Critical Perspectives and Reflections

This interchange began on Facebook with a reflection on a conversation I had had about a training exercise aimed at helping staff to be more sensitive to Indigenous people. It developed into an interchange that is unfortunately indicative of some of the problematic attitudes and understandings held by too many White Canadians of the colonial class, for Indigenous people in Canada. Lawlor Lee : This morning I had an interesting discussion with an Indigenous person who I know very well, Sirius Lee. He works for a provincial government agency. We were joshing back and forth about some new “Indigenous” training that will be offered virtually to members of the civil service. It’s about learning about inclusion, cultural safety and the like, in not one, but two 1.5-hour sessions. Three hours in total. It’s aim, clearly very laudable, is to facilitate a person’s, “own path to reconciliation”. For some reason, neither he or I were very impressed. Keegan Lee-Newbury 2: If the system convinces i...

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. - F. Scott Fitzgerald More and more these days I find myself using the term “monied classes” where before I might have used the term “capitalist class” or “the owners of production”. It is not because I have jettisoned my belief that Marxist analysis is perhaps the most powerful social philosophy that has ever existed. Rather, it is because it is not a complete system and not immutable (nor did Marx ever expect it to be) for understandin...

The cause of justice requires us to wage a struggle on many fronts. Struggles against colonialism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia are only some of those fronts. Each struggle is complex and together, they are more complex. This is not to say that they are too complex to be taken on but rather that we need to spend some energy in thinking critically about how to engage them. Too many activists however try to depend on simple stories to understand and discuss the issues that make life so unreasonably difficult for people. We have to be prepared to face up to the complicated nature of the issues and how they often intersect. Rick Sin (2021, forthcoming) states that “… social relations are multifaceted, multilayered, interwoven and inseparable from power relations and social struggles, which assists in understanding the complexities of marginalization. For example, poverty is a class phenomenon but is also often racialized and gendered, increasing the marginalization of Indig...