Term Limits
In a CBC news article on September 11, 2023 about new rules for federal public servants using AI, President of the Treasury Board, Anita Anand, is quoted as saying, “As a racialized woman myself, I am very conscious about the potential for bias to creep into decision making,”
Someone so high up in the federal government of Canada using the word “racialized” to describe herself seems a shame. As a brown-skinned immigrant (here in Canada now since twenty-five years) I find that sad and disheartening. How did a term like “racialized” get normalised and become part of not just public usage but also governmental? Who came up with such a demeaning term to describe all coloured people? So now we are all “racialized”? It’s like some external evil entity did something to us and put us in a blighted state and now we can never undo it? Each and everyone of us is a helpless victim with no agency or will, relegated to a state of perpetual victimhood, forever doomed to rely on Woke benevolence to be helped and saved?
I am trying to imagine why or who would want to describe themselves by such a demeaning term, except perhaps those who need to access corporate or institutional quota funding, or employment and career opportunities in the booming DEI industry.
And what does it tell us about the victimhood mindset if there are some who will always see themselves as “racialized” even after reaching positions at the top that the faithful believers in meritocracy who refuse to play the victimhood card can only dream of? What message are we sending to our young, bright-eyed, hopeful setting out into the world with great dreams? That it’s a good thing to see yourselves as your racial or gender identity and nothing more, to the extent of wearing it as a badge in public? How sad, and how sadly self-limiting.
So pray tell me, how do I make myself un-racialized and return to being just a human being like everyone else?
That’s a rhetorical question obviously.
Another awful, demeaning and reductive term that crept into public usage is the acronym BIPOC, which lumps together three completely different races into one box. It’s another way of saying ‘not White’. It’s bad enough to see one whole race as just a homogeneous mass with no human individuality and uniqueness, to do so for three is downright preposterous. When are we going to stop putting people in boxes, separating them, and reducing them — and all their glorious unique human individuality — down to a dehumanising acronym on the basis of race and skin colour? And here I thought all these years that I was just a human being and a Canadian like everyone else. Now I am told by the supposedly progressive crowd, that due to my brown skin I should see myself as BIPOC?
It’s wrong at so many levels. So all of a person’s aspirations, their capabilities, their worldview, their knowledge of different cultures and histories, their interests, are all somehow determined by their racial or cultural origin? How does that even make sense? Every human being is an individual, and a complex one. How can anyone be classified by a silly acronym? Besides, it separates people not bring them together. It segregates. How is that not obvious? It might be with the best of intentions, but it’s still segregation. Not a physical one, but far worse, at the level of the imagination.
Segregation again? I though we fought against and ended that in the last century?
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An earnest request to all. Please don’t unquestioningly buy into every terminology that is foisted on the public discourse and help normalize it, no matter how good your intention or that of those who introduce the terms. Apply critical thinking, your human intuition of what’s right, and sometimes just common sense. Otherwise you might be inadvertently hurting those you want to help, robbing people of their dignity and their human individuality; and contributing to more harm than good, to retrogression than to progress.
