Frequently Asked White Questions by Ajay Parasram

Author:Ajay Parasram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

CAN MEMBERS OF AN OPPRESSED GROUP BE OPPRESSORS?

There’s nothing simpler than good and evil, hero and villain, oppressed and oppressor. It’s not incidental that “white” and “black” are also binary terms, because the idea of whiteness overlaps with the way people justified colonial expansion as a project of “civilization” — those people closest to a “pure” place (usually Christian Europe) had a right and even obligation to spread purity to the rest of the world. This isn’t the whole story of whiteness — far from it — but the idea of a pure, white, honourable, and civilized body opposite a contaminated, black, dishonoured, and uncivilized body helps illustrate not only the problem of thinking in binaries, but also how binary thinking has duped people into excusing and justifying racism and colonialism over the last several hundred years.

Many questions white people ask us are preoccupied with concerns about oppression and anti-oppression that take binary forms, including those about “reverse racism” or the idea that if Europe had not colonized much of the world, someone else would have. In both cases there is an assumption that today’s outcome was inevitable, which is ahistorical and works to make the inequities of today appear incidental. In the subtext of their questions, white people often imply that social justice–oriented people assume that white people do not face discrimination and injustice. This is patently untrue, but perhaps it’s worth also saying explicitly that racialized people across all intersections and combinations of identities can be spectacular assholes just like white people can. The important thing to remember, as outlined in Chapter 1, is a white person is never being oppressed because of the colour of their skin when they live in a society built upon structural white supremacy. As we explore below, they may be oppressed for a variety of other reasons, and sometimes those oppressing the white person in question may have brown skin. But in this hypothetical situation, the power dynamic between the oppressive nonwhite person and the white person does not exist because of skin colour; it is due to some other form of structural power, such as class, gender, sexuality, or religious position.

Equity Hiring, the Myth of the Meritocracy, and Equal Rights

A common kind of question we are asked in SSFWQ concerns equity and meritocracy in hiring practices. For many, work is the environment in which they most often mix with people not of their choosing, as it is the means through which they sustain themselves and their kin. As a result, white people regularly share concerns about what equity-oriented policy directions may do for their children’s futures — shouldn’t the “best qualified” person get the job rather than someone who happens to not be white? The problem lies in the framing of the question, which reveals the person asking it believes they already live in a merit-based society. They don’t, and there’s much work to be done before such a society can exist.

One of the leading determinants of whether a person

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