 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. The flag is not just violent. The flag can be many different things. The critical question is to ask why are those who acknowledge its violence depicted as killjoys or marginalized or stigmatized? What brings us together today was my realization of how viscerally afraid of the Canadian flag I have become. When I see somebody flying the flag now, I think white supremacy. And when I say now, I mean after the convoy in Ottawa. And I really took a step back to explore this. And I'm not speaking for any other communities. Perhaps many people already felt this way about the Canadian flag. After the graves were found at residential schools, the Canadian flag was flown at half-mast in many places to show solidarity with Indigenous communities. And last Canada Day, many people called for orange instead of red and white. But I'm a child of the 70s, and I grew up to think that this was kind of a safe patch that I put in my knapsack when I travel. And I think a lot of people, regardless of their generation, feel proud to be Canadian. But symbols can and do change. That's part of the reason we started thinking about this kind of a conversation. And I know that protest movements like Land Back, and Idle No More, and Pride, and Black Lives Matter have all raised awareness about challenges to Canadian nationalism and belonging. Both of our guests today have deeply studied concepts of multiculturalism, citizenship, and belonging. Daniel McNeill is a professor and Queen's National Scholar Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University. His scholarship is intersectional and looks at history and culture and the complexities of global Black communities. Also joining us is Lucy Al-Sharif, a PhD candidate in ethnic and pluralism studies at the University of Toronto. Lucy explores questions of belonging and citizenship and asks, what does it mean to be a settler of colour in Canada as she holds up a mirror to her communities? Welcome Lucy, and welcome Daniel. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much. When I first started my job at the Conversation Canada, we were coming up to Canada 150. Hello everyone. Happy Canada Day. Today we celebrate 150 years since Confederation. It's a day to celebrate our past and look boldly towards our future. So we were sitting in our newsroom and there was a lot of debate about whether we should acknowledge the colonial anniversary. We have Indigenous peoples living in third world conditions in First World Canada. We're here on Algonquin unceded and unsurrendered territory. Our people have suffered hundreds of years of colonialism. This celebration of 150 years of 150 years of colonialism and policies of genocide. And finally we decided that instead of talking about Canada 150, we were going to talk about Canada 2167. 150 years into the future. Because it was one thing that we could agree on. We could talk about our future in a way that was positive and not necessarily celebrate the 150 years of colonialism. Well, we're only five years removed from that now and I know that in our little corner in our newsroom, things have really changed. We've really grown as journalists. We've really learned how to challenge that colonial project, the 150 year idea. And I wonder what you feel Lucy, have things changed if we've grown as citizens since then? What's really interesting about your lead up in the question is how you've phrased whether we should acknowledge the colonialism of Canada's 150th anniversary. And I think it being a question is really a very privileged position from which particular people like myself as an immigrant to Canada or like many other people can take. For many there's really no question about it. It just seems ludicrous looking back at a time when we actually thought, oh, do we need to acknowledge the genocidal nature of colonialism and Canada's 150 or not? And the way that in 2022 the ludicrousness of that question is really hard to ignore. I joined graduate school in 2012. I had just become a Canadian citizen. I had just made an oath of allegiance to the Queen of Canada which is very interesting because I was born British and I never had to swear allegiance to the Queen. I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Queen of Canada And now here I am becoming a Canadian citizen and I have to suddenly affirm or swear allegiance to this personage. And what really strikes me when you ask that question is how early voices who were pointing out the ludicrousness of Canada want to see as a celebration of Canadian nationalism and who really question the basis that underpin that celebration. These people were really vilified and they had to go through a great deal of hate speech. What comes to mind is the young woman, Missouma Khan, at Dalhousie University. She's a brown woman. She wears hijab. And at the time she put forth emotion to suggest that Dalhousie Student Union not celebrate the 150th Confederation celebration and the motion was put to vote and the motion passed. Basically Canada 150 according to the Student Union we should not be celebrating this. We should instead be discussing the true history of Canada. Exactly. Her motion was not for all of Dalhousie University. It was for Dalhousie University Student Union. She was vilified and people came after her personally. And the attacks that came at her were very well known attacks that are directed at people of colour and black people and indigenous people whenever we question what's going on with Canada who do you think you are go back to where you came from. You should be grateful that you came to this country and particular attacks were directed at Missouma Khan in relation to her wearing hijab. And they're very specific Islamophobic attacks that were made at her. And what's also interesting about this is Missouma Khan was not an immigrant. Missouma Khan was born in Canada. She had lived in Canada all of her life. Her parents had immigrated a few decades ago but she was as Canadian as anybody else. Except for the fact of course that she was brown and she wore hijab. The attacks that came at her were incredibly hateful. She responded to some of them and what ended up happening that was really mind boggling is that Dalhousie University started to discipline her as she was facing. So what does it mean for a person of color to make a statement like this? Whereas if you're going to step out of the lines of what white liberalism in this country sets out, you're really sticking your neck out and you could face very serious consequences. We really need to think about what does it mean to be a person of color living as a settler on indigenous land and what does it mean for us to express solidarity with indigenous people. The stakes for people of color maybe we can bring Daniel into this conversation. There's important connections not just to think about how we approach this in a Canadian context but also a lot of my work is thinking about transnational or translocal connections. In my forthcoming book, Thinking Well Black we talk about a famous book that was written in the 1980s called The Ain't No Black in the Union Jack and that was one of the chants the hooligans and members of the far right used the chants of football games and in marches to try and exclude and alienate people of color in the UK and at that time in the 1980s black was a political term that included people from Asia Caribbean and Africa. When we think about this as a long story rather than just a recent story we get to think about what's changed but also what's continued. As a graduate student in the 2000s I think back to that period and I think back to what were the narratives that were being shared and being repeated in the media and when I think back to that time I was still hearing the narrative and I'm still hearing the phrase that Canada is a nation of immigrants. Have we challenged that narrative? Is that still being repeated? I think it has been challenged effectively to avoid people using that again but the legacy of it, the memory of it continues to inform a lot of debates and to come back to the first point I was saying around the right no black in the union Jack the right no black in the maple leaf I don't think we have those types of narratives anymore but the question then becomes on what grounds is blackness permitted or supported or recognised when it does enter into the Canadian public sphere and I think that's an interesting conversation that we still have to have and as Lucy articulated so beautifully we still have to struggle for. You're talking about the Canadian flag and is blackness a part of Canada? Can we just ask that question? My sense would be that blackness is part of Canada and I think it's an example of struggle to ensure that it is recognised but I think a lot of my work and a lot of the work of great scholars like Richard Iton, Catherine McKittrick and others is to address not just how marginalised groups have fought for recognition within a state that has so often demonised them but also to think about the limits of that recognition and bring up that point around it's not just about blackness being recognised it's also about acknowledging the limits of that recognition also these strategies of recognition can also be part of what Glen Coulthard and others have called a colonial politics of recognition that is intended to sublimate or marginalise or incorporate voices to try and limit and soften or even reduce the radical demands I think that's partly what you both write about when you talk about the brand of Canada we're talking about your analysis of Canada's multiculturalism and multicultural policy what would you say is Canada's current brand? What would you prefer it to be? I'm an immigrant to Canada I had to do the citizenship exam the oath of affirming allegiance to the Queen is really setting the terms of what Canada's brand of multiculturalism of what its brand of social relations is you're all going to live in this country and your allegiance is to the Queen which is allegiance really to white supremacy therefore in relating to indigenous people I am expected to relate to them through the oaths that I have made to the Queen and that white supremacy organises my relationship with indigenous people with black people with people who are from other social groups and so what does it mean for me to come into Canada as an Arab Muslim who is racialised Arab Muslims are racialised in very particular ways and then to say well I want to relate to indigenous people in a different way that you made this oath and the terms in which I came into Canada were about white supremacy these are the social relations that you are expected to have it's really a very interesting encapsulation of what the social relations we are expected to have with each other, with the land of Canada if you look in the citizenship exam and how it describes our relationship to the land of Canada there is extraction, there is tourism that it doesn't really tackle indigenous relations in place indigeneity is always this kind of pre-historic existence so if I was to go back to the question of the brand of multiculturalism in Canada we are all subsumed under this title of whiteness and we relate to each other via white supremacy that's how it is multiculturalism is really an avenue for us to express my belonging to Egypt my belonging to the Arab world my expressions as a Muslim but really beyond that anything that is more political than that is not really in Canada's brand of multiculturalism so when a young courageous woman like Missou Mahan says we shouldn't be celebrating Canada 150 this is a celebration of indigenous genocide she has stepped outside that contract outside the brand of multiculturalism that she was expected to have interestingly enough if a white person makes that statement I'm not saying it's going to be smooth sailing for them but the kinds of arguments the kinds of hate speech that are mobilized are different articulate problems with this model that we have certainly not people of color and not with the same stakes either that's why I was talking about the brand too because it's this idea that we should be grateful can I ask you that same question Daniel about the brand of multiculturalism is the audience for multiculturalism presumed to be the queen just intrude and or generic imaginary white middle class Canadians and I think when we do talk about multiculturalism we're often thinking about how do minority or ethnic groups translate their identities to a presumed white audience and a white audience that is imagined to be fearful or somewhat ignorant about those groups that often leads to a certain oversimplification of ethnicity so it's not as if Iranian groups are encouraged to engage in conversations with indigenous groups it's not as if Caribbean groups are encouraged to engage with those from Africa there is a presumption that these groups are all in competition with each other for the attention of this audience part of the work I'm doing with students to think about an immigrant's guide to Canada where the presumption is not here's how we encourage and train individuals to fit in to a presumed Canadian norm but how do we listen more carefully to the insights of migrants to Canada who have interesting things to tell us about the liveliness, the radicalness, the ambiguity the messiness of Canada so again we're getting back to this idea of avoiding narrowly confining what Canada is and thinking more broadly and more creatively about how Canada can move in multiple directions the sense I get of branding Canada as multicultural is also the idea around defining Canada as welcoming to others and defining Canadians by their positive traits of fairness openness and generosity so I haven't gone through citizenship on the permanent resident I'm profoundly ambivalent around swearing an oath of allegiance to the queen I haven't gone through that but when I have studied the citizenship documents when other scholars have addressed these documents that's what they've tended to find that these citizenship documents continue to address and imagine Canada as open and generous these documents do acknowledge racism in Canada they do acknowledge crimes but they tend to acknowledge those crimes against indigenous groups as distinct to the essence of Canada those crimes happen but the states and Canadian institutions can rectify them these abuses against minority and ethnic groups are not seen as constitutive of Canada that's an important distinction addressing history becomes so important because if there is this presumption that migrants have been given freedom when they arrive in Canada then it's what a lot of philosophers have called a horrible gift of freedom because it not only takes away the agency of our ancestors who struggled for their freedom it also says that because we've given you freedom you should eternally be grateful for it and any type of expression of rage, of anger of frustration is seen as illegitimate you wrote an article for us that said that black Canadian activists are pressure to be quiet pressure to be quiet leaders the terminology that you use also in that article is shy elitism what I'm trying to get at with the question around shy elitism or the concept of shy elitism is this idea that Canadian society may talk a lot around incorporating prominent migrants such as Rosemary Brown into Canadian society Rosemary Brown the first black woman to run for a federal leadership to select me to be the new leader of our party what I'm thinking about with shy elitism is this idea that she's given a degree of prominence because of her connections to McGill because of her connections to prominent institutions in Canada so there is this form of elitism in terms of saying what types of respectable figures can be brought in to Canadian society what I wanted to think about with this concept of shy elitism is how there can be a shy form of elitism in Canada where there is this emphasis on McGill U of T queens as elite institutions but at the same time people are told don't appear elitist Rosemary Brown famously talked about how to talk about transformative issues her and other immigrants would say that it has to be communicated in the most banal possible way to the everyday Canadian voter and what I worry about with this is the emphasis around oversimplifying fails to acknowledge the capacity of audiences to think critically to do the kind of work to search out information what's interesting for me is how invested Canadians are in this idea of multiculturalism and in my research when I asked young Arab Canadians what are the things that you're proud of about being Canadian and they always say the same two things multiculturalism and peacekeeping both of those things are incredibly problematic for various reasons when you talked about being a child of the 70s I was also a child of the 70s I was born and raised in the UK in my early years and when I was in Canada and I had my children in Canada I was also amazed at Canadian multiculturalism I was invited to come into the classroom and talk about Ramadan I was encouraged to share Arabic songs with my children's teachers and when I compared that to the 70s in the UK where there were lots of people who would not even talk to me because my parents were from Egypt relatively Canada was amazing I also immigrated to Canada from the United States after 9-11 and when I compare that to what the situation was like for me and my husband in the US after 9-11 and my husband was an Arab Muslim student coming to Canada was almost a sigh of relief Daniel, you called multiculturalism the myth of the Easter Bunny there was a presentation in the UK and there was a Canada Research Chair on the panel but there was also a scholar from the UK called Paul Gilroy Gilroy made a comment around the lines of we need to think about international conversations in which American voices and North American voices do not drown out all the others and the Canada Research Chair interjected and said surely you mean US you mean US voices dominating all others and Gilroy said no you're not getting off the hook here this is also about Canada you've been going around the world selling multicultural snake oil for years so many times in the 1970's people could say well we're not as racist as the US South we're not as racist as South Africa but that's clearly not the point the point is not for us to have this sense of distance that allows us to feel a little less guilty Superior it's the idea that Canadians are exceptionally superior we're better than those other places we don't just want to think about guilt we also want to think about the idea that shame may be a more productive emotion by that I mean one can often live with guilt you live in it with your private environment but you still go into the public and part of what shame forces us to do is to say that we can't go on simply repeating the same thing simply managing expectations and having a sense of muddling through managing things simply implementing policies sometimes we need to step back and actually ask these deeper perhaps more existential questions around what is this project not just what is this brand but what is this project what constitutes our identities and in performing those identities and cultivating those identities what harm are we doing what are we excluding what violence are we veiling or perpetuating and how are we often failing the ongoing dispossession of land what kind of existential questions should we be asking ourselves in order not to perpetuate the violent system that we're brought into how as communities of color in Canada how many communities are struggling to survive or struggling for recognition what's really important for us to consider is what does it mean for us to think about our relations with other social groups outside of white supremacy what does it mean for me as an Arab Muslim woman with white passing privilege to struggle for recognition in a system that ultimately creates and is anti-black that is fundamentally against indigenous people what does it mean for us to be Canadian who do we want to be as Canadians the real issue in my view with white supremacy it's really insidious how it organizes our relationships with each other as people of color so if I can make gains on the ladder of social and racial mobility by walking over or climbing the ladder on the backs of other people is that ultimately what we want for ourselves as communities it's really important to think about how the system consistently rewards communities and people for engaging in violences towards other social groups it's interesting how I learned this actually from the citizenship study guide how the first person of color the first black person to receive the Victoria Cross was a man who participated in the Siege of Lucknow which is a city in India the British were bombing Lucknow and of course Canadians have sent forces to support the British and the black person had participated in that Siege of Lucknow so well that he got the Victoria Cross and what that spells out to us the way in which this person who is a black person was rewarded for participating in the oppression of brown people it's really insidious the way the white supremacy organizes our relationships with each other my ancestors are from Lucknow oh really? not even my ancestors, my dad if we recognize someone who predominantly white communities racialize as non-whites then we're moving forward in quote-unquote race relations so what I'm reminding of with UC's reflections is wonderful philosopher Lewis Gordon who talks about bad faith and anti-black racism and when Lewis is talking about anti-black racism he says that an anti-black world doesn't just say number one be white it also says number two if you can't be white don't be black and by that he means connected to communities connected to a sense of being in the world that's governed by Euro-modernity let me ask the very basic question because we started off with this idea of how the spark started for this episode and my question to you both is has the Canadian flag become a symbol of violence I think it always has been again it's something that is read depending on the context who is reading it when are they reading it, where are they reading it but I think it's important to remember in the Canadian communities in particular it was always seen that way and now we're starting to feel the trepidation that many people view the Canadian flag with we need to ask ourselves so many questions and I think because of the things that you were talking about with the citizenship guide and the things that were taught in school about who we are as Canadians how proud we are about our multiculturalism all of those things I think like Daniel used the word all those relations we've not been taught to unsettle we've not been taught to shake the carpet beneath us also to really think about what stories are attached to the flag for me as somebody who became a Canadian travelling the world on a Canadian passport how the Canadian passport is received the stories that people attach to me as a Canadian when I'm abroad that maybe are different stories and they would attach to me if I have an American passport it's really important to think about what are the stories that are evoked by the flag Daniel can I ask you the same question has the Canadian flag become a symbol of violence there's a danger of reducing it to a single story so the flag is not just violent the flag can be many different things the critical question is to ask why are those who acknowledge its violence depicted as killjoys or stigmatised and that's the key thing for me to think about how by flying the flag or by using the flag in particular ways there's often this power move to try and silence other voices to claim it for one particular narrative the other way that I think about this is to think about it in relation to not just is or is not the flag violent but to think about when we use it does it prolong violence and so how as scholars we don't just find a way for acknowledging pain acknowledging suffering and for pessimism but also how we address the joy in struggle the different ways in which people have come together to make their feelings the issues legible and audible and visible to different communities thinking about yes we have these feelings that we're associating with a flag but taking seriously how others may associate that flag with pleasure or with joy and how we open up space for those conversations about historical memories it kind of reminds me of this idea of Langston Hughes that sometimes one of the most patriotic things that one can do is to challenge your nation this idea of citizenship this idea of belonging is a fluid thing and we need to keep challenging it thank you both very much I really appreciate both of you taking the time to speak with me today about these very complex issues thank you so much that's it for this episode of don't call me resilient Daniel and Lucy thank you for coming on and talking about this challenging subject as we roll into this year's Canada day let us know what you're thinking after that conversation you can email us the old school way or find us online I'm on Twitter at writevenita that's at W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A and don't forget to tag our producers at conversationca use the hashtag don't call me resilient and if you'd like to read more about multiculturalism nationalism and the Canadian flag go to theconversation.com we have all kinds of information in our show notes with links to stories and research this is our last episode of the season if you missed any of our episodes they're all posted on our website and wherever you get your podcasts if you missed any go back and have a listen if you like what you heard today please tell a friend help spread the love leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using don't call me resilient is a production of the conversation Canada this podcast was produced with the grant for journalism innovation from the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada the series is produced and hosted by me Venita Srivastava my series co-producers are Hailey Lewis and sound editor Ligia Navarro Vaishnavi Dandekar is an assistant producer Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer Lisa Verano is our audience development editor and Scott White is the CEO of the conversation Canada and if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim the track is called Something in the Water