[****]On June 29, 2022, the CRTC issued its decision on the complaint filed against a column by Simon Jodoin dated August 17, 2020. In less than a week, a sea of articles, columns and a petition followed one another to converge on the idea that there would be nothing wrong with the chronicle and that the CRTC should have closed the complaint without any further action.
[****]If it is very healthy to debate this decision, several logics at work in what is said and published are more than embarrassing. The complaint and the decision are often reported in a simplistic, even caricatural way. The quasi-symbolic nature of the sanction is never underlined, which prevents any rational discussion of its real consequences for journalistic freedom in the country.
[****]Let’s remember to begin with that no one was specifically blamed by the CRTC. No sanction of prohibition of antenna or financial nature was retained. The CRTC asks the SRC to apologize to the complainant because the public broadcaster should be able to do better to meet the demand for high quality of its services and especially with regard to subjects which involve it in a multicultural and multiracial society. This requirement is also enshrined in the Broadcasting Act, as the CRTC points out.
[****]The entirety of the CRTC’s decision is however crystal clear. There is no question of banning the word, nor of blacklisting Pierre Vallières’ book, even less of censoring any discussion of this crucial work for the Quebec collective unconscious. In its conclusion, the CRTC mentions the need to take measures to mitigate the impact of the n-word on a certain part of the audience in order to take into account the multicultural and multiracial nature of society. If some suggestions appear, it is up to the SRC to define the strategies and ways it intends to deploy to achieve this objective.
[****]Many comments in fact rush into a breach opened by the dissenting minority opinion of CRTC Vice-President, Broadcasting, Caroline J. Simard: the charter and the applicable broadcasting provisions do not protect the right to don’t be offended. The spirit reconnects with the media frenzy that followed the affair of the n-word at Concordia University and in which the incriminated chronicle took place: it is suggested that complaining about a non-prudent use of the n-word amounts to demanding an absolute right not to be offended.
[****]Those who complain are assimilated to fragile, even brainless beings, whose sensitivity is incompatible with life in a democracy. They are denied a political conscience, they are accused of ignoring the history of Quebec and its linguistic struggles. This denial is generally accompanied by the accusation of aping movements from the United States or from multicultural English Canada, a thousand leagues from Quebec society.
[****]We like to point out that the n-word does not have the same charge in French and in English. We forget that on page 34 of his book, Vallières explains: “It is by wanting to break through [un certain] wall of silence and contempt that I invented, to designate Quebecers, the concept of ne[***]s whites of America. It is in English that this concept spontaneously formed in my head. White N[****]rs of America. The decision has the merit of specifying that one cannot constantly use all these excuses to do nothing.
[****]Ricardo Lamour, the plaintiff, says in a crucial passage of his complaint that “this term requires, at least, that the people historically targeted by the implacability of the use of this term can have a place of choice in a discussion taking place in a context that calls for anti-racism and not for the flattening of struggles in a decentered aim of those whom Fanon called the wretched of the Earth”.
[****]The insistence on the collapse of journalistic freedom unless one can pronounce the n-word, or even repeat it at will, is a media ritual that builds a veritable taboo. The logics of Vallières’ work are still at work in the Quebec of 2022: it is in the name of the flattening of struggles with a decentered aim that the highest peak of the state is denied the existence of systemic racism in Quebec. One cannot be a racist or a colonizer if one is oppressed “like the others”.
[****]This same logic leads us to believe that the best we can do to talk about the work of Vallières is to repeat the title ad nauseam in a patent between-itself, forgetting that the history of Quebec is lived and thought by the majority as by the minorities.
[****]Will we end up understanding that, faced with the issues raised by the CRTC and a political context hostile to minorities in Quebec, the uses and repetitions of the n-word are simply outrageous? To say that nothing happened in the chronicle in question, to require the CRTC and the SRC to close this file without further action, is to miss yet another opportunity to look at these subjects head on. It is also, in the case of the use of this word in the title of Vallières, refusing to move forward on the right foot by looking at the history of Quebec, together.
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