Stephan Villanueva

No stranger to controversy, U of C professor Darren Lund co-edited The Great White North?, a collection of essays addressing race issues in the Canadian school system

It is a popular notion that Canadians are colour-blind when it comes to race — that as a multicultural, pluralistic nation, race has become irrelevant due to shared ideals of equality, fairness and tolerance. In his new book, The Great White North? Exploring Whiteness, Privilege and Identity in Education, University of Calgary professor Darren Lund challenges this assumption, saying that the very idea of colour-blindness as it applies in Canadian society gives white people an unfair advantage.

It’s a provocative idea, but then again, Lund is no stranger to controversy. A noted social justice activist, Lund recently won a landmark human rights ruling in the case of Stephen Boissoin, a Red Deer pastor who, in 2002, wrote a letter published in the Red Deer Advocate comparing gay people to pedophiles and drug dealers. After a five-year battle, Lund finally got the Alberta Human Rights Commission to declare Boissoin’s letter a hate crime — but not before Lund received his own share of hate mail and death threats.

Now, in The Great White North?, Lund re-enters the social justice fray by pointing out that most white people don’t see themselves as a race, and that this allows them to enjoy the benefit of being white without having to question the hierarchies and historical antecedents that give them advantages in Canadian society.

“Let’s talk about the unearned privilege that white people enjoy in Canada,” states Lund. “Not all of them use it very well, but it’s there. There’s an assumed racelessness among white Canadians, but that has the effect of retaining the status quo — the power structures, hierarchies and privileges that benefit us.”

“We have the luxury as white people of never having to think about our skin colour,” adds Lund, “We get to see ourselves as the norm.”

Co-edited by Lund and Paul Carr of Youngstown State University, The Great White North? contains a collection of essays and articles by prominent scholars, activists and educators on the topic of white privilege as it relates to social justice and education. The articles cover a range of issues, including the fact that “colour-blindness” tends to be one-sided — most non-white racial groups are very aware of white identity. One chapter in the book quotes a non-white student saying, “White privilege is not really [new] because I’ve been confronted with it throughout my whole life that they [white people] are the dominant race.” Meanwhile, the chapter’s author observes that in many cases white people struggle to even conceive of themselves as a group, let alone one with “privileges not available to others.”

The book also discusses the power of language: how the absence of white racial terms in the media serves to reinforce white dominance while marginalizing others. For example, the term “visible minority” immediately establishes whiteness as the “norm” against which other groups are compared. And as Lund points out, “You just don’t talk about yourself as a ‘white’ person. But you’re allowed to talk about the ‘other’ — such as the Asian community or the black community or black teachers.”

The book has a particular emphasis on public education — what Lund calls a “microcosm of Canadian pluralism.” It addresses this area by looking at the many complexities faced by educators — who are predominantly white, middle-class females — having to reach out and connect to students at risk of marginalization due to their increasingly diverse racial and ethnographic backgrounds.

At the outset, the authors acknowledge that it is an oversimplification to say that all white people are privileged — certainly white people can face steep obstacles on other counts such as gender, geography and socioeconomic class. However, Lund also wryly points out that rarely can it be said that it actually hurts to be a white person in Canadian society.

Against outcries of reverse racism, Lund stresses that his work is not meant to encourage blame, guilt or division. Rather, acknowledging one’s whiteness is about becoming an informed participant in the fight to remove barriers and disadvantages in society by being honest about how those barriers benefit some and hurt others. As the book’s introduction states: “For white people to become allies in anti-racist struggle, it is crucial that we understand not just the racialization of others, but our own whiteness, both as a marker, and a constituent element of our own privileged cultural, national and class location.” And as Lund, a self-confessed privileged white guy observes, “It isn’t just people of colour who need to fight racism. We all have a part to play.”