Challenging the resistance to change

One of my goals as a writer and editor is to ensure the content that I contribute reflects the rapidly changing social realities of Vancouver. It’s not always easy.

How our city is today is certainly not the way our city was a few decades ago, or even a few years ago.

Sometimes it takes a while to catch up to those changes. Because a lot of the barriers to change tend to systemic—that is, a whole system is based upon certain deeply rooted fundamentals that are inaccurate, outdated, or flawed.

It’s more clear cut when there’s something like racism, sexism, or violence as an issue that can be the subject of an article. What is more difficult to change are the things that slip under the radar and are accepted as the norm: in our language, in our thoughts, in our behaviour.

In the ’80s and ’90s, feminist theory and ethnic studies contributed to postmodern theory, which challenged educational content in university. Whole curriculum had to be reconsidered and questioned when canons were exposed as founded upon criteria with inherent gender and racial biases.

In art history, for example, academics began to question why were so many female artists ignored? Why were certain types of media such as textiles disregarded? Why were whole cultures or communities overlooked?

In a similar vein, Daniel Wood’s cover story is a good example of how enmeshed thought systems, with deeply ingrained biases, can cause people to resist understanding the world more accurately. Wood’s story shows the difficulty there is in overcoming the vestiges of Eurocentric thought that remain at the foundation of Western historical and anthropological comprehension.

There are reverberations of this reflected in our daily lives.

And a lot of this, though, is not conscious. Which is the difficult part.

It’s like subliminal advertising. You can digest a lot of stereotypical values, for example, embedded in films, music, conversation, and writing, without realizing it. (Film theorists have long pointed out that entertainment is one of the most powerful political propaganda tools.) We all do it. It’s just a matter of whether or not we make the effort to become aware of it, and question it.

But no one ever said it was easy.