Racialized subject formation proves that white identity is affirmed throughout society – white culture often employs strategies that push down native people – how we frame relations through culture is important to subject formation

3. Racialized subject formation and othering: a conceptual approach For white settlers, our stories are echoed—and hence our ‘selves’ affirmed—in ‘our’ schools, courts, parliaments, public spaces, books, films, and families. White identity and interest is shared and celebrated in the people, through a ‘state as formed by “the people”, who see their best interests reflected in its workings’ (Thobani, 2007, 53:19). Taken together under a structure of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, these conditions produce significant constraints to critical self-reflexivity for white settler culture (Connell, 2001, DiAngelo, 2011, Tuck and Yang, 2012). Through the national narrative, colonial and imperial violence is seen as ‘in the national interest’, in turn undergoing erasure, while being implicitly celebrated through national rites, rituals and stories.  describes the white national subject as being at the centre of a triangulated racial structure of subject formation in Canada, while the immigrant subject occupies a space of conditional inclusion,5 and the Indigenous subject remains marked by dispossession and extermination. As scholars have elucidated (Wolfe, 2001, Wolfe, 2006, Ahmed, 2000, Veracini, 2011, Lawrence and Dua, 2005), the colonial state has intervened in the lives of Indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants in different ways (consider the Immigration Act’s focus on credentials and economic exploitability versus the Indian Act’s focus on spatial and resource control), for rather different ends (the exploitation of labour versus the appropriation of land/resources). Thus, how we identify and narrativize others is not static or in direct and equal opposition to national selves, but contingent on history, proximity and relations to land and resources, as well as more specific and unstable relations (conditioned through variegated intersectionalities) between interactants. Put simply, how we see/frame an immigrant, refugee, or Indigenous other is conditioned by systemic hierarchies and is brought to life in the spaces between actants. Specifically, the strangeness of the ‘other’ is a function of their relative distance to our self (as a bundle of narratives, ideologies, and characteristics). Extending Said’s (1979) analysis of Orientalizing discourses: the other is made to exist as we know it, and our ‘knowing it’ is conditioned by intersecting forces of white supremacy and colonialism. Ideally, this framework emphasizes structures and relations beyond our own agency, while still acknowledging the capacity to resist these structures. Drawing from Thobani’s triangulation of racial subject formation within a settler colonial lens, three emergent identity relations are distinguished in the research: the white farmer self, the Indigenous other, and the migrant other. To analyze the data, the interactions between three elements are considered: socio-symbolic distance, proximity, and self-motivations,6 as these elements determine how one recognizes an ‘other’. Socio-symbolic distance involves the perceived socio-symbolic distance/difference between the self and other by reference to identity, ideologies, customs, rituals, rites, etc. As Alexander (1992) argues, such codes and symbols help supply structured categories into each member of civil society, such as ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. This socio-symbolic space provides meaning and justification for inclusion and exclusion from ‘civil society’. Of course, ‘this distinction is not “real.” Actors are not intrinsically either worthy or moral: they are determined to be so by being placed in certain positions on the grid of civil culture’, drawn from ‘a systematic, highly elaborated symbolic code’ (, 291). Identification of others is further conditioned through proximity between selves and others over space and time. Proximity underpins the materiality of social relations, extending identity beyond mere constructivism. Considering race specifically, its construction is tethered to material causes and effects, producing what Saldanha describes as a ‘viscosity’, revealed through ‘the stickiness of racial segregation’ (Saldanha, 2006, 10). Indeed, the effects of proximity are variegated, and cannot be essentialized as they depend on interacting modes of (class, gender and racial) oppression alongside the spatial dimensions of its reproduction and resistance.7 Finally, where selves fix others will depend on their own motivations and interests. Of course, othering often serves to justify the self’s privilege (whether consciously or not). Hence, identification varies depending on the self’s interests in land, capital, and employment, and how the other might impact those interests. The remaining analysis explores how, to what degree, and to what effect, white settler culture employs these strategies.