Does Reconciliation and Racial Justice Necessitate a Struggle against White Supremacy?

Abstract

Several literatures including those focusing on settler colonialism, critical antiracism as well as ethnic studies and sociology more broadly often position racial injustice and genocide as a struggle against whiteness and white supremacy. Here I use my own positionality to illustrate what might be unseen in the current thinking about the meaning of what whiteness entails. Then I propose the preliminary workings of a nonbinary approach to thinking about racial justice and reconciliation that still centers the specific experiences of 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-Black racism, my hope is that the theoretical logic will also be of utility for thinking about moving forward on issues of racial justice and genocide in other contexts.