I was very surprised to see the letter signed by the headliners of Radio-Canada in reaction to the CRTC’s decision on the use of the n-word. The letter is short, direct and of a beautiful sobriety, it should be underlined, but at the end of my reading, the questions jostled in my head. If I were still a journalist in the Radio-Can newsroom, would I have had the right to contravene the principle of impartiality contained in the Journalistic Standards and Practices to put my signature at the end of an open letter denouncing the use of the n-word by my colleagues, in the name of the integrity of the black community? Would I have had the right to invoke freedom of expression to justify my position in a major daily?
At this time, what internal or external forum do Afro-descendant employees of Radio-Canada and their allies have to make divergent points of view heard without fear of reprisals or repercussions on their professional trajectory? You can ridicule the concept of safe space, the fact remains that the need to create secure spaces for discussion arises when managers and/or people who have both hands in the editorial create, perhaps without even noticing it — privilege obliges — an unhealthy climate of the “with us or against us” type. Anyone with a background in industrial relations could confirm this; it has nothing to do with the big bad “wokism”.
This exit of the current headliners, combined with that of the former ombudsmen and directors of information as well as that of the “heavyweights of the media environment”, leads me to wonder who, in Quebec, assumes the right to indignation to the point of having a monopoly on it.
The duty of [p]Reserve[r]
The signatories of the three letters, who are mostly white, evoke (explicitly or implicitly) the risks of censorship and self-censorship. But censorship and self-censorship are already practiced at Radio-Canada and in other instances of political, economic and cultural power, where minorities, regardless of the group to which they belong, often have the reflex to keep quiet, for fear of being stigmatized, ostracized and penalized for having reservations about the dominant thought.
And in an environment where one can be quickly “barred” or “tabled” for a simple conflict of personalities, it is living dangerously to share points of view, reflections or experiences which diverge from those of the majority group and which most often remain in the latter’s blind spot. Myself, as a privileged freelance columnist who browses from one broadcaster to another and from one medium to another, I often worry about the scope of my words, which always have the potential to make me pass from flavor of the month to a simple pain in the ass that talks too much.
However, I continue to speak because there are very few black or racialized columnists who are involved in public affairs and who have access to forums mainstream to share their views on society. Despite the prevailing discourse that evokes the tyranny of minorities everywhere in the West, we still regularly, at prime time on different networks, in the United States as in France or Quebec, panels of four able-bodied heterosexual cisgender white men who discuss the merits of positive discrimination measures, to take a recent local (and absurd) example.
To come back to the specific case of Radio-Canada, I find that there is something troubling in the fact of seeing a handful of hand-picked personalities (because no, these are not all the headliners from coast to coast of the box that have been consulted) use the full force of their star power of “people in front of the camera” to give the impression of consensus, even of unanimity, to pose as the supreme authority in a polarizing file and at the same time to make invisible the points of view of their less known colleagues or those of the workers of the shadow, from the journalist-editor to the intern researcher, passing through the IT people or even the security guards at the entrance to the house of Radio-Canada (strangely a department where there is always a beautiful reflection of Canadian diversity , to use the accepted expression). Because frankly, who in the business would risk standing up to these tenors?
Warning is not muzzling
Much has been said about the CRTC’s decision regarding the use of the n-word. Have you walked through it? I invite you to do so, with particular attention to articles 12 to 24. Personally, I have read and reread it and I do not understand the moral panic it generates. There’s the explosive issue of apologies, okay. Know that, personally, I don’t see the point of summoning the public broadcaster to apologize to an individual following Simon Jodoin’s column on Pierre Vallières’ most famous essay, on the airwaves of 15-18in August 2020. I too reject the idea of an apology, mainly because it doesn’t solve anything and because it’s unlikely to be sincere anyway.
But the CRTC’s recommendations, beyond the controversial issue of an apology, are not particularly outrageous. The organization does not even ask Radio-Canada to stop using the n-word. She urges him to find ways to lessen the impact of the term on the audience.
How does asking for warnings before talking about a sensitive subject amount to muzzling the public broadcaster and/or jeopardizing journalistic integrity?
We are talking about a company that already offers continuous training to its employees, training that aims to update knowledge on trade practices, on new technological tools, on how to write a good title, choose a good photo, write a good precedes. We are talking about a box that has internal resources to standardize things as heterogeneous as language, management of Amber alerts and reports containing information that is no longer up to date in the age of misinformation.
What is heretical in the fact of adding oral or written warnings (in the form of boxes) to preserve the dignity of a community badly abused over centuries and reduced to a word aimed at insult her and dehumanize her? If even a giant like Disney is able to do it for its old sexist, racist and anti-Semitic cartoons, what is the blockage for Radio-Canada? We are already careful not to swear too much on the air, not to talk about “seed” or “noune” at 8 a.m., we avoid reporting the most graphic details of a murder or a rape, all this in particular to preserve the sensitivities of a younger or older audience, but we are not able to make an effort to preserve the sensitivities of the black community?
The scope of a word
English speakers use the expression ” n-word for decades and, according to the latest news, the Anglo-Saxon fourth estate has been able to continue its long tradition of quality journalism, from the pages of the washington post to those of Guardian.
In closing, I would like us to agree once and for all on the scope of the n-word. I’m tired of talking about it, but like many black people here, I was devastated by the murderous attack by a white supremacist on the African American community in Buffalo, USA last May. . Why am I telling you about this? Because the shooter, follower of the far-fetched theory of the Great replacement, would have written the word in hatred with the marker on the tip of his weapon.
There is a tenacious myth in the Francophonie that the word hate is not as violent in French as in English. Where does this impression come from? I ask you seriously the question: what is the difference between the cotton field in the United States and the sugar cane plantation in Santo Domingo (former name of Haiti)? In Quebec, we learned so much to distrust the British crown that we ended up forgetting the cruelty of the French crown, which committed the worst abuses in its black colonies where the word hate resounded as brutally as the cracking of whips.