I have had the privilege of never having to question my citizenship in Canada, and of not having it questioned. I’m white, born in an Ottawa hospital only 5 minutes from my childhood home. When asked where I was from, my answer was never met with “no, where are you actually from?” that I know follows the response of many people of colour who are also born and raised in Canada. And in parallel to that, I have not had to grapple with the complexities of being Indigenous and Canadian and the ways that those two terms can seem at odds. Although I know of my privilege, and am actively trying to use it in solidarity with those who are not afforded the same, I’m still learning what it means to be Canadian.
While I have been trying to unlearn my biases and examine what constitutes the ‘glasses’ I wear (as Sensoy and Diangelo put it), I am realising that there is so much more that contributes to these than just the “big” ideas, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality.
My position as a teacher is not just as a white, cis, able-bodied woman—there are “smaller” factors (I do not say smaller to diminish them, just to distinguish them from the larger, easier to identify ones), such as my position as a 4th & 5th Canadian citizen, that contribute to how I engage with my community. In my undergraduate degree, I studied how to conduct user-testing for systems — and part of that training included learning what my biases are, and learning how to enter a user-testing space without preconceptions of what a person may or may not know or be capable of based on what I perceive about them. I took this training with me, and knew that entering a classroom as a teacher, I would need to do the same, but while that was good, it was also a relatively shallow understanding of the myriad of factors that contribute to my privilege and my biases when interacting with others.
Clearly, there is no limit to the things that contribute to a person’s identity, as there is no limit on things that may happen in a person’s life, and so that work of unlearning bias and examining my preconceptions must be ongoing, as there is not an end goal. That would be impossible — what I can do is just always strive to be better, to be always more aware of what I think and believe and what that impact has on my view of the world.