United Colours of Ryerson

The offense

Signs have appeared over the last few days all over Toronto, and are just as quickly being torn down. They say very little: “White Students Union!” and a web link. This, apparently, is “offensive” (U of T). “We don't condone this sort of thing,” (Ryerson).

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? A visitor from another planet might easily suppose that “white students” are an oppressed group, not permitted to organize in their own defense.

And they would be right.

After all, student groups based on other ethnicities, real or imagined, are a common feature on campuses. Ryerson has an Albanian students’ association, a Muslim students’ association, an African students’ association, an Afghan students’ association, an Armenian students’ association, an Assyrian students’ association—and so far we are not even out of the “A”’s. U of T and York, being larger, have all these and more. Most Canadian colleges have not just courses, but entire majors, in fields such as “Aboriginal Studies,” “Black Studies,” “Women’s Studies,” and so forth. In most of these, white males might well feel rather uncomfortable. So why can it be so wrong, even unspeakable, to seek to form a “White Students Union?” Equality seems to demand it.

“Ah,” the opponents will say, “but white people are different. They are privileged. Therefore, they must be discriminated against to level the field.”

No doubt some people have an advantage over others because of their background. However, the logic of this argument, at best, is that two wrongs make a right. They do not. Moreover, while discrimination in favour of people with white skin in Canada is a theory, and debatable, the formal and institutional discrimination against them is, as in this instance, an indisputable fact.

And is anyone at all aware that the most severe cases of discrimination in history tend to be against groups which, like “white students,” are held to be privileged? It stands to reason, after all: first, since everyone knows in their conscience that discrimination is wrong, you need to have a rationalization such as this: you have to have a reason to claim they deserve it. Second, envy is a powerful emotion, more powerful than contempt. It is a stronger motivator to do harm to another. Third, there is a lot more money and stuff to be confiscated in discriminating against the rich and successful than against the poor and destitute.

The model case is the Jews. In most times and places, they have been discriminated against. And in most times and places, they have been better educated and wealthier than their neighbours. This was certainly true in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe just before the Nazi Holocaust. The claim was that the Jews were unfairly in control of everything. Just like “white males” today.

Privileged bourgeois skulls, Cambodia.

But there are lots of other cases, if you go through the list of the worst persecutions known to history. There are the class persecutions of the Communist realms: on the theoretical claim that the middle classes have historically persecuted the workers, millions of members of the “bourgeoisie” and “intelligentsia” were rounded up, stripped of all their possessions, and often shot, in the elimination of the kulaks, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, and so forth.

Privileged Tutsi skulls, Rwanda.

Often, as with the Jews or the “white students,” this envy of material success or educational attainment intersects with race. This does not make it morally better or worse; it just makes it easier to identify and isolate the victims. In Rwanda, the middle class was primarily Tutsis, and the poorer classes primarily Hutus. Was oppression involved? Perhaps; perhaps not. But the Hutus massacred the Tutsis. Just as the Russians massacred the Circassians, the Zanzibarian blacks massacred the Zanzibarian Arabs, the Sinhalese repressed the Tamils, the Equatorial Guineans massacred the Bubi, the Nigerians repressed the Ibo, the Cantonese and just about everyone else in Southeast Asia repressed the Hakka, and the Haitians, Tupacs, Yucatanese, and Boxers massacred the Europeans—the “whites.”

Yes, this usually happens when the group targeted for discrimination or destruction is a minority of the population. This is for obvious practical reasons. But “straight white males” are indeed a minority of the Canadian population, and that is what the target group has been whittled down to so far. It’s getting pretty close to being bite-sized.

We are left with two choices here: either we must allow “White student unions” on the same basis as everyone else, or we must ban all ethnic-based organizations. Of the two choices, the former is obviously preferable. First, it is far less intrusive, and, second, there is this little detail called the right to freedom of association, It is a basic human right, which means that no government may legitimately interfere with it. Unfortunately, it has been all but trampled in the mud for the past fifty years or so.

It means everyone has the God-given right to hang with whomever they want to hang with, given mutual consent.

Without it, democracy itself is not possible over the long term.