After complicity and shame: Effective political action for non-Indigenous people – ABC News

Canada relies on extractive industries and the colonial land-theft that sustains them. My relationship with extraction, as a Canadian, is complex. I believe Canada should respect the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and thus Indigenous law; I believe Canada should live up to our commitments to address global warming and thus not build new oil pipelines; we should fulfil the explicit and implicit treaty agreements that founded the nation; we should end military interventions in other nations (including within our borders); and much more.

As a Canadian, I pay into an unregulated pension plan that invests heavily in oil futures which promote global warming, as well as tobacco advertising, and migrant detention facilities on the US-Mexico border; I cannot change this investment. My taxes pay for military interventions and fund the politicians who ignore treaty relationships. I drive a car, turn on heat and lights, and fly to conferences. Im complicit in Canadas protection of resource extraction from pretty much any angle I think of, simply by virtue of the complex web of relations in which I live and breathe.

I benefit differentially as a white immigrant mortgage-owner from histories of and present social relations of land theft and colonial oppression. In complex situations like, well, simply being alive, we make all sorts of compromises and become complicit in all sorts of things we would like to wash our hands of. Its unsettling.

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I used to teach a class called Unsettling Canada. Students learned about the internment of Japanese Canadians, current indefinite migrant imprisonment, military action in 1990 at Kanehsat:ke, and Indian Residential Schools, among other things. After class one day, one of my non-Indigenous students said to me, I just dont know how to carry on, now that I know these things about Canada. Ive always been a proud Canadian, and I dont recognize myself in this history. I feel so ashamed. Another student, gathering her things after class, said, I often wonder what it is like learn about these things for the first time. To me, they have always been something I knew about. She was Indigenous, and most of her family either had kids taken away and put in genocidal institutions or had been forced to be in the institutions themselves. None of this was news to her.

When people charge someone with being complicit, frequently the result of that charge is a particular kind of immobility. When we are charged with complicity, we tend to turn inwards in shame, or be overwhelmed by a feeling of how impossible it would be to extract ourselves from currently ubiquitous relations of domination. Often, the feeling of being complicit means we give up on action. Indeed, frequently the charge of complicity is meant precisely to entail the claim that if you are complicit in something, you do not have standing to oppose that thing. This is worth investigating, because if calling out complicity is meant to prompt effective ethical or political action, but instead derails precisely that action, the charge of complicity may itself produce further complicity or, at least, it may not help to further the goal of reducing the relevant harm or wrong.

The question is, then: can identifying complicity produce collective solidarity instead of individual immobilisation?

This summer Indigenous communities in Canada have begun using ground-penetrating radar to locate hundreds of unmarked graves long known to be at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau echoed my non-Indigenous students feeling of shame when he said that he is appalled by the shameful policy that stole Indigenous children from their communities. And Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller characterised it as shameful that Pope Francis has declined to apologise for the Catholic Churchs role in running the schools on Canadas behalf.

Scholars make a distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is the name for when I recognise that I have done something wrong. So, when Ive hurt someone, or broken a friends favourite mug because I was being careless, I might feel guilt. Shame, in contrast, is the name for a feeling of being wrong, or bad it is sticky, and it attaches to our sense of self rather than our actions. For the most part, shame is the kind of negative feeling about ourselves that we should reject, because it has been forced on us about things in which there is no inherent shame our bodies, our faith traditions, our sexuality, and so on. However, there is a place for naming the feeling of being implicated in collective wrongdoing as shame as long as we dont stop there.

I am a white settler immigrant; and like many non-Indigenous people in what is currently Canada, I am in an ongoing process of learning about Canadas genocidal practices. Gary Kinsman writes about the social organization of forgetting, through which ruling institutions attempt to make both oppression and the struggle against it un-remembered. But only non-Indigenous people are surprised to discover the realities of genocide; Indigenous people, such as my former student, have never forgotten being targeted for erasure. The Tkemlps te Secwpemc First Nation relatives of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where the first 215 bodies discovered this summer were found, always knew they were there and so did the people who ran that school, who buried them. So, what can an ordinary non-Indigenous person grappling with shame about colonialism do with these feelings?

The first thing is to recognise guilt and shame when they arise, rather than trying to deny them. My research has demonstrated that many white people started what became valuable contributions to collective anti-racist transformations when they felt shame about benefiting from racism or racist structures.

Shame is one feeling we white people might have when we look back at the past and recognise all the horror that has been done on behalf of whiteness and by white people to others. We didnt do those things ourselves, personally, so the feeling we have isnt really guilt. But we recognise that we inherit their legacy, that those things were done by our ancestors.

In the present, many white people see that white supremacists are organising and recruiting, and that they enact racism in our name, against our will. Many of us who want to refuse to benefit from structural and interpersonal racism may feel shame and anger about colonialism, police murdering racialised people, and more. This is a starting point for making a different future, changing what we inherit and what we benefit from into something else.

Shame is a common response to the feeling of being complicit in a situation we find ethically objectionable. Awareness of complicity can take the form of identifying the complexity and interrelatedness of our world, or of highlighting the inescapable embeddedness of our being in the world. This can freeze us. The vast and complex nature of the problems confronting moral agents today can make it seem that no one in particular is responsible for taking them on. Dispersed responsibility is one common response someone else will do it!

Alternatively, when there are actions we can take, for example, to oppose systemic racism, or to use less plastic, or to support libraries and education workers, or to reduce our carbon footprint, many of us succumb to a kind of moral fatigue there are so many things we know we would like to do or stop doing, so many ways we are connected to the suffering of the world, that we just get tired. Being overwhelmed can lead to a kind of counterphobic reaction to, for example, thinking about global warming, rising seas, climate catastrophe, and the extinctions of so many nonhuman beings: since I cannot solve all of these things, I may as well fly as much as I like, eat as many single-servings of high-fat yogurt as I want, and so on.

Conservatives and liberals alike particularly the subspecies whose primary political work is trolling people on the internet are fond of charging people with complicity. They cry hypocrite! at people who are now speaking out about something when they did not raise an objection in the past. They delight in pointing out inconsistencies, as when trolls tweeted at a friend that she could not both oppose human-fuelled global warming and drive her car. Or they say that if someone benefits from something, they cannot protest to it.

Each of these criticisms deploys what we can call purity politics: because the person expressing the desire for another world is complicit or compromised, they are supposed to give up. Conservatives and liberals alike use purity politics to try to close down critique and action.

Purity politics points to a problem with the way we normally think about complicity. Only an individual can aspire to be pure, to know everything that it might be important to know. Or perhaps it would be better to say: only the conceit of a delimited individual, sovereign in his skin, independent and unreliant on others, sufficiently potent to be able to make any needful changes in the world around him, capable of knowing in advance what the correct course of action might be and not deviating from it, capable of knowing everything relevant to any given situation, someone who does not make mistakes only such an individual would be invulnerable to charges of complicity.

No such individual exists. All of us are open to one another, offer one another the possibility of mutual regard and recognition, are interdependent and needy, relatively helpless to change things we care about, quite limited in our knowledge and understanding but educatable, changeable in light of new circumstances, and routinely err. Beyond that, of course, the scale and scope of problems we collectively face are laughably far beyond any individuals capacities to solve.

Not every horrible thing that happens in the world is a site of complicity. Perhaps we should be understood as complicit only in horrible things that could be prevented and to which we are in some way connected. When someone dies in a landslide or an avalanche, I may be sad for the people grieving their loss, but barring unusual responsibilities for avalanches I am likely not to be complicit. When a miner dies at work in a cave-in beneath my city which the mining company could have prevented with more investment in safety infrastructure, which they chose not to build because they calculated that the cost of life insurance for one miners death per year was cheaper than the infrastructure, and when my government provides that company with substantial tax-write-offs to keep them in the country, I likely am complicit in that death.

However, there are degrees of complicity and responsibility. I am less implicated than the person in the company who made the decision based on a profit-loss ledger that weighs peoples lives against insurance claims. Complicity is very much a matter of degree of connection, capacity to change the circumstances, and the distribution of power. Thus, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expresses shame, he has much more responsibility to address his complicity than an ordinary Canadian.

Recognising the shame-worthiness of complicity in genocide and racism can be an important starting place for non-Indigenous white people indeed, a much better approach than trying to claim innocence or non-involvement. And we can refuse to allow complicity to sap our will to change things. But what comes next?

Taking connection, complexity, and complicity as a starting point for action rather than a reason to give up opens possibilities for ethical decision-making. Complicity can produce solidarities oriented towards collective action. Although we may not be able individually to solve something, we may still be morally responsible to try solve it as best we can which, often, is going to mean making collective, social, or systemic change.

This kind of ethics is always political, in the sense that moral decisions in conditions of complicity depend on factors beyond the scope of the individual. Political decisions refer outside the individual to receive their weight. They do not depend on innocence for their decision-making. Rather, they depend on the understanding that we confront hard problems problems that always leave what Bernard Williams thought of as a moral remainder. Lisa Tessman characterises us as living a kind of moral trouble that comes from existing in a complicated world. Perhaps we can begin to truly confront moral trouble only once we give up on the idea of innocence and purity, only once we begin from complexity and complicity, only once we regard collective ethical decisions as inherently political.

In the case of addressing the Canadian states genocidal policies, many suggest that settlers educate themselves. They can read the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), follow investigative initiatives, watch films and read books from the viewpoint of survivors. Self-education includes understanding the lines of continuity between past harms and current practice we can see connections between stealing Indigenous children and imprisoning them in residential schools and the Trudeaus government decision to fight Indigenous kids in court today, between starvation policies of the past and undrinkable on-reserve water in the present. A next step would be to demand accountability from the Canadian government by writing to elected representatives and lobbying for legislative change. And non-Indigenous people can donate money to support survivors or for reparation work.

Self-education, donating money, and lobbying can all be parts of building a genuinely transformative approach. However, white settlers in particular may have a tendency to focus on ourselves when confronted with racism and colonialism our self-education, our political self-expression. Feeling complicit, or ashamed, tends to turn people inwards, and self-abnegation is not actually helpful to political change.

So, we can consider what have been historically effective roles for white people in the struggle against racism: participating in collective work against racism. Non-Indigenous people who arent white might also find some traction in these approaches, but because racialised people have been and are themselves targeted by both the Canadian state and white racists, their collective work will be different.

Quite often, instances of shame such as an implication in genocide are points of connection in our lives. They might show us things we are genuinely moved to work on. If someone is deeply committed to their church community, for example, and discovers that it was directly involved in residential schools, educating their congregation and initiating its responses to the TRC Calls to Action might be a natural next step.

A person who cares about the environment might turn towards supporting Indigenous land defenders in places they care about, both in Canada and abroad. Someone who cares about teaching and education can support school-centred actions.

Non-Indigenous people have been involved in solidarity work for many years in ways that might be instructive for responding to the legacies of Indian Residential Schools. In the 1990s, there were examples like Settlers in Solidarity with Indigenous Sovereignty, Anti-Racist Action members in Toronto who fought against white supremacist fishing and hunting groups and Raction SIDA members who supported the Kanienkehka people as they defended their land from development during the Oka Crisis at Kanehsat:ke.

Today, we see some settlers protesting alongside Wetsuweten, Secwepemc and Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations in their efforts to defend their land against logging, chemical spills from mining slag and the effects of petroleum pipelines. Showing solidarity and getting involved are connected to the work of actively responding to the TRC Calls to Action. We can be more effective working together than alone.

Many of us will never have been part of a collective response to something we have identified as requiring change. And since every aspect of settler Canadian life in some way connects to Canadas genocidal practices, we might feel not only ashamed but also overwhelmed. White people who have contributed to collective action against racism share some key practices that we can emulate.

The most effective non-Indigenous participants in antiracist work resist the impulse to act like individual heroes, martyrs or white saviours. They support and stand by Indigenous people instead of making it about themselves. For people getting involved in ongoing projects of which there are many key starting points include listening more than talking, not trying to introduce big new ideas, taking up the non-glamorous work, and not speaking for others.

People who dont burn out by trying to do everything, who are in it for the long haul, and who help build useful collective organisations those whom other people can count on for years of support and collaboration turn out to be the most effective contributors to social transformation at the scale needed for addressing Canadas treatment of Indigenous people.

I return to the work of social movement scholar Gary Kinsman, and his conception of a politics of responsibility which he defines this as involving those of us in oppressing positions recognizing our own implication within and responsibility to actively challenge relations of oppression. A politics of responsibility recognises our relative, shifting, and contingent position in social relations of harm and benefit; it enjoins us to look at how we are shaped by our place in history. We can take responsibility for creating futures that radically diverge from that history, seriously engaging that work based on where we are located, listening well to the people, beings, and ecosystems most vulnerable to devastation.

The question, then, is not: How can we be innocent of implication in complex and distributed harms? The question becomes: What forms of implication will we take up as points of connection for anchoring our activities? With whom will we become complicit? Whose side are we on?

Asking which side we are on raises the prospect of binary, purist thinking about politics, as though it was easy to delimit sides. If we take that approach, complicity would make it impossible for us to be on the side of justice. Its probably clear by now that I believe were complicit no matter what we do, that we cannot excuse ourselves from implication, that were always connected. It is precisely these political features of ethical decision making in complex and relational contexts that makes this ethically interesting terrain.

The good news when there are no easy answers is that we have the capacities to elaborate the stakes and reasons for our decisions; we have the capacities to make strategic decisions and to know when we are effectively fighting shameful situations.

Ive learned the most about how to approach this in training in activist strategy notably in the model of a spectrum of allies. Picture a rainbow, with yourself and the people with whom you thoroughly agree on one end; directly across from you, 180 degrees away, are the people with whom you disagree and who you oppose. Following the arc of the rainbow are people on a spectrum of agreement with you and your opponents. There is a tendency to think that we should direct our attention and work towards the people we most oppose, the people most directly responsible for the harm we have identified as the problem at hand. In the case of Canadas ongoing incursions into Indigenous land, I might address my moral and political work to the provincial government, the chief of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the Prime Minister of Canada. Or I could work on changing the heart and mind of the most racist fellow Canadians I can find (usually in the comments section of my national paper).

But the spectrum of allies approach is interested in what causes the people with decision-making power to make different decisions about the things in which we are mutually implicated. A key shift in the spectrum of allies is to stop addressing oneself to people who directly or ideologically oppose one, with the idea that they will reverse their position solely through moral suasion. Taking a spectrum approach, one aims to move people from where they are one or two positions over to move people who are passive allies to become active allies, or people who are passive opponents to be oblivious neutrals.

Crucially, the spectrum of allies approach assumes that we are all connected, that no one is essentially or fundamentally pure or evil, and that anyone can change their minds through changing their activities. Grounded in nonviolent communication, it also emphasises listening to others both those who are passive allies and those opposing us on an issue. Listening to people different than us, and especially listening to people we consider complicit in evil, is perhaps unpopular in our moment. But it is an ethically and politically interesting proposition. The kind of listening were interested in here remains political, however, in the sense that it is committed to certain worlds and not others.

Because we are complicit, we can act in solidarity and stand with some people and not others. As Katrina Shields puts it:

Although listening to the oppositions point of view is important it is equally important to put your position and be heard both by the opposition and by the public. This can be quite an anxiety-provoking experience when you are not used to doing it. Something I have found useful is imagining those I represent standing behind me whether they be environments, creatures, or humans, including those of the future. They require me not to betray them by giving up my power in these situations. This has been a source of strength enabling me to speak up and not compromise.

This approach is a kind of brave relation, building the capacity to stand in relation even to situations and evils with which we would like to cut off relation. We should cultivate such brave relations. Even when we are complicit or ashamed, and maybe because we are complicit and ashamed, we can still act to change things.

Alexis Shotwell is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, where she is cross-appointed with the Pauline Jewett Institute of Womens and Gender Studies and the Department of Philosophy. She is author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.

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After complicity and shame: Effective political action for non-Indigenous people - ABC News