What separates messaging from motive?
Across the last few weeks, posters bearing the words “It’s okay to be white” have sprung up around university campuses and public squares from Winnipeg to Charlottetown. Now, according to Postmedia, they have surfaced in Ottawa.
As is typically the case with similar instances of mass-produced political messaging efforts, these signs have been met with a sharp response. Harjit Sajjan, Canadian Minister of National Defense, tweeted, “These posters may appear innocent, but the racist undertones they represent have no place in Canada.” Meanwhile, Derek Fildebrandt, the leader of Alberta’s Freedom Conservative Party, described the posters’ criticism as “hyperventilating reactions” from the “modern leftist.”
Fildebrandt, himself a white male, clearly has little issue with these posters. I share his ethnicity, and because of this, I understand that my view of these posters may appear to hold some bias. I’d like to alleviate some of these concerns by saying that by no means do these efforts hold benign motivations. The 4chan commenters who started this align in overall ideology with those involved in vitriolic, hate-filled displays like the alt-right protests which occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
I have no quarrel with those who criticize the means behind these posters’ proliferation. White supremacy is a prohibitive result of deeply-rooted anger and prejudice that only serves to hold back progress in society. It is unacceptable.
However, I must return to the question I posed at the top of this letter: “What separates messaging from motive?” A common response to these signs is that white people have not even come close to experiencing the oppression faced by other cultures. Sure, at a glance, this is true. But, why should this justify the removal of expressions of the sentiment that being white is simply “okay”?
To take the phrase “It’s okay to be white” as coming from a race that cannot have possibly experienced enough oppression is nearsighted. Oppression is not a competition. One race can face more hardship than another, but there is no such thing as a “hierarchy of cruelty.”
The inherent hypocrisy of the opposition to these signs’ literal message is that it seemingly recommends the exclusion of the word “white” from positive messaging, as the result of a sort of historical see-saw. I thought we were living in an advanced, more equitable society, not one that is a mirror image of the imbalanced one that we have supposedly left behind.
In striving for equality, we should try to recognize everyone’s value. That means considering being white, like any ethnicity, as neither “supreme” nor “lesser.” Perhaps that is an idealist way of looking at things. I’d love it if everybody could get along, but that is unlikely to happen, thanks to the inevitable presence of prejudice in common discourse. Radicals will always be around to push exclusive notions of their own cultural “supremacy.” These messages will inevitably cause understandable aversion from certain parties and, ultimately, division in society. As a result, when it comes to promoting cultural welfare, we must broaden our horizons in messaging and avoid exclusivity.
While it may be true that the groups backing these signs represent agencies of hate, the clear-cut message of “It’s okay to be white” that they present should be taken, in isolation, as an obvious, inoffensive truth. We can, and should, be opposed to the hideous motive of white supremacy, but we should accept this messaging in a literal sense. What is the alternative to this specific message? “It’s not okay to be white”? Or, perhaps a message proclaiming other, non-white ethnicities as “okay”? As the common legal axiom reads, expressio unius est exclusio alterius—“to say one thing is to exclude the others.”
We must see the value of every ethnicity and do what we can to recognize them all. Instead of taking down signs, we must make a bigger sign.
