With the long-drawn debate on the use of Squampton stickers, the medieval witch-hunt (styled these days as liberal and progressive activism) has reached Squamish too.
A few days ago, I asked a vocal resident to write on the issue. She flatly refused, afraid that she would be hounded out of her job if she expressed any view not in line with the dominant woke discourse.
A variety of views on the issue clash on social media, but one thing is clear — anyone will get the impression that old Squamish was casually racist. And woke ideology now wants to reform Squamish by erasing its ‘racist’ past.
But the hard, thick line that divides good and evil in the woke universe is actually faint and broken and not so straight in real life.
That’s what I found in my more than a decade of living and working in Squamish. My own story — and of many other local people of colour I know — defies stereotypes of race relations.
However, I too started with those stereotypes.
When I moved from Toronto to small town BC, first in Parksville and then in Squamish, 11 years ago, I was warned by many that I was making a mistake in going to rural BC. When I was about to move to Squamish, a friend remarked about it being an old, loggers’ town and how confused, insecure, and out of place I would feel in that redneck ghetto.
It was no place to build a future or a life for a person of colour, I was told. My friends suggested I would be far better off to stick to Downtown Toronto or Vancouver if I wanted to feel welcomed and accepted.
But I liked the natural beauty of Squamish and decided to take a chance.
My experience in setting up a newspaper business opened my eyes to the complexity of the human experience and the metropolitan assumptions that I had carried with me.
Those assumptions had started to unravel within weeks of my starting a news blog, as I noticed strangers were willing to share their life stories with me without any regard to the colour of my skin. Against my apprehensions, I was being encouraged by locals to write and report more about not only the civic issues but also their personal lives.
Slowly, other assumptions started to fray.
Conventional wisdom dictated that a person of colour locking horns with the powerful white elite in a small town will never succeed. My experience was the opposite. My aggressive reporting brought praise and encouragement from readers who mostly happened to be white. Far from one seeking patronage of the white elite, I was seen as a loose cannon who didn’t hesitate to publish anything if it was in public interest.
I felt so encouraged that I decided to start a print newspaper. When I would tell people in Toronto how even old residents of Squamish, such as the logging community, supported my work, they would be very surprised. It flew against all the accepted ideas of race relations in small towns.
The recent controversy made me look back at my time in town. I wondered if Squamish was such a casually racist town back then, how could I succeed as a journalist here, especially someone who was so combative?
All this is not to say I did not experience racism here. Or that racism did not or does not exist in our town. Sometimes racism here is quite in your face. But my experience of inclusion far outweighs that of racism.
I had an inkling before I came to Squamish that racism could have its own diversity. In Squamish, I saw it. I faced racism from some who styled themselves as liberal and progressive.
There is no doubt that racism is a lived experience for a large number of people in Squamish, and also in BC, in Canada or, for that matter, in South Asia, where my roots are. Nor is there any doubt that we must be vocal about racism amidst us.
What I want to stress is that my own experience and my interaction with other people of color in Squamish tells me human relations here or anywhere cannot be crammed into theories manufactured in metropolitan centres. But such a view runs the risk of attracting woke ire. Their ideas have come to assume the force of theological certainty.
Woke dogma has harassed people and institutions so much that some of their leading lights are now raising their voices. A recent letter written by 150 prominent writers, academics and journalists (including Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Gloria Steinam) calls out the cancel culture that has now spread to Squamish too.
This is how they describe it: “But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”
Read the full letter here.
Gagandeep Ghuman is the editor of the Squamish Reporter.
Ihor Zalubniak Per says
I wonder if the supporters or detractors of the “squampton” moniker have any direct and intimate knowledge
of Compton, CA. as it was when the name was coined and applied.
Yvonne says
I truly never noticed that you were a person of color.
C. Forsyth says
Thanks for sharing your observations and your personal experience Gagandeep. I recall meeting you at an ESL volunteer group 11 years ago. I knew you had a degree in journalism, but you had not started your paper. I’ve been pleased to see The Squamish Reporter established in Squamish. Living here as a person of colour and from a different culture your viewpoint is real and welcomed.
Reckonig Day says
All male bovine droppings aside, there is only ONE race. The human race !
Donald Patrick says
Gag… pretty sure you have me figured out. This issue is not really in my general scope of living… I have seen the bumper stickers etc but never really paid attention…. when going to University in Inglewood California there was a small airport at Compton that was utilized for a couple of nervous flights near LAX air space and to flip over to Catalena Island, but again after witnessing the Watts riots…. none of this stuff every related me to skin colour, but have to admit some cultures seem to me are going overboard….. I lived abroad and always tried to act like a local resident…matter of fact used to wear a black leather jacket in Munich with my attache case on way to work, never realized that looked like a Cop… until got the call one day.
Brian Hockenstein says
Interesting opinion piece. Thanks for sharing and glad your experience does not line up with that of so many other BIPOC community members’.
As far as the opinion piece/letter you mention.. a bunch of mostly white, wealthy, privileged people using the platform that their white privilege has provided them to decry so-called cancel culture (which most definitely exists) does not sit we with me personally and a lot of others.
Here’s a quote from a really interesting rebuttal piece that I found that I thought put things in perspective and has quite a bit of relevance in the ongoing “squampton debate”:
“To those unaccustomed to being questioned, this all feels personal. They have confused a lack of reverence from people who are able to air their views for the very first time with an attack on their right to free speech. They have mistaken the new ways they can be told they are wrong or irrelevant as the baying of a mob, rather than exposure to an audience that has only recently found its voice. The world is changing. It’s not “cancel culture” to point out that, in many respects, it’s not changing quickly enough.”
From this piece here – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/08/is-free-speech-under-threat-cancel-culture-writers-respond
Bruce Kay says
Brian Hockenstein, you quite correct see right through Mr Guhman’s rather incompetent critique. One thing he fails (deliberately?) to mention by drawing attention to the recent letter is that Margret Attwood, Salman Rushdie etc all emphatically support the general premiss of “Black Lives Matter” which is that systemic racism exists and it is systemic, which means that whatever their criticisms of “Woke Culture” (which incidentally i agree with) being woke to systemic racism is not the criticism -it exists and it impacts negatively minority races in a white dominant society and everyone should be “woke” to this fact. I mean serious, if its a fact, are you honestly going to argue otherwise?
There is something that Mr Guhman lets slip that I think reveals his own myopia.
“All this is not to say I did not experience racism here. Or that racism did not or does not exist in our town. Sometimes racism here is quite in your face. But my experience of inclusion far outweighs that of racism.”
Fair enough. The bulk of his experience didn’t involve racism against him. That is a good thing, I suppose, until you just consider that if he was white, he would not have experienced any racism. None, certainly none of consequence. That is the difference here. By Mr Guhman’s standard, the dark skin minorities must feel happy that they only experience racism a minority of the time. You should feel lucky i guess so long as no crosses are burn’t on the lawn!
Sure thats a bit hyperbolic but you get the idea. There is a standard of acceptable racism for Gagandeep Guhman (only 20% of the time) and also an acceptable standard for the White man (0% of the time)
As you can see the sub conscious bias of racism that permeates our back ground since it was beaten into us in the school yard may no longer manifest overtly as much as before, but it still flavours everything, a bit like the “Silent Hand” of the market.
It even permeates Gagandeep Guhman’s own editorials on the general absence of it
Terri says
Did anyone think to ask someone from Compton CA what their views are? Maybe they’d think it was a compliment young people coined the term in the 1990’s (?). And respected the culture of Rap music? Or something like that ? I have sons in their 20’s. When I started listening to their music I didn’t get it. Then one day I LISTENED. It’s profound and clever. I may be way off base here. But maybe you could ask someone in Compton? 😉
RB says
Squampton is about drinkin Jin and juice in the hood- where ever your from even in Compton – Squamish – or East coast west coast North America. Light it up smoke it up like Dr Dre in the hood. Livin in Squampton is like that nothing else not racist not even red neck. Thats the truth. Represent your hood Love care and respect and people from Squamish represent as Squampton in no harmful way. Think about Ripping down a bike trail in the middle of Squampton! Listing to you old time favourite tunes? There ain’t nothing wrong with that! Where’s the love for the sticker and the people who love the town and grew up on that! That report was a bit black and white where’s the grey? The grey remains in Squampton. Black flys matter.
Feet Banks says
If a sticker is the biggest front-line battle against racism in Squamish i guess we are doing pretty well in the overall scheme of things… Meanwhile the cops who killed Breonna Taylor or Chantal Moore haven’t had to face justice yet….
Perhaps, instead of yelling at each other on the internet like idiots(creating more division than there was before), we can put the collective energy into something everyone can agree would be positive and helpful, like a multi-cultural festival or calendar of events that will help everyone better understand all the great cultures in our area.
Brian Hockenstein says
Beautiful and quite on-point words from both Feet and Bruce. Thanks for chiming in. I personally do not see this as us “yelling at each other”, rather engaging in a really f’ing sweet conversation. Although I suspect/hope you aren’t referring to the comments here….
To me at least, this conversation hasn’t remotely been about the sticker since the first troll started personally attacking the IG poster, calling her a c*** and threatening her with violence. At that point it immediately became about a much deeper issue – does systemic racism exist in our community and what does our lack of ability to have a respectful conversation about it say about us? This misguided (in my view, admittedly) opinion piece is just another symptom of the deeper issue. PS – Credit to the author for allowing these comments to go public, that’s definitely honourable.
I think The Chief hit the nail on the head and closed this chapter of the conversation around the sticker. Now, as Feet said, let’s dig in deep on the underlying issue and grow as a community. That’s where all the exciting stuff happens
Brad Pittsburg says
Rather than whinging on about a term on a bumper sticker, might it be better to put energy into tangible steps that help advance social justice – like volunteering at Helping Hands, the Women Centre, the BCSPCA, or Squamish Hospice? It takes limited effort to show off one’s social justice street cred on social media. But that accomplishes little else then scoring woke brownie points. I’ll proudly wear my “Squampton” hoodie while serving meals at Helping Hands while you all continue to virtue signal in your basements.