Of TEDx and Paris

I take a break from not writing about my time in Paris to post something more important that, coincidentally, has to do with Paris as well. Coincidences are fun! Who knows when I'll actually post a "Part 2" of our time in Paris...probably never, I feel like that ship has sailed and is never coming back. But anyways.

Today, I attended my very first TEDx event. As far as I know, TED events are dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” through a conference style event with speakers delivering talks on a certain theme. This year’s theme for TEDxVancouver? ID, or identity. To me, and certainly many others, identity has been, is, and will continue to be one of the most relevant topics as we navigate our lives daily to define ourselves. Who am I? Who are we?

Identity has always been a very important thing to me and is something that I think about frequently. What have I experienced? How has this impacted how I see the world? How has it impacted the shape my world takes? How do I behave and in what ways does this influence my perspective? And, ultimately, how do these all fit together to form my identity? A lot of what I study involves dynamic processes, or change. So for me, getting to attend an event dedicated to ideas surrounding identity, an inherently fluid thing, was exciting.

It is sad for me to confess that TEDxVancouver was not all that I’d hoped it would be. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of very cool and interesting, thought-provoking talks delivered by inspiring speakers. A wide range of topics was covered, from sex economics to trans inclusivity to cannabis production (yes, I’m serious). I learned a lot of cool things. But I can’t shake the disappointment I felt as a result of things that, perhaps for some (or many), might seem minute or nit-picky. And yet, I’ve got to talk about them.

As a person born and raised in BC, but most especially from my undergraduate years, I’m accustomed to, and indeed have come to expect, the acknowledgement of any event taking place on the unclaimed and unceded territory of the local indigenous peoples. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I became more aware of the importance of this acknowledgement by settlers, this acknowledgement of the sovereignty and integrity of indigenous peoples from whom this country has benefitted from unequally. And so, with such a prestigious event as TEDxVancouver, I was very surprised that no such acknowledgement took place. The opening live performance was by Smokey Valley, a local indigenous drum group, and one speaker, Michael Nicol Yahgulanaas, is a Haida man hailing from Haida Gwaii, so clearly the event included indigenous peoples. So why not the official acknowledgement?

Another defining feature of TED events is the intermingling of attendees and the promotion of social discourse amongst them – the passing on of ideas. One of the ways that TEDxVancouver sought to encourage such discussions was by organizing attendees into “tribes” based on their answers to a 7-question personality survey we had to answer when buying our tickets. Seems reasonable enough – with the theme of identity and the natural human tendency to want to cluster together, it makes sense that with 3500 participants, it’s easier to facilitate conversations by grouping similar personalities together. The logic makes sense. The terminology does not. I tweeted my concern about the use of this term, to which the official TEDxVancouver account replied that they are using the dictionary definition of the term, which is “a social group with commonalities”. This is all well and good, until you consider who writes dictionary definitions and the cultural significance that “tribe” has for many peoples. Since the times of colonization, words like “tribe” and “band” have been appropriated, bastardized, and warped until there is no longer an obvious relationship between their “new” meanings and their culturally significant ones. In fact, these words have been used to lock indigenous peoples in a historical vacuum wherein they are viewed through a condescending lens. To many cultural groups, “tribe” holds a specific, culturally significant meaning, and to use this same word to simply mean “a social group with commonalities” can be considered offensive. Why not just “clusters”, “groups”, “factions”, or “packs”? For an event centred on the concept of identity, I expected more.

Of course, throughout the event, numerous speakers recognized the terrible events that occurred in Paris the night before. How could they not? In less than 24 hours, every single social media platform, televised news program, and news outlet has been over-run with tributes to the victims of the attacks in Paris. Just now, a Sportsnet anchor talked about how many NHL teams observed a moment of silence for Paris before their games tonight, and some even played the French national anthem. I admit that I myself wrote post after post expressing my horror and heartbreak for Paris, especially as the attacks in the 11^th arrondissement took place so very close to where I had spent part of my summer. Paris is a city that I love dearly. The entire afternoon, as I sat in one of my graduate seminars, all I could do was follow the Telegraph's live blog on the events. Later that night, I posted a tweet saying "Mes pensées avec tous ceux qui est à Paris, en France". And yet, how easily we forget (and ignore) similarly horrifying events unfolding in other parts of the world, in places that don’t look like ours. Beirut, Lebanon. Baghdad, Iraq. Bombings occurred in both of these locations, but not one post on my Facebook or Twitter newsfeeds gave any notice of this. But I’m not surprised. After all, it was just last year when the Charlie Hebdo attack took place in Paris, when we all proclaimed “Je suis Charlie!” in solidarity and support of…the French? The Western world? Liberty and democracy? And yet, hardly any news outlets reported the massacre in Baga, Nigeria of potentially over 2000 people that occurred that very same week. I saw not one social media post claiming solidarity with Baga, no proclamations of “We are all Baga!”. Thus, the complete absence of public support for Beirut and Baghdad is actually kind of predictable.

But why? Because when horrific attacks happen in places that look like Canada, like the U.S., it reminds us that it could happen to us. If places like Paris can be attacked, then so can Vancouver. But when extreme violence happens in places “over there”, we aren’t as worried, because we don’t identify as much with people from “that side” of the world as we do with Parisians, because they don’t look like us, they don’t act like us, they don’t “share the same values”. And when we finally hear of these events taking place, we might perhaps feel horror, maybe even guilt at not knowing what to do, but eventually this subsides into thoughts that tell us, “that’s their problem, not ours”. There is the danger of writing it off as an occupational hazard of their “backwardness”. There is a danger in viewing their religions and cultures as inherently violent. This breeds hostility, destabilizes society, and threatens to make already occurring problems even worse. Think of the Syrian migrant crisis happening right now. Think of the lines people will and are drawing between the Paris attacks and plans to bring in refugees. Our societies become more unstable and xenophobia will be heightened. Where does that leave us…what are we to do? And how does this relate to identity? What does it mean when we declare our solidarity with Parisians, but not Beirut or Baghdad? What does it mean when people like Barack Obama declare the Paris attacks as “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share”?

Who gets included in this “humanity” and who is pushed to the margins?