In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
As Canada’s diversity increases, anti-racialism becomes essential
After months of mounting scandal, Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages Minister Randy Boissonnault’s efforts to evade his predictable political demise finally ended this week.
It wasn’t the allegations of conflicts of interest or associations with cocaine dealers that were his downfall. He was forced to resign due to a consistent pattern of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.
Boissonnault’s case adds to a growing list of high-profile Canadians such as Mary Ellen Turpel-Lanford, Buffy Saint-Marie, and Joseph Boyden who’ve been found to have misrepresented their Indigenous heritage for the purposes of government benefits, employment opportunities, or social standing.
This week, The Hub published a must-read article by young Indigenous lawyer Aaron Pete who himself is the intergenerational product of Canada’s unjust Indigenous policies on the subject.
His principal argument was against the system of perverse identitarian incentives that have led to these cases and in favour of what he describes as a more “merit-based framework.” Put in simpler terms: he’s proposing that we reject racialism and embrace meritocracy.
I use racialism intentionally here. I first encountered the notion a couple of years ago in a thought-provoking essay by Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam. It has since influenced how I think about these issues concerning the interaction between race, identity, and the inherent anti-individualism of modern identity politics.
Salam characterizes anti-racialism as the proposition that “heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress.”
Based on this definition, one might describe racialism—what Salam convincingly argues against—as a conception of society that elevates the salience of racial identity over individual considerations and in turn views race as fundamental to understanding socio-economic disparities, political power, and so on.
As an epistemological framework, it represents a way of thinking that systematically organizes individuals into group categories based on race and then grants it explanatory power for virtually everything.
