How might the Commission’s procedure have normalised a hierarchy between racialised people and white Franco-Québécois?
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The Bouchard-Taylor Commission was a study held in Québec to examine national identity, secularism and interculturalism in the midst of reasonable accommodation debates. Although the Commission was praised by many non-white community leaders for being a strong first step towards mutual understanding, “the Commission ended up reinforcing the racialized hierarchies and exclusions that it wanted to redress.” (Mahrouse, 85) It did so through the definition of racism it employed as well as the dynamics of the dialogue at work.
Firstly, new forms of racism involve the “assumption of cultural or acquired inferiority” (Thobani, 159) as a result of one’s membership to a ‘backwards’ culture, thus positioning the majority-white members of society in opposition to migrants as progressive, modern and tolerant. Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor made the lazy mistake of applying the idea of racism as a violation of one’s rights “based on physical traits, typified by the the notion of race” (Mahrouse, 94) because they believed the concept of neo-racism would be confusing to their white audience. By doing so, they failed to address the inherent positioning of the majority as superior and instead perpetuated the arguments that implicit societal hierarchies are based on: “the incompatibility of world views [and] the inability of certain immigrants to adopt the liberal society’s core values.” (94)
Following, the citizen participation forums that were established to hear voices from both sides of the aisle revealed the French-Canadian nostalgia for la belle époque when their lives remained untainted by ‘cultural differences.’ Faced with this, “minority groups were being called upon to ‘defuse the angst’ of the majority.” (89) The Bouchard-Taylor Commission reproduced existing subjectivities by reinforcing the station of the Québécois(e) as innately belonging and placing the burden of labor on the marginalized migrant who must justify their presence and reaffirm their loyalty to the hegemony’s values. Indeed, the Commission made no effort to upend the hierarchical binaries that forge the assumptions that manifest and promote neo-racism.
The binaries associated with the Québécois national and the migrant, in particular, the Muslim, include modernity v. tradition, secularism v. religion, sexual liberation v. sexual oppression, gender equality v. patriarchy and West v. East (Bilge, 307). Gender-and-sexual politics and politics of belonging coupled with the mythical “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West have deemed Muslims as “inassimilable and dangerous to the nation” (304). In a world where feminism and queer rights are considered core Western values, the Muslim is viewed as a personified threat to ‘freedom.’ Be that as it may, the shift from classical Orientalism which “depicted the Muslim world/body as the site of sexual depravity” (307) to associating “the West with sexual freedom [and] the Muslim world with that which threatens this freedom” (307) is the perfect illustration of how the West leverages malleable constructs of identity to cater to the rhetoric it wishes to disseminate.
Fascinated with ‘other’ people and eager to collect curiosities, Victorian Era Orientalists visited Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and other Muslim-ruled lands to indulge in a foreign culture. Much to their surprise, married men took on lovers, women had female lovers and ‘sexual deviance’ was rampant in these societies. Interpretations of sexuality in Christianity emphasize the honor in chastity as Jesus was chaste, and only encouraged intercourse for the purpose of reproduction. Thus, European orientalists considered themselves superior to their hosts, Muslims were established as ‘backwards,’ and European polemical attacks on same-sex relationships were witnessed in Muslim lands. As some Muslims felt the need to prove that they were just as ‘pure’ as their colonizers, queerness started to be excluded from society. Yet, here we are today, as the West has decided to change its polemic again.
In a word, not only did the Commission fail to challenge the intrinsic power dynamics between racialized groups and the French-Québécois, but also perpetuated and normalized the existing hierarchies. This failed attempt to ‘accommodate’ the minority showcased how the colonial legacy and evolving cultural constructs continue to portray marginalized people, Muslims in particular, as incompatible with the dominant culture of so-called modernity.