On Monday, a talk titled It’s OK To Be (Against) White(ness) at Trent University. Where’s the “Like” button?On Tuesday, a talk titled Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity at Wilfrid Laurier University. Where is the “Stop!” button?Instead, Laurier was saved by the bell, literally. Someone rang the fire alarm button, resulting in an evacuation of the hall and the event being cancelled. The first event isn’t racist, the second is virulently so. Whiteness is an academic term that describes a system of race-based hierarchy. Whiteness does not mean white people. Whiteness does not mean white people are bad. You don’t even have to be a white person to subscribe to whiteness. Whiteness is a term that facilitates the understanding of racism as being not just personal ignorance but systemic discriminations. Based on attendees’ social media accounts, there was nothing inflammatory in University of Regina educator Michael Cappello’s lecture. He didn’t talk of race-based superiority or threaten other humans or seek their extermination.The second talk? That was headed for fear-fuelled toxicity manifesting in xenophobia and white victimhood. A university would be the last place you’d expect to go to pollute your mind with reheated white supremacist schlock, but Wilfrid Laurier had clearly decided that was just what the social justice doctor had ordered. It hosted on its campus Faith Goldy, a person too vitriolic even for the far-right propaganda site Rebel Media, to discuss her views on immigration.This is, after all, the person who calls for Muslims to be thrown out of the Holy Land, who talks of the threat of white genocide, says NATO should fire rocket propelled grenades at refugees to protect Europe, spouts pseudo-scientific bunkum such as “High IQ people tend to have a much higher characteristic and personality trait of openness. And you see them being open to these ideas & ...
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