Columnist Margaret Wente. Photo courtesy of the Globe and Mail.

Margaret Wente is confused about racism. That is the most generous interpretation I can offer for her recent Globe and Mail article, “The good news about racism,” in which she argues that racism is vanishing from society. It is declining at such a rate, in fact, that the recent resurgence of white supremacy is a negligible blip, because “overtly racist behaviour…has become taboo.” Wente seems to have mistaken the fact that racism has been acknowledged as a societal factor with the end of racism entirely. She seems to have confused an improved sense of decorum around tragedies with the end of them altogether.  

Wente is a shrewd woman: She does not attempt to argue that discrimination is entirely non-existent. She relents, as an example, that Black and Indigenous men “can expect” to be stopped by police due to their skin colour—but still decries “systemic” racism as an invention of the progressive left. In her requisite admission that racism is not entirely a fabrication, however, she points to one of the most pervasive examples of systemic racism: the Ontario police practice of carding.

Wente believes that those who call out systematically discriminatory practices are, at best, malingering. At worst, they are the undercover agents of the progressive left. Why? Because she believes that since overt racism is passé—it is automatically on its way out. But racism isn’t going away, and we are not making progress “by every measure available.” Us white people are merely becoming aware of what has been going on around us. The work, for the most part, has yet to be done. Still, the exhaustive effort of acknowledging racism as a fact makes Wente want to believe that racism is no longer a defining feature of our society. And she wants you to believe it, too.

While Wente declined to define the terms she sarcastically put in quotes, systemic racism is a phrase coined by sociologist Joe Feagin to describe anti-Black practices that are institutionally entrenched in society. “Structural” racism refers to one of the ways systemic racism manifests itself, and is defined by Frances Henry and Carol Tator as “inequalities rooted in the system wide operation of a society.” The hallmark of systemic racism is that this form of discrimination is embedded in society: It does not require its agents to be hateful, or even personally bigoted. It is self-perpetuating: It only requires that we do nothing at all.  

In her article, Margaret Wente proved hasty to dismiss the concerns of marginalized folks. In this spirit, she joyfully brought us the Good News of racism: It’s not as bad as you think! Wente’s gospel springs from a 2017 study conducted by criminology professor Brian Boutwell and his team. Using data obtained from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Boutwell et al attempted to assess the prevalence of perceived discrimination in the United States. But the Add Health questionnaire is poorly suited to measure racial discrimination—likely because this was never its intended purpose.

Add Health itself was a comprehensive study designed to follow a nationally representative sample of twins from early adolescence to young adulthood. The aim of the questionnaire was primarily to provide measurement on “friendship networks, school activities and health conditions.” Because the survey was not designed specifically to study racism or discrimination, the sample is not consistently adjusted to reflect an evenly intersectional population. This is notable in one area in particular: As the authors of the Add Health study acknowledge in their recruitment analysis, “Add Health…oversampled African American adolescents with highly educated parents.” It has been repeatedly proven that a higher level of parental education correlates with higher socioeconomic status, and economic status itself is a protective factor against discrimination of any kind. This sampling flaw, however, seems to have been overlooked in Boutwell’s secondary analysis.

Boutwell only examined the results of two questions from the Add Health questionnaire:

“Question one: In your day-to-day life, how often do you feel you have been treated with less respect or courtesy than other people?

Question two: What do you think was the main reason for these experiences?”

Participants were only allowed to choose one response from a list of 11 mutually exclusive categories. Women and LGBTQ folks were not given the opportunity to report multiple experiences of discrimination, but instead had to decide which they felt was most pressing. The most common category selected? “Other”—making up a plurality of responses within every subgroup. With the Other category removed, race was the most common reason selected across Black, Asian, and Hispanic subgroups.

The wording of the questions is also troubling. In a study about discrimination, where the results are based exclusively on participant response, the word “discrimination” does not appear anywhere in the survey question. Neither does any approximation of this term. And because Boutwell et al didn’t conduct the questionnaire themselves, the participants had no context for their answers: Lack of respect or courtesy and discrimination are in no way mutually exclusive terms. Boutwell et al are out of their depth making claims about racial discrimination. Quite simply, they didn’t ask the question.

But of course, the Boutwell study is only one prong of Wente’s argument. The other? You (meaning her) just don’t see racism that much anymore. When racial tragedies are splashed across the headlines, the public responds appropriately. It doesn’t matter that these things continue to happen: What matters is that now it would be considered impolite not to send your thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. Sure, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, and sure, in Thunder Bay, Ont., “Indigenous kids have been found in local rivers.” But systemic racism? That’s just the last gasp of those “invested” in the narrative of racism. You know, those who profit from it.

Conservative pundits joke about a kind of racism so insidious it’s “invisible”—but it isn’t. It is, however, easy to ignore if you are white and unwilling to take people of colour at their word. Systemic racism has existed long before us and it will continue to function unless it is purposefully dismantled. Racism can thus exist in an organization like the police force, independent of the intentions of individual officers, through discriminatory mandates and practices set up long before polite society became #woke.

Ontario’s police practice of carding is one example of these mandates. Carding refers specifically to the Community Contacts Policy, an intelligence-gathering policy that allows police to randomly stop, identify, and document community members. An analysis by the Toronto Star in 2013 showed that this policy has had unequivocally discriminatory results. The Star found that Black, Indigenous, and people of colour were more likely than white people to be targeted in every single patrol zone across Toronto; in predominantly white zones, the disparity increased. The analysis also revealed a grim but telling statistic: “Looking solely at young [B]lack male Toronto residents, aged 15 to 24…the number who were ‘carded’ at least once between 2008 and 2012—in the police patrol zone where they live—actually exceeds by a small margin the number of young [B]lack males, aged 15 to 24, who live in Toronto.”

Wente acknowledges that despite the good intentions of individual actors in the police force, the organization as a whole is incapable of functioning without racial bias. She says as much in her concession that we as Canadians are not, in fact, perfect: “Most [B]lack or Indigenous men,” she admits, “can expect to be stopped by police because of their skin colour.” To live with the expectation that you will be randomly stopped by the police in your own neighbourhood, due to you skin colour alone, is to live under the thumb of systemic racism. Wente can sneer at the terms we have chosen to define these problems, but she herself acknowledges the truth behind them. She admits that systemic racism is real and visible when she admits that she is aware of pervasive, policy-based discrimination enacted by the police force.

Wente knows that millions of people across North America still experience discrimination. But, unfortunately for all of them, she does not find this knowledge terribly compelling. She does not seem to find evidence of lived discrimination much more than a tedious vestige of ancient history (after all, the last segregated Black school in Ontario was closed in the distant past of 1965). If your example of racism isn’t utterly grotesque to behold, if it is instead the story of a quiet but pervasive injustice, then your story can’t be trusted—you must be “invested” in the racism narrative propagated by the progressive left.  

Wente is not affected by the problems of systemic racism, so she chooses to believe that nobody is. If nine out of 10 people can tolerate the idea of an interracial marriage, that’s a win. If “onlookers are outraged” by outward displays of white supremacy, we are living in a post-racial epoch. If Quebec can find the space to bury the Canadian victims of a terrorist attack, committed in a place of worship, due to the perceived otherness of said place of worship? Well then, Margaret Wente thinks we’re doing pretty darn good.

By the time Friday rolled around last week there was a veritable anthology of jokes to which “David Gilmour” was the punch line. The paper-bag jowls and complacent half-smile of his face pasted on News Feeds and blogs like an advert for a public flogging. Everywhere that CanLit went, so too went the name David Gilmour, followed by some expletives or exasperated eye-rolling. The Canadian author had detractors aplenty; but he had defenders a-one.

In case you missed the original rant, here it is. For people, like myself, who care a good deal about Canadian literature, it was big news. Far from being incensed, many of us saw it as an opportunity to laugh at the curmudgeonly prattling of a man who should’ve lived a hundred years ago. But backlash opportunism reared its head—as it does when anything seems too one-sided—and its head was in a national newspaper.

Coming to Gilmour’s defense, Margaret Wente, a Globe and Mail columnist, steered the conversation towards academic feminism and its pesky reputation of late for sneaking into all nooks of the humanities faculty. “Frankly, I was surprised and glad to learn that there remains one small testosterone-safe zone at U of T”, she said. “As anyone who’s set foot on campus in the past 30 years ought to know, courses in guy-guy writers are vastly outnumbered by courses in women writers, queer writers, black writers, colonial writers, postcolonial writers, Canadian writers, indigenous writers, Caribbean, African, Asian and South Asian writers, and various sub- and sub-subsets of the above. But if you’re interested in Hemingway, good luck. No wonder male students are all but extinct in the humanities.”

Well, I went through a humanities faculty—an English department more specifically—and I can confirm that quite a few courses privileged “sub-sets” of writers, but I can also say that I took a whole course devoted to T.S Eliot, and that, in literature classes that teach a period before our current one, male writers still make up the bulk of the syllabus. I mean, I didn’t go to U of T, but I can only guess that—Wait, what? They post their course list online? And the first three courses are exclusively male? Oh…

Here’s the kicker, Margaret Wente: I didn’t go to university to have my masculinity stroked. I didn’t go so that I could grow a great bushy beard like Hemingway and shoot belts of whiskey off a buck’s carcass—I could’ve done that without higher education, I’m pretty sure. I went to school to learn. And a big part of learning in the humanities is empathizing, divesting oneself of the performance of gender, or class, or race, and digging an antenna into what it is to be human.

In her last paragraph, Wente attempts to dissolve the whole discussion by saying that only in academia would this be a controversy. Her last sentence, directed at academic feminists is, “Please get a life”. This is classic, children’s rhetoric. Offer a viewpoint then erase the issue’s importance to ensure that yours is the last viewpoint.

It’s a shame. The argument shouldn’t have been jilted that easily, because it’s one that still crops up in literature studies, most notably from the luminary American critic Harold Bloom, in what he terms “The School of Resentment”. Wente’s done no one a favour by stifling the discussion around this topic. Is academic feminism ruining the aesthetic aspects of literature studies by politicizing them? In this age when girls outnumber boys in all but the engineering department, is education becoming feminized, and is that feminization built around opposition rather than inclusion? Is women’s studies, as University of Ottawa English professor, Janice Fiamengo is quoted as saying, “actually preventing learning by substituting a smug sense of oppositionality, woundedness and bitterness for the intellectual curiosity, openness to ideas and eagerness to pursue truth that university education in the humanities is supposed to produce”?

Or might it be that viewpoints can co-exist. Art can be for art’s sake, and it can also be a social bellwether and political tool. Humanities education can be a hulking chimera of feminism, masculinism, normalization, destabilization, aesthetics, politics, etc. and we can trust students to understand that the large tapestry of viewpoints, only when understood holistically, may indicate a deep sense of what it is to be human. There exists in this world oppositionality and woundedness, and, far from these things being substitutions for truth, they are part of the truth. Young men and women interested in literature would do well to read voraciously—in, as well as out, of their comfort zone. Authors (ahem, David) would do well to do the same. Professors would do well to attempt to teach the vast, variegate human experience. Reporters for national newspapers would also do well not to feed into this petty cycle of boys vs. girls, girls vs. boys and all the balderdash that goes along with that. And I think we’d all do well just to listen to each other.

www.theglobeandmail.com

For guys (unless they’re in engineering school), life is a paradise of sexual opportunity. For women, it’s a wasteland. The old-fashioned custom known as “dating” (as in: guy calls up girl and asks her out next Friday, takes her to a movie and a meal, picks up the cheque, takes her home, kisses her goodnight and, if he’s lucky, gets to third base) is something their grandparents did. Today, people just hook up.

Okay I get that the “guys in engineering school are too nerdy to get laid” thing is a joke, but it’s not funny, it’s outdated. And while it’s true that there are more females than males in university today, saying that it makes school a “paradise of sexual opportunity” for men and a “wasteland” for women is bogus, for a few reasons. First, Wente makes it seem like men are just dogs who think with their penises and will literally sleep with any female who blinks twice at them. That isn’t true; guys have types and “deal-breakers,” too. Second, does Wente think university girls look around campus and pout, “But I wanted to have seeexxxxx tonighttt and there are noooo boyyyyssss“? (We don’t.) Finally, that last line: “Today, people just hook up.” Are you serious? Yeah, sure, young people do that. But to say that “hooking up” is all “young people” do is a major generalization. I have a lot of friends, both male and female, in serious, long-term relationships. Some of them even live together. Some of them even talk about marriage. And we still go on dates! Seriously!

What explains the campus hookup culture? One widely overlooked factor is the scarcity of men. As buyers in a buyers’ market, they’re on the right side of supply and demand. The price they have to pay for sex – in terms of commitment, time and money – is at a record low. Plus, women are more inclined than ever to say yes.

So basically what Wente is saying is that these horny dog-men finally get the sweet deal they’ve always dreamed of: no being nice to girls, just sex! Sure, there are guys out there who only want sex from girls. But there are also guys who like relationships, who only want to hook up with that girl they’ve had a crush on since the first day of class—and they want to date her, too. Even if it’s easier than ever for a guy to get laid without putting any work in, it doesn’t necessarily he’s going to go that route. Also, why are women “more inclined than ever to say yes”? Because we’re just so happy that one of the few guys on campus is talking to us, so we’d better snatch him up before the bitty in the next booth does? Blah.

In economic terms, our unequal desire for sex means that, in the sexual marketplace, men are the buyers and women are the sellers. Until recently, the price was steep, up to and including a wedding ring and a promise of lifetime commitment. In my parents’ generation, the only way for a 22-year-old guy to have a lot of sex was to get married. Today, plenty of 22-year-olds can get all the sex they want for the cost of a pack of condoms.

Okay not all women want marriage oh and also so what?

Dr. Baumeister argues that, throughout history, it was to women’s advantage to keep the supply of sex restricted. “Sex was the main thing they had to offer men in order to get a piece of society’s wealth, and so they restricted sexual access as much as they could, to maintain a high price,” he says in his essay Sexual Economics, Culture, Men and Modern Sexual Trends (with Kathleen Vohs). But as women began to gain power and opportunity, that began to change. Women can now get a piece of society’s wealth on their own. And life for everyone is a lot more fun, because it turns out that, wherever women have more autonomy, people have more sex.

So sex was only ever our way of feeling successful. It was never an act of passion or love or fun. Nope, it was just our way of feeling like we were worth something. Great message.

The changes in gender politics since the 1960s have been good for both sexes. Women got something they really wanted (access to careers and money) and men got something they really wanted (more sex). But this bargain is having some unexpected consequences. Young men are in no hurry to get married. Why should they be? As my dear old dad used to say when I waltzed out the door in my miniskirt, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” I hated it when he said that. But he’d grasped the central principle of sexual economics.

NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO.

A lot of women are in no hurry to get married, either. But it might not work out so well for them. They’ve watched too much Sex in the City. They think they’ll still have the same choices at 35 and 40 that they had at 25. They have no idea that men’s choices will get better with age (especially if they’re successful), but theirs will get worse. Believe me, this sucks. But it’s the truth.

WHAT? Saying that we watched too much Sex and the City and therefore have this distorted view of what it is to grow old and have sex and be a woman is actually making me feel queasy. (If Sex and the City misleads anything, it’s how easy it is to make it as a professional writer. There’s no way Carrie could afford all those Manolo Blahniks off a single column.) Also we’re just supposed to accept that while we get super gross and boring once we hit age 30, men get sexy so they’ll be fine—and therefore we need to get him to put a ring on it pronto for fear of living alone? What year are we in?

University is hard. True. Work is hard. True. Being an adult is hard. True. So why is Wente pointing the finger at those of us who are still trying to wade our way through the muck? And if what young men want most of all is sex, then why work hard if they don’t have to? Young men like sex, for sure, but news flash: so do women! If young females are having more sex, it’s probably because they like it. Also is sex really what guys want most of all? If a 22-year-old guy was offered one night of sex or a university degree, do you think he’s going to pick the former? Are men really that shallow? Are my guy friends really just hugging me when I’m sad because they want to get in my pants? Is the barista who told me to have a nice day as I stirred sugar into my Americano really telling me that he’d like to take me into the staff room and have sex with me? If he was, like, should I go back and talk to him?

Community Shared Agriculture is a system of buying vegetables where people buy shares in the farm and pay for the harvest at the beginning of the season.  Members pick up a box of their veggies every week, and farmers benefit because they were given the capital they needed up front to buy seed and equipment before the season began. At our CSA, our farmers get between $475 and $725 per family at the beginning of the season, when they need it most (people are paying about $25 in veggies per week).  The other benefit to farmers is that while the whole CSA membership shares in, say, a bumper crop of strawberries, they also stand with you in case of a hard season – like this one.  Members take their share of the harvest, and that means if the cucumber crop was smaller than usual because of the heat then everyone takes home one cuke instead of two.

As Wente unceremoniously points out, being a “locavore” or eating only organic has its limits.  Food can be both organic and have a huge carbon footprint.   Food can also be local but represent large-scale cash crops, as with PEI potatoes, which are sold in part to McCain Foods.  McCain wouldn’t be the poster child for local food in the minds of Whole Foods-types and community market shoppers, but if you lived in Charlottetown, it’d be local.

Part of the attractiveness of “local food” is that being close enough to our farms and food sources allows us to think about them as part of a larger system.  For example, if we eat local fish we might be more concerned with mercury poisoning in a local river.  Whereas if we are getting fish from abroad, through a large-scale distributor like Captain High Liner (Haddock caught in the Arctic Ocean, for example) we’re not as aware or concerned about how that fish harvest is integrated into local ecosystems, for better or for worse.  In the same way, if we eat “organic” or wild fish from far away, it’s easier not to think about why we aren’t eating fish from the river that runs through our city, the same one the kids can’t actually swim in.

The answer isn’t just eating local and/or organic, but being accountable.  Eating local and/or organic can in some cases become an expensive badge of honor for those trying to follow the trends—I think that’s what Wente is talking about here.  There is no pat answer to how to make food part of a sustainable future (although some would say being vegetarian would make the biggest difference), and likewise its probably not going to be an answer that makes a good bumper sticker.  But I’m still going to opt for getting to know my soil better, my farmers better, and this water better, in the interest of being accountable for what I consume.  This means I’m turning down the proud label of “vegan” or “locavore” in favor of weighing my impact and what I can afford on a case-by-case basis, and being open to change.  What about you?