Anti-White Privilege: The Case of Aeman Ansari
Huffington Post recently posted an article titled “Ethnic Minorities Deserve Safe Spaces Without White People” by Aeman Ansari. The article is in response to two first-year journalism students being turned away from an event organized by Racialised Students’ Collective because they were White. A quick Google search turned up RSC’s website with the following info:
“Racialised Students’ Collective opposes all forms of racism and work towards community wellness for students. Through education, campus and community organizing, and our commitment to struggle across differences, we seek to responsible [sic] reflect, represent and serve racialized students,” with their mission statement being, “To create and [sic] anti-racist climate on campus that will foster a healthy and rich working and learning environment for all.”
The RSC is a part of the Student Union at Toronto’s Ryerson University. When RSU coordinator Vajdaan Tanveer was contacted via phone about the incident, he responded by saying, “We don’t want (racialized) students to feel intimidated, that they can’t speak their mind because they are afraid of being judged or something they say might be used against them.”
A couple quick thoughts come to mind: 1) it’s another example validating the meme, “Anti-Racist is just a code word for Anti-White”; 2) White students are expelled from school and make National headlines for chanting a racially insensitive song while Student Union groups can openly discriminate against White students without consequence (beyond getting an ambitious student journalist’s op-ed published on a major internet site) and with limited publicity; 3) hypocrisy always has an agenda (usually hatred and/or ignorance).
Being a “person of colour” is central to Ansari’s world view:
Marginalized groups have a right to claim spaces in the public realm where they can share stories about the discrimination they have faced without judgment and intrusion from anyone else.
I am a person of colour and a journalist and so there are two conflicting voices inside my head. But in this case one voice, that of a person of colour, is louder and my conscience does not allow me to be impartial. I have to take a side.
Ansari’s choice between speaking on behalf of the best interest of her “colour” (whatever that is; see photos below) or standing up for normal professional standards is definitely a privilege unavailable to Whites of any occupation. Speaking with a White voice in pretty much any occupation has an entirely predictable result: unemployment.
But just what colour is Ms. Ansari? The two photos accompanying the article are very different in terms of skin color and perhaps nose shape.
Unless the darker woman is intended to be a generic “woman of colour” and not the author (which seems odd on the face of it), we seem to have a situation where someone of South Asian descent wants to appear as dark as possible in order to increase her claim to victimhood. After all, South Asians have unfashionably light skin tones which must be downplayed in order to advance one’s career as a professional victim.