Contextualizing Racism

During the 2019 Alberta Election, a number of UCP candidates were tagged by opposition as having track records of peddling hate.  Several of these candidates ended up stepping aside during the election as a result.  One of these was Caylan Ford.  At the time, I pretty much shrugged and thought to myself "that's par for the course, so long to bad rubbish".  Usually when this happens, the candidate disappears for several years until the heat has gone off and they decide it's time to take another run at elected office. 

Then this week rolled around, and I started seeing Ms. Ford's name rolling around on Twitter as a result of the following National Post article:  Howard Anglin: The Smear Campaign That Took Down A Promising Politician. To be fair, Anglin is a conservative partisan, so I didn't expect him to do much more than bitch and moan about "cancel culture" (which is basically what he does).  

However, it did prompt me to go back and review what had happened, and in particular what she had allegedly written.  The Press Progress article about it "UCP Candidate Who Complained 'White Supremacist Terrorists' Are Treated Unfairly, Leaked Messages Show", as well as her post-resignation essay on the matter: "Apologia" (which is some 30 pages of extemporaneous recollection of the conversation that Press Progress referred to). 

I'm not going to do a detailed analysis of her essay and the arguments in it, partly because doing so would require me to be at least as long winded as she is, and I don't think it would be particularly informative.  30 pages of material is a rather verbose to say the least.  Yet, there are some themes that do warrant addressing. 

First (and it repeats through both subsequent essays on her personal website and on her Twitter feed), is an unassailable sense that she was being perfectly reasonable, and nobody needed to take offence at her words. You see, we're supposed to understand that whatever she had said was part of a much larger context of discussion. 

I will agree that although the Press Progress article on the matter does not provide us with the full context of whatever conversation is being had, it seems very difficult to imagine a scenario where a statement like "I am somehow saddened by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands ..." can be seen as anything other than overtly racist. It's rooted in a conspiracy theory that came oozing out of the white nationalist far right a long time ago. It made its way into right wing nationalist politics with the likes of Marine Lepen in France. No amount of contextualizing can make this any less a racist statement. You could have been arguing about a dozen different things, the statement itself is a unadulterated racism. It seems particularly ironic that the statement is being made by a Canadian at a time when Canada is but beginning to deal with the legacy of how its founders displaced the First Nations, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report only 2 years old. 

Yet, there is precious little in Ms. Ford's essay that would lead anyone to believe that she understands how those kinds of statements are damaging to both individuals as well as the fabric of our society as a whole. Perhaps Ms. Ford doesn't see herself as being "racist" in her identity, but in such a circumstance, it would be appropriate to at the very least acknowledge the inappropriateness of the statements made.  We all have our biases, acknowledging them when they are pointed out is simply to take ownership of dealing with the bias itself. 

Second, is the amount of deflection of responsibility going on. For the most part, we are to believe that the other party in the conversation is the great betrayer. Whilst I can agree that Ms. Ford has cause to feel betrayed by the leaking of what she clearly understood to be a private conversation, I find it very difficult to see how this  absolves her of responsibility for what was said. Like any other conversation that somehow becomes public, the participants are still responsible for their own words. This has been demonstrated in our courts many times when supposedly private conversations somehow become matters of public record. Any politician today has to be prepared to speak to past conversations and statements, if for no other reason than "The Internet Never Forgets".  

While Ms. Ford is unquestionably articulate in her arguments, being articulate doesn't necessarily mean her arguments are substantively any different than those of less articulate extremists that I have encountered both in person and online. For a few examples, I spent some time trawling through her Twitter timeline, and found the following pieces. 

For this writer, the above thread (Unredacted - you have the full context of her tweets) is little more than standard anti-transgender rhetoric which is grounded in some seriously flawed understandings of the science around transgender youth. While it attempts to sound reasonable, it is at its core unreasonable because it is based on misconceptions.  Referencing a Jesse Singal article at the end is but icing on the cake, since Singal has a long standing reputation of writing articles that misrepresent the transgender experience, how treatment is in fact conducted, and so on.  However, this is not atypical among conservatives these days. 

I find it notable that at no time did she respond directly to replies that challenged the fundamental assumptions she was making / repeating in this thread. She appears to have simply ignored them. 

The concept of "moral illness" comes up fairly regularly as part of religious social conservatism, and is often used to justify taking positions hostile to the LGBTQ community as a whole, but also in resisting everything from science to public education.  Needless to say, this writer disagrees with the fundamental tenet of "moral illness" to begin with, as it seems to be an excuse to impose a particular moral framework on others without consideration for their perspectives. However, it does give us a sense of how Ms. Ford has made herself appealing to a hardline Social Conservative like Jason Kenney.  

The minute I see someone talking about "conservatives having a more expansive moral matrix", I pretty much start laughing. This is classic in-group thinking that "we are superior because ..." stuff. Moral superiority is precisely the language of trade among social conservatives, who believe at some level that they have 'The Answers', if only the many unwashed among us would do as they demand. I for one find the morality of opposing lockdowns for public health "because of the economy" the antithesis of any reasonable morality - it's literally saying "we're willing to let you die so others can continue to enrich themselves", little different than the days when "gods" were thought to demand human and animal sacrifices. There are ways to approach things, but at the height of a pandemic that is hospitalizing killing unprecedented numbers of people, seems both callous and short-sighted. 

However, again, this gives us a little more insight into the desire to "rehabilitate" her public image so quickly.  Somebody within Kenney's circle _REALLY_ wants her in public office. It's not hard to imagine why this is the case. Like CPC leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis, we have someone here who is articulate enough to walk around some of the more obvious landmines that social conservatives routinely step on (See Derek Sloan for examples), while seeming apparently reasonable. 

All this comes at a time when Ms. Ford seems to be involved in a full-court press to rehabilitate her public image through a number of venues, from a $7M defamation suit she has recently filed, to having political allies like Mr. Anglin write columns decrying how "the mob" of social media "cancelled" her candidacy. I can only speculate as to why this is happening now - I suspect it has something to do with next year's civic elections.  (However, that is but a guess - I am no psychic, and cannot read her mind to divine her intentions). 

Update - December 27, 2020

On her personal website, Ms. Ford has put up a section titled "Litigation", wherein she tries to describe some of the alleged context of her statements.  

I'll consider going through it in more detail at some time in the future, but the following particularly caught my attention:  

I really don't see how this bunch of excusing makes the statement any less racist.  It's almost as bad as the classic homophobe's statement "I have friends who are gay" ... often given as a defence after arguing against gay rights. Perhaps the judge on the bench will be kinder than I, but I really don't see this making the statement's ultimate meaning any less offensive. She still chose wording which at its absolute core is easily read as racist. 

This kind of argument is ridiculous here, because the statement that she made later on in the conversation (and was highlighted in the initial release from Press Progress) is in fact a personal values statement. It's not one where she said "gosh, the consequences of the demographic changes on society could be traumatic for some".  No, she expressed sadness over "demographic replacement of white peoples".  Further, she used language like "homelands", which most people would conceptually understand to be the language of organized racists.  

Has Ms. Ford forgotten that conservative politicians have used coded language like this extensively for at least 25 years? Arguing that "I think in the conversation, nobody understood it to be racist" is ridiculous. Policy makers are perfectly capable of making statements that acknowledge facts without using language that is known to be that of racism.  As someone with apparent experience in foreign affairs, she should know full well how to write about a topic like this without using language that _WILL_ be seen as inflammatory by the general public.