A Citizen reader called last week and left a message on my voicemail. Unfortunately, I got all huffy and deleted it with righteous indignation, rather than taking the caller, who was good enough to leave his name and number, more seriously.
The gist of the message went something like this: with all this gay pride and native pride in the community and in the pages of the newspaper, why don't we have more white pride? Why aren't we publishing more stories about the accomplishments of white folks and the great historical contributions white people have made to our community and country?
I apologize, caller, for being so dismissive of you and your concerns. I presumed you were a racist without even talking with you when I should have started with the presumptions that you care about your community and your newspaper and you honestly wonder why we don't have more stories about white pride.
So here is my response:
In Prince George and in Canada, we're surrounded by so much white culture that it's the equivalent of standing in the middle of a forest and asking where the trees are. To take the metaphor further, in that same forest, gay pride and aboriginal pride are a handful of seedlings. They are neither big enough nor plentiful enough to threaten the trees in any way but they are part of the forest nevertheless and they deserve to be there as much as the old, established trees.
Put that way, the question does seem a little silly and the wording makes it much worse. The problem with the phrase "white pride" is that it's an uncomfortably short distance from there to the "Aryan pride" of Adolph Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. White pride is the language of violence and race war, of the Oklahoma City bomber and the shooter of the Charleston Nine. But let me - a French-Canadian white man - take the phrase back momentarily to answer the caller's question seriously.
The story of white pride in Canadian history and culture is everywhere. B.C.'s longest river is named after Simon Fraser and so is a B.C. university. Canada's longest river is named after Alexander Mackenzie. B.C.'s largest city is named after George Vancouver. Canada's highest mountain is named after a founding member of the Canadian Geographical Society.
Yet it runs far deeper than that. White culture is in the days of the week and the months of the year after Greek, Roman and Norse gods, as are the names of the planets and many of the stars. Most sects of Christianity and their customs and holidays, as well as the style of government, the rule of law, the monarchy, the financial system, mathematics, the scientific method and much of human understanding of the physical and biological world is, in whole or in part, a product of white society - North American and Western European, to be precise.
The rise of identity politics, of which gay pride and aboriginal pride are part, came about as a product of white pride and culture. Individual rights have been on the rise since the time of the Greek philosophers, leading to the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, Canadian independence and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As soon as oppressed peoples - be they of sex, colour, sexual preference, gender identity, ethnicity, language, religious background and mental and/or physical disability - began insisting that they are also "we, the people," that the four fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Charter applies to everyone equally, everywhere and in every circumstance, suddenly there was room in the forest for more than just trees.
The picture looks even better in a Prince George context. The only two statues of individuals in Prince George are of Terry Fox and Bridget Moran. Go ahead and feel some white pride if you must for two white folks who fought for more rights and acceptance for the physically disabled and for aboriginal residents, respectively. Fox and Moran are deserving of praise and remembrance because they believed pride and equality is something everyone should feel, regardless of the hand dealt to them at birth. Feel more white pride for the white mayor and city council who endorsed the construction of those statutes for those reasons.
I apologize for not returning the call but let me assure you that no one is coming to take your white pride away. All you're being asked to do is recognize that others with backgrounds not like yours are also proud and they would like to be as proudly public as yourself. There is more than just white pride, white history and white culture in modern Canada and more than just trees in the forest of the nation and the community.
