17 Jun Is whiteness the problem?
In response to Gus Reed’s droll dissection of management practices at the Waterfront Develop Corporation, an analysis that rested heavily on the WCL’s blue-blood sameness, Peter Kavanagh writes:
I loved the post and the strength of the critique, but I am confused about the whiteness claim. Without doubt, the corp is remarkably uniform, but it is the link between whiteness and ableism that escapes me.
Are you and Gus really trying to suggest that if they were less white this wouldn’t have happened? To me it is the lack of a disabled voice or perspective that is the key issue. Surely neither you nor Gus want to suggest that an indifference to disability is a white problem… or are you?
Contrarian riposte:
Great question. The problems with the WDCL are much, much broader than accessibility cluelessness. It has always been a law unto itself. In communications practice, it is aloof and unresponsive. In community engagement, it is developer friendly and citizen hostile. Its failure to include accessible washrooms required by the building code is simply one illustration of its refusal to abide by the building code in any way.
Turns out the municipality, as a lower order of government, cannot enforce its will on a provincial (or for that matter, federal) entity. But most provincial and federal organizations simply pretend it can. So the airport authority, for example, which operates on federal land, could exempt itself from the building code, but instead it chooses to enforce the code 100%. All its own construction activities, and all contractors, are required to apply for municipal building permits, submit to municipal inspections, and abide by municipal building inspector orders.
The WDCL (and the federal Ports Corp) simply thumb their nose at the municipality. We know this led to the lack of an accessible washroom. How do we know it did not lead to floor joists that are too small to support the required loads?
So, no, whiteness does not have a straight-line connection to inaccessibility. But pervasive whiteness reflects a throwback to the stodgy, aloof, British, arrogant, establishment Old Halifax. The kind that erects statues to genocidal military heroes and evicts black folks from urban renewal sites in the backs of garbage trucks. As [name of wretched flak redacted] wrote me in response to the same post, it “says everything anyone needs to know about Halifax.”
Peter again:
All fair comments. I will simply note that Britain had no monopoly on being stodgy, aloof, or a law unto itself. The same might be said about the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Mongols, and a host of other peoples.
I think it is too easy to slap the label of whiteness as some defining characteristic of evil or wrong thinking. It is lazy, if you will, and tends to create the impression that whiteness is responsible for all evil in the world.
Final word to the man who owns this printing press:
Oh I completely agree. I hope I will have something to say when an important provincial Crown corporation is discovered to have a board of directors, management, and staff composed entirely of Mi’kmaq. It’s not the whiteness. It’s the sameness, in this case, a sameness that perfectly corresponds to the crowd that has always run the place.
[Peter Kavanagh is a retired CBC journalist and — what’s that phrase everyone’s using these days? — public intellectual. He spent much of his career in Nova Scotia, exposing the sins of stodgy, aloof, British, arrogant, Old Halifax establishment.]