Life As Performance Art 54

Lately "other" has turned into a verb. When you are othering someone, you are treating them like an outsider, a stranger, someone who is not quite human, the other. When we think of people as categories instead of persons, we are othering them. This is my objection to the way the Anglican Church wants to continue their bromance with the First Nations. They don't appear to be focussed on individuals who happen to be aboriginal (that would be my focus), but as aboriginals who might also happen to be individuals. It is pure identity politics. They were doing the same thing when they wanted to embrace gay people as they sought to legitimize marriage equality twenty years ago. if you were queer and in a same-gender relationship or seeking to be in a relationship, then you were welcomed with open arms. But not because of who you were, but because of what you were. It gets even more complicated when people occupying these categories, be they First Nations or African, actually want to be viewed and approached through the filtre and lens of their group identity. It is as though, now, persons no longer matter, or they no longer matter as persons, they are simply their demographic. What I also find troubling, is the way their appointed, or self-appointed spokespersons presume to speak for all aboriginals, when it could be reasonably alleged that there is going to be a much greater diversity of perceptions and opinions in their number. We are now all being viewed as manifestations of our group identity. This is scary. As we spent the sixties and seventies challenging the racism in our country, there was a huge push to stop looking at colour or other superficial differences, and to see and embrace the person. Race became a myth, an illusion. This is where my thinking still lies. By the same token, equality became the presumed result of whitewashing, which is to say, the more white, or British European Colonial you became in your identity and behaviour , the more accepted you could feel in the general community. Like the Asian Banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), or the South-Asian or African Coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside) But then, in the seventies, white people started wearing their hair in Afros, followed by the equally unfortunate trend of dreadlocks during the nineties. I remember an African-American Christian band called the Jeremiah People who were visiting and performing at my church back in 1971. One woman in the band quipped about how ridiculous a white guy looked sporting an Afro, with his white skin and blue eyes, rather like a chunk of blue cheese stuck in a Brillo pad. It still makes me smile. Now we call this cultural appropriation, but I think the offense taken to be a bit exaggerated and out of proportion, and really it's simply a pathetic demonstration of how culturally starved and deprived your average white North American must be. I have never othered people of other races. From childhood, I had friends from backgrounds, Japanese, and First Nations, then African and Chinese, Jewish, South Asian, among others. More recently, I have a lot of Latino (racially mixed folk) whom I count as close friends. My first contact with people of African heritage happened when I was fourteen. I had just converted to Christianity, and the church the Jesus People were involved with was the Fountain Chapel, a black Pentecostal congregation in the Strathcona neighbourhood. The pastor was an African Canadian named Sister Ann Walker. We used to talk and visit in the church basement, and I was deeply touched and comforted by the warmth and kindness she showed me. Likewise for all the indigenous people I have known. They have never been for me the Other. From age fourteen, on, I have known them, respected and loved them as peers and friends. For me, they, like everyone else in my life, have existed purely, and primarily as persons. I have always respected their culture and their experiences as members of minority cultures in a less than welcoming and often hostile society. But I never thought of myself as white, nor as them as Asian or indigenous or black, because we were persons, friends, all navigating together our way through life. I really do not understand this paternalistic and patronizing obsession that Anglicans have about group and identity. I find a lot of those people, especially some of their clergy, to be appallingly stupid. They still don't seem to get it, that we are persons, all of us, and that our group identity plays perhaps a very limited role in shaping who we are, and that the postmodernist crap coming out of the universities and seminaries hugely exaggerates the play of culture and social and class interactions and conflict. We have to start rediscovering the value of the person and of people as individuals, and get entirely away from this poorly disguised racism with a big fat smiley face painted on its backside.