Fear of a Diluted Blackness (original) (raw)

Pioneering Racism in Post-Racial Canada

In our conversations on racism, when we acknowledge the dozens of black youth slain in the streets of America, we must too acknowledge the hundreds of Canadian Indigenous women that are murdered and missing in the same breath. Aside from the emotional distress and physical removal of Aboriginal peoples, tar sands and the consequent environmental pollution they cause have led to the mass destruction of Aboriginal communities, promising nothing short of steadily climbing cancer rates. How can we as Canadians, who so proudly beat our chests upon hearing terms like “post-racial” and “multiculturalism”, wade through the ignorance which drowns our own people?

Ghosts and Shadows: A History of Racism in Canada

A history of racism reinforces discrimination and exploitation of racialized immigrants in general and African-Canadians in particular. My paper contends that historically institutionalized structures are the ideological fulcrum from which ongoing socio-economic inequalities derive and retain their legitimacy. Specifically, I argue that the historically institutionalized system of slavery and ensuing systemic structures of racial discrimination negatively influence the incorporation of racialized immigrants into the Canadian labour market. A historically racially segmented labour market continues to uphold colour coded social and economic hierarchies. Although Canada's point system ensures that immigrants are primarily selected on the basis of their skills and qualifications, many professionally trained and experienced racialized immigrants endure perpetual socio-economic constraints, characterized primarily by low-end, precarious forms of employment. While not intended to serve as an exhaustive chronology, this essay draws on three historical periods of Black migration and experience in Canada: the first spans early sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth-century, the second dates from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, and the third extends from mid-twentieth century to the present. The following historical timeline traces the prevalence and enduring nature of systemic structures and substantiates Abigail suggestion that both "racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were and remain endemic to the Canadian state" (p. 6).

Why I Killed Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History in Canada

Histoire sociale / Social History, 2000

Anti-racism provides the basis for a richer understanding of the past, an understanding that is potentially more sensitive to the requirements of generally accepted standards of historical criticism than is the nationalist framework that shapes most historical writing about Canada. An anti-racist history takes seriously the existence of racisms and asks questions about their roles in shaping institutions and experiences, including those of dominant groups. It encompasses previously excluded meanings through a broader understanding of the historical record: written, oral, and material. It views the rise of nationalism and nation-states within the larger context of European colonialism, transforming nationalist projects (such as the making of Canada) into historical problems to be explained, rather than taking them for granted as organizing devices for the study of the past. It allows questions to be asked about how some identities come to be seen as fixed, how certain ones become normalized and others marginalized. Anti-racism thus has the potential to develop a better history than the nationalist one whose loss is lamented by J. L. Granatstein in Who Killed Canadian History?.

Race, Racism, and Empire: Reflections on Canada

2005

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE SEEKS TO INSPIRE CROSS-BORDER DIALOGUES between academics and activists on the ways "race," racism, and empire are being theorized and experienced on the ground. In particular, we would like to focus attention on the unique manner in which race, racism, and empire are articulated in the Canadian context. Canada provides an interesting site for investigations on race, racism, and empire. On the one hand, it has a long history of indigenous colonization, white settlement policies, settlement of people of color through racialized immigration polices, participation in free-trade regimes, and in British and U.S. imperialist agendas. On the other hand, Canada is located in a peripheral location within Western hegemony and is characterized in national mythology as a nation innocent of racism. In the postwar period, state policies of multiculturalism have represented Canada as a welcoming haven for immigrants and refugees, while in reality thes...

Documenting and Reinterpreting the Excluded: Black Canada's Histories and Literatures

Although the title and theoretical underpinnings of Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past are inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, his work is quite distinct, as he analyzes black Canada (particularly black Canadian literature) as intricate and essential to, yet largely ignored or convoluted in, theories of the black Atlantic and transatlantic slavery studies. Acknowledging that these omissions are symptoms of the exclusions of black Canada within broader Canadian histories and literatures, Siemerling conducts a thorough and detailed study of the important local and transnational possibilities of these works. Indeed, Siemerling emphasizes a different map, with additional times, spaces, perspectives and accounts, routed through black Canadian writings. He balances the flawed possibilities of the Canadian context throughout his analysis, by navigating the ways that certain legal and political conditions of what is now Canada made important black texts and networks possible and impossible.