Commentary on racism in occupational science

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational science
• Racism
• White privilege

I write today from Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq where my university is located. Everyone in this place is bound by Treaties of Peace and Friendship signed in the mid 1700s. It is interesting to read this paper, almost 10 years later, and see how racism is an almost-unstated backdrop to its focus on spirituality. Josephine and I were very much focusing on racism in this study, and elsewhere published more explicitly how racism shaped everyday occupations (Beagan & Etowa, 2009), but here—in occupational science—we backgrounded experiences of racism. Interesting.

A note on terms: ‘Race’ is not a biological reality; there are more genetic differences within ‘races’ than between them. Yet racism, a social construct, is very real. It is based on notions of inferiority and superiority attached to social groups marked by physical attributes. (It often gets extended to incorporate cultural differences, which is ethnocentrism.) Which groups get socially constructed as racialized is social, political, and economic. Racism is oppression, a system of social power relations rooted in history. It is systemic, meaning it operates at the macro level (built into laws, policies, institutions, ideologies) and at the micro level (individual interactions that carry the weight of those wider social inequities), and at all levels in between. Systemic means power inequities based on ‘race’ are not just built into institutions, but those inequities co-exist in complex patterns across all the institutions in a social structure.

When I entered the world of occupational science and occupational therapy in 2000, I had been thinking, speaking, and writing about oppression and privilege for about 15 years in the world of sociology. The study of social inequities is my primary area, so I studied and taught about racism, sexism, ableism, classism, heterosexism, ethnocentrism, colonialism, and more recently cisgenderism and gender binarism. I quickly learned that my familiar language was not very well received in the occupational science/occupational therapy world.

‘Oppression’ was considered too strong by journal reviewers, and gradually I found myself moving to the language of ‘marginalization’ and ‘disadvantage’. I noticed that virtually no one was writing about racism, rather the language of ‘cultural difference’ and ‘diversity’ was proliferating. This is ‘culturalism’, when the role of culture is over-emphasized with respect to how it shapes the beliefs, values, and practices of the Other (oppressed groups), while culture is positioned as far less powerful in determining the decisions, thoughts, and behaviours of dominant group members. Social inequities and health inequities are then cast as the result of cultural eccentricities, instead of the result of oppression, income disparities, racism, stigma, and other sociopolitical structures. Oppression has not yet fully entered into the lexicon of occupational science and occupational therapy (Pooley, 2020).

In my early work in occupational science, I saw it as essential to distinguish between cultural difference and the power-laden system of oppression that is racism. ‘Cultural difference’ fits all too well with the growing emphasis on ‘diversity and inclusion,’ dangerously depoliticized terms that misdirect from much-needed attention to equity and justice. Diversity and inclusion as goals assume inequitable power relations have already been eliminated, emphasizing the need for increased presence of those from oppressed or under-represented groups without transformative change to institutions, policies, practices, and business-as-usual (Stewart, 2017). Diversity and inclusion emphasize increases in numbers of racialized people; anti-racism emphasizes fundamental change to the institutionalized Whiteness that pervades Western societies, rooted in histories of colonial racism and slavery.

My early experience with publishing about racism reflected the state of thinking in occupational science and occupational therapy. Once I submitted a paper on racism to a US-based occupational therapy journal and was told that the US was about to elect its first African American president, so while we might still have racism in Canada, the paper would not be of interest to American readers. Hmmm … More than once when I had papers on racism reviewed, I was asked to change my use of the term racism to ‘perceived racism.’ This phrasing renders racism a matter of individual perception (perhaps misperception), rather than a systemic, structured, institutionalized set of processes, practices, policies, and ideologies, grounded in history. The ‘solution’ becomes one of thinking differently, rather than structural change.

Overt discussion of racism is growing in occupational science and occupational therapy, but remarkably slowly. A quick search of the word shows how little has been published about racism, even in 2020. The term colonialism also garners some citations, but the field is still far too slight. To be clear, occupation simply cannot be adequately understood without attending to oppression and privilege. Everything we do and don’t do, the expectations we face, the encouragement or discouragement we receive, the meanings we attribute to occupations, the impacts of our occupational engagements, the barriers to occupation—all are affected by our membership in social groups both oppressed and privileged. All of our doing, being, belonging, and becoming are shaped by the power relations of oppression, and in turn serve to maintain, bolster, resist, transform, or undermine oppression and privilege.

This dialectic is increasingly clear through the scholarship of occupational scientists and therapists around the world examining racism and colonialism. For example, the excellent work of Chontel Gibson in Australia, following earlier work by Alison Nelson. The contributions of Isla Emery-Whittington, Jane Hopkirk, and Yvonne Thomas in New Zealand. In Canada, the interventions of Angie Phenix and Kaarina Valavaara, as well as Allison Gerlach and Karen Whalley Hammell. The scholarship of Ana Malfitano, Sandra Galheigo, Lilian Magalhães, and others in Brazil, where social occupational therapy has a long, robust history. The work of Juman Simaan writing about Palestine, of Roshan Galvaan and Elelwani Ramugondo in South Africa. The scholarship of Lisette Farias in Sweden, and Amber Angell in the US. These are just some of the relevant authors. But when it comes to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, as Chontel Gibson (2020) wrote, “We all need to do the hard work, which involves critical reflections and changing the systems, structures, and processes” (p. 18, emphasis added).

This year I was delighted to see an occupational therapy paper entitled, “Cultural competency and the reproduction of White supremacy in occupational therapy education” (Grenier, 2020) naming White supremacy, and racism as a system of power, as central to the profession of occupational therapy. As Sara Ahmed (2012) has written in another professional context, institutionalized Whiteness establishes a culture in which racism is subsumed into normalized practices. Settler colonial Whiteness is subsumed into the very epistemologies—the ways of knowing and ideas about what constitutes knowledge—of occupational science, occupational therapy, as well as other disciplines and professions (e.g., Kovach et al., 2015; Williams & Snively, 2016).

In capitalist cultures, there is a strong tendency to see everything through an individualist lens, making it challenging to even see the oppressive power relations that operate at the level of social groups. Because we cannot easily grasp social groups, we cannot comprehend structured inequities, like racism. Meritocracy is a cornerstone of capitalist belief systems, the notion that people rise and thrive (or not) based on our own merits—our skills, abilities, and efforts. It allows people to not-see White privilege, the system of unearned advantages that grants some of us extra resources and options at every turn.

Because belief in individualism and meritocracy is so firm, and ignorance of White privilege so entrenched, dominant group members tend to experience as unjustified attacks any efforts to name racism, to insist on remedying its harms, to insist on moving toward equity and justice, to change and transform racist power relations, policies, and practices. Insisting Black Lives Matter is racist while “All Lives Matter” is egalitarian denies the reality of racism ongoing for centuries in nations founded on slavery and colonialism (Lavalley & Johnson, 2020). It denies the racism and colonialism built into and operating daily in education, politics, legal systems, economic systems, the media, health care. It denies the vastly disproportionate rates at which Black and Indigenous people are incarcerated. It denies the fact that Indigenous women and girls in Canada are murdered and missing at terrifying rates (National Inquiry on MMIWG, 2019). It denies the fact that structures put in place to protect citizens not only do not protect ‘all lives’ equitably, but in fact are the sources of grave harms for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour.

Racism is a form of oppression. It is systemic, operating through a myriad of social, political, and economic avenues that in their interconnectedness constitute oppression. The fact that it is systemic does not mean it is enacted by monolithic, invisible forces immune to change. Rather it means critical analysis is needed to see who has created racist policies and structures, who benefits from them, what practices uphold them, what groups are working to maintain them, and where inroads can be made to change them. Based in beliefs about justice, anti-racist activists have spent decades employing education and moral suasion,¹ attempting to convince non-believers that racism exists. As Ibram Kendi (2019) has argued so powerfully, changing ideas has not eliminated racism; rather it is time to change policies, to change structures and systems and institutions, trusting that change in ideas and minds will follow.

In societies infused with/founded on racism, there is no neutral ground, no ‘opting out’ through a stance of ‘non-racist’. There is participation in the status quo, which is racist, and there is actively working to change racism, engaging in anti-racist activism. There is no middle ground.

Notes

1 Kendi’s (2019) term, moral suasion, can entail persuasion, but also coercion, force etc.