A brief family history: I'm mostly Irish and German-via-Russia. None of my ancestors, afaik, owned slaves, conquered lands, or harassed Indigenous people. That doesn't exempt me, a white dude, from white privilege. Lemme get specific.
I know less about the Irish side, because they've been in Canada longer. I know they came over during the Potato Famine, landed in Montreal, and eventually ended up in BC and Alberta. They left a place where they were discriminated against based on ethnicity & religion...
and arrived in a place that was much the same (but without the potato blight). So. Can they be said to have had white privilege? Yes! Because at whatever point they moved west, they were able to purchase land easily. Even the Irish were eligible to acquire stolen land in the West
And I do mean stolen. Alberta was taken legally by Canadian law, but not by Indigenous law (those treaties have never been fulfilled), and BC was taken illegally even by Canadian standards. My ancestors didn't do the stealing, but they directly benefitted from the theft.
Meanwhile, my Mennonite German ancestors only showed up in the 20th century. Long after the civil war or the last major treaty. So surely they're not culpable, right? Wrong. Because again, they were able to buy farmland in Alberta when other people couldn't.
Moreover, they arrived in Canada during the era of the Chinese Head Tax and the Komagata Maru. My great grandparents weren't turned away at port, or charged a race-based fee for entrance into Canada. They were white. They could resume farming immediately.
But wait, there's more. My great grandparents came from Siberia. THEIR ancestors were GIVEN land in Siberia by Catherine the Great, who was eager to fill up these lands with white German farmers after Russia pushed off all the Central Asians who lived there.
My entire family history is deeply entwined with the expansion of white people outside of Europe at the point of a gun. Yes, even the ancestors who were pacifists.
But even if that weren't true, it wouldn't matter. Because the problem is that white supremacy and structural inequality still exists TODAY, in 2018. Nobody cares about transported intentured servants or medieval pirate slavers because those ties have been CUT.
There is no measurable effect that they have on anyone living today in the present. Somehow, mysteriously,* the race-based inequalities that began 500 years ago in North America can still be seen today by the distribution of who has wealth & power.
*-not actually mysterious
*-not actually mysterious
If they had been erased, who is rich or poor would match the average demographics of who lives in the country. They don't. They're skewed. SOMETHING IS SKEWING THEM. And it needs to be fixed.
