Jen Gerson: The problem of white people

Here's a sort-of defence of Canada's latest Pretendian, Randy Boissonnault

This generic white man is 1/16th Cherokee.

In light of recent events, I was inspired to dig through Hansard for the musings of now-former Liberal cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault in regards to claims, implicit or otherwise, about his Indigenous heritage.

I found this:

"Mr. Speaker, miyotôtâkewin tatawaw. That is Cree for ‘Guests, you're welcome, there's room here.’ If my great-grandmother Lucy Brown Eyes, a full-blooded Cree woman, had been able to be elected to this place, she may well have extended the same greeting in the House from the peoples of Treaty 6.”

And this:

"I'm non-status adopted Cree from Alberta, my great-grandmother Lucy Brown Eyes, was a full-blooded Cree woman. Everybody thinks my mum is Mexican because she goes out and tans for a half hour to two hours and it's like she's been outside all summer. She's one-quarter Cree."

Oh, and this:

"I can see her at 85, with gnarled hands, making an apple pie because she married a Dutchman. She never lived on reserve. She once said to me: ‘Randy, we come from the land. We will someday go back to the land, and one day we will all be one people again.’"

As has recently been discovered — all of this is bunk. Boissonnault’s adopted great grandmother was not, in fact, a full-blooded Cree woman. However, no malice was intended on Boissonnault’s part, we’re told. This was a simple case of mistaken self-identity: a terrible error that Mr. Boissonnault innocently believed thanks to his own misapprehension of his family heritage. The now-demoted former cabinet minister was forced to confront the truth in "real time" when the National Post found the records not of "Lucy Brown Eyes," but rather a "Lucy Brenneis" who was listed, along with her husband, as German in census documents from 1931. Boissonnault now claims that Brenneis was not Cree, but, rather, Metis.

Okay.

In general, one's personal family history is of nobody's concern — unless, of course, one is a cabinet minister who owns a company that tried to get special access to government contracts because said company is "Indigenous owned." A claim that was, apparently, also not fact checked in “real time” when said company was answering the federal RFP for face masks.

“Global Health is a wholly owned Indigenous and LGBTQ Company,” Boissonnault’s former business partner, Stephen Anderson, stated in a June 2020 bid by the company, named Global Health Imports Corporation (GHI). All due props to the National Post, who obtained the bid through an access-to-information request. (In a statement to the Post, Boissonnault’s spokesperson said Anderson acted without his knowledge or consent in submitting that bid.)

At the risk of coming off as naive, might I suggest that I actually have some empathy for Boissonnault. Or, rather, I think there's more going on here than a case of mistaken identity; more, even, than a desire to gain a lucrative government contract otherwise reserved for Indigenous companies.

Let me be clear that I don't think even the most-generous supporter of Randy Boissonnault can fail to see what's happening here. And I think the fact that Randy Boissonnault managed to stick around for as long as he did in the Liberal cabinet, and a member of its Indigenous caucus (merely as an ally, of course), while figures like Jody Wilson-Raybould were kicked out after the first term, tells us everything that needs telling about what this government is, and how it operates.

I would also pause to note that as a totally ordinary white person, I absolutely acknowledge that it's not for me to grant or deny anybody else's claims to Indigenous identity. I recognize that this identity isn't always cut-and-dried: there are many white-passing people who have legitimate claims to it. There are also those who can show Indigenous DNA, yet don't have any grounded claims to the title. It's for First Nations people in this country to decide who they claim, and under what terms.

These facts duly acknowledged, in this specific case ... come the fuck on.

If Boissonnault or his family had a credible claim to Indigenous identity through their cultural links, at a minimum they ought to have had the good sense to know that they, uh, weren't Cree. And that's before I point out that tying one's personal identity to the family lore of one of eight great-grandparents is objectively lunatic behaviour. Like, that is a uniquely white person thing to do.

Every pale-skinned mutt kicking around the Canadian prairies for more than a generation is going to find some non-white ancestry peeking around the corners if they look hard enough. So what? Why does a non-white ancestor — presuming he or she exists — take precedence over all the others?

But still. I don't believe Boissonnault was motivated to lie solely to get the inside track on government contracts. I think that assumption falls into the trap of mistaking material solutions for spiritual problems.

I think it's incorrect to fall into that trap, firstly, because claims like this are just so painfully common. Every white family out here has a story like this, of some ancient Indigenous ancestor lost to the mists of time. And these family legends are passed down for a reason: because they make white families feel magical, spiritually connected to the land — or less complicit in the violence of colonialism. If one of your great-grandparents was a victim of imperial expansion, somehow this absolves the other seven.

Boisonnault’s story is only the latest case of Pretendianism, which has either become more common in recent years, or more commonly condemned. Lots of people are checking this box because there are now grants and jobs specifically set aside for people of Indigenous heritage. But I think there’s more to it than that. The rise of Pretendians across the span of art, culture and politics in this country is a symptom of a crisis of white identity that is being helped along by a collapse in national identity.

What do I mean by that?

Well, let's get one caveat right out of the way. "White identity" is a fiction. There are no "White People" in the sense that the pales share any cohesive culture, history, purpose, or sense of self. There never has been. There are many ethnic, cultural and national identities of peoples who happen to burn easily in summer; but skin colour alone doesn't define anyone. It doesn't mean anything.

I'm a pale Canadian, I guess. I don't identify as German, or Irish, or Gaelic. I don't know where most of my great-grandparents were born, or how they identified, and frankly, I don't care. I can't un-split the atom. I'm just a boring, mushy, mutty Canadian. Just like Randy Boissonnault. And, like him, I'm of a generation that was taught not to identify with "whiteness" — but rather to acknowledge that the myth of a distinct "white people" was a lie perpetuated by white supremacists. "Whiteness," therefore, was an absence, a non-identity. In its stead, what was left was national identity — a beer commercial Canadianness that is post-racial and post ethnic, and fully inclusive regardless of skin colour.

At least, that was the unfulfilled ideal.

Truth be told, this was totally fine, until we get into the more recent progressive political shifts that have defined our culture since about 2016. When, suddenly, failure to acknowledge one's "whiteness" was, itself, racist and perhaps supremacist. We are now counselled to be hyper conscious of our race, and of the presumed sins of the ancestors who shared it. Canada is not an imperfect national experiment striving toward a post-racial ideal, but instead must be forced to reconcile with its intrinsically evil, colonial and genocidal nature — a nature that lies not in the errors of the past, but rather continues on into this very day.

Being white is no longer an absence, or a non-identity, but rather visible proof of an inheritance of privilege and oppression, an original sin for which the non-melanated must atone — as if early aging and skin cancer weren't punishment enough.

This is what Justin Trudeau meant, I believe, when he said in 2015: "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada." It was an explicit rejection of the national mythos by which many generations of Canadians had been taught to define themselves, often to the exclusion of older markers of identity like tribal, ethnic, or religious affiliation.

Let's put the merits of this emerging ideology to the side: Instead, I would ask people to stop and consider what the practical effects of this have been on those of us taught to disidentify with "whiteness" in favour of a more classically liberal and expansive national identity.

For those who accept this new framework, there are three choices.

Firstly, some pasties have embraced the charge — but not in the way that was intended. They have abandoned a false or illegitimate claim to a post-modern national identity, and instead adopted the white supremacist lie. These are the people who trade in RETVRN and "Deus Vult" memes. Who would turn the clock back to a time in which they could claim their ancestors were not oppressors, but rather conquerors.

The people who go this route reframe the sins of history as virtue, and seek to laud it. Is it coincidence white nationalism, once relegated to the most extreme fringes of society, has been revived as a competitive ideology in tandem and in parallel to identitarian leftism?

Maybe making pale people hyper-conscious of a false racial identity was a ... bad plan. Maybe. I don't know. I'm spitballing.

The second way for whites to respond to this ideological shift is with total self abnegation. For those white people who fully embrace their inheritance as history's villains, the only moral response is to truly commit to the bit. Fully live the guilt and expiate it by becoming an ally of the oppressed. Rectify history by doing the work of social justice. (And if that guilt can be leashed to the political aims of those who would seek to reify a new and better racial hierarchy, well, that's only just, now isn't it?)

Most often, however, the people who fall into this camp are those who suffer from guilt without conviction; they're the types who are willing to say the right thing, to acknowledge their evil and privilege, but do nothing about it. These are people who will sit quietly during the corporate DEI seminar, or dutifully recite a land acknowledgement in which they admit they live on stolen territory — but will never, ever hand over the keys to their house. Or give up a job promotion. People are people, man.

The third, and last response to the problem of white identity is to seek loopholes. And, guys, I have to be honest when I note that I find this happening most often among urban Liberals who absolutely desire to do and say the right thing, but can't quite fully commit to acts of servility for their racial sins.

This, here, is the realm of the Pretendian, and others like him — the people who find a way out of the sin of their whiteness by appropriating an ancillary identity that allows them to play at being of the oppressed. I don't think Pretendians are solely animated by the desire to gain privileges that are rightly afforded to Indigenous people. Rather, I think a lot of the time, this phenomena is rooted in a sincere response to feelings of distress and guilt at hailing from the wrong side of history; of carrying forward a morally tainted bloodline — and one that additionally fails to offer any of the consolations of ethnic community. And, by the way, regardless of strict historic accuracy, sometimes these ancillary identities do engender real empathy and kinship toward marginalized peoples, as I think it did in Boissonnault’s case.

I can have some sympathy for all this while suggesting, gently, that there is a better way through the problem of identity.

We can simply reject this framework. Any ideology that assigns social value to immutable characteristics is a dead end. It just doesn’t get us anywhere useful. Nobody ought to feel bad about the sins of his ancestors, or about who she was born to. Pale humans are not uniquely responsible for history's evils; nor are they the only people who have committed violence, war, genocide, or colonial expansion at a mass scale. We can all simply regard our ethnic heritage as a morally neutral trait; one that deserves neither undue pride, nor guilt. We can all take what serves humanity for the good, and discard what does not.

Go back far enough in the family tree and, regardless of skin colour, you are going to find armies of oppressors and oppressed, of victims and victors, conquerors and the conquered. Because human history is not divided between the black hats and the white, and those hats are most certainly not handed out at birth according to modern distinctions of race.

Regardless of whether one's ancestors were saints or sinners, we can all acknowledge the errors of our history, try to make amends where possible, and work to build a better future for all our fellow citizens without regard to racial lineage.

Maybe that's wrong or naive. Maybe I am history's greatest monster. But it sure seems like a better way to push the ball forward than whatever the hell we've been trying over the last few years. And, at a minimum, it spares me the image of watching a grown-ass man try to craft a whole identity around apocryphal family legends of his German Metis great-grandmother's Dutch apple pie.

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