How the Woke Woke Racism

Treating looking forward as backward is no way to build a shared future

I grew up in a Toronto suburb where my friends were from everywhere - different colours, different cultures, different family histories - but we all lived broadly the same kind of life. Comfortable, middle class, and very much the suburban stereotype of the age.

Most of our households had a dad who worked full time, and a mom who worked part time - or at least seemed to be around more, so I assumed she must have worked less (which I realize now may not always have been true). I’m not holding that arrangement up as some ideal (I have no kids and would not want that life), but it speaks to what the economy allowed back then. And I think that economic baseline is a huge part of why something I am holding up as an ideal - our sameness amidst difference - was able to exist at all. People from all over the world could arrive here and have a genuine chance at a stable, secure, settled existence.

As kids within that context, we’d drift between each other’s houses after school or for lunch, depending on whose mom was home that day. I ate homemade food from all over the world long before I ever thought of it as anything remarkable. I heard stories shaped by lives very different from my own - including one parent’s stories about Lebanon that somehow made me both deeply want to visit and absolutely never want to go at the same time.

Despite any differences, we were united in a way that now feels almost impossible to recreate. We weren’t defined by where our parents came from (or at least, not primarily). We got to be our little group of kids first - not a set of demographics - growing up in the same place, participating in the same society, moving through life roughly in the same direction.

The best way I can describe it is that where everyone “came from” sat mostly in the rear view. What mattered far more was where we were, and where we could go from there.

Because of that, the way Canadian immigration worked - and, just as importantly, the way it was understood back then - really did feel genuinely ideal to me. It’s hard to explain, and probably hard to grasp if you didn’t experience it firsthand. I’m only recently realizing just how globally unique that moment really was. It didn’t pretend culture didn’t matter, but it also didn’t treat culture as fixed or separate. Part of this was because the system selected for people who wanted to build a life here, specifically. Being here was their chance, and so whatever they’d left behind mattered a little less.

Somewhere along the way, that forward-looking confidence came to be seen as backward.

In some weird confluence of the apex of capitalism (meaning enough of us were high enough on the hierarchy of needs to worry about higher-order concerns) and its erosion (meaning we were starting to feel the first cracks in that security) - some people got the bright idea that we should re-emphasize all the ways we are different.

In some cases, it was one-upmanship dressed up as sophistication - the belief that “good enough” is morally suspicious, so progress only counts if it keeps moving, even when no one stops to ask where it’s headed. For others, it was status strategy - a way to set themselves apart in an increasingly competitive environment and “make it”.

Instead of celebrating a shared culture of sharing culture, we were pushed toward locating people in an ever-expanding hierarchy of identity. Instead of saying, “You’re here now, and you’re one of us”, we were encouraged to say, “You’re here, but your primary relationship is to what makes you different”.

This was sold as progress. As moral sophistication. As anti-racism.

What it actually did, though, was re-racialize everything.

Race stopped being a background fact of our diversity and became the primary lens through which we were encouraged to interpret one another. Culture stopped being something to share, enjoy, and comment on, and became something fenced off - something you could mishandle, appropriate, or transgress simply by having an opinion about it.

Hand-in-hand with that came the idea that unless you’ve personally lived through something, or at least come from a “people” who has, you’re not allowed to form a judgment about it. I don’t buy that. Learning from other people’s lived experience is how we avoid repeating the worst of it, not how we stay ignorant.

I don’t need to personally live under rules where women are expected to dress a certain way, defer to certain men, limit their movement, or shrink their ambition to know it’s bad - or to know I don’t want that shaping our norms here.

And I’m also well within my lane to call shenanigans on the idea that we shouldn’t comment on - or intervene in - something like China exerting control over its diaspora through intimidation and alleged “police stations” abroad. Pretending the tolerant move is to let some people have fewer rights or less protection because that repression is dressed up as “culture” isn’t respect. It’s giving those citizens less than they deserve - which is the same protection every one of us deserves.

I’m grateful for what I learned about Lebanon from my friend’s mother. The same goes for what I understand about Eastern Europe, shaped both by some of my own family roots and by my partner, who was born in Belarus. That kind of shared knowledge matters. It keeps me from falling for conquest dressed up as kinship - the “they’re basically family” framing that’s meant to make invasion sound like a domestic dispute - and it makes it easier to recognize patterns, including in how Ukraine was treated and how the US is increasingly starting to approach Canada.

Being able to connect dots across different lived experiences is one of the best benefits of living in a genuinely diverse society. Telling people they’re not allowed to learn from one another is a corrosive message, no matter how carefully it’s dressed up.

The word woke is badly degraded at this point, but it still gestures at something real I’m pushing back against. A systemic ideology that replaced multicultural optimism with racial fatalism.

What once felt like a very comfortable, robust multicultural society - people sharing space, norms, expectations, and opportunity - was replaced with something far more brittle. A society hyper-aware of difference, and increasingly unsure what it’s allowed to share.

I also think it’s worth talking about what happens when tolerance starts to feel one-directional.

Something I’ve noticed personally, out in the wild, over the last few years, is that more people seem oddly insistent on saying Merry Christmas. I’ve always said Happy Holidays - not as a statement, just as the neutral, friendly default I grew up with. And more often than I’d expect, people will look right at me and say Merry Christmas back, rather pointedly.

I usually just say Merry Christmas, in response. I don’t mind the phrase itself. What I find concerning is that what used to be a fringe obsession about a “war on Christmas” seems to have broken containment.

And it turns out I’m not imagining it. There’s now data to support my anecdata. More Canadians prefer what used to be widely considered the “less tolerant” option - they’d rather say Merry Christmas than Happy Holidays.

To be clear, I could not be further from a keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas kind of girl. I’m not religious. What I personally celebrate is probably closer to pagan Yule - which Christianity famously co-opted. Lights, food, cozy rituals, darkness giving way to light? I’m in. Theology and traditionalism as a loyalty test? Not for me.

But whether I agree with it or not, this shift is predictable.

If you spend years telling people that culture is supposed to stay separate, that some cultures are shareable and others belong behind glass, and that inclusion mostly runs one way, it’s naive to think the majority culture won’t reassert itself too. If the message is “your culture can’t include mine”, people eventually think, “fine - then mine won’t include you either”.

Not because that’s right. Not because it’s good. But because it’s the most likely conclusion of that kind of thinking.

You don’t build social cohesion by treating shared space like a minefield. You build it with norms sturdy enough to include everyone, without the constant implication that stepping outside your bubble is an explosive faux pas.

When “we’re all in this together” is framed as outdated or suspect, people go looking for a new “we” they can belong to.

I don’t think a confident multicultural country requires its majority culture to apologize for existing. It requires that culture to be open, generous, and secure enough to make room for others.

I don’t want to go back to some imagined golden age. But I do think we should be honest about what we lost - and why. A colourblind society wasn’t perfect, but it was aspirational. It said - this is what we’re trying to build. It invited everyone into a shared future.

What replaced it offers no such invitation - only endless categorization, endless suspicion, and very little sense of shared purpose.

I don’t think that version of Canada is gone forever.

We can choose to build a country again where people are judged by what they do, not how they’re sorted before they even start. Where culture is something to share, not handle like a hazardous material. Where the baseline is solid enough that people from anywhere can once again expect to come here and end up on the same streets, in the same schools, living a wonderfully boring, normal life together.

To call back to another product of the apex of capitalism - I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, as long as you love “us”.

I think we should say it all. Say “Happy Holidays”. Say “Merry Christmas”. Say “Happy Hanukkah” (especially now).

And mean it.

I want all the holidays. Diwali sounds great. I love lights, all year. I will take everything great from everywhere, and you will never convince me that isn’t progress.

Moving forward with the best of all of us - having seen the worst and left it behind - is the only way we actually move forward.