Cultivating the Soil of White Nationalism: Settler Violence and Whiteness as Territory

This paper considers the emergence of white nationalist movements in Canada and their relationship to settler colonialism. How do ideas of Canada as a white nation, and fear mongering about white Canadians being “replaced” come to be so effective in a context in which white people have typically been the replacers themselves? While the Canadian state frames itself as multicultural, many of its laws and practices cultivate white nationalist beliefs, affects, and feelings. The state informally deputizes white settlers as owners and protectors of private property and uses them to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land in order to appropriate it. This deputization protects both the material territory of the state and the affective and ideological justification for the continuation of settler colonialism. Private ownership of land cannot be understood merely as a legal capitalist relation, but is feltby many settlers as a deep, primordial connection to the land. Acts of settler violence both express and shape the racialized core of Canada. I propose thinking about settler private property as what I call “settler whitespace,” which is not only protective and expansive, but also involves the fabrication of an idea of white nativity to Canadian territory. This racialization of space serves to naturalize racist violence, cultivate hypermasculine expressions of whiteness, and ground white claims of exclusive belonging to Canada, all characteristic of the resurgent far-right. The property regime of Canada is not just part of its territorializing project; it lays the groundwork for white nationalist movements.

Un/Covering White Lies: Exposing Racism in the Era of Racelessness

This project examines a Canadian court case that involves the largest arson homicide in the history of Vancouver, British Columbia. In May 2006 a fire killed four members of a Congolese refugee family (Adela Etibako and three of her children, Benedicta, Edita, and Stephane) along with Ashley Singh, the South Asian girlfriend of the target and sole survivor of the fire, Bolingo Etibako. On October 5, 2008 the accused, Nathan Fry, a 20-year-old white male, was found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Fry received an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole for 25 years. This paper considers this crime and the legal proceedings as a case study that can further our understanding of discourses of race, racism, and citizenship in Canada, and their link to Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics, what he terms as the politics of life and death. I argue that the viciousness of the crime, an offense involving a white male perpetrator and victims all of whom are racialized as Black and Brown, reflects the embodied practices and psychological processes that are both emblematic of, and integral to, the violence of coloniality, and the racial relations and structural arrangements of present-day white settler society (Martinot, 2010; Razack, 2002, 2005). I show how the crime, the investigation, and the trial communicate symbolically and materially what bell hooks (1992) characterizes as the “terrorizing force of white supremacy” (p. 344).

Framing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Process in Canada: A Media Analysis of Settler Colonial Rhetoric and Colonial Denial, 2003-2016

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada helped to expose the trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS), which were governed and run by government and church officials. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for these residential schools. This apology was undermined, however, by a denial of colonial history by Canada at the G20 in 2009, revealing a rhetorical contradiction that is part of a public narrative of colonial denial. This paper examines the public discourse during and after the TRC process to understand the impact of negative discourses regarding the TRC and colonialism. This case study examines written content from five Canadian media platforms that covered the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and TRC process between 2003 and 2016. Drawing on concepts such as the white possessive, white rage, and white fragility, the aim of this paper is to unpack the cognitive dissonance of apology concurrent with the rhetoric of settler colonial denial. Findings from the discourse analysis substantiate the hypothesis that continued dominant narratives of settler colonialism align with representations of the TRC process. This limits the authentic potential for a formal apology to address the IRS legacy which perpetuates continued settler colonial realities in Canada.

Introduction to Special Issue: Whiteness in the Age of White Rage

This Special Issue—“Whiteness in the Age of White Rage”—names and interrogates what is implicit in anti-racist, Indigenous, and whiteness studies: white rage. Drawing on Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2017), we invited scholars to explore empirical and theoretical inquiry of how rage is a defining characteristic of settler colonialism, whiteness, and white supremacy in Canada. In this Introduction we elaborate how contemporaneously, historically, and theoretically a vital dimension of the configuration of whiteness in Canada is the normalization of rage as a property right of whiteness. Presently, as fascism is once again a global phenomenon, there is an opportunity for critical scholarship on whiteness in Canada to name and explicate the social effects and quotidian mobilization of rage in conservative and liberal articulations of white supremacy. We offer a general outline to the theme of whiteness in the age of white rage to introduce nascent scholarship that builds on the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and critical whiteness scholars.

Rendering Whiteness Palatable: The Acceptable Muslim in an Era of White Rage

In this paper, I analyze the perspectives of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)in two Canadian case studies: (a) Irshad Manji, a Canadian Muslim journalist and activist who has been an active commentator on a variety of issues including those related to Muslims; and (b) the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), which was the first Canadian mainstream television series featuring Muslim characters. I suggest that these case studies illuminate the figure of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)who is represented as a “moderate,” modern, and assimilable Muslim, and who espouses a privatized faith with few public expressions of religious/cultural belonging. Centrally implicated in Canadian debates about multiculturalism, gender equality, citizenship, and secularism, Acceptable Muslims (re)confirm the racial boundaries of the nation-state, becoming icons of multiculturalism, reanimating the whiteness at the heart of the Canadian nation-state. The Acceptable Muslim sustains the narrative of the Canadian nation-state as liberal, secular, modern, and inclusive even as it relentlessly excludes, punishes, and eliminates the Muslim Other, enabling such policies to be legitimated as “race-neutral.” Acceptable Muslims stand as sentries at the (symbolic) borders of the nation, reanimating racialized boundaries of acceptability and signalling that those beyond these boundaries can be legitimately policed by the nation-state. My analysis provides insights into how Canada has re-configured the power and persistence of its white fantasy and, through the strategic use of the Acceptable Muslim, cloaks its deeply racialized coding in more palatable grammars of multiculturalism, gender equality, and secularism.

Decolonizing Kink: Nishinaabeg Stories as Critical Engagements with Power

The purpose of this paper is to address interpretations of Nishinaabeg epistemologies and pedagogies that replicate essentialist modes of storytelling and governance. This paper elaborates on Anishinaabek theories of consent and consent-based governance systems by drawing upon our stories and storytelling practices. Presenting Anishinaabeg storytelling practices as critically reflexive engagements with power, this paper demonstrates the untranslatability of Nishinaabeg methods of governance to colonial contexts of systemic violence. The intention of this work is to reveal how Nishinaabeg relationship governance practices are fundamentally oriented to consent, sustainability, and collective and/or mutual/reciprocal validation.

The Reimagining Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium: An Overview and Reflective Essay

The following provides highlights from the Reimagining Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium, a one-day event held in Kingston, Ontario at Queen’s University in January 2019. It was hosted by the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) and the Department of Gender Studies, Sexual and Gender Diversity Certificate Program. The overarching aim of the day was to provide a space for meaningful dialogue on gender, sexuality, cultural revitalization and relations within Indigenous communities. This special section of this Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) issue highlights some of the Indigenous intellectual work emerging from the Colloquium. The written pieces presented here cover some of the themes related to love, two-spirit identities, governance, kinship, consent, storytelling, and belonging. It is our hope the Reimagining Kinship, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium and this special report from JCRI will spark further conversations and ideas that will contribute to the cultural resurgence of our Indigenous communities and knowledges across Turtle Island and among all our relations—human and more-than-human.

Clay and Common Ground: Clanships and Polyspirited Embodiment

In this article, I explore embodiment within discourses on trans and two-spirit through a consideration of polyspirited(many-spirited) within the context of Indigenous and transnational stories of clay. Two main articulations spiral out from embodiments of the polyspirited: 1) that embodiment is not limited to one or two spirits but potentially many spirits operating through or within the body collectively in reciprocal relationality; and 2) that stories of clay teach us that the Westernized scientific conception of the human body is limited in its capacity to articulate what it means to be in relation. By understanding clay stories, we begin to comprehend that we are potentially more than two-spirit peoples.