staying quiet during a racist

event makes you complicit

» Why I have decided to not maintain social order under such circumstances

   

CJ Sommerfeld
Staff Writer

 

ystemic discrimination is built on conformity and complicity. Racism

and other prejudices have succeeded in the past because people
abided—regardless of whether they believed that it was moral, or not.
While some of us may have more social education than others, we are
all responsible to speak-up against prejudices when it crosses our paths;
regardless of how much or little knowledge that we have on the topic of
social issues or social structures.

When an ideology—such as ethnocentrism or any supremacism—is
being repeated over and over, it becomes a norm. This process is sped up
when that ideology is confirmed by others—both passively and actively.
Active confirmation looks like explicit, outward approval, through words or
the likes. Passive confirmation can be as innocent as staying quiet and not
acknowledging that something that was said or done was wrong. Passive
confirmation of others’ discriminatory words or actions is as damaging
as active confirmation as it further perpetuates these harmful dogmas.
Harmful ideologies can persist when confirmation from others occurs with
a simultaneous lack of interjection.

Every day we see the harmful by-product of groups thinking that
they are superior to other groups as is evident through their actions and
words. Dave Chapelle’s ongoing trans and queer comments are perfect
examples of a cis/hetero-folk feeling superior to trans/queer folk. Recently
a Philadelphia man forcefully raped a female metro rider in broad daylight:
an example of male supremacy. And, let us not forget the countless
murders of BIPOC persons by police—which, without the mass of protests
and acknowledgement that occurred in 2020, probably would have flown
by under the radar.

Luckily, there has been an uproar against Dave Chapelle’s special
being featured on Netflix—which has similarly brought the hateful themes
of his comments to public light. Sadly, the rape that recently occurred on the
Philadelphia metro was not stopped by other metro riders, which allowed it to
go on for as long as it had. Racism, misogynism, transphobia, homophobia
and ethnocentric beliefs all came from somewhere, just as they are all going
somewhere— and that direction is each individual's responsibility.

     

To paraphrase an old saying: if you are not contributing
to change, you are contributing to the problem.

Silently confirming oppression and this lack of interjection may
explain why many of us were taught a skewed and incorrect history in
our younger school years. Throughout my elementary school and high
school, my teachers taught and maintained this colonialist ideal. Canadian
history classes consisted of learning about brave European explorers
who discovered Canada. We proudly wore red and white on Canada
Day; the country’s industrialization was viewed as progressive, as were
residential schools and the 60’s Scoop, among other Canadian atrocities.
Indigenous history class was separate from Canadian history and was
not mandatory—instead, it was an elective. Ironically, we simultaneously
learnt that Hitler and the Nazi’s actions were immoral.

Do | think my teachers wanted to teach us that Europeans are
culturally superior? Probably not consciously. Do | think my teachers
wanted to teach us that Canada was a colonial superpower? Also,
probably not consciously. Norms and ideals preserver when they are not
questioned, and when a counterargument does not emerge. | graduated
high school in 2011, during this time many social issues had not yet been
brought to light. Facebook had just surfaced; Twitter was under the radar,
and Instagram only existed as a whiskey-photo sharing app. There was
only a grain of salt’s worth of the social confrontations which we currently
have. My teachers had probably never heard an alternative to the content
which they were teaching so they excepted the biased histories which
they were told and subsequently taught them to us. And, for many years |
similarly accepted those biased histories as truth.

Before | elaborate on why we have a personal responsibility to stand
up against supremacism, let me note that while some people are crudely
discriminatory and overtly harmful to those who they view as inferior
as shown in the above examples, it does not always exist so evidently.
Prejudices equally occur through subtle means such as stereotyping.
This belief is a cognitive framework that allows us to speed up the
processing of social information, or rather is a cognitive shortcut. In
psychology, this term falls under the realm of heuristics: mental shortcuts
that provide quicker and easier conclusions to problems and judgements.
For those who have been exposed to certain discriminations towards
minority groups, and have accepted what they have heard as truth, that
information is cognitively easier to access than it is to employ higher