During the anti-G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, cars with Québécois license plates were pulled over by police and people with francophone accents were targeted too. There were, of course, a fuckton of Québecers in town, and the police services knew that; they also probably believed that “francophone radicals” might be particularly rowdy, and not without some reason.

Thanks to the organizing of CLAC (the Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes) and RAGE (the Régroupement anti-G20 étudiante), busloads of Québecers showed up in town, meaning that Montréal and other Québécois locales made up a disproportionate number of the demonstrators in town, especially when you consider their distance from Toronto in comparison to other cities.

Ai happened to spend a good chunk of hours in the Eastern Detention Centre that weekend, and one of the people ai shared a cell with was a Québécois dude. He was nice, and we talked about stuff. At one point, though, we got to talking about the targeting of Québecers, and he said (in English), “If this isn’t racism, ai don’t know what is.”

Ai didn’t say anything at the time, though ai definitely should have. It’s not like ai had anything else to do other than to talk politics with this stranger, and preferably about things that would be too esoteric for any listening cops to learn anything from.

So this is what ai should have said:

The thing is, dude, that fucking with Québecers isn’t racism. Even hating Québecers isn’t racism. The reason? Because Québecers aren’t a race!

«Mais», you say, «vous anglos disez que la race, bien que c’est une construit sociale, est aussi réelle autant que la société la rend réelle.» Well yeah, bro, that’s true, but Québecers still aren’t even socially constructed as a race.

«Pourquoi?» Because Québecers aren’t racialized – except, sometimes, by Québecers themselves, and as far as ai know, only by white Québecers. Nègres blancs d’Amérique by Pierre Vallières is a good example of this.

Although Vallières deserves some credit for identifying with revolutionary anti-colonial struggles around the world in this book, and for later distancing himself from more problematic parts of its analysis (like the one implicit in the title itself, which posits the Québecer as «nègre»), we should probably see it as an effort to gain sympathy for the liberation struggle of Québecers from non-white people by presenting an unacceptably essentialist notion of a Québécois nation as somehow non-white itself. This is unfortunate, because, while Québecers – and Acadians, Brayons, and other Canadian francophone peoples – were genuinely oppressed peoples in need of liberation at the time of this book’s writing in 1968, they weren’t, on the whole, a people whose oppression had a foundation in race.

Note: the reason ai say “on the whole” in that last sentence is because there were, even at that time, a minority of Canadian francophones who were non-white or not entirely white, by which ai mean Métis people, black Québecers, and others. Vallières, in Nègres blancs, didn’t take these folks into account at all – and that’s another major lacuna in his analysis.

The discourse of race

Before the 1960s, of course, things were different, but after the Holocaust, race and racism changed in Europe and the white-settler countries as a result of a very rapid recalibration of social mechanisms of racialization. A quick and dirty history of racial discourse is in order.

This discourse, in one form or another, goes all the way back to the ancient world, but it wasn’t until much more recently in history that it lost a great deal of its purely rhetorical character and started to become a coherent concept. Thus we can speak of an emergence of modern racism on the plantations of England’s mainland Turtle Island colonies, different from all the colloquial and inconsistently applied uses of the term “race” that had existed before then. With the advent of modern racism, race was a pretty straightforward concept, based on easily visible characteristics, primarily skin colour, but also facial structure and hair type; this collection of characteristics can be called “racial phenotype” (and ai’m basically just following Ward Churchill’s example here).

With the emergence of racial phenotype as something that people cared about and created systems and customs around, you suddenly had, in the parts of Turtle Island sending taxes to London, an awareness that there were white people, there were black people, and there were “Indians” whose skin colour would usually be characterized as red. There must surely have been people who, for one reason or another, defied easy categorization, but they must not have been numerous enough to matter to the larger racial narrative that was emergent on the Atlantic coast of this continent in the 1600s.

In the nineteenth century, though, a more apparently scientific language started to predominate in racial discourse – and in other areas of discourse, too, of course. Less obvious characteristics of designated groups of people, or simply invisible characteristics (which were, to be clear, usually completely fictitious), were investigated and posited as hallmarks of racial difference. Generally speaking, among white Europeans, groups who were already colloquially racialized proceeded to be pseudoscientifically racialized. Jews got the worst of this, it would seem, but Protestant pseudoscientists were quick to ascribe inferior characteristics to all manner of “papists” as well, like the Irish.

After 1945 (and the collapse of the short-lived Nazi empire), this “scientific racism” – never entirely hegemonic, increasingly difficult to argue in the context of certain geopolitical alliances, and not necessarily conducive to social peace in Europe or white-settler countries – was widely rejected. This didn’t end racism, of course, even though there have been many efforts to that end since 1945, and from many different political standpoints. What it did, though, is purge race of its esoteric element. Notwithstanding the minority who still adhere to such ideas, race mostly became a matter of visible and obvious difference once again, which really means that it mostly became a matter of visible phenotype. White people were simply white people, black people simply black people, and so on. Today, when Toronto-raised children of Italians realize that their grandparents consider Italians to be non-white, or when people in the Canadas are told that the Hutu génocidaires considered the Tutsis to be racially distinct because of their height and their somewhat lighter skin tone, the reaction is generally one of confusion.

“The Québecois race”

In the 1960s, white Québecers didn’t look particularly different from other white people in Turtle Island. While people in the anglophone upper class had certainly circulated some racial narratives about them in the past – about how, for example, Québecers and other Canadian francophones had been descended from peasants, not from the aristocrat seigneurs of Nouvelle-France who left after Conquest, and thus were of inferior stock – this kind of shit was a bit passé by the time Duplessis finally hit the bucket. This doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer discrimination. It just means, again, that this discrimination had no roots in racial conceptions.

One thing that gets cited a lot is that francophones were often told by anglophone to “speak white”. This was definitely a thing, but is it racism? And was it a thing that francophones faced in particular, as opposed to italophones, lusophones, or grecophones? Ai think that English’s dominant status in the northern two thirds of occupied Turtle Island meant that it was considered, in effect, the language of white people, so an admonishment to speak white was perhaps an admonishment to behave like a proper white person. The same admonishment, though articulated differently, could be directed at any white person engaged in an emotionally and/or sexually intimate relationship with a non-white person, or any white person who supported something as basic as voting rights for black people in the American South. Admonishments like these were not, however, an assertion that the targeted white person was somehow not white, only that the person was improperly white.

Now ai’m a little forgiving of people for having some weird ideas about stuff a few decades ago, especially in the context of what, again, was a genuinely shitty situation for most white francophone Québecers, and where knowledge of worlds beyond their own was not as accessible as it is today. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, though, not so much. Describing Québecers as a race kind of sidesteps the fact that Québecers themselves are stratified into different racial categories. This was true in the 1960s, too, as ai’ve already said, but one could make the argument that it was a much more racially homogenous society at the time, and that argument could sorta fly maybe. Today, it doesn’t work at all. Unless you define a Québecer as being de souche – in other words: unless you’re an unambiguous racist, or you want to invisibilize or dismiss a part of the chosen identity and/or self-conception of a significant number of people of colour, or both – then Québecers, as a whole, constitute a multiracial population.

Ai believe that the Québécois dude in that Eastern Detention Centre cell with me probably would not define being a Québecer as being de souche. So, then, why would he use the word “racism” to describe the targeting of Québecers that weekend? Well, other than using the word in a lazy and/or imprecise way in a place where the word “prejudice” might be more appropriate. (An aside.)

So, if Québecers constitute a multiracial population, to posit that Québecers constitute a distinct racial group (which can be done indirectly, as when Québecers are posited as possible targets of racism by Toronto police services during the G20 summit) and still be coherent is to select some characteristic other than a phenotypical one and use that as a basis of identifying racial difference.

Coming into contact with the writings of anti-colonial theorists elsewhere, many Québecers identified language as such a nucleation site; the French language was often posited as “the blackness” (in French, «le négritude») of the Québécois people. This term came from Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, who later commented that, while perhaps being skeptical of Québecers’ use of the term with regards to themselves, he thought that Québecers had at least understood the concept – something that couldn’t be said for many other people. As a person who is himself somewhat confused by what concept (or concepts?) may exist behind Césaire’s word «négritude», ai don’t know if speaking French in the context of northern Turtle Island can count or not – but ai do think that, even if it is a kind of négritude, that does not mean that white Québecers can claim themselves to be «nègres», i.e. racially distinct from other white populations near them, and therefore possible targets of racism.

They might be targets of linguicism, though? Why not.

Alternate racialization schemas?

Ai do believe that things other than phenotype can be nucleation sites for racialization. For example, it seems that, in our society, the quality of being Muslim – in one sense or another – constitutes such a nucleation site. This is a topic for another post, but unless we want to concede that acts like Jyllands-Posten publishing its pictures of Muhammad in 2005, or Florida pastor Terry Jones burning qurans in 2011, are somehow not racist in and of themselves, and instead only neutral acts being framed racially. Ai don’t want to make that concession, personally, especially because ai don’t think it’s necessary.

Instead, ai would point to the fact that people who would probably be identified as white based on phenotype may, as a result of their Muslim or apparently Muslim names, be subject to a form of discrimination that is generalized to others who are Muslim. It’s not just white people, either. In the United States, black Muslims, as well as black people who simply appear Muslim in some way, may be the recipients of hatred and discrimination from black Christians. This, for me, is an indication that a “kernel of Islam” (as absurd a concept as the “one drop of black blood” that determined blackness in the United States for so long, and yet no less socially real) has become the esoteric nucleation site around which a somewhat non-standard form of racialization can form – although ai would certainly be open to a semantic discussion about whether this should be called “racialization” or not. The whole thing is similar, though, to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, a form of racism that also hinges on the capacity to identify a given body on the basis of its defining “religious” characteristic (which, of course, has little to do with “how religious” the body is).

Without even getting into a discussion of whether such an alt-racialization constitutes a kind of racialization at all, though, ai really just don’t think that the characteristic of speaking French is a similar kind of nucleation site. It’s not something upon which a racial construct can be built. Even if it could be, though, it hasn’t been – except by Québecers themselves, some of whom seem to think that others (non-Québecers) think of them (Québecers) in racial terms, rather than in cultural terms.

To be clear, ai am not saying that Québécois nationalists identify Québecers in racial terms. They don’t, or at least not as a general rule. They, instead, identify the Québécois people in terms of identity, cultural values, and other stuff. This makes sense. Considering that Québecers are, in terms of “blood”, much more obviously an amalgam of different “nations” than other populations of white people (like, compared even to places where white racist nationalism has been very popular before, like 1930s Germany, or today, like Hungary), “purity” is less a thing to mobilize around. Hell, instead, you might incorporate “mixity” into your population-fusing, nation-state-building program, like certain South American admirers of the Nazis did, coming up with their counteridea of a racially diverse “cosmic race” that is still as absurd as the Nazis’ idea of a “master race” of somehow “Aryan” character.

So we have a situation where, despite the fact that white people in other parts of Turtle Island alt-racialize certain populations (like Muslims), they don’t alt-racialize Québecers – and yet Québecers, except for the most organized fascists amongst them (like Mussolini-admiring Troisième Voie types), actually do conceive of themselves racially! Or at least some of them do, casually and perhaps unintentionally, when discussing a situation where something bad happened to someone because that unfortunate someone was a francophone.

A complicated situation

There’s always a lot to say when delving into the subject of how human populations are stratified by a wide variety of different identification mechanisms, the ways that social power is unevenly distributed between people in a way that corresponds to the ways that they can be identified, the political implications of this reality, the strategies that make sense for dealing with it, and so on and so forth. It can be confusing to talk about. It can be hard to follow the arguments of others, especially when the substance of what they are saying hinges on very small details. Therefore, the language we use to discuss these things needs to be very precise. This is as true in the specific situation of Canadian francophones as in any other.

In the specific situation of the targeting of Québecers at the G20 summit, ai am very skeptical that we should even analyze the events as a situation of systemic discrimination. At the very least, it shouldn’t be our primary mode of looking at what happened. State security agencies had spies in CLAC. They knew that people in Montréal were, at the very least, planning to come. Without any other details of the conspiracy, too, they understood that Montréal is, for better or worse, the principle producer of urban radical culture in the Canadas. In such circumstances, it was simply intelligent police work to direct lower-rung Toronto cops to target Québecers.

And, to be clear, the cops didn’t just target Québecers. Normal English-speaking folk who don’t think of themselves as Québecers and don’t want to think of themselves as Québecers (so, y’know, a lot of anglo anarchists in Montréal) also got their cars pulled over if their cars happened to have Québécois licence plates. But, of course, the police probably expected the people pulled over to have French accents, so there’s that.

Just because what happened at the G20 summit doesn’t strike me as particularly good evidence of discrimination against Québecers, ai do think that anglo chauvinism is still a thing, and white Québecers may sometimes face unfair sorts of discrimination and difficulty as a result of that. Ai think that, in many places, francophones who can’t speak English (or at least can’t speak it fluently) face a certain kind of material difficulty that is worth talking about – at least once in a while, in the appropriate venue. And even if ai didn’t think all that, ai still think it would make sense to sometimes speak of the no longer existent Canadian social order where francophones got a much smaller share of imperial and colonial superprofits (if only to analyze “the white nation” all Sakai-style).

Ai just don’t think that any of these conversations can benefit from using the word “racism” in a non-intuitive, imprecise way.

And seriously, “linguicism” is a pretty decent word!