The choice of location is highly symbolic. Here, in Henri-Bourassa Park, Fredy Villanueva died in a hail of police bullets eight years ago. On this ground, participants in what has been described as the “other social forum” are seeking to make their voices heard. But many of their potential allies seem to be turning a deaf ear.
For me, the symbolism of the place bears a special emotional charge. Henri-Bourassa Park is more or less the backyard of my old high school. A place from which I cherish fond memories, but which also awakens some old scars. One of many places where I faced a form of social exclusion difficult to break through: that of gender. In this park, adolescent rumours about “my ways” often contradicted my desperate efforts to appear “normal.”
The place strikes me as appropriate for tackling another point of differentiation that divides the social world into hierarchical groups: race and ethnicity. Here, there is no need for long and pointless debates about whether racism exists. The shared belief that there is a problem is a prerequisite for deeper discussions on issues such as housing, mental health, racial profiling, police brutality or intersecting power relations.
Despite the distinct experiences that affect different social groups, the desire to “make common cause against racism” dominates the discussion. But this in no way means that the event is defined by a monotonous consensus or is free of tensions.
A hesitant left
When she spoke in the late evening, U.S. professor Rose Brewer lamented the disconnect between the organization of the World Social Forum and the forces gathered in Montreal North.
This criticism made a representative of the forum who was present visibly uncomfortable. The organizers of the World Social Forum have said that Hoodstock was not included in the official program because the event was confirmed after the printing of promotional materials and was happening too far from the other activities. This explanation does little to challenge the stereotype of a left confined to the territory served by Montreal’s subway lines.
For many participants, however, this omission is symptomatic of the power relations found in progressive social movements under white hegemony. Where to invest our energies, asked a listener, when the activist dynamics of official left organizations consistently lead to an erasure of our realities?
To this question, Émilie Nicolas gave a heartfelt response. The initiator of the petition for a commission on systemic racism in Quebec deplored the slowness of major unions, in particular the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec, to join the movement. She was surprised to see that despite the support of Québec Solidaire and the Fédération des femmes du Québec, the union movement has been surpassed by the youth wing of the Quebec Liberals, who have officially supported the call for a commission. It shows how difficult it is, for a significant portion of the left, to admit that ethnic and racial divisions are social and political ones.
Politicizing ‘false divisions’
The strength of an event like Hoodstock is that it stands in opposition to such blindness.
Emphasizing the systemic nature of racism highlights that human beings are responsible for it, and it is not in our nature or simply an error of judgment. In doing so, it gives us a significant motive to take action. By acknowledging that the processes that divide the world into social groups and put them in an ethnic or racial hierarchy are the product of human history, we make problematic what passes for normal. At the same time, it makes possible the transformation or even elimination of these divisions through the passage of human history. As such, we move away from limited and moralistic analyses that reduce racism to a reprehensible attitude on the part of some misguided minds.
This blind spot is not solely the preserve of “the right,” as we saw this weekend. True, the most obvious denial of systemic racism is often found in the writings of well-known conservatives in the province, for whom racism is an invention used to bash Quebec. But this right that calls itself such sometimes meets a left that sees racism and sexism as “false divisions” designed by demagogues and “the elite” (which one?) to divide “the people,” as if it was enough to attract the attention of the populist tribunes so that finally, everyone could join hands and engage in the “real battle” against the 1 per cent. A fight without contradictions on the axes of race or gender, it goes without saying, since they are but mere illusions…. Say they do not exist and they will disappear!
As someone on the wrong side of one of these “false divisions,” I know that social conflict is far from that simple. To have a slim chance of overcoming the power relations that divide the social world, in Quebec as elsewhere, it is best to agree to face them and work to recognize them as socially constructed. They are neither immutable essences nor coarse ideologies invented from scratch by the bourgeoisie to maintain their domination of a homogeneous people. What is true for class relations should also apply to the social relations of race, ethnicity and gender.
To really challenge these divisions which frustrate those who regret the fragmentation of the “commons,” they would do well to avoid chastizing those who seek to politicize their circumstances for doing so. Or, at least, be present and lend an ear when they get together to do it.