Dear white students unions: disband

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By: Kyle MacDonald

I am white. When I work on my family’s genealogical records or listen to the folk music that links me to my far-flung relatives, I immerse myself in the stories of white people, but I do not know of anyone who would claim that these are racist practices. We should all be able to engage with our origins and identities.

Unlike these practices, the White Students Unions that have recently surfaced at a number of Canadian universities , including McMaster, are not so benign. The idea of whiteness does not provide a valuable framework within which to understand oneself or the world; rather, it perpetuates violent and divisive untruths that we need to scrub from our discourse. There are better ways to discuss and understand European identities. These White Students’ Unions should acknowledge the lies on which they are founded and disband immediately.

I am not going to retell the history of racism, which has been told many times by people far more qualified. Let it suffice for me to say that white people as a group have little in common that is worth preserving. My ancestors and their countrymen created the notion of whiteness in order to set themselves above their neighbours, for the express purpose of subjugating people of colour by force of arms, in order to carry out the exploitative missions of empire and slavery.

When groups of white students try to create “white spaces,” the standard response is that every space is dominated by white people. This is true, but it misses a point that must be resolved if the whiteness movement is going to die: to white people, common spaces don’t feel white, because being white doesn’t feel like anything. To be white in North America feels largely as it should feel to be human: free to go where one wants and say what one thinks, without fear of violent exclusion. We are numb by design: white people are free to be individuals in public, not forced to represent our nationalities or ethnic groups, precisely because racism designates white as normal. As a result, we are able to forget where we come from.

Despite the legacy of colonialism, European ancestry is not inherently shameful. On the contrary, I am proud of my roots from Ireland and Scotland to Poland and Greece. But I am proud of these places individually, because of my family’s small part in their rich histories, not because they are each mostly white. I have no German ancestry; as such, despite the whiteness of its population, I care about Germany in the same way that I care about Uganda or Thailand: as a historically and contemporarily important nation with a beautiful, complicated legacy that does not directly involve me.

Moreover, I am more Canadian than European. My father’s Scottish ancestors settled in Nova Scotia’s Margaree Valley. Some of my relatives still live there, an afternoon’s drive from Halifax. As a result, I am far closer in history to the eviction of Black Nova Scotians from Africville than to the recent Scottish independence movement.

The idea of whiteness not only obliterates the distinctions between groups of European descent, but also makes arbitrary, indefensible decisions about who is white or European. The truth is that Europe is a construction, like whiteness or like binary gender: useful perhaps for drawing a broad outline of the world, but always doomed to fail when examined closely, and in many cases completely useless even as a starting point. As far as the Mediterranean is concerned, the Danube, the Nile, and the Suez Canal all carry the same water and end up in the same place: as rain over Athens or Tripoli, no colour but that of the sky.

To those white students who feel alienated from their cultural identities, I urge you to ask your grandparents to tell you their stories. Read history books for context. Learn the languages of your ancestors. Learn to cook the food they ate. Sing their songs. Understand the strengths and the flaws of their worldviews. Reach out to other students and community members who genuinely share your heritage. Find ways to rejoice in its beauty together. Use it to make this campus more accessible to those whom racism works to exclude.

To anyone involved in a White Students’ Union: give your head a vigorous shake. Delete the Facebook group and acknowledge your errors. You won’t lose anything by sacrificing whiteness.

*After this article was written it was discovered that this trend was a hoax. Despite this, we still believe this article offers a unique perspective. For more information on the trend, see page 5 of our Issuu.

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