlai Stevenson is reputed to have observed, “An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.” Are we Globe readers getting our money’s worth?
