A couple of weeks ago, posters stating “It’s okay to be white” started appearing in downtown Ottawa. These posters have appeared in cities and university campuses all over Canada and the U.S. They are simple—just black text on a white background. There is not any group name or other message. The poster seems innocuous, but it is the insidious message behind the statement that is terrifying.
The problem with the message is that it implies that white people are a marginalized group in a country that holds whiteness as the norm. Everything around us—the media we consume, the literature, the art, the politicians in power—has whiteness as the biggest part of it. What about our culture says it’s not okay to be white?
Take, for example, university education. In my English program at Carleton, in a primarily white department, I read primarily white authors. Unless I take a class that specifically focuses on non-western or non-white literature, I am not likely to read anything by a racialized author. The most popular non-Canadian and non-British literature electives are American literature and Celtic literature—which are both white forms of literature.
Literature by white people is seen as universal, whereas literature by racialized people is attached to some facet of a racialized identity, such as immigration, culture, and racism. While these are important topics to talk about because they affect people’s everyday lives, racialized people often cannot inhabit the same forms of “neutrality” that white people can.
One of the main gripes about how it’s not okay to be white in this culture anymore is that now job positions and scholarships sometimes state that they encourage minorities to apply. An even smaller number of positions and scholarships are open only for racialized people. Yet white people, when arguing about being shafted in situations in society, always seem to refer back to affirmative action.
The statement “It’s okay to be white” holds a subliminal threat to people of colour. It says that we need to stop trying to shift the hierarchy and just assimilate to whiteness. Slogans like this completely disregard the ways in which people of colour are affected every day, in seemingly miniscule ways. Racialized people who want to succeed in this culture often have to adopt whiteness in order to be seen as acceptable and respectable. One example of this is adopting white ways of speaking, whether it is accents, slang, syntax, or ease of speaking.
This does not even touch upon the violence against racialized people—Black and Indigenous people in particular. Not being white means that institutions of authority react differently to you, whether it is in a police, housing, office, or academic context.
Movements like Black Lives Matter and cultural heritage events do not care about reversing the roles of white versus racialized people. Racialized people simply want a chance for our lives and our voices to exist as being part of the base structure of society, rather than as an afterthought. But, of course, even the slightest nudge to destabilize the solely central role that white culture has held for so long feels like an attempt to topple white culture from the pedestal entirely.
It starts with the election of U.S. president Donald Trump. It ends with a Muslim ban and a wall. It starts with the election of Ontario premier Doug Ford. It ends with the removal of an inclusive sex-ed curriculum.
It starts with seemingly innocent posters that say “It’s okay to be white.”
