Category: History

Open thread: Michael Marrus and Massey College

For at least a year now people have been quite appropriately doing important work in questioning legacies of racism and institutionalized forms of racism at Massey College, including in the traditional use of the title “Master” to refer to the head of the College.

A hurtful, callous, and offensive remark made in the dining hall has added urgency to the discussion. It was described in the resignation letter of the scholar who made it as “a poor effort at jocular humour” and a “bad joke”. In part, Dr. Michael Marrus’ letter from 1 October 2017 says:

First, I am so sorry for what I said, in a poor effort at jocular humour at lunch last Tuesday. What I said was both foolish and, I understood immediately, hurtful, and I want, first and foremost, to convey my deepest regrets all whom I may have harmed. What I said was a bad joke in reference to your title of “Master,” at the time. I should never have made such a remark, and I want to assure those who heard me, and those who have learned about it, that while I had no ill- intent whatsoever I can appreciate how those at the table and those who have learned about it could take offense at what I said.

I’m not going to link the rather foolish editorials published by The Globe & Mail and the National Post (two papers that seem to share lazy assumptions and ineptitude much like Canada’s Liberal and Conservative parties). Some more meaningful commentary has already been in the public press:

Op-ed: Reconciliation at Massey College
An Indigenous Junior Fellow shares her story
By Audrey Rochette

Op-ed: The importance of forgiveness
A former Don of Hall reflects on moving forward from conflict at Massey College
By Juliet Guichon

Black faculty members pen letter condemning Marrus, coverage of incident
Open letter criticizes media outlets for framing incident as “political correctness run amok”
By Aidan Currie

In my six years at Massey College, I have had regular routine and polite interactions with Dr. Marrus. My only exposure to his academic work has been two lectures he gave on the theatrical quality of trials.

History’s unpredictable paths

Columbus could not have foreseen the results of his search for piperine, Magellan was unaware of the long-term effects of his quest for isoeugenol, and Schönbein would surely have been astonished that the nitrocellulose he made from his wife’s apron was the start of great industries as diverse as explosives and textiles. Perkin could not have anticipated that his small experiment would eventually lead not only to a huge synthetic dye trade but also to the development of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals. Marker, Nobel, Chardonnet, Carothers, Lister, Baekeland, Goodyear, Hofmann, Leblanc, the Solvay brothers, Harrison, Midgley, and all the others whose stories we have told had little idea of the historical importance of their discoveries. So we are perhaps in good company if we hesitate to try to predict whether today there already exists an unsuspected molecule that will eventually have such a profound and unanticipated effect on life as we know it that our descendants will say, “This changed the world.”

Le Couteur, Penny and Jay Burreson. Napoleon’s Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History. Penguin, 2004.

Related: Learning and teaching

Canada’s courts and Indigenous rights

One privilege during my time at U of T was to take Peter Russell’s class on Canada’s history as a series of incomplete conquests in 2013.

He taught the class for several years running to a mixed group of undergrads and grad students, using it partly to help him refine the new history of Canada he was writing.

That book has now been released: Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests.

The paper I wrote for the class was called “The judiciary in the lead: Aboriginal politics in Canada’s post-Charter era“. Russell addresses the subject in the finished book:

The Supreme Court of Canada, as the Powley case demonstrates, continues to be a major player in the resurgence of aboriginal peoples. This is true in other common law countries with colonized native peoples within. The high courts of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are now playing an important role in shaping the rights of Indigenous peoples in their countries. Indeed the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Calder, which was instrumental in changing Canada’s Aboriginal policy in the 1970s, was the crucial precedent in the Australian High Court’s Mabo decision, which changed Australian policy in the 1990s. For Indigenous peoples, as small minorities within democratic countries, resorting to the courts to vindicate rights and defend interests makes good sense, especially when the courts are rooted in the common law tradition of judicial independence and law development, and their judges are no longer soaked in the racism of earlier settler generations. The courts in all four common law countries, in varying degrees, have been relatively liberal in responding to the legal claims of Aboriginal peoples. Their decisions have often been out front of elected politicians, forcing changes in the policies of their governments. But their agency as instruments of full decolonization is limited. They are still the “white man’s courts,” not only in their composition, but also in the justices’ belief that Indigenous peoples are subject to the overriding sovereignty of the settler state.

The Supreme Court of Canada has made its most important contributions to advancing Aboriginal rights in decisions relating to native title. The Court’s 1997 decision in Delgamuukw confirmed that native title was one of the existing Aboriginal rights recognized in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and spelled out some of its features. Native title is communal, rather than individual. It confers on the society that it has full ownership of the land and its resources, including subsurface minerals. That was the good news. But much of the Court’s treatment of native or Aboriginal title has dealt with its limitations. First, Aboriginal people cannot sell any part of their lands on the private market; native title land can only be sold to the Crown — that is, the Government of Canada. A second limitation smacks of paternalism: the Aboriginal people that hold native title can develop the land in non-traditional ways, providing a development does not undermine their historical attachment to the land. The Supreme Court gave two examples of what it would not allow a native community to do to its own lands: strip-mine a hunting ground or pave over a burial ground for a parking lot. A third limitation underlines the continuing colonialism in the Court’s thinking. In common law, native title is understood as a “burden” on the Crown’s sovereignty, and in discharging the Crown’s — that is, the federal or provincial government’s — responsibilities to the larger community, there might be compelling and substantial circumstances that could make an infringement of native title justifiable. Chief Justice Lamer, who wrote the principal majority opinion, asserted somewhat casually that “the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, hydroelectric power, and general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations” — any of these — “can justify the infringement of aboriginal title.” The Court’s purpose in fashioning this new law, the chief justice explained, was “to reconcile the pre-existence of aboriginal society with the sovereignty of the Crown.”

…

A duty to consult native owners and try to accomodate their interests before pushing through projects on their lands might be better than nothing, but it is still a far cry from affirming Aboriginal peoples’ constitutional right to protect and develop their lands and resources.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 434–6

Dunkirk

I saw the 70mm film version of “Dunkirk” last night and found much to appreciate about it. The production values are excellent, and it generally seems an unusually realistic depiction of history and combat, with less of the spectacle and fewer of the implausible dramatic storylines that often dominate the genre. The non-linear storytelling adds to the sense of chaos, and perhaps adds a bit more dramatic tension to a story where — for anyone who has taken high school history — the broad outlines of the ending are known in advance.

The film is unusual in part because almost no characters have names which are mentioned or emphasized. Rather, most of the storytelling is visual and told in overlapping vignettes: sinking ships and air combat, and repeated portrayals of the men of the British Expeditionary Force waiting on the beach for its evacuation.

In some ways, I felt the film consciously subverted some of the tropes of spectacular high budget war films like the notorious “Pearl Harbor“, and even the more unified and neatly structured storytelling of classics like “Saving Private Ryan“. For instance, a successfully tense scene centres around whether an oil slick from a sinking ship would catch fire; in a “Pearl Harbor” type film, the leaking ship probably would have exploded in the shot when it was first shown. Only two moments struck me as transparently unrealistic: when the senior officer on the beach somehow knew exactly how many people had been rescued just as the last boats were leaving, and an odd scene in which men trapped in a sinking ship somehow believe that throwing a man or two overboard will address the problem of bullet holes below the waterline in the hull.

All told, the film was evocative and memorable, as well as generally non-moralizing (though the heroic Winston Churchill quotation in the closing minutes might have been usefully tempered with some reference to his disastrous involvement in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16). The absence of well-known actors (though I certainly recognized Mark Rylance from the excellent “Bridge of Spies“) added to the sense of watching a plausible historical reenactment more than a standard Hollywood drama.

Recommended for those with an interest in history, real-world sets in place of heavy CGI, and perhaps seeing very expensive ship sets being rotated and submerged. I’m curious about whether some genuine WWII aircraft were used in the air combat scenes that linked together the disparate bits of the plot.

Activism and social linkages

Activism depends on more than just idealism. It is not enough that people be attitudinally inclined toward activism. There must also exist formal organizations or informal social networks that structure and sustain collective action. The volunteers were not appreciably more committed to Freedom Summer than the no-shows. Their close ties to the project, however, left them in a better position to act on their commitment. Those volunteers who remain active today are distinguished from those who are not by virtue of their stronger organizational affiliations and continued ties to other activists. Attitudes dispose people to action; social structures enable them to act on these dispositions. Thus by sustaining political organizations and maintaining links to others, the volunteers are preserving the social contexts out of which movements have typically emerged.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press; Oxford. 1988. p. 237

Personal costs of activism

First, to a remarkable extent, they have remained faithful to the political vision that drew them to Mississippi nearly a quarter century ago. Second, they have paid for this lifetime commitment with a degree of alienation and social isolation that has only increased with time. The political and cultural wave that once carried them forward so prominently continues to recede, putting more and more distance between them and mainstream society with each passing day. In a sense, the volunteers are anachronisms. They have remained idealists in a cynical age. They continue to tout community in a society seemingly antagonistic to the idea. They are, for the most part, unrepentant leftists in an era dominated by the right. If, however, these qualities make the volunteers anachronistic, it is more a comment on contemporary America than on the volunteers themselves. In their view, it is they who have kept the faith while America has lost it.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press; Oxford. 1988. p. 232