Does Racial Justice and Reconciliation Require Moving Beyond the Problem of Whiteness?

Rima Wilkes, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia

Is the struggle against racism a struggle against white supremacy? In both the academy and beyond, there is much discussion of the problem of whiteness and white supremacy. In this talk, I begin by using my own story and my own positionality as a basis for interrogating what has now become dominant thinking, particularly on the left, about the meaning of whiteness. Several literatures including the settler colonial, racial capitalism, critical race and critical ethnic studies literatures all center a struggle against whiteness, white privilege, white fragility and white supremacy. The binary and message about who are the “bad guys” is clear. In contrast, here I propose an alternative non-binary approach to thinking about racial justice and reconciliation that still centers the experience of racial oppression but that does not also entail blaming a particular group as oppressor. While I focus on Canada and responsibility for Indigenous genocide (and, to some extent, anti-Blackness) my hope is that the larger theoretical logic will also be of utility for thinking about moving forward on issues of racial justice and genocide in the contemporary United States of America. 

Rima Wilkes is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.  Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including International Migration Review, American Sociological Review, Science and Social Forces. She is the Past President of the Canadian Sociological Association, a past editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and in 2017 received the UBC Killam Research Award. Her current project interrogates the oppressed/oppressor binaries that persist in the study of race and racism.