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.

David Gilmour's Transgression

Novelist David Gilmour has apparently made quite a stir with recent comments about the courses he teaches at U of T. Students are holding protest rallies. A fellow U of T professor has posted a rather personal online rebuttal. The chair of the U of T English department has publicly declared himself “appalled and deeply upset.”

Goodness—what exactly did Gilmour say?

The entire transcript is here. He says he only teaches books he himself loves, and, “unfortunately,” none of the authors happen to be Canadian, women, or Chinese. All of them seem to be “serious heterosexual guys.”

I find it hard to see anything objectionable here. I think it has to be either 1. that Gilmour is teaching only books he likes, as opposed to some official canon of great literature, or 2. that Gilmour does not happen to really like any books by women (except, he notes, Virginia Woolf), Chinese authors, Canadian authors, or openly homosexual authors.

But it can't be 2., can it? After all, there's no disputing taste. Gilmour's taste is certainly not the same as mine either, but to object to this would be ridiculous.

So it must be 1, that he is departing from the accepted canon? Yet Gilmour's chosen authors are in any way obscure: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Elmore Leonard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Phillip Roth. Surely all are, in fact, in the accepted canon, except perhaps for Roth, who is too recent to have a traditional place. So this can't be it.

And the bigger problem here is that English departments themselves have long ago departed from any accepted canon. Quite possibly they shouldn't have, but it's a bit late to blame Gilmour for this. The only issue should be whether the books and authors studies are clearly stated on the syllabus. Which, in Gilmour's case, they were.

So how, then, are books now supposed to be chosen for a course, if the traditional canon is to be ignored, yet it is not supposed to be the personal preference of the prof?

The answer, sadly, is painfully obvious. They are supposed to be chosen for political reasons, on the basis of affirmative action. Properly, whether the author is male or female, Canadian, homosexual, or Chinese, should not have any bearing on the literary quality of a book. But these days, English departments are all about politics, and have little interest in the literary quality of a book. One must include women, gays, and no doubt other designated groups in any curriculum. One need not, on the other hand, include heterosexual males; one can just bill the course "women authors," or "queer studies," and then it's okay to exclude men.

Indeed, quite apart from personal taste, it may well be, in the real world, that women have just not written as many good books as have men. This is quite likely, given that women have written many fewer books overall. It may well be, in the real world, that homosexuals have not written as many good books as heterosexuals. This is quite likely, given that homosexuals have written many fewer books overall. The same might be said of Canadians, or Chinese authors, at least Chinese authors accessible in English. Why should David Gilmour be held responsible for this? And why should students nevertheless be forced to waste their precious and expensive college time with inferior books in defiance of this fact?

Gilmour deserves the Order of Canada for this.