This month’s book club we’re looking at the meanings of words through the eyes of Carol Off. She specifically looks at 5 words she feels have been hijacked and weaponized so that their use demonizes all sides of an argument. Language is important, Off cites Victor Klemperer’s look at how the Third Reich subtly changed the meanings of words over years until formerly progressive people viewed Jews as vermin and supported Hitler’s genocide.

The first word we tackle is freedom, and she’s ultimately talking about circles of moral concern. When scarcity is present those we view as like us and worthy of the same rights as us shrinks. When there is plenty to go around, we’re willing to accept more types of people as like us, and the rights of those people increase.

In the world now with mostly white men in power, that means anyone who isn’t a white man is seeing their rights reduced because white men are feeling like they aren’t getting their fair share. The rise of the Far Right is fuelling this by finding disaffected men and telling them that their right to freedom overrides the rights of others. They should be free to hate and persecute others, while the others don’t have the right to feel safe.

Off looks at the Canadian Freedom Convoy as she examines who gets rights and who doesn’t. The Freedom Convoy wanted the freedom from mask mandates, and scoffed at the freedom of others who wanted freedom from sickness. We also saw how the protest of white people is legitimate while the protest of First Nations and non-white people is ended swiftly as she compared it to the Wet’suwet’en protests.

The protest by First Nations was swiftly shut down with a show of police force due to “economic interruptions”. Government documentation shows that they knew the economic impact of the Wet’suwet’en protest would be minimal and that the Freedom Convoy would have a much larger economic impact.

But one was white people protesting and one wasn’t.

After reading through this chapter I was reinforced in my thought that freedom mostly means freedom to be white and do what you want. It’s not freedom for all. Much like many early women’s rights advocates were looking for freedom for white women to vote, or do other things that were restricted without wanting to extend the same rights to First Nations or Black women¹.

When you say freedom, do you really mean freedom for everyone, or just freedom for those that look like you?

1. See Take Back the Fight for more on freedom for white women ↩︎