Something's gone awry at the CBC studios in Vancouver (a technical problem, we are told). As a result, yesterday and today local listeners awoke to feeds from CBC Kelowna and Victoria, respectively.
As much as I appreciate the variety -- hearing different voices from different places -- it is only my privilege that has it appearing as such, as all three hosts are, like me for the most part, white middle-aged heterosexual men.
Is this a problem?
Having lived in both Kelowna and Victoria (BA, UVic, 1986; MFA, UBC Okanagan, 2018), I can say that these are overwhelmingly white spaces, with Victoria the more socially progressive of the two. But does that justify their representation by white men? Of course not.
My notion of diversity is not secondary to majority rule -- a hallmark of democracy -- but based on equal participation and representation by those of as many self-identifiers as we can think of, not just those that immediately spring to mind (gender, race/ethnicity, class, disability).
On the topic of Democracy, is there any news? Is it, like our planet, running out of a gas (fossil fuel)? Is there a more efficient alternative? Is efficiency even the desired goal? (Is gas, too, a tiresome metaphor?)
In an achievement-driven culture, the answer is always yes. And Byung-Chul Han continues to ask the best questions about why our achievement culture is killing us ("auto-aggression") -- one individual at a time.
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