Reflections on 4 AM with four "radical" white men and a bottle of tequila.

Flowing in lightly on the white winds, whispers of privilege elicit hot responses shot from the hipsters, blowing hard out of XY windbags. In our heady defense of our own efforts to "modulate the dominant academic discourse," we throw around big words and fill rooms with the loud sound of our white-male apologeticism. In that quintessentially Canadian manner, sorry is a word often invoked; yet the other words on either side indicate, with complex subtlety, that we are sorry not for being domineering but for the fact that no one understands that we understand that we have something to apologise for.

We formulate apologies of hierarchy and try to talk over each other the whole time. We apologise with such dominance and verbosity as to preclude even the acceptance of our apology; no one else can get a word in edgewise. Thus, our educated, white males' polemical monologue on injustice blows on, ruffling feathers, rattling the drums of privileged resistance, and never permitting the other's existence or experience to enter the equation.


We dominate all that we touch. How do we cease when it seems we cannot stop dominating even our friends and our families? Nous--les hommes blancs--who seek education so that we might better the world, how can we apply what we learn? How do we fight domination without dominating? How do we proliferate a worldview that values all people without establishing hierarchies not just of quantity of knowledge, but also of kind. To assert a radical, white, straight, educated, colonial male analysis and to project the resulting worldview onto all issues is to appropriate and colonise the discourse of resistance. So if we are truly committed to change, what are we learning for?