Minority Status’ Insufficient Justification

On Dubious Indigenous Heritage And Incentives

(Nathaniel Arfin came on the Scrimshaw Show Tuesday to talk Tariffs and Mainstreet. Subscribe, like, and become a paid subscriber to this site to support the work I’ve done and will continue to do. 2025 will feature Ontario and Federal elections, and your support makes it easier for me to cover them with the seriousness they require - and keep me from losing my mind.)

I was at Rideau Hall for the swearing in of Justin Trudeau’s government in 2015. A bunch of the UOttawa Liberals went, and we stood in the courtyard outside and watched Trudeau walk in with his team and refreshed Twitter for the news and then got lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Byward. It was a great morning, until I saw the “Because it’s 2015” response to the gender neutral cabinet.

I remember exactly where I was when I saw it, and I remember the group being split on it - the lads thinking it was a dumb quote, and the girls loving it. My objection wasn’t to gender neutrality, but making gender neutrality a virtue - which only served to reinforce the idea that many of the new female Cabinet Ministers were idiots and undeserving of Cabinet jobs. Now, some of them were, but so were plenty of the men. For some reason we didn’t seem quite as invested in whether John McCallum was still senile than whether Maryam Monsef was Cabinet worthy. Stephane Dion taking a big 4 job was insane, but the story of that Cabinet was the women, and their worthiness. All because of a quote.

The reason I’m litigating all of this is that the Liberal candidate in the Cloverdale Langley City byelection is now the second Liberal in recent weeks to run afoul of claimed Indigenous heritage of dubious status. I’m not here to litigate her status questions - I’m not Métis, I’m not an expert in Métis heritage and culture, and there are plenty of white people willing to opine on things we don’t need to pretend expertise in. What I am here to point out is it’s probably a bad thing that we have made Indigenous heritage, and every other form of minority status, a shield against legitimate criticism, but also a stand in to avoid making an actual case for people on their merits.

We’ve seen it a lot in various battles about Israel, Palestine, and the conflict over there, the idea that People Of Colour and Women of Colour must be above reproach, as if it’s not significantly more offensive to be told that you’re not smart enough to actually be taken seriously and that you must be protected on the basis of your race and gender. (If you remember the specific day on Twitter I’m subtweeting, you’ll remember how nauseating it was.)

What should happen, in a world where we haven’t all lost our minds, is that one’s arguments would win the day. Either in intellectual debate or in political campaigns, the ideas would be - should be! - what win out in the end. But they don’t, and they never do, because we’ve entrenched the idea that some people’s opinions are worth more than others. Degree holders, people with fancy resumes, and those given importance and influence get away with bad arguments because we’ve taught ourselves to stop listening to the words themselves.

In the US this week, the architects of Kamala Harris’ campaign did Pod Save America, and the interview is mostly getting panned for being more about the principals covering their asses than admitting they were wrong. You can agree with the consensus or disagree, but it is undeniably true that this backlash represents something of a watershed - those with impeccable CVs and titles that are immensely impressive if that’s your thing being outwardly dismissed by the masses and the masses absolutely winning.

The same thing happened at some point down the line with minority status as it did with titles and degrees - the minority status became what people looked for, not the content of their character or of their arguments. The Ontario public service has openly said that if you’re a straight white man “good luck getting promoted” in a department wide town hall last year by a Deputy Minister. This culture of caring more about the boxes you check is how you get Randy Boissonnault claiming Indigenous heritage to get a government contract, and this Liberal in BC lying to further her political career.

I’m a gay man who hates Pride. Fucking cannot stand it. The idea of ever attending is my personal hell. And almost every time I make this case to someone, their immediate response is “but you’re gay, how can you hate Pride?” This is, to a T, after I have already done a 60 second rant (that, let’s be honest, was actually 90 seconds) about how Pride has become a street party for a certain kind of queer person that does more to alienate us from the majority by projecting stereotypes and nonsense onto us that makes our lives harder. But so few actually engage with that because in their head it seems impossible someone could be gay and hate Pride.

The problem is that plenty of women, plenty of queer people, and plenty of racial minorities are bad politicians, make stupid arguments, or are in general not particularly impressive. But every time somebody wants to say that Chrystia “Cancel Disney+ To Fight Inflation” Freeland should be fired, you get dumbasses attacking you for being a sexist, even if you literally propose replacing her with another woman in that same column. Because, for some reason, it’s unacceptable to hold her to the same standard I hold Steven Guilbeault or Marc Miller to.

This isn’t solely a left problem - Danielle Smith has made similarly dubious claims of Indigenous heritage - but it is the left’s incentive structure that has reduced people to boxes. It incentives people like Elizabeth Warren, who is at best 1% Native, to make her family story relevant in her unofficial campaign launch because she thought being some level of Native would help. The problem is, why the fuck should it? She either has the ideas, the capacity, and the campaigning skill to be President or she doesn’t - why the fuck should we give a singular shit whether 6-10 generations back her ancestor was Cherokee or not?

The left has become willing to allow history through minority status - First [Insert Minority Status] to do [Insert Job] - to be celebrated, as if that is enough to allay all concerns about whether the person is smart enough. Boissonnault’s a great example - he’s an idiot Minister who has skated on a lot of criticism because nobody wants to criticize The Gay Minister. It’s the same reason Scott Brison’s 2012/13 tampering with the independence of the Central Bank by openly recruiting Carney while still in the job got 1/100th of the scrutiny it deserved - well, that and Brison was a reliable friend to the whole Press Gallery.

We have effectively ended reliable scrutiny of non-straight white men by deputising their minority status into the argument as a reason that some people’s arguments are worth more than others. It doesn’t matter what is actually said, the mere fact that a minority is saying it matters more than when straight white men do. (Jews only count as minorities when it’s useful, also, because none of this is actually about supporting minorities and all of it is about dumb factionalism.) It makes effective scrutiny of ideas nearly impossible, but it also incentivizes people to exaggerate their own heritage to find as many boxes to tick.

Think about all the police abolitionists we had to take seriously as representative of minority communities in 2020 who turned out to speak for a narrow minority of their own communities. Think about the fact that if you point out that schools letting kids go by different names without parental consent is unpopular and not something progressive political parties should support if they want to win you get yelled at as a transphobe. Think about the fact that somehow supporting straight white man Joe Biden being replaced by Black and Indian woman Kamala Harris was considered a racist opinion for a couple weeks in July. Think about how round the fucking bend we’ve gotten because we’ve stopped listening to the contents of ideas and arguments and focused on the person making it.

Every time I’ve made the point that Trudeau is no longer the right person to lead the Liberal Party, the vast majority of the pushback isn’t from people making the case that a change carries more or unacceptable risk, it’s just people being pissed at me for not being willing to shill for the Liberals. The number of people who have said, either directly to me or just about me, “I used to like him, but not anymore” because they put me in a box and didn’t actually care about my actual beliefs is ridiculously high. I’m the same guy I’ve always been, but because nobody engaged with my actual arguments they’re now surprised that I’ve allegedly changed. But I haven’t.

The left has undermined its own intellectual capacity by refusing to engage with the substance of arguments and focusing on whether the argument is being made by the “right” person. It is that exact mentality that incentivizes people to exaggerate or invent from whole cloth Indigenous heritage. And it will continue until we start treating the contents of one’s argument as more important than the person making the argument.