Before I started writing about the Trucker Convoy, I had been working on a long series about Indigeneity and the land question in Canada. These two series are now converging so I should probably urge those who joined us late to catch up by reading the first three parts of the series on the land question.
In one of the most successful uses of subversion propaganda in history, Indigenous people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Anglo America hit upon one of the few effective ways of bridling European colonialism: appealing to the nostalgic and romantic sensibilities of colonists. As I have written elsewhere, historian Sam Gill offers a compelling case for Indigenous people adapting, modifying their demands and self-description to play on European sentimentality and romanticism about their own peoples’ experiences of conversion and colonialism.
Herodotus’s idea of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods,” strongly informed how Britons thought about the druids and England’s Celtic past; it likewise informed Germanic thinking about the valiant resistance of the Saxons who fought and died to protect their sacred groves from Charlemagne’s armies. While this afforded Indigenous people more political purchase on the present, this rhetoric was and remains costly in innumerable ways.
For a start, it is moored to the idea of the Celtic Twilight, the sense that the old world of elves, giants and great men, while superior, is nevertheless inexorably fading, diminishing, giving way to a world of more numerous yet lesser men. This is one of the central thematic sensibilities in JRR Tolkien’s hugely influential Lord of the Rings; the elves may be better than us, closer to the earth, closer to the heavens, closer to the gods but they are fading and will inevitably be succeeded by “the world of men.”
At the end of the nineteenth century, this Indigenous propaganda coup coincided with another major realigning cultural event, “the closing of the frontier.” With the frontier closed and America filling with settlers, the Myth of the Vanishing Indian was born. Read any major encyclopedia or canonical authoritative text from the end of the nineteenth century and, it is clear that there existed a cultural consensus that to be Indigenous meant, axiomatically, that one was in a process of vanishing. If a person or a people were not vanishing, they were not Indigenous. If one was Indigenous, one was necessarily vanishing.
It is, in this light, that one might want to reconsider the “kill the Indian to save the child” rhetoric of conservative proponents of Canada’s Indigenous residential school system. It is, in fact, a statement that one does not want Indigenous children to vanish and therefore that they must be shorn of their Indigeneity. Imperialistic? Yes. Racist? Absolutely. Blinkered Western triumphalist? Sure. Genocidal—only if you think “cultural genocide” is more lethal than actual genocide.
Of course, Indigenous people were not naturally vanishing, despite the horrific consequences of the virgin soil epidemics. They were being made to vanish by the market, by public policy, by a host of forces arrayed against them.
Unlike the original progressives who were strangling the Indian to save the child, contemporary progressives love romantic vanishing Indians. The more Indigenous people seem to be associated with a noble, ancient, fading culture, the more “racially transparent” they are, the more progressives love them. Thanks to centuries of intermarriage, most Indigenous Canadians today do not have their Indigeneity unambiguously tattooed on the outside of their bodies; that’s why progressives like such folks better when their speech style and costume fill in any blanks left by their skin and facial features. Neo-traditionalist Indigenous people are the most racially transparent group of Canadians. More and more frequently as it engages in greater and greater patronage of self-tokenization as a public performance, the Indians progressives encounter at their events, giving the land acknowledgement have fashioned themselves to be, as Thomas King writes, “the Indian I had in mind” because that is the Indian they have paid to have arrive.
There are a million ways to be Indigenous in Canada and be fully Indigenous; there is no wrong way. Nathan, my (inadvertently) white-passing pipeline worker, Tory candidate and Catholic men’s group organizer friend is just as Indigenous as every other member of the Assiniboine people. There is a spectrum of ways of being Indigenous in Canada; from the non-status Métis people who celebrate Canada Day harder than anyone else and are most likely to enlist in the Canadian Forces to the late Splitting the Sky, the Mohawk neo-traditionalist radical who led the armed standoff at Gustafsen Lake as a member of the Sundance Movement.
And associated with these two polarities are opposing political demands: Joseph Brant’s belief in a sovereign, self-governing traditional Mohawk Nation with full independence within the British Empire, answerable only to the Crown is at one end; Louis Riel’s belief that the Métis people were the co-owners of the Canadian project, or at least the project as it existed in the West, a synthesis of its founding peoples and beliefs, ready to take their place among the nation’s leaders.
Both are legitimate strategies because only God can see all ends.
Yet what has happened in the past five years is that the latter strategy, what we might call the “Riel Strategy,” has become conflated, in both the US and Canada, with accusations of white nationalism. In fact, “white nationalist” has almost become a synonym of “white trash.” This might seem an extreme interpretation until we realize that, in the minds of progressives, the expression of white guilt is constitutive of one’s entitlement to experience true whiteness.
What has enabled this bizarre turn of events is the way in which progressives and conservatives have increasingly diverged in their theory of whiteness and the social meaning thereof. A common feature of what are called populist “white nationalist” movements around the world, from India to the United States to Brazil to the Philippines is the lowering of the Colour Line. For the Trump movement, high caste Hindus are white; whites from São Paulo and Rio di Janeiro are white; whites from Uruguay and Argentina are white; white trash are white; Alaskan Eskimos are white. Furthermore, the movement’s costume can be used to whiten an individual, even if they do not become fully white. The single most effective protection against police bullets for black Americans is not Kevlar; it is a MAGA hat.
We must understand that the genuine racism of these movements, their association with hate groups, including Nazis are politically possible because at the same time as they demand more discrimination, more bigotry against black people, Arabs, low-caste Indians, they are also engaged in democratizing whiteness, and offering it to more people. At the level of personal, individual experience, a nearly-white person joining a white nationalist movement is experienced as a reduction in the racism one personally faces, even if it increases the level of overall racism in society. The authoritarian right offers a path in which more of society is white but the consequences of not being white grow more dire by the year.
Progressives have, probably reactively, become increasingly committed to raising the colour line, offering incentives for people to identify as something other than white. And they are increasingly concerned about racial transparency; the worst race to be, for progressives, is unknown, without precise knowledge of someone’s race, how are they to be located in the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being. And whereas conservatives tend increasingly to construct race as a binary, white/non-white, in or out, progressives grow more committed to a neo-Ottoman racial hierarchy with a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
Whereas too many conservatives now view a lack of whiteness as an insufficiency, progressives have returned to the nineteenth-century practice of seeing different races as possessing special, boutique knowledge and talents that are transmitted through the blood. However, as much as progressives purport to see their increasingly separatist, diversity-celebrating racial order as egalitarian, the reality is that they are slinging white superiority nearly as much as conservatives. It’s just that the rhetoric of white supremacy is very different.
One of the most horrid neologisms to come out of the alliance between Big HR and postmodernists is the term “logocentric.” The idea is that there are so many ways of knowing and all are equal. In fact, white people are supposedly cursed with being “logocentric,” i.e. they use reason and math to figure stuff out. Indigenous people are not “logocentric”—they have ancient, quasi-magical ways of knowing that are supposedly better than reason. Whereas progressives once thought that things like the Enlightenment and mathematics belonged to everyone, they now assert that they are the exclusive property of white people, in one of the most outrageously racist humblebrags of all time.
Another feature of progressive whiteness is compulsive ancestor-blaming for everything that has ever gone wrong. No African ever sold another African into slavery. 9/11 was caused by Europeans imposing “cis-normative heteropatriarchy” on the Islamic world, which had previously been a feminist paradise. What white progressives are really saying when they articulate these views is that our ancestors were amoral supermen in complete control of the engine of history, that only white agency exists in history, that white people do things and non-white people have things done to them. Only white people possess moral agency in history, another amazing racist humblebrag.
A final example is the discourse of “cultural appropriation.” Cultural appropriation used to refer to the events like those depicted in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, when American record companies recorded folk songs that had existed as a non-commodified shared good and converted them into their intellectual property. The conversion of shared, non-commodified cultural production into a thing that could be owned and commercialized used to be what this term meant.
Today, “cultural appropriation” has come to mean that the “right” to make certain kinds of art, certain kinds of music, certain kinds of food lives in the blood, that it is heritable and biological. Even acts of imaginative empathy to narrate the experiences of others is understood now as a violation of these rights. Right now, the government of Canada is in the process of creating a regulatory framework to prohibit the production of art and literature that one has not inherited the right to make. Soon, a white person telling a story from a black person’s viewpoint won’t just face loud condemnation from Woke Canada; it may soon be disqualified from state patronage in the form of grants, airtime and gallery space.
Of course, this “stay in your lane,” theory of culture is premised on a complete misunderstanding of what culture is, that central to the operation of culture is movement and exchange, that culture is a way you navigate difference, not a way to achieve separateness. Such an approach also saps our ability to actually love and understand one another because acts of imaginative empathy are now understood to be theft. Trying to understand people of other races, to see their world through their eyes was once the core of anti-racism; now progressives claim that it is the essence of racism.
And this should not surprise us because, just like the return of authoritarianism, rising white supremacy is a global, society-wide event that is leaving no one unscathed. So, we must acknowledge that the ascendant tendencies within both progressives and conservatives share a commitment to the permanent inferiority of non-whites. But whereas the new white nationalist conservatism thrives on the effacement of racial transparency, progressivism increasingly requires this.
Whereas conservatives offer non-whites an unequal part in their nationalist projects, white progressives do not include non-whites in their nation-building efforts; instead, they favour sponsoring parallel nation-building projects run by their tokens and surrogates at a remove in other communities. As an example of this, just yesterday, a BC progressive podcaster and opinion leader suggested that it was racist for non-Indigenous people to have opinions, to think thoughts, about massive development projects if they were being conducted by Indigenous people, even if that project is across the street.
For all their lectures about the evils of South African and Israeli Apartheid, progressives sure do love a good Bantustan.
In the next part of the series, I will apply the ideas I have put forward here, with specificity, to the Canadian Trucker Convoy of 2022, beginning with the provocation that, if Louis Riel were alive today, he would have been at the head of the convoy, in the biggest rig, with the Virgin Mary and a medicine wheel painted on the side.
