FIGHTING FEELINGS: RACIAL VIOLENCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

by

Gulzar Raisa Charania

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Gulzar Raisa Charania 2015

 

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FIGHTING FEELINGS: RACIAL VIOLENCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Gulzar Raisa Charania Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto

2015

Abstract

This dissertation explores how women of colour live with and learn about racism.

Through interviews, I mine microsites and memories of early racial aggression to

examine their enduring effects and the varied meanings and practices that they produce.

Integrating insights from feminist, critical race, queer and Foucauldian analytics, I trace

understandings of racism formed under pressure from neoliberal interpretations of racial

oppression and its attendant remedies. Principally, this study gives an account of racism

and its effects and traces the accounts of racism that it is possible for people of colour to

give. Women of colour are often caught between feelings and experiences that

materialize oppression in their daily lives—and dominant postracial and neoliberal

horizons that evacuate collective histories, politics and a public language with which to

name racism. In other words, racial injury is privatized. I explore the tensions that they

negotiate, of becoming entrepreneurs of the harm and pain that racism deposits in their

lives and throwing responsibility for racism back to the people and conditions that

produce it.

Fighting Feelings: Racial Violence in Everyday Life renders a social, historical and

structural account of encounters with racism, the harm that it leaves behind and the

divergent orientations to racial politics that it engenders. Attending to women of

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colour’s everyday lives reveals and challenges the power of standardized accounts of

racism that spatially and temporally contain racism to other times, places and people. In

harder to find moments, racial and social justice materialize as a possibility and

aspiration. I consider the conditions that cultivate it, the openings that it affords and

sometimes, how hard it is to hold onto.

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Acknowledgements I welcome this opportunity, at long last, to thank all of the people who helped me to arrive at this acknowledgements page. I was fortunate to benefit from the guidance of an exceptional dissertation committee. It has been a privilege to be supervised by Sherene Razack. Sherene’s impressive scholarship and unwavering commitment to critical race studies created the conditions for me to do this work. The rigour and precision with which she thinks and works have been an inspiration. I am grateful for everything, Sherene – the questions that returned me to the work in renewed ways, your ability to know where I was going when I didn’t, your attentive engagement with the work and for showing me what it means to be so deeply committed to racial justice. Kari Dehli has also been a profound force in my thinking. Her insights and vast knowledge improved my work considerably. Kari introduced me, through her teaching and scholarship, to methodological questions that helped me to think through some very difficult impasses in this project. Thank-you Kari, for letting me follow you into retirement, for the generosity with which you shared your time and knowledge, for encouraging me to think more deeply about schools and for your attention to commas and the most substantive of issues. When I started my graduate program, students advised me to take a course with D. Alissa Trotz. Very quickly, I understood why. Alissa is a remarkable thinker. Her encouragement, sharp questions and pointed challenges extended my thinking in significant ways. I am grateful to you, Alissa, for demanding more and for reminding me of the limits of my thinking in the best possible way. Minelle Mahtani was a meticulous and generous reader. Her insights turned me in directions that I have not yet sufficiently thought and I am very appreciative of her attentive reading and support. My sincere gratitude to my external examiner, Philomena Essed, for her careful and thoughtful engagement with this work. She asked some very difficult questions about my project for which I am grateful. She reminded me, as does her scholarship, what is at stake for people in their struggles against everyday racism. It was an honour to share this work with you. Thank-you for doing the work that you do so that I could do this work. To Miglena Todorova, for asking me to think again about pain and methodology and to Lisa Kramer for being so wonderfully encouraging at my defense, thank-you. To the participants in this project: thank-you for your generosity and courage in sharing what it means to learn about racism and live daily with its effects. This project would not be possible without you. I am grateful for the many ways that you enriched, shaped and challenged my thinking. I hope that our collective thinking about racism in the pages that follow will have some resonance. My time as a Teaching Assistant and Instructor in the Equity Studies Program at the University of Toronto was so rewarding and foundational to this project. To the fantastic group of students whom I taught over the years, thank-you for making the classroom such a vibrant, generative and challenging space. So much of this work and my thinking came from the many years I spent with you. June Larkin and the whole Equity Studies team

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taught me so much about teaching and learning and it was wonderful to work so closely with them. While writing this dissertation, I thought often about my work in the Equity Department at the Toronto District School Board. From Terezia Zoric, Alice Te, Ken Jeffers, Patricia Hayes, Nadia Bello, Jamie Berrigan, Verna Lister, Jennifer Zurba, Vanessa Russell and many others, I learned about the tenacity and pragmatism that it takes to advance equity within institutional constraints. Thank-you to them and to the awesome teachers and students in public education with whom I worked - so many of the problems we jointly tried to address continue to animate my work. I thank the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their generous support of my doctoral studies. I am grateful to the many people who, over the years, have provided important feedback, helped to demystify the doctoral process and been so generous in sharing their own process of thinking and working. Thanks goes to: Lance McCready, Roland Coloma Sintos, Sheryl Nestel, Nadine Naber, Kate Cairns, Lynn Caldwell, Suzanne Lenon, Vannina Sztainbok, Shaista Patel, Kate Milley, Anne O’Connell, Teresa Macías, Catherine Burwell, Vivian Jimenez, Tammy George and the amazing group of scholars in the thesis support group. I have learned so much from George Dei’s long-standing commitment to anti-racist education. Working with him and a committed team of researchers was an invaluable part of my graduate experience. Carmela Murdocca has always made herself available for any request – no matter how big or small. In the early days of this project as I tried to understand my own very preliminary thinking about racial violence, her engagement was invaluable and her friendship continues to be. Though I do not see them often enough, Sheila Batacharya and Harjeet Badwall are friends and scholars from whom I learn so much. They have been critical in helping me to persevere at difficult times. To Gada Mahrouse, thank-you for endlessly listening to me think my way through this project, for refining countless drafts and for facilitating this research in too many ways to count. Your patience, brilliance, thoughtful questions and encouragement carried me so far. In addition to all of this, you gave me a home in Montreal. Thank-you isn’t enough. Ruthann Lee and R. Cassandra Lord, what a long journey it has been. For the trade in citations, feedback on drafts, ideas to consider and reconsider but above all, for your friendship and love, I am grateful beyond words. Your constancy and commitment helped me to endure when I couldn’t see tomorrow. You have both enriched this project and my life in innumerable ways. On so many pages of this work, I see the presence of your amazing scholarship, our shared conversations and even our sharp disagreements. Your insistence that I reach further in my work and stay open to all that I don’t know is a gift. To my faithful family, I am grateful for the love, laughter, wonderful meals, open doors to your homes, excellent distractions, endless texts and emails to keep me going. Feisel Haji, Alain Coulombe, Zamil Janmohamed, Sherdil Hussein, Amanda Hotrum, Charlie

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Pullen, Effie & Izzy, Laurie Vaillancourt, Juan Jaime Barreto, Isabella, Dawn Machado-Parker, Tony Parker, Ian & Claire, Tabish Surani, Stephanie Faubert, Josephine Itéla, Malik Cocherel, Kymani & Shyeim, Annamie Paul, Fayyaz Vellani, R. Cassandra Lord, Ruthann Lee, Anne-Marie Estrada, Gada Mahrouse, Zarin Charania and Adam Smith Charania - life is sweeter because of you all. To Marilyn, for all of the care that you have extended to me and for never looking away from racial violence and all of the losses that it entails, I am grateful. You played no small part in helping me to get here. I grew up in a house where we were not allowed to put books on the ground, nor were we allowed to touch them with our feet. Both my mother and my maternal grandmother strictly enforced this edict. From this and from them, I learned that knowledge is sacred and ideas are important. My life has been shaped by this idea about ideas. I am very grateful to my family for instilling in me a desire to learn. To my parents and siblings, thank-you for making much of my learning possible and for not giving up on a kid who learned so slowly and with so much difficulty. I remember and I am grateful to you all. To my mom and brother, the last few years were made possible through your love. Smith, your tough love texts and constant presence saw me to the end and always gave me something to laugh about, even when I was far from laughing. Ma, for all of the ways that you have loved, cared for and protected me and my family, there are no words. Thank-you for always being there, for teaching me how strong the force of love is and for helping me to pass it on. So much of this dissertation was written to the rhythm of Baabar Bear, snoring at my feet. He teaches me daily about trauma, second chances and the capacity to be family across species. To Jamila Sofia who bursts into the house with so much life and noise and so many stories from the day, thank-you for insisting that I look up from my desk. I am inspired by your most creative use and invention of words and the excellent questions that you ask about the work. Thank-you for enduring my absences with such a big heart and for giving me so many wonderful and worrying reasons to write. I hope that in these words and ideas, you will find some protection and guidance without giving up on a world in which none of these words are necessary. Finally, for Sabrina, for more than two decades, you have been my most critical and encouraging reader. Among other reasons, I write to convince you. You have lived daily with this dissertation for a very long time. For all that you have done and given up for me to pursue this work, for always believing in its importance and my ability to do it, I thank-you. More than anyone I know, you have lived so many losses because of your decisions to love. That you remain such a deeply loving and ethical person is a testament to the beauty and strength of your spirit. It is to you that I dedicate this dissertation.

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Table of Contents

Abstract  .......................................................................................................................................  ii  

Acknowledgements  ................................................................................................................  iv  

Table  of  Contents  ...................................................................................................................  vii  Introduction  ..............................................................................................................................  1  People  of  Colour  .................................................................................................................................  7  White  People/Whiteness  .............................................................................................................  10  Dissertation  Overview  by  Chapter  ...........................................................................................  12  

Chapter  1:    Theoretical  Anchors  and  Openings  ..........................................................  19  Historicizing  the  Post-­‐Racial  Turn:    What  is  Racism?  ........................................................  20  Foucault  and  Liberalism  ..............................................................................................................  26  Racial  Neoliberalism  .....................................................................................................................  29  Racism  and  Interlocking  Oppressions  ....................................................................................  36  Negotiating  Racism  in  Multicultural  Canada  .........................................................................  39  Canadian  Neoliberal  Multiculturalism  ....................................................................................  42  Race  and  the  Everyday  ..................................................................................................................  48  Feeling  Racism  .................................................................................................................................  53  Power,  Resistance  and  Everyday  Politics  ...............................................................................  58  

Chapter  2:    Methodology  and  Research  Dilemmas  ....................................................  64  Recruiting  Participants  ................................................................................................................  64  Criteria  for  Participation  .............................................................................................................  65  Interviews  .........................................................................................................................................  67  Negotiating  Interviews  .................................................................................................................  71  On  Demographic  Disclosures  or  “Who  are  the  Participants?”  ........................................  75  Who  Am  I?  .........................................................................................................................................  79  Experience  ........................................................................................................................................  83  From  Interviews  to  Analysis  .......................................................................................................  88  On  Making  Arguments  With  People’s  Lives  or  Neoliberal  Methodologies  ..................  93  Clue  1:    Rationalities  in  Research  ..........................................................................................................  98  Clue  2:    On  Pain  and  Telling  Stories  ...................................................................................................  102  Clue  3:    Trading  Pain  for  Proof  .............................................................................................................  107  Clue  4:    Becoming  a  Neoliberal  Researcher  ....................................................................................  111  

Chapter  3:    Early  Racial  Pedagogies  –  Becoming  ......................................................  114  Inheriting  Silence:    Feelings  That  Have  No  Name  ..............................................................  119  Struggles  for  Language  ...............................................................................................................  136  Inheriting  Words  for  Feelings  ..................................................................................................  139  Family  Stories  ..............................................................................................................................................  150  Burdensome  Inheritances  ......................................................................................................................  165  

Conclusion  ......................................................................................................................................  173  Chapter  4:    Lessons  in  Racism  ........................................................................................  179  Neelam  .............................................................................................................................................  186  Connecting  Stories  With  Racial  Hierarchies  ..................................................................................  191  

Turns  to  and  Away  From  Race  .................................................................................................  200  

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Usha  ...................................................................................................................................................  216  Being  “Good”  to  Get  Out  From  Under  Racism  ...............................................................................  224  

Dhanya  .............................................................................................................................................  236  Refusals  to  Learn  .......................................................................................................................................  247  

Conclusion  ......................................................................................................................................  253  Chapter  5:    Shiny  Bodies  ...................................................................................................  260  Quiet  Queers:    Reflections  on  Queer  Horizons  ...................................................................  263  Neelam  ............................................................................................................................................................  263  Dianah  .............................................................................................................................................................  278  Nur  ...................................................................................................................................................................  287  

On  Shiny  Bodies  ............................................................................................................................  297  Anti-­‐Black  Complicities  ..............................................................................................................  309  Shani  ................................................................................................................................................................  312  Nimat  ...............................................................................................................................................................  316  

Conclusion  ......................................................................................................................................  324  Chapter  6:    Living  the  Nation  ..........................................................................................  329  National  Belongings  and  Evictions  .........................................................................................  333  Salimah  ...........................................................................................................................................................  333  Neelam  ............................................................................................................................................................  337  Dhanya  ............................................................................................................................................................  338  Usha  .................................................................................................................................................................  340  Forget  Racism  ..............................................................................................................................................  342  Am  I  Canadian?  ...........................................................................................................................................  348  “Good”  Multicultural  Subjects  ..............................................................................................................  351  “Other”  Places  ..............................................................................................................................................  355  

On  Silences  and  Colonial  Containments  ...............................................................................  360  Schooled  in  Settler  Colonial  Complicities  ........................................................................................  362  Reduced  to  a  Paragraph  ..........................................................................................................................  363  Small  Openings  ...........................................................................................................................................  367  Indigenous  Settler  Relations  .................................................................................................................  370  Entangled  Histories  ..................................................................................................................................  374  Auditing  Privilege  and  Oppression  ....................................................................................................  382  

Conclusion  ......................................................................................................................................  385  Coda  ...................................................................................................................................................  391  

Conclusion:    From  Racial  Injury  to  Anti-­‐Racism  .......................................................  392  The  Way  Forward  .........................................................................................................................  401  Coda:  Times  Before  ......................................................................................................................  407  

Appendices  ...........................................................................................................................  410  Appendix  A:    Request  to  Participate  in  Research  Project  ...............................................  411  Appendix  B:    Information  Letter  for  Participants  for  Interviews  and  Informed  Consent  Protocol  ..........................................................................................................................  412  Appendix  C:    Interview  Questionnaire  ..................................................................................  416  

References  .............................................................................................................................  419  

 

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Introduction  This dissertation has many beginnings. For now, we will start with a story and a dinner

party that I attended many years ago. It was late, much food had been eaten and drinks

consumed. The light mood and uproarious laughter gave way to more serious

conversations. Things got quieter. There were only four of us left, all people of colour.

A woman, whom I call Sara, told a story.1 It was a story that she had never told and it

was a story that I couldn’t forget. It was 1979, Sara was in grade 6 and she lived in a new

publicly subsidized housing subdivision with many young families. Because there was

not a school close by, Sara and the other neighbourhood kids, were bussed to and from

the closest school. The kids would meet at central pick-up points and were dropped off at

the end of the day in groups. Describing herself as brown, Sara recalls another brown

student. Her name was Fatima but she like to be called Fati. Fati was hassled both on

and off the bus, called racist names, and chased and pushed around. Sara recalls that at

some point and she assumes, partly because of these incidents, Fatima was dropped off

before the other students, not at the common drop off place. Sara speculates that the

point of this was to make it harder for the kids to rough up Fatima as she walked home.

Instead, Fatima’s earlier drop off turned into a challenge for Sara and other students to

“chase the kid down.” Sara remembers their renewed efforts to catch Fatima, “the people

who were sprinting after her were the athletes. It was a bunch of white kids and me. I

don’t remember calling her names but I know that I did. I remember very much being

                                                                                                               1 I use pseudonyms for all of the people who appear in this study.

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involved but I wasn’t the leader. I almost remember having a feeling that the kid was not

human. It felt justified.”

With her permission, I wrote one of my course papers about this incident, a paper that

Sara read. She deeply regretted what she had done and though she found it exceedingly

difficult to remember it, she also said that it was important to think about why she and

others had been so cruel and hateful to Fati. As the years passed, Sara reflected in more

pronounced ways about the school’s response to the violence. She wondered why

teachers and school officials hadn’t done more to stop her and the other kids from hurting

Fatima. The lesson that all the children had been instructed in was to run faster – not to

stop the violence. It stuck with me, what had happened and even many decades later, it

was so raw and deeply imprinted in Sara’s life. Then and now, I was curious about the

effects of racial violence in Sara’s life and the lives of other people of colour.2 How and

in what directions do we learn to think, act and live in relation to racism?

This dissertation has also another set of coordinates that can be found in my work as a

teaching assistant and instructor in an interdisciplinary social justice program at the

undergraduate level. It was a program that attracted many racialized students, some of

whom did not have linear educational trajectories. At the same time that I was reading

and thinking about how to think about racism and its organization and effects, I was also

teaching, preparing lectures and marking their assignments. Many took a course in the

                                                                                                               2 Many of the terms deployed throughout the dissertation, including racism, racial violence and racial literacy are defined in detail in Chapter 1. I explain how I use the terms people of colour, whiteness, white people and racialized people later in the introduction. In brief, the terms race and racial are used to refer to “various designations of group differentiation” while the term racist refers to the “exclusions prompted or promoted by racial reference” whether intended or not (Goldberg 1993:2).

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program as an elective, out of interest, and others came searching for a place where they

could think in more sustained ways about the social organization of oppression, its

histories and contemporary resonances. Over the years, I came into contact with students

with varying degrees of fluency around issues of racism, equity and social justice. I

became increasingly curious about their political formation, about their struggles with

and insights into racism and social change. How were they living with and learning

about racism?

In one of my tutorials, as usual, I opened the class asking if students had questions,

comments or anything that they wanted to put on the table for discussion. Afua, one of

the students, started to share how difficult some of the materials were to read, not only for

that week, but in general. When I asked her to say more about the difficulties she was

having, she talked about what it meant, for her, to be a black person reading histories of

slavery, displacement and racism and the force of these systems in her life and the lives

of the people she loves. As she talked, she placed her forehead on the table and she wept.

For a long time, there was our collective silence, broken by the sound of her sobs. Other

students started to share their own experiences of racism and all of the harms that it

deposits in their lives, their struggles with professors and police officers, finding

employment and housing but most of all, how exhausting and despairing it was, to live

with racism and sometimes, even to learn about it. In the midst of our conversation, a

student arrived to tutorial late. He was white. Everyone stopped talking.

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Both of these incidents and difficult disclosures took place in people of colour spaces.

This wasn’t entirely surprising to me. As Sherene Razack points out, “few people of

colour have ever considered learning in a mixed-race environment as safe” (1998:48).

What was surprising was how ill equipped I was to respond to these incidents. Teaching

about anti-racism and social justice in spaces comprised primarily of racialized students

was new to me. Much of my earlier anti-racist efforts and most of my educational life

had been lived in white dominated spaces. As a result, my thinking, reading and

strategies for teaching were shaped by the political imperative to make whiteness visible

and interrupt it. Sara, Afua and the students whom I was encountering in university

classrooms insisted that I think more about the complexity and effects of racist realities

for racialized people. The genealogy of this project lies in my desire to understand this

complexity more and better.

In her often cited description of how an Africanist personal contains, shapes and enables

American literature and identity, Toni Morrison describes, in beautiful detail, the contents

of a fishbowl: “the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white

careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny,

intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the

tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface.” It goes almost unnoticed but Morrison

suddenly points out the “bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the

ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world” (Morrison 1993:17). As she further

points out, “it requires hard work not to see this ” (1993:17, emphasis in original). I

adapt Morrison’s fishbowl to reference the ways in which racialized people apprehend

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structures and systems of racism. How do people of colour learn to see, articulate and

live with racism? What are the lessons it imparts? Where are they learned? What does

racism do to them and what do they do in response? In short, how do they come to see

the fishbowl and what difference does this seeing make? It turns out that learning to see

the bowl, seeing racism also requires a lot of labour and sometimes, there are incentives

for people of colour not to see. As much as racial literacies (Twine 2010:92) are

cultivated, this dissertation illuminates that they are also powerfully curtailed.

As I reflected on the story that Sara told, Fatima was familiar to me. I had also learned to

run. Because we only know the story as Sara remembers it, we don’t know how it shaped

Fati, if at all. How would she tell the story? Is the memory of it something that she

carries with her? The story, however, was an opportunity to think more broadly about the

racial landscapes in which people of colour find themselves and how they make sense of

and respond to them. As I learned in the process of researching and writing this project,

the distance between familiarity and understanding can be significant. Things that I

recognized on the surface, certain responses to racism, for example, were much more

complex than I expected. This became evident when I talked to people about the diffuse

and long-term effects of racism in their lives and how they had come to take up certain

positions and practices in response to it, rather than others.

Sara was much less familiar to me. I was curious about her and what she had learned

about racism but thinking about Sara was not easy. She opens up a set of questions about

how people of colour not only contest racial hierarchies, but also contribute to their

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reproduction. In other words, race is not without complications (Farley 1997:492).

How did Sara try to take cover from racism in ways that took the ‘heat off’ her but also

intensified the ‘heat’ for Fatima? My work attempts to capture a range of negotiations

with racism but it is not an effort to mitigate Sara’s violence or to rescue her, but more a

commitment to maintaining clarity around the differential impacts of and invitations into

whiteness, for both Sara and Fatima. It is these differentiations and specificities that I

attempt to centre, while not losing sight of the racial hierarchies into which they are

folded.

To return to Afua, she and the other students insisted that I take weeping and feeling

seriously. This has been difficult for me. People of colour often do risky things like

weep and feel in private. In public, some of us organize, trace how racism works, teach,

compile evidence and sort out ways to interrupt racist practices. Little material in a

yearlong course responded to her despair and to that of other students, to the affective

landscapes through which oppression is so often lived and that accompanied the historical

and contemporary practices that we pored over in readings, week after week. We studied

racism as a set of practices and ideas. What to do with feelings in a university

classroom? What to do with feelings in a dissertation? These became pressing questions

in the analysis and writing of this project. In some ways, this dissertation is an effort to

understand and respond to the despair and privatization of racial harm in the lives of

people of colour. I amplify stories never told, those remembered very quietly or those

that people of colour have tried desperately and imperfectly to forget. What and how do

they remember? What produces the forgetting? Listening to participants also evoked far

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away memories from my own life and in some places I’ve included them. I excavate the

labour and potential of returning to these memories, however difficult and fraught, as

well as the incentives for people of colour to keep them buried.

Secretly, I wanted to find people of colour committed to social justice. What I ended up

with is a much more complicated and nuanced picture of real people engaged in big and

small struggles of everyday life. Sometimes the incentives to keep things the same are

very powerful as are the risks and punishments for doing anything else. This observation

is not an indictment of the women in this study or a critique of their political analysis and

action or inaction (Gould 2009:19). As Sara Ahmed observes, “‘doing things’ depends

not so much on intrinsic capacity or even on dispositions or habits, but on the ways in

which the world is available as a space for action” (2006:109). In other words, there are

conditions that produce and make possible certain forms of thinking, speaking and acting

in relation to racism. I pay attention to these social, national and institutional constraints

that the women inherit and navigate. In harder to find moments, social justice does

materialize as a possibility and aspiration and I consider the conditions that cultivate it,

the openings that it affords and sometimes, how hard it is to hold onto it.

People of Colour Throughout the dissertation, I use the terms people of colour and racialized people

interchangeably to describe the participants. These terms do not refer to some essential

quality about people who are non-white but are used to draw attention to how

racialization works as a process to classify people in racial terms (Murji and Solomos

2005:3). Throughout the dissertation, my use of the term people of colour as a category

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has been both useful and limiting.3 Categories can conceal and they can illuminate. At

times, I came up against the limitations of not being able to theorize the racial

experiences, migration histories or specificities of racism and racial formation as they

relate to a specific racial group. Even though I did not set out to report back on specific

racial groups, racism works by classifying, sorting and arranging people in various

hierarchies and so in specific instances, anti-black racism or Islamophobia, for example,

became particularly relevant in how participants experienced, learned to understand and

respond to racism. Andrea Smith explains that white supremacy works through distinct

but interrelated logics, what she calls the three pillars of Slavery/Capitalism,

Genocide/Colonialism and Orientalism/War. In these pillars, black people, Indigenous

peoples and Oriental others are turned into enslaveable, always disappearing and inferior

populations (Smith 2006:67-69). The pillars do not only oppress people of colour, they

are productive in offering the ability to participate in the oppression of others.

At times, the category people of colour or racialized people comes apart or shows its

cracks under pressure from specific racial formations or it can’t stand up to specific work

required from heterogeneous racial experiences. So while I give up some of the richness

of “particular histories of resistance and domination” (Walcott 2003:27), I find the term

people of colour analytically useful and politically relevant because of the ways that

racism both differentiates racialized people but also flattens out people and communities

through racial designations. As Stuart Hall observes, the violence of slavery unified

                                                                                                               3 Thanks to Tiffany King and Ruthann Lee and R. Cassandra Lord, discussant and co-panelists respectively, at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference in 2013, for pressing me to think about my use of this category.

9

diverse black people and communities across differences (2005:238). Contemporary

racial hierarchies can accomplish a similar simplifying unification. Just as people of

colour are produced through distinct and specific racist interactions, histories and

designations, racism can also produce people of colour as homogenous and

undifferentiated racial others.4

I rely on M. Jacqui Alexander’s notion of “analytic agility” (2005:10) to embrace a

practice that is less invested in a particular category or way of naming and more open to

the most effective way of naming in relation to specific political goals and contexts. I do

appreciate that at times, the category people of colour or racialized people may not be the

most useful or illuminating. Racism is not a monolithic, homogenous structure and it

works unevenly, within and across what we read as racial groups, and in concert with and

through multiple forms of oppression, in specific times and places. As such, it can

conceal racial distinctions that matter a great deal and in a few cases, I take the term apart

to examine these tensions. In this project, I use the category people of colour, with all of

its limitations, as it enables me to call attention to the collective forms of harm that

racism produces.5

                                                                                                               4 At times, I use the pronoun “we” in the dissertation. It is used to include myself within people of colour communities and other times, I use it to include myself in a community of people invested in social justice and change, some of whom may be racialized. 5 My use of the term, however, does not signal a collective sense of politics or political formation among the women I interviewed. While women of colour feminists have commented on the use of the term to signal an oppositional politics or political communities organized around gender and racial justice (Melamed 2011; Alexander 2005; Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Bannerji 1995; Moraga and Anzaldua 1981) the participants do not necessarily embrace the term nor do they uniformly reflect a commitment to political action or formation in this way.

10

White People/Whiteness When I refer to white people or whiteness, I similarly employ the term not to reference

something essential about a group identifiable as white. Rather, I draw attention to the

social and historical production of this racial category (Frankenberg 1993:21). Like the

term people of colour, whiteness is lived complexly and always in relation to gender,

class and other social locations. However, whiteness is also marked in relation to non-

whiteness as a position of “dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than

marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage” (Frankenberg 1993:237). This is

important in locating all people within racial terms and hierarchies, not only people of

colour. Racial distinctions are not simply matters that one can opt out of nor are they

wholly determinant. As David Goldberg argues, whiteness is a “structural condition”

(2002:195) but he and other critical race scholars add that whiteness does not only

reference skin colour. Ghassan Hage, for example, observes that whiteness also

encompasses a range of cultural practices including habits, customs, language, looks,

values and religion (2000:54, 58). In her work on how race shapes the lives of white

women, Ruth Frankenberg demonstrates that whiteness is a “set of cultural practices”

(2005/1993:1) that are historically situated and materially embedded in the lives,

behaviours and privileges of white women. In her meticulous archival work on Dutch

colonial policies, Ann Stoler demonstrates that biology alone did not secure or deny

racial entitlements but rather, racial privilege required the cultivation and performance of

proper cultural competencies (Stoler 2002:11,17) or in Goldberg’s words, “mores and

manners, values and virtues” (2002:206). Thinking of race in this way clarifies the

management and regulation required to produce race on bodies that are themselves

11

produced. By this, I mean that something recognizable as race is the product or effect of

material and discursive practices.

These scholars illuminate the social construction of race, its embeddedness in particular

historical and contemporary arrangements as well as the ways in which racism and racial

discourses are premised both on the visual and the linking of the physiological to more

ambiguous and hidden internal attributes such as morality and character (Coleman 2006;

Goldberg 2009:38; Stoler 1995:8-11). Thinking of whiteness as a way of being, thinking

and living, relies in principle on the idea that all can develop such qualities, the illusion

that anyone can embody such standards and enjoy their accompanying privileges, though

as Goldberg points out, this turns out “not quite” (2002:173) to be the case. It is in this

space of racial categories being made and remade, that I return to Ghassan Hage. As he

argues, the process of accumulating whiteness is not a process that all engage in on equal

terms as there are those who escape this struggle (2000:61). Hage also insists that

Whiteness itself is not sufficient to secure forms of belonging but rather, there is a

process through which such accumulation must be recognized by others (2000:52-53).

Importantly, Hage goes on to point out how productive this logic of accumulation is in

creating the belief that capital can be accumulated by anybody and it therefore creates the

incentive to “‘play the game’” (2000:63). It is how people who are racialized are invited

into this game and its unevenness that interests me. The apparent flexibility of whiteness

and its need to be manufactured alongside its stability and clarity as a category is useful

for my project. The narratives that shape this dissertation reveal how this idea is

productive and present in the lives of racialized peoples. Racism is not only something

12

that harms and constrains, it is also something that invites and seduces (Said 1979:7;

Farley 1997:476). I trace how people of colour identify and navigate this racial

landscape. Pausing and peering into their “bargain[s] with racism” (Puar 1996:132), I

suggest, can be instructive for illuminating their and our embeddedness in and responses

to racial arrangements and hierarchies.

Dissertation Overview by Chapter Chapter 1 of this dissertation sets out the theoretical anchors that ground this project. I

draw on an interdisciplinary analytic through which to explore the interface of histories of

racism and racial consolidation, the big picture of racism, with the ways that it shapes and

shows up in the everyday (Knowles 2003; Essed 1991). I historicize the post-racial and

neoliberal landscapes so that in subsequent chapters, I can consider how they contain,

direct and make available certain interpretive resources through which people of colour

are encouraged to understand and articulate their experiences of racial injury.

Chapter 2 explains how I gathered the data for this project and some of the

methodological challenges that I encountered. I describe methods of recruitment,

analysis of the data and introduce the participants of this study. The second part of this

chapter lays bare some of the tensions and dilemmas that I faced in conducting this

research. I explore the embeddedness of the research process in relations of power, not

unrelated to the pressures that participants describe finding themselves in, under and

around. In other words, the neoliberal landscape pressed down on me and created

problems in figuring my way through this project. What became clear to me through this

process were the conventions of knowledge production into which the dissertation and

academic knowledge more generally, are expected to conform. I was constrained by

13

these forms but quarrelling with them was also generative. It propelled me to produce

and assemble knowledge in ways that call attention to what the conventions require and

what they leave behind. I work this tension in the dissertation, offering up some

conventions, because they are expected and useful and turning away from others because

they do not allow me to understand and explore the lives and struggles of people in

colour in ways that I wanted. In this chapter, I outline some of these ways.

The subsequent four chapters centralize the experiences and reflections of participants in

this study. Each chapter explores how people of colour live with and learn about racism

with a different focus point - families, schools and the nation.6 Schools are persistent in

this dissertation as a place where racism is routinely encountered and one that notably

influences the racial literacies and practices that participants develop. While schools,

family and the nation spill over between chapters, the following chapter framework

provides a loose roadmap for readers. Chapter 3 primarily concerns itself with the

prominent place of early racial memories in the emergence of racial literacies. The home,

school, childhood, family stories, and parental instruction all mingle together as the

women return to memories that are both difficult to remember and forget. The memories

                                                                                                               6 Readers looking to find a sustained engagement with the university will be disappointed. While the university experience and present lives of participants feature prominently in the interviews and in some ways, set this project in motion, it is not centralized here in the way that I expected it would be. When asking people about their university experiences and “education in racism” (Cheng 2001:21), virtually all of the participants referred back and at length to their earlier educational experiences and in some cases, their childhoods. It wasn’t something that I could easily gloss over or even contain and I chose not to. Instead, I decided to more fully attend to how these earlier experiences shape orientations to racism, learning and their own educational futures. In the concluding chapter of this dissertation, I return to the fact that while I set out to study participants’ current lives and learnings about racism, what I ended up with is a study that turns its attention to early formative experiences of racism. I reflect on the significance of the connections between stages of schooling and how earlier encounters of racism in schools are relevant for the post-secondary educational experiences of women of colour. A more sustained engagement with participants’ experiences in universities is a promise deferred for a future project.

14

are sometimes small snapshots. Not everyone wanted to talk at length about their

families, childhoods or early encounters with racism but most people discussed how

profoundly they had been shaped by these “inaugural moment[s]” (Hartman 1997:3) with

racial violence. This chapter integrates feminist and feminist of colour autobiographical

scholarship to explore the complexities of racial formation, the histories, forms of

survival and longings for futures into which they are folded. In it, I explore the affective

landscapes through which racism is experienced. Sometimes the women inherit explicit

racial instruction and I trace the intergenerational transmission and reworking of racial

literacies. In other cases, the women are left with feelings that have no name. I explore

how the silences and the words together facilitate shifting orientations to race and racism.

I mine microsites of racial aggression to understand how the political horizons of

participants were caught up in the feelings and meanings that racism produced. This

chapter works towards rendering a social, historical and structural account of encounters

with racism and the harm that it leaves behind.

What racism looked and felt like in schools, how it was lived and how the women in this

study live with its memories form the heart of Chapter 4. I draw extensively on critical

race scholars in education to illuminate how racism operates but is dismissed and denied

in schooling contexts. This chapter traces the profound consequences of these

institutional practices on the women of colour and intervenes squarely in post-racial and

post-feminist turns in educational discourses. As I argue in the chapter, women of colour

often fall through the “posts” in both post-racial and post-feminist landscapes. I take

seriously the often quiet desperation of girls and young women of colour in schools.

15

Despite their academic success, I account for the many ways that schools fail and harm

them and trace the different orientations to race, schooling and futures that they develop.

This chapter attempts to strengthen feminist contributions to critical race studies and lend

critical race insights to feminist interventions in educational studies. It also endeavours

to deepen and suggest more expansive ways of reading the relationship between schools,

emotions, race and resistance. Building on the larger preoccupation of this dissertation, I

continue to centralize how structural conditions of racism and oppression are lived and

racial literacies developed. I consider the interpretations available for people of colour to

understand and articulate their experiences of racial injury and the many ways that young

women of colour are encouraged to quietly master and overcome the pain that racism

deposits in their lives.

While Chapters 3 and 4 centralize the question of how people of colour live with racism

and what it teaches them, Chapters 5 and 6 deepen and complicate that question. In

Chapter 5, I investigate relations within and between racialized communities. This

chapter takes seriously interlocking forms of power and centralizes the importance of

gender and sexuality to racial formation. Once again, school features centrally in the

narratives and analysis in this chapter. This chapter has three major focus points. First, I

illuminate how and why queer women of colour can so easily go missing, particularly in

high schools. Just as the previous chapter followed quiet desperation, this chapter

considers ways of being queer that require nuanced readings of queer desire, partly

attributable to the pressures and vulnerabilities that racism and heteropatriarchy create in

the women’s lives. Participants’ reflections about and negotiations of family, spirituality

16

and survival illuminate queer aspirations that push Western definitions and practices of

queerness. Sometimes they lived and expressed their queerness quietly. Secondly, I

consider how centrally women’s bodies are involved in feeling, living and making sense

of racism and heteropatriarchy. I gather these retrospective memories together to explore

how the desire for whiteness and white femininity is about aspirations for educational

success and more secure futures. They try to get closer to whiteness because they

understand well the social and institutional worlds they inhabit and their place within

racial hierarchies. It is a strategy, not simply an expression of self-loathing. I end this

chapter with a section that looks at anti-black racism. How racial literacies are developed

not only in relation to whiteness but between racialized communities is important in the

lives of the women of colour. They puzzle over the relationships between black and

brown communities in particular. Their troubling observations and unanswered questions

are important reminders to cultivate vigilance towards invitations into white supremacy,

heteropatriarchy and other forms of domination, even while we long for some of the

entitlements and protections they purport to offer. Overall, this chapter insists that in

order to improve the lives and conditions of schooling for women of colour, strengthened

interdisciplinary conversations, commitments and crossings between critical race,

feminist and queer scholars in education are required.

Chapter 6, the final data chapter of this dissertation, concerns itself with how racism is

lived and learned in the nation. This chapter is divided into two thematic sections. The

first part of this chapter establishes the racialized underpinnings of citizenship and the

consequences of this for women of colour. I consider how women of colour are offered

17

a place in the nation through multicultural politics that requires racism be forgotten or

privatized. Racism is simply incommensurate with the kind of place Canada is and who

Canadians are or think themselves to be. Once again, schools feature prominently in

cultivating a standardized story of Canada that spatially and temporally contains racism

to other times, places and people. This puts into motion different strategies, of

provisionally embracing, critiquing or repudiating the nation. All of this goes on against

the discursive authority of the nation to adjudicate how, where and when racism is

understood to take place. As I have done throughout the dissertation, here again, I draw

attention to the conditions and constraints under which people of colour are permitted to

think, speak and act in relation to racism.

The second part of this chapter investigates the erasure of settler colonial violence in the

narratives of women of colour. While not surprising, I reflect on this absence and

consider the small openings afforded by a few of the participants to think in more

meaningful ways about settler colonial practices. The question of how to take something

up that is missing or barely there has been a challenge. I am persuaded by the need to

investigate the “primacy of settler colonialism as a logic that structures the world for

everyone” (Simpson and Smith 2014:13). This section refocuses the question of racial

literacy, to ask about the limits of our literacies and what gets bracketed off when we fail

to see across multiple struggles or ask more uncomfortable questions about our own

entanglements in and distancing from struggles which are not seen to be “our” own.

Relying significantly on Native feminist and critical race feminist scholars, this chapter

18

complicates and expands the critical race scholarship in education on which I draw so

extensively throughout this dissertation.

At the end of one of the interviews that I conducted for this research, Lily, one of the

participants, put a series of questions to me. She asked: “What is the point of your

research? What are you trying to do? What does the thing that you produce do?” Big

questions – then and now. The concluding chapter is an effort to respond to some of

these questions, to reflect on the distance between the start and the end, to circle back to

some of the research challenges that have recurred throughout this project and to consider

the contributions that it seeks to make and the questions that it opens up for future

investigation.

 

19

Chapter 1: Theoretical Anchors and Openings  This dissertation is an exploration of how people of colour live with and learn about

racism. My analysis throughout the dissertation focuses on the effects of racial violence,

what racism does to people of colour, and how they develop accounts of and responses to

it. In this chapter, I set out the theoretical resources that help me to think about the

central question that guides the dissertation and I elaborate the important terms and tenets

that shape this work. In each chapter, I highlight a different but related set of theoretical

resources that are more specific to the data under discussion. In this chapter, I bring

together insights from critical race, feminist, poststructural, Foucauldian, sociological,

cultural and political theorists that form the backdrop for this project. My primary goal in

bringing together this interdisciplinary analytic is to historicize the contemporary racial

landscape and to draw on scholars who offer important insights into the workings of

power. How the women of colour interviewed in this study make meaning of and

respond to racism requires that I attend in nuanced ways to the circulation of power and

their efforts to interrupt, redirect or live better with its effects. I historicize the post-racial

neoliberal landscape for two reasons. First, I illustrate the longer liberal trajectory in

which it is embedded and which it extends. Secondly, in subsequent chapters, I consider

how post-racial neoliberalism contains, directs and makes available certain interpretive

resources through which people of colour are encouraged to understand, articulate and

respond to their experiences of racial injury. In short, this is the landscape within which

subjects are navigating and negotiating their lives. In the first part of this chapter, I lay

out the larger racial terrain that forms the backdrop of these struggles in the lives of

20

women of colour. In the second, I explain the various ways that people of colour are

living and navigating these structures.

Historicizing the Post-Racial Turn: What is Racism? Drawing on the work of Mica Pollock, Paul Warmington argues that “there are instances

in which we need to reinstate racial analysis, to talk about race more; there may also be

instances in which we need to talk about race less. The key intellectual (and pedagogic)

challenge though, is to talk about race more skillfully” (2009:283). Through an

elaborated engagement with critical race scholarship, I contend that talking about race

more skillfully requires us to engage with a much longer historical trajectory of racial

emergence and articulation. In particular, one of my goals is to resituate the more

contemporary interest in post or neoliberal racism to a much longer story through which

racism is made both ubiquitous and difficult to discern. The scholars on whom I draw all

seek, in their own ways, to unsettle or reopen Jodi Melamed’s very instructive question,

“what counts as a race matter” (2006:4)? This question turns out to be central as

participants recount the endless contest to contain the meaning of racism or to disappear

it entirely as well as their own struggles to apprehend and word their experiences of

racism.

Barnor Hesse (2004) contends that hegemonic contemporary understandings of racism

mobilize the Jewish holocaust in Europe as the paradigmatic framework for analysis.

Consequently, there has been, in Western political culture, a focus on extremist

ideologies as a distortion of or deviation from “western liberal and democratic” (Hesse

2004:10) thought, practice and institutions. Racism is often understood as an aberration;

it is, Hesse argues, “pointedly associated with excesses, lapses, distortions and

21

derelictions” (2004:10). It is Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow. In

contradistinction to this Eurocentric definition of racism, Hesse posits a subaltern or

de/colonial formation that displaces extremism in place of racial governance and its

“routine governmentality” (2004:9). He argues that Eurocentric ways of defining and

understanding racism disavow the “racialised assemblage of liberalism and colonialism”

(2004:14), the ways in which racism is tethered to nationalism and anchored in liberalism

and liberal democratic institutions (2004:1). Drawing on DuBois and Cesaire, Hesse

points out that the atrocities carried out in the British and French colonies, similar to

those carried out under the Nazi regime, met with little international concern or objection

(2004:16, 19). He also argues that apart from a recentering of Europe, the post WWII

consolidation and discarding of specific meanings and practices of racism efface “the

struggle over the conceptuality of the concept of racism” (2004:20). Hesse elucidates the

profound significance of the Eurocentric definition of racism as the one against which all

other articulations are judged and calibrated. African American subjugation, for

example, becomes not the condition of modernity and liberalism, but rather its exception

(2011:169-170). Hesse forces a reckoning with the question of what constitutes racism

but he also insists on directing us to consider when and where racism is thought to take

place. He exposes the practices and temporality through which racism is contained. To

put it simply, he warns against an interpretation of racism as something that we can point

to in the past, as something that is decidedly and definitely over.

Like Hesse, David Goldberg argues that racist expression and articulation are not

anomalous to liberalism but constitute its emergence and consolidation. While Goldberg

22

recognizes the various schools of thought and interpretations within liberalism, he also

identifies its key presuppositions as follows: its commitment to individualism, universal

principles applicable to all, the principle of reason or rationality, progress through

improvement and finally, its stated commitment to equality (1993:5). He explores the

profound or apparent contradiction between liberalism’s stated blindness and indifference

to and dismissal of colour and race with the actuality of its range of racial practices and

exclusions (Goldberg 1993:6).

Goldberg elaborates two traditions of racial conception, naturalist and historicist or

progressivist commitments (2002:74).7 The former can be summarized by the claim of

inherent racial inferiority of the colonized, naturalizing both positions of slavery and

mastery and fixing the colonized as being incapable of progress, development and

civilization (Goldberg 2002:61,43). The latter historicizes racial inferiority, attributing it

not to some innate and fixed state of being, but rather to one in which racial Others have

the potential for development and advancement from their primitiveness (Goldberg

2002:43). Goldberg argues that these two traditions of racial thinking, of “enslaveability”

and “saveability” (2002:43), are not distinct but coexist in nuanced and uneasy ways and

both have made possible various state forms and practices - the vicious and the

paternalistic (2002:45,74,79). While he details these at length, he is also clear that the

“‘negro,’” with its polite racism and even seeming egalitarianism and the “‘ni----,’”8 with

                                                                                                               7 In order to historically situate these traditions as the foundations of nineteenth century racial theory, Goldberg (2002) details the debate, reflecting these dispositions between Thomas Carlyle, who espouses a more vitriolic or naturalist form of racism and John Stuart Mill, whose racism is conveyed in politeness or a historicist form. See The Racial State pp.57-72. 8 I made the decision not to include this word in my work. Despite contemporary debates on the varied uses of this word, I am mindful of the ways in which language and racist expressions, in particular, are not only offensive, but also harmful (Goldberg 1993:226).

23

its more vicious or explicit racism are both bound together by the “common thread of

racist presumption and projection, bald and vicious, on the one hand, polite and effete, on

the other, but both nevertheless insidious and odious” (2002:71). He also insists that the

real threat of repressive violence underwrites historicist practices and racial organization

(Goldberg 2002:118).

Like Hesse, Goldberg also writes against the tendency, both historically and in the

contemporary, to judge, notice or condemn racism by its severity in the examples of

apartheid South Africa, Leopold’s Congo, the American south or Hitler’s Reich. He

argues that historicist practices and forms of government can and have been equally

devastating and destructive (2002:81-82). Forms of colonial administration

paternalistically mandating that “natives ought not to be brutalized, to be sure, not

enslaved, but directed – administratively, legislatively, pedagogically, and socially”

(Goldberg 1993:35) have been central in advancing colonial projects and no less

annihilating. Historicist forms of racial governing have also relied on more explicit and

direct forms of violence when administrative and other options have not been successful

in keeping the colonized in place (Goldberg 2002:129). However, the obvious and

consistent viciousness of naturalist forms of racism are used to shore up claims of racial

tolerance and/or racelessness on the part of historicists, whose claims Goldberg points

out, have been institutionalized as the dominant form of racial reasoning within modern

liberal states (2002:134,155). By holding up naturalist forms of racial reasoning and

accompanying illiberal forms of governance as the only expressions of racism, and as

exceptions to liberalism, a whole range of racist practices and exclusions within

24

liberalism, get obfuscated. Goldberg describes this as the way racial historicism evades

responsibility for its racism by “definitional deflection” (2002:210). Racial practices and

reasoning that are not seen to be naturalist, are seen not to be racist, allowing historicist

forms of racial organization to appear uncommitted to racist articulations and effects

(Goldberg 2002:210). In other words, racial hierarchies can be promulgated through

seemingly non-racial terms and practices.

The tensions about what constitutes racism and the chasm between individuals

responsible for their own lives and the force of racism, history and oppression are on

display throughout this dissertation. Many participants in this study share the ways that

racism is lived but rendered invisible, except when it is exceptional. Explicitly racist

epithets and jokes for example, are narrowly admitted as racist. The implicit ways that

racial hierarchies organize life, learning and work go missing. The struggles that

participants describe in their own lives can be referenced back to the very relevant

insights that Hesse, Goldberg and others offer. My use of the term racial violence

throughout this dissertation references this much more embedded, capacious and

historical understanding of racism and its effects. Far from a problem of misinformation,

stereotyping or individual wrong doing, my use of racial violence is meant to draw

attention to the accumulated material, social and emotional consequences that it exacts

from people of colour.

My insistence on historicizing liberalism rather than starting with neoliberal formation is

deliberate. Liberalism’s reach is long and deep. As Saidiya Hartman incisively observes,

25

liberalism “enable[s] and efface[s] elemental forms of domination primarily because of

the atomistic portrayal of social relations, the inability to address collective interests and

needs, and the sanctioning of subordination” (1997:122). Drawing on critical race

scholars, I elaborate the contradictions contained within liberalism – of a professed

commitment to universalism and its obvious reliance on different modes of government

and technologies of rule for different populations. Its presumed universality and

individuality rely on “tacit exclusions and norms that preclude substantive equality”

(Hartman 1997:122). The work of these scholars is also useful for illuminating that racial

formations are so resilient, pervasive and diffuse precisely because of their ability to

adapt or “modify [their] mode[s] of articulation” (Goldberg 1993:107) and work through

prevailing cultural norms and social theories. While this may seem obvious and well

established in some academic contexts, the continued resilience of racism alongside its

dismissal make it imperative that I make the case for how serious and sustained attention

to racism continues to be eclipsed.

As participants in this study so often express, in limiting our understandings of racism to

extremist individuals, ideologies and practices, we miss the actual range of racist effects

and exclusions. For so long, so many of them struggled to find the language through

which to articulate their own experiences with racial injury. By recentering Eurocentric

definitions in which racism is seen to be an aberration of otherwise sound and well

functioning liberal democratic practices and institutions, our ability to apprehend and

interrupt racism today is severely limited. Liberalism with its focus on individualism and

self-improvement encourages people of colour to refuse racial and collective terms to

26

understand the racial conditions of their lives. Consequently, people of colour are

encouraged to and rewarded for enduring and overcoming white supremacy, not naming

and organizing against it. The narratives throughout this dissertation reveal how some

people of colour try to make white supremacy work for them a bit more or to hurt them a

bit less. I draw extensively on critical race scholars throughout this dissertation to

understand the enduring and normalized ways that racism is embedded in social

structures, knowledge production and everyday life. While these theoretical explorations

may read as dense and disarticulated from life, the subsequent chapters bring these

tensions to light, the routineness with which they occur and the importance of being able

to locate racism in the force of histories made missing. Recuperating a clear, analytic

lens with which to understand, name and intervene in racism remain central

preoccupations of this project.

Foucault and Liberalism My work is also informed by Foucauldian approaches to liberalism. Burchell argues that

Foucault approached liberalism less as a theory and more as a way of thinking about and

doing government (1996:21). Referencing its broader meaning in the sixteenth century,

Foucault argues that ‘government’ focused on directing the conduct of groups and

individuals as well as on political structures and state management (1982:221). In

Foucault’s words, “to govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of

others” (1982:221). As Burchell expands, this broad understanding includes both the

dispersal of different forms of government throughout society, at the level of the

interpersonal and institutional as well as the centralized form of state sovereignty. It

spans the localized and intimate, such as in the school and family as well as government

directed at individuals belonging to populations or the nation (1996:19). Government in

27

this sense, is concerned with affecting the conduct of individuals and the governed as

both objects or targets and accomplices or partners of government (Burchell 1996:23).

Elaborating the dynamic interface of government and the everyday, Burchell argues

“government increasingly impinges upon individuals in their very individuality, in their

practical relationships to themselves in the conduct of their lives” (1996:30). He cites

specific ways of being and behaving, performing roles such as parenting, and the

development of particular habits such as responsibility and self-improvement, as

examples of how those governed are encouraged to enact “practical relations to

themselves in the exercise of their freedom in appropriate ways” (1996:26).

Governmental forms of power operate by reordering and penetrating the habits, lives and

conduct of subjects (Scott 1999:43-44).

Drawing on Foucault, Goldberg similarly argues that the political is more diffuse than

state institutions, infusing processes of subject formation and organizing social relations

(2002:101). Social power, then, operates through subjects and processes of self-

regulation, discipline and surveillance as well as through state imposition (Goldberg

2002:105).9 It is in this attentiveness to multiple and simultaneous technologies of

power that I find Foucault to be particularly useful along with the interesting set of

                                                                                                               9 As Mitchell Dean takes care in pointing out, scholars who rely on Foucault’s work on governmentality often misread his work to mean that disciplinary power replaces sovereignty as a condition of the emergence of liberalism in eighteenth century Europe (2003:116). Following Foucault, Dean and others argue that various technologies of power operate simultaneously and there is more accurately, a “mutual interpenetration” between discipline and control, rather than a replacement of one by the other (2003:117-118; Foucault 1991:101-102; Stoler 1995:64; Lewis 2000:28). Coercion, violence, confinement and torture or quite simply, “the right of life and death” (Foucault 2003:240), associated with sovereign power, operate alongside discipline, surveillance and technologies of normalization in modern, liberal forms of government (Goldberg 2002:106; Dean 1999:147).

28

questions it opens up in relation to how our everyday lives and ways of being are subject

to forms of regulation.

As I elaborate in the subsequent sections, particularly on power and everyday politics,

racism oppresses people of colour in devastating ways but it does more than this, it

encourages us to live and understand life in particular ways (Goldberg 2006:334). The

meanings that can be made of racism, the words that can be found, the responses that are

encouraged all point to how distinctions are made between “reasonable and qualified

knowledge” (Hook 2001:525) about racism and ones that are discarded and disqualified.

At the heart of this matter, as Foucault observed, are the power relations and conditions

that enable certain discourses to be true, possible and believable. As Charles Mills notes,

the power of the racial contract is not only in the political systems that it entrenches and

the material consequences that it has. The power of racism and the post-racial landscape

also lies in its ability to demarcate true from false, to declare what is racist and what is

not, to delineate correct ways to interpret our experiences from incorrect ones. It entices

people to“misinterpret the world…to see the world wrongly” but with the force of white

authority sanctioning their misinterpretations (Mills 1997:18). It eviscerates context and

history. This dissertation follows these tensions in the micro-sites of racialized peoples

lives and in the aftermaths of racist aggressions. So many endlessly struggle to register,

to themselves and others, racism as a fact, a fact of life, a fact of their lives. They labour

to turn it into something real. Drawing again on Mills, having access to accurate

concepts through which to understand racism in our lives is not a theoretical exercise.

Having or not having these concepts can “hinder learning, interfere with memory, block

29

inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate problems” (Mills 1997:7). Ideas have

consequences and there is a lot at stake in the conceptual apparatus that we use to

understand racism. This dissertation makes visible the struggles between vastly different

stories of racism as a relic of the past or as an enduring condition of the present. There

are people who bear the weight of these significant variations in the story of what racism

can be, where it is found and what it does. It is their struggles and meaning making that

this dissertation centres.

Racial Neoliberalism “Neoliberalism is in the first instance, a theory of political economic practices,” writes

David Harvey, one animated by an ethos of entrepreneurship in an institutional context

loyal to private property and free markets (2005:2). Charting transformations in global

capitalist accumulation, Harvey lays out neoliberalism’s uneven political and economic

trajectories. At its core, he argues that the “neoliberal project is to disembed capital”

from political or social regulations and constraints (2005:11). Goldberg extends these

ideas that focus on neoliberalism as an economic doctrine, specifically focusing its racial

dimensions and consequences. Neoliberalism is a constellation of practices, policies and

ideas undergirding them. Goldberg argues that it is through an intensified focus on

“individualized merit and ability” (2009:31) and away from state responsibilities that

colorblindness or racelessness are institutionalized. Aihwa Ong also argues that

neoliberal logics have shifted claims that citizens might make of the state and have

instead promulgated ideas and practices requiring individuals to be “free, self-managing

and self-enterprising” in all aspects of life (2006:14).

30

Crucially and for my present purposes, Goldberg insists that race and the exacerbation of

racial inequalities are central to such contemporary structural and policy shifts but that an

additional condition of neoliberalism is the purging of race from public life (2009:341).

“Born again racism” (2009:23), as he refers to it, is a racism devoid of its historical force

and contemporary resonance, “but we are being asked to give up on race before and

without addressing the legacy, the roots, the scars of racisms’ histories, the weights of

race” (2009:21). Once again, Hesse casts our gaze back from more contemporary

discussions of the neoliberal and post-racial with its attendant declarations of racism

overcome. He insists that “the founding Eurocentric concept of racism virtually secured

the eventuality of the postracial horizon” (2011:171). It is the trajectory of this

Eurocentric definition and its “originary foreclosure” (Hesse 2011:172) that produces

racism as “unspeakable” today and points instead to racial progress in perhaps its most

emblematic contemporary figure, Barack Obama (Hesse 2011:172). To put it plainly,

that a black man can be president of the United States, is the unequivocal evidence that

racism is over. At the heart of the post-racial landscape, then, is the notion that racism

has been confronted and remedied. Due to this remarkable racial progress, race is no

longer a category of social significance. As Sumi Cho remarks, this “retreat from race” is

not only “redefining the terms for racial politics,” it is also discouraging collective

organizing and political mobilization on the part of racialized people (2009:1596).10 The

                                                                                                               10 See also Da Costa 2014; Lentin 2011; Leonardo 2011 and Warmington 2009 who specifically elaborate the post-racial landscape and its significance. Leonardo considers the post-racial landscape not only as a dominant discourse that organizes and articulates notions of racial progress. He investigates how it is used by people interested in social justice as an “aspiration” (2011:676) of a society less heavily governed by racial hierarchies. “That race matters does not suggest that…race should keep mattering” (Leonardo 2011:679). While acknowledging and supporting the importance of these aspirations, I use the post-racial landscape to illuminate the dominant landscape in which racism is dismissed and denied. I investigate how participants draw on and navigate these discourses in coming to various understandings of and responses to racism.

31

only thing standing in the way of freedom from racism is the idea of race and the racial

subject that obstinately clings to it. This, perhaps, best epitomizes the post-racial lesson

that people of colour are encouraged to live and learn. Subsequent chapters explore the

deep implications of these post-racial pedagogies in how everyday racism (Essed 1991) is

lived and understood.

“But white supremacy is hardly dead” (Winant 2004:xiii), Howard Winant reminds us, it

is merely repackaged. He adds that while the “jagged edges of racial dictatorship” may

have been smoothed over, partly in response to the challenges posed by anti-racist and

anti-colonial struggles, the “contemporary racial hegemony” has left largely intact, the

enduring structures of racial injustice (2004:xvii-xix). Race is disappeared but its

meanings and effects are rampantly reproduced through the thoroughly racialized

discourses and figures of the undeserving, terrorist, immigrant, criminal, illegal and the

welfare queen (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Goldberg 2009; Razack 2008; Duggan 2003; Jiwani

2006; Kelley 1997), to name a few. Goldberg also points out the logic of whiteness

under threat that bolsters conservative support for neoliberal policies (2009:337). In this

rearticulation of racial injury and white vulnerability, it is whites who are now harmed by

the unfair advantages that racial minorities enjoy, underwritten by state resources.

Racism is past or where it exists, whites are its primary victims; supremacy masks as

disadvantage (Winant 2004:5; Apple 2004:80). Whether vacillating between

vociferously denying racist realities or opportunistically appropriating the language of

racism, both strategies ensure that white entitlement remains firmly in place (Charania

2015:268).

32

Lisa Duggan also expounds on the centrality of race to neoliberal politics and policies

(2003:xii). Liberalism and its “neo” manifestations, she argues, continue to mystify

intensifying and unequal conditions of life under capitalism, conditions that are lived out

through the registers of race, gender and sexuality (2003:5). Like Goldberg, Ong and

others, she too observes that the language of “privatization” and “individual

responsibility” (Duggan 2003:16) has eviscerated a politics of “collective life” (Duggan

2003:5) and displaced attention from history and structural analysis. In place of more

explicitly racist discourses, there has been a turn to “racially coded strategies” (Duggan

2003:32) through which racist effects are multiplied. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva refers to

these colour blind practices as “‘racism lite,’” meaning that there might be less name

calling but the racial order is reproduced through more covert practices (2010:3). For

example, “competition, self-esteem, and independence” have come to stand in place of

and against “entitlement, dependency, and irresponsibility” (Duggan 2003:14, emphasis

in original). Resisting the bifurcation of the economic from the cultural, Duggan

challenges scholars and activists to take seriously the split between political economy and

identity politics that forecloses more robust possibilities for political organizing. It is not

only neoliberalism that enforces racelessness and proclaims its post-racialism, it is also

easily found in leftist class politics (Winant 2004:xix). While not uncritical of narrow

forms of identity politics, Robin Kelley also argues that the contributions of black lesbian

feminists and other marginalized groups have been easily overlooked in enriching, not

displacing, class politics through an analysis of race, gender and sexuality (1997:109-115;

Duggan 2003:85-86). Roderick Ferguson similarly points out that women of colour

33

feminisms, by insisting on the simultaneity of oppressions, has cogent insights to offer on

racial formation, gender justice, queer life and capitalist expansion (2004:134).

Understandings of social change, he argues, can be significantly enlivened by attending

to these expansive political horizons (2004:133) and by remaining attentive to invitations

to middle-class normativity against racialized working class subjects, especially women

(2004:148). Duggan also points out that the alienation of marginalized groups from

economic justice efforts can lead to a focus on shallow reforms, such as a “neoliberal

brand” (Duggan 2003:44) of inclusion and diversity and a turn away from more

transformative politics. Duggan worries about these political formations across a number

of equity seeking communities and the potential alliances they might forge with

neoliberal movements. Gay and lesbian organizing around gay marriage and military

service are prime examples of such neoliberal shifts in social movement demands with an

abandonment of more substantive and expansive queer politics and concerns (2003:44-

45).

Queer and queer of colour analysis (Ferguson 2012; Puar 2010; Alexander 2005;

Gopinath 2003) has been a useful anchor in this project, particularly given the important

contemporary debates within queer communities about what the outcome of social justice

organizing should be and how social change takes place. Scholars thinking through these

issues point out how “political horizon[s] get established, consolidated, stabilized, and

reproduced over time” (Gould 2009:3) in ways that are useful for my project. I trace how

the political horizons of people of colour are established and restricted, how the women

34

learn to struggle and survive, remember and forget.11 One of the primary lines of inquiry

that marks this dissertation, then, is how meanings of racism are offered, made, modified

and discarded. My attention to liberalism and racial neoliberalism more specifically is

also meant to illuminate how much it frames the analysis, language and interventions that

people of colour are encouraged to take up in relation to racism. As my analysis in

subsequent chapters will show, racial neoliberalism is productive of particular ways of

interpreting their experiences and the social world. I follow its constraining

consequences and regulatory effects. It opens up certain forms of analysis and action and

forecloses others. Neoliberalism does some of the things we might expect. It disables

communal forms of life, collective organizing or the naming of racism as a social

problem. It shapes racist articulation and organization as well as the vectors along which

response to it can be imagined. By reading participants’ narratives alongside an

historicized understanding of liberalism and tracing its effects, this thesis reveals how

structural inequities and histories recede and individuals are charged with their own

successes and failures. Put simply, people who live racial inequalities are encouraged to

privatize them. One of the major goals of this dissertation is to track how the structural

problem of racism is rearticulated as an individual one and to consider the conditions

under which it can be returned to its structural conditions.

The challenge and reward of working with people is that they never live or reproduce

theory as cleanly as the theory suggests. Theories of racism, racial neoliberalism and

neoliberalism are persuasive and seemingly coherent on the page but in people’s lives,

                                                                                                               11 By political horizon, I refer to the ways in which the analysis of people of colour are framed and limited by dominant understandings of racism (Hesse 2011:172) and the subsequent forms of action that are constrained and made possible.

35

there are diffuse effects and dispersed fears, aspirations, anxieties and practices that are

much more difficult to disentangle. As Avery Gordon argues, “the power relations that

characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the

names we give to them imply” (Gordon 1997:3). It is in investigating these structural

forces at their multiple points of articulation, where they “touch down”12 in our lives, that

we can come to trace the familiar, unfamiliar and enormously creative ways in which

racism works and adapts itself, the effects it has and the lessons it imparts.

Listening to people of colour struggle against how harmful and destructive a force racism

is in their lives gave me pause when they talked about the need to live positively or to

achieve success. In other words, it made me think in more nuanced ways about how

racial neoliberalism works and how people negotiate their lives within it. As Hesse,

Hartman and Goldberg articulate, theories such as liberalism and the practices that it

engenders are lived quite distinctly. Elizabeth Povinelli similarly observes that politics

are “uneven terrains of social maneuver” (2011:28). These reminders helped me to

contextualize the ways that people of colour mobilize ideas and inhabit practices that

appear to be, and I would argue, sometimes are consistent with or collude in prescribing

individual remedies for social problems. I have resisted recuperating these ways of

navigating racism into neoliberal tales of resilience. As the narratives and analysis in

Chapter 3 illuminate, there are traditions of self and communal care that are not reducible

to neoliberalism. Patricia Williams is mindful of all the ways that networks of supports

                                                                                                               12 The phrase “touch down” is adapted from Saskia Sassen’s idea that we need to attend to the materiality of globalization or as she puts it, it’s “global touch down points” (http://www.blakeharris.com/bh/archive1/sassen.htm).

36

and histories of self-help within black communities, so essential for survival, are “so

casually overlook[ed]” (1997:68). Barbara Cruikshank, despite her interest in tracing

how deeply our personal lives are a result of power relations, that “personal life is

governed” (1999:102) also reminds readers that the “language of empowerment and self-

esteem emerged out of social movements” (1999:94). Neo-liberalism and the relations of

power that it encourages are not always straightforward and evenly lived. Learning to

live in a system not intended for your success or survival requires an enormous amount of

labour and effort. Sometimes that effort meant that people engaged practices and

discourses that, on the surface, share much in common with neoliberalism. It would have

been easy to dismiss all of these practices and aspirations as insufficiently political.

Paying attention to them, however, illuminates how women of colour live and navigate

racism and develop responses that enable them to retain some dignity or to claim and

create spaces that systemically exclude, evict or precariously include them. Their lives

required me to take a second look at dismissing what appear to be neoliberal forms of

desire or even aspirations to the “good life” with the accompanying markers of material

success and achievement and an affective ease. Being able to feel good and live well

became part of the political terrain in ways that I did not anticipate.

Racism and Interlocking Oppressions While my work is anchored in critical race frameworks, the insights of anti-racist

feminists have been important in always situating racism within a framework of

interlocking oppressions (Combahee River Collective 1995/1974; Hill Collins 1986; B.

Smith 1995; Razack 1998; Fellows and Razack 1998; A. Smith 2005). An analysis of

interlocking oppressions illuminates that oppressions cannot be isolated as discrete

components or recast in the familiar mantra of race, class or gender. Patricia Hill Collins

37

(1986) and Barbara Smith (1995) explain that the complexity of black women’s

experiences give rise to ways of thinking about interlocking oppressions. As Smith puts

it, “we examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our

behinds – race, class, sex, and homophobia. We saw no reason to rank oppressions”

(1995:260). Building on the work of Patricia Hill Collins in particular, Mary-Louise

Fellows and Sherene Razack explicate the operation of interlocking oppression as

follows, “this ‘interlocking’ effect means that the systems of oppression come into

existence in and through one another so that class exploitation could not be accomplished

without gender and racial hierarchies” (1998:335). In other words, categories are not

additive and race cannot be separated from class, gender and so on. As Razack further

explains, rather thinking of people as doubly or triply oppressed or privileged,

interlocking frameworks consider how power and privilege shift and overlap, structuring

relationships within and between people and groups (1998:12-13).

Participants’ narratives certainly speak to these complexities, to the lack of “neatness”

(Bannerji 1995:11) with which life is lived and the difficulty in isolating racism. Here

too the people in my study complicated my stated theoretical commitments and the

questions I sought to understand and investigate. I was challenged to think about the

genealogies of their own racial literacies (Twine and Steinbugler 2006), sometimes in

ways that racial harm and responses to it were not so easily extracted. As critical race

feminists have long insisted, these complexities are not detours or distractions from the

task of understanding racial formation but the way to a more nuanced and deepened

analysis of its articulations and unevenness. Consistent with the narrative driven focus of

38

much of this dissertation, it is through an elaborated attentiveness to the lives of the

women in this study, that these complications are explored. Chapter 3 for example,

considers how race, class and gender together shape experiences of schooling and the

often quiet desperation that marked the educational encounters of girls of colour. Chapter

4 most specifically examines the effects of heteropatriarchy on understanding and living

racism and the need for anti-racist commitments to be explicitly queer and feminist. My

participants have reminded me that in trying to distill racism and racial literacies, I run

the risk of flattening out feminist and queer complexities to which I remain committed.

Gopinath discusses the “dangers of privileging antiracism as a singular political project”

(2005:46) and while I take her caution seriously, I also balance it, at times

unapologetically, with the need to bring race into sharp focus in contexts where it is

occluded and made difficult to speak and be heard.13

Scholars working with ideas of relationality and interlocking analytics are particularly

useful in developing my analysis of relations within and across racialized groups.

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan are mindful that racism and oppression don’t only

generate resistance, they also create “new sites of power” and solidify existing ones

(Grewal and Kaplan 2001:671). As Sherene Razack explicates, the interdependence of

forms of oppression centres notions of complicity in important ways as it precludes the

ability to retreat to positions of innocence (Razack 1998:21). The notion of                                                                                                                13 See Gail Lewis for an assessment of how generative intersectionality has been, particularly as it relates to producing feminist knowledge “from the margins” (2013:871). However, in a European context, Lewis also cautions that despite its “political traction and influence,” (2013:870) intersectionality has also been used to displace conversations about race to America or Britain while disavowing its continuing relevance to the rest of Europe (2013:874). She notes how paradoxical this development is given that the goal of intersectionality is to develop more robust, inclusive and complex understandings of gender formation (2013:875). For more on the potential and complexities of intersectional theories and methodologies, see also Carbado 2013; Cho, Chrenshaw and McCall 2013 and Nash 2008.

39

accountability and centering relations of power and privilege, domination and

subordination, is of particular interest to me as processes of racialization do not exempt

people from various forms of privilege and entitlement. While my project centres how

racism is lived and learned, it does so with an awareness that I need to carefully “thread

[my] way through the complexities of power relations” (Razack 1998:22). As Andrea

Smith argues, white supremacy is not enacted in a singular way, nor does it have the

same or uniformly oppressive effects (2006:67,69). In other words, racism does not only

generate conditions of oppression that are shared, it also invites us to be “complicit in the

victimization of others” (2006:69). Throughout the project, we see how racism is offset

or intensified through gender, class and sexual orientation and how people of colour are

similarly and differentially impacted by and implicated in racism.

Negotiating Racism in Multicultural Canada Multiculturalism, as a number of Canadian anti-racist scholars argue, displaces an

analysis of racism, white settler colonialism and anti-racist politics and in its place,

encourages talk of culture, difference and diversity (Thobani 2007; Jiwani 2006; Mackey

2002; Razack 2002; Bannerji 2000). Tracing the adoption of state multiculturalism as an

official policy of the Canadian government in 1971, Sunera Thobani explains that it

defines the nation as bilingual and bicultural, constituting the “British and French as its

real subjects” (2007:145). The context leading up to this policy and its passage enabled

the Canadian government to manage the problem of Quebec sovereignty, increasing

demands of Indigenous peoples and the need for immigration in a global context where

articulations of white supremacy were forced to shift in the face of anti-colonial

movements, anti-racist organizing and post-Nazi Europe (Thobani 2007:148-150).

40

Breaking from overt racism, the management and tolerance of difference were

institutionalized as the hallmarks of multicultural Canada in the 1970s (Mackey 2002:70).

This rebranding of Canada masked its founding violence as a white settler society and its

ongoing exploitation of Aboriginal peoples and people of colour (Razack 2002:17;

Thobani 2007:155). As Himani Bannerji points out, official state multiculturalism

constantly reworks political demands, of Aboriginal sovereignty, and racial and economic

justice, into cultural demands and diversity claims (2000:9, 45). To return to Goldberg’s

earlier reflections about definitional deflections (2002:210), it also enables good citizens,

committed to pluralism, to distinguish themselves from racist, extremist ones. These

distinctions are also classed as they often involve middle and upper class white

declarations of support for multiculturalism, offering them a claim to define themselves

as “sophisticated, urbane, and cosmopolitan” against “irremediably racist and uncouth”

working class people (Thobani 2007:153).

But as Thobani incisively points out, multiculturalism does more than allow

“inconvenient histories” (2007:154) and white racism, particularly in its liberal forms, to

be glossed over. It also promises racial others a place in the nation: “no longer openly

reviled as racial inferiors, immigrants and their descendants were instead seduced by their

being celebrated as a source of cultural diversity” (Thobani 2007:149). This, Thobani

explains, has been particularly advantageous for “certain classes of ethnic and racial

professionals” looking to advance their economic opportunities (2007:161-162). It has

also resulted in an alliance between the Canadian state and men who are seen to be the

41

leaders or representatives of various cultural and ethnic communities, often with

distressing outcomes for women (Bannerji 2000:49). While still “under white

supervision” (Thobani 2007:172) and surveillance, some racial others are offered a

provisional place in the nation – a possibility to stake a claim and to have that claim

recognized. This leads to efforts on the part of certain people of colour to differentiate

themselves within and across racial groups and against Aboriginal peoples in order to

consolidate their status and entitlements in relation to white Canadians.

The national landscape in which people of colour could draw attention to and organize

against racist practices and exclusions, already precarious, shifted as multiculturalism,

became more entrenched (Bannerji 2000:45; Thobani 2007:172). People of colour,

particularly those entering low-income jobs could speak less and less of racism and

oppression in employment, immigration, policing and lack of child-care (Bannerji

2000:44). These are not problems of culture but of political economy and its racialized

and gendered effects. If multiculturalism was an answer, it was not to a question that

people of colour and Indigenous people were asking but, as Thobani and Bannerji both

point out, multiculturalism became the publicly available avenue for people of colour to

articulate and exercise recognizable and reasonable forms of politics (Thobani 2007:162;

Bannerji 2000:45). They could trade in race and in exchange, they would be rewarded

with the chance for “increased inclusion” and access to citizenship rights (Thobani

2007:175). In other words, multiculturalism worked to domesticate the demands of

people of colour. The lexicon and analytics used to describe racism and its effects, not as

exceptional, but as everyday occurrences to people of colour in Canada is made

42

unintelligible within this multicultural landscape. The “achievement of Canadian

multiculturalism,” Rinaldo Walcott explains, is its simultaneous management and

disappearance of race (2014:132).

This dissertation explores the centrality of racism in Canada and the consequences of its

concealment. In place of race, there is talk of tradition, culture, religion, family, values

and character (Razack 1998:60; Thobani 2007:158; Bannerji 2000:48; Razack 2008). In

place of expansive racial politics, there are language classes, religious accommodations

and cultural celebrations. There is, in other words, a “multicultural bureaucracy” (Brand

1994:77). Multiculturalism turns racism from a contemporary system with muscle and

consequence to an historic anomaly. Where it is acknowledged, it is only named

narrowly – as a problem of misinformation or individual misunderstandings. As I show

later in this thesis, people of colour are left struggling with this injunction to leave racism

behind even when it is before them, to forget racism while it happening and without a

public language to address all of the ways that it shapes their lives. I trace the struggles,

tensions and dilemmas that these multicultural pedagogies produce in the lives of women

of colour and how powerfully they are learned in the nation’s schools. In Chapter 6 in

particular, I observe the force of Canadian national mythologies in displacing an analysis

of racism and calling people of colour into more palatable multicultural politics.14

Canadian Neoliberal Multiculturalism As I pointed out in the earlier part of this chapter, my focus on neoliberalism is not to

posit it as new but to examine the contemporary intensification of liberalism with its

focus on self-managing and meritorious subjects who are not reliant on the largesse of the                                                                                                                14 In Chapter 6, I elaborate, with much more specificity, the white settler colonial project.

43

state for their well being and success. Similarly, my use of the term neoliberal

multiculturalism is not to suggest that it is a new process. Rather, I deploy the term to

draw attention to how processes of racial differentiation, already embedded within liberal

multiculturalism, are creating new opportunities for racialized people. As Jodi Melamed

argues, “neoliberal multiculturalism repeats some of the core procedures” of racial

liberalism (2006:14; also see Roberts and Mahtani 2010). Thobani points out that

multiculturalism produced spaces for the right racial others – professional and

entrepreneurial classes who were encouraged to settle in Canada and those working class

people who were able to avail themselves of the educational and employment

opportunities of the 1970s (2007:152).15 Trading in race was less costly if there were

good jobs, schools and futures on offer. The beneficiaries of these small openings are

offered up as evidence of individual achievement and excellence against racial others

who have not shared in these gains or have been deliberately excluded from them.

In their examination of how neoliberalism modifies the functioning of race in Canada,

David Roberts and Minelle Mahtani argue that neoliberalism and multiculturalism work

to make claims of racism increasingly unintelligible even while racist practices are

increasingly intensified (2010:254). They explain that immigrants, already a highly

racialized category, are invited into a “neoliberal game” where racism is said to be

insignificant but is nevertheless reproduced through processes of not recognizing foreign

                                                                                                               15 The social programs of the welfare state, created after the Second World War and expanded into the 1970s, despite their varied, uneven and contradictory effects in different communities, did much to satisfy demands of feminist and labour movements (Thobani 2007:106). Starting in the early 1990s, there was, according to Stasiulis, a shift to decrease family class immigrants, refugees and immigrants that would be more likely to make demands on social services. Instead, investor and financial immigrants, mostly highly desirable transnational elites, were encouraged (1997:156).

44

credentials and work experience (2010:253). Roberts and Mahtani illuminate how

neoliberal racism works to strengthen white, non-white racial hierarchies and entitlements

but in ways that are difficult to point out and ascertain. Connecting up Thobani’s earlier

insights about the spaces granted to racial others within multicultural Canada to Roberts

and Mahtani, we can also see how neoliberal racism works to strengthen distinctions

between the “thriftiness and entrepreneurial genius” (Giroux 2008:64) of some racialized

people against non-achieving others. Personal failures are the answer to these

discrepancies - not shifts in immigration and employment status or differing integration

within capitalism.

Further developing this argument in a U.S. context, Jodi Melamed argues that “official

anti-racisms” (2006:2) or “neoliberal multiculturalism” (2006:13) point to a multiracial

American military or racialized individuals in prominent political positions, such as Colin

Powell, Condoleezza Rice or Alberto Gonzalez, as evidence of America’s multicultural

achievements. Such apparent successes, or in Ferguson’s formulation, “diversification[s]

of the status quo” (2012:51), are used over and against vulnerable communities enduring

renewed racial assaults (Melamed 2006:18). Neoliberal multicultural formations and

practices do not unequivocally repudiate multicultural others but their uneven

incorporation makes the racial landscape much murkier. Like Grewal and Ferguson,

Melamed is also attentive to the shifting and uneven terrains of racial formations “so that

traditionally recognized racial identities – black, Asian, white or Arab/Muslim – can now

occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma opposition” (2011:13). She argues further that

neoliberal multiculturalism is also sutured to American imperial governance, providing

45

the example of the distribution of Qurans to prisoners and provisions for prayer time in

Guantanamo prisons as being emblematic of such multicultural sensitivities that do not

oppose the illegal, indefinite detention and interrogation of Muslims and Arabs but

repurpose them in light of American responsiveness to and respect for difference

(2006:15-16). There are good reasons to be wary of inclusion.

Of the less racially bifurcated privileged and marginalized opposition, Melamed

importantly points out that “this divide itself is always on the move” (2011:13). In a

contemporary Canadian context, Walcott points out that despite the desperate conditions

of life for Aboriginal peoples, there is a record number of Conservatives of Aboriginal

descent in Parliament (2013:2). Walcott importantly draws attention to how global

capitalism provides increasing opportunities for distinctions within and across Indigenous

and racialized communities (2013:2-3). Roland Coloma Sintos makes a similar

observation of individuals of Asian descent who can be found in powerful positions in

and across various Canadian governmental and cultural organizations (2013:580).

Ruthann Lee concurs that social justice efforts within the Canadian landscape need to be

fine-tuned to analyze these processes of differentiation offered by global capitalism.

People and markets, their various movements and dislocations together, she insists, are

required for thinking well about this complex landscape (2011:3-4). Lee amplifies

perspectives for thinking relationally in order to sort out hierarchies that need to be

challenged and opportunities for solidarity that can be nurtured (Lee 2011:10). The

growing absorption of racialized people within the state apparatus and the incentives for

them to trade in race not only buys their silence for their own advancement or sometimes

46

survival, it is also used against other racialized populations. Their success is used to

punish and police others.

Discussing multiculturalism in an Australian context, Sara Ahmed (2000) also suggests

that multiculturalism is a way in which the nation imagines itself in relation to difference.

Multiculturalism, she similarly argues, is not incompatible with including those who are

seen to be strange or unassimilable; rather, it requires selective practices of inclusion

along with targeted expulsions (Ahmed 2000:95,97). Difference is variably tolerated,

required, sought after, even celebrated but in ways that erase history, mask relations of

power and the processes through which racial differentiation and hierarchies are secured

(Ahmed 2000:103).

Writing about the United States, Inderpal Grewal also observes that multicultural

translations of the American dream have provided certain marginalized gendered and

racialized subjects with asymmetrical access to consumer culture, markets and a

“dominant white lifestyle of power and plenty” (2005:9). Grewal draws our attention to

the “traffic” between neoliberalism and social movements and the need to remain vigilant

about the uneven and differing articulations of and access to rights and recourse for

injustice (2005:19). More recently, Roderick Ferguson argues that the demands of social

movements in the sixties and seventies were increasingly domesticated through the

incorporation of “formerly marginalized and excluded subjects and societies” (2012:21-

22). Such strategies of “absorption” (Ferguson 2012:28) were meant to suitably manage

and accommodate demands of justice and equality without significant disruption to the

47

status quo. Differential invitations of inclusion and participation created what Ferguson

describes as an “economy organized to produce bargains between the oppositional and

the concordant” (2012:39). Through selective incorporation, difference becomes a

resource to be exploited.

Attending to how people of colour are variably seduced, coerced, consent and refuse to

engage in racial hierarchies is not without its risks (Said 1979:7; Farley 1997:476),

particularly at a time when many activists and scholars have drawn attention to the

intensification of racial hierarchies through discourses of national security, neoliberal

regimes of privatization, state surveillance and regulation, the prison industrial complex

and corporatization and militarization. It is precisely because of the intensification of

these regimes that I feel compelled to undertake this work. There is an urgency to look

simultaneously at the effects of racist practices alongside our role in them. This is not to

endorse the perspective that non-whites have more incentive to participate in or enact

forms of violence as a response to racism. While such a relationship between violence

and racial subordination cannot be discounted altogether, a disproportionate focus on

such incidents obscures pervasive individual and systemic racism, of which whites are the

primary actors and beneficiaries. As Razack also reminds us, while we need to take

seriously the actions of racially subordinate people in relation to racial violence, this must

not eclipse the extent to which such practices are rejected (2004:114-115). White

supremacy is a project that requires a great deal of violence on the part of all of us who

are invited into it on highly specific terms (Razack 2004:115). While we are all

implicated within racial hierarchies, we are no means equally implicated or impacted.

48

My challenge has been to write the complexities and tensions with which racism is lived

and learned without dissolving critical distinctions between how whites and people of

colour are racialized and sorted in everyday life.

Race and the Everyday There is much existing work on race, racism and processes of racialization that focuses

importantly on institutional, ideological and state racism and its historical underpinnings.

This literature has been shaped, in part, by the exigencies of confronting the pervasive

and powerful effects of racist discursive frameworks and institutional arrangements in

education, policing, immigration, cultural production, economic organization and the law.

I situate my work in the instantiations of these larger racial arrangements in the everyday.

In their seminal work on racial formation, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that

racial projects are embedded in both social structures and everyday experiences

(1994/1986:56). While the scale of racial projects range from large to small, Omi and

Winant suggest that “everybody learns some combination, some version of the rules of

racial classification, and of her own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or

conscious inculcation. Thus we are inserted in a comprehensively racialized social

structure” (1994/1986:60).

Philomena Essed’s (1991) groundbreaking study of everyday racism stands as an

important contribution and complement to more structurally focused work. While the

notion of everyday racism is axiomatically referenced in critical race work and forms the

49

foundation for mine, my project owes much to Essed’s earlier work.16 In an effort to

redress the systemic focus in critical race scholarship, Essed remarks on the challenges of

tracing the complex and multiple ways in which racism permeates lived experiences,

disciplinary challenges of thinking about social organization in broad and capacious

ways, rather than ones that are discipline bound, the tendency to dismiss the ordinary and

everyday as banal and not properly intellectual and finally, the need to engage with a

wide range of divergent experiences requiring the ability to link micro and macro forms

of racial domination (1991:7-8). Drawing on the work of feminist sociologist Dorothy

Smith, Essed develops the notion of everyday racism as a way to trace how social

relations and categories permeate and organize everyday life (1991:47-49).17 Caroline

Knowles (2003) is similarly preoccupied with the interface of micro and macro forms of

racial analysis. While she appreciates the need to establish a big picture analysis of

racism and its underpinnings, Knowles also argues that the macro perspective does not

tell us very much about the interface between people and racial regimes (2003:27). In

other words, how ideas and practices take hold, how they are lived, undermined and

contested in the lives of people is central to understanding how racism operates.

Attending to these everyday processes but also linking them to the larger organization

and implications of racism, “zooming in and out on race” (Knowles 2003:27), is part of

the richness of Essed’s work. While she attends to how her participants, Black university

                                                                                                               16 In some critical race scholarship, the notion of everyday racism is also translated into racial micro-aggressions (See Chapter 4 and the following for further discussions: Minikel-Lacocque 2013; Kohli and Solorzano 2012; Smith, Allen & Danley 2007; Solorzano, Ceja and Yosso 2000). 17 As Smith herself acknowledges, her work on the “everyday world” is characterized by insufficient attention to the classed and racialized dimensions of gender organization (1987:8). In this way, Essed uses and improves the resources and methodology offered by Smith, considering the everyday operations of racial and gender domination simultaneously.

50

educated and professional women, living in California and the Netherlands, acquire

knowledge of racism, she acknowledges that this is not the primary focus of her work

(1991:87). Rather, Essed’s key contribution is in illuminating the lived experiences of

Black women across geographical contexts and the relevance of their knowledge for

understanding the complex and multivalent ways in which racism operates and is

reproduced (Essed 1991:1-2). Essed further highlights how national discourses around

race and racism impact the knowledge that women themselves come to identify and

articulate about structures of racial domination. Of particular relevance are the ways in

which Dutch frameworks of tolerance, pluralism and the workings of race through

cultural discourses results in Black women themselves being able to describe their

experiences of racism but in ways that often frame “racism as a problem of

misinformation” (Essed 1991:111), relying on and reproducing notions of cultural

pluralism (Essed 1991:117).18 As I explain earlier, like Essed, I explore the complex role

that such national articulations in a Canadian context play in developing racial literacy

and the contours of it with David Goldberg’s qualification that the state is central, though

never entirely or absolutely successful, in policing and producing feelings, habits, and

meanings while also limiting the circulation of alternative commitments and social and

political priorities (2002:152). My project asks that we pause to consider and make

explicit the specific processes through which knowledge of race and racism is acquired

among racialized people and like, Essed’s work, attend to the ways that our everyday

lives are structured by these larger scales of racial domination and our responses to them.

                                                                                                               18 My analysis here is not meant to simplify Essed’s rich analysis in which she traces the relevance of different and related historical trajectories in European and American contexts for the emergence of a range of knowledges with respect to racism.

51

The concept of racial literacy, deployed by France Winddance Twine, links with and

extends Essed’s work on the everydayness of racism by looking more closely at the how

racial structures are deciphered and managed (Twine 2010:92; Twine 1999; Twine

2004)19. Twine’s work focuses on how interracial families navigate race and whiteness.

While her work spans a range of family configurations, Twine (2010) initially offered the

concept of racial literacy to look at the ways in which white parents, mothers in

particular, of Black-White interracial children, work to become aware of racism and are

able to parent their children to respond to experiences of racist oppression and develop

affirming connections to their black identities. Twine and Steinbugler expand the

concept of racial literacy to encompass a set of practices, meaning, ways of reading or

apprehending and responding to racial structures individuals encounter in everyday life

(2006:344).20 Twine locates her work as an effort to bridge the gap in sociological

research in critical race studies that looks specifically at cultural practices of interracial

families and the relevance of this for widening discussions on White identity formation

and anti-racist practice. She argues that diverse racial and ethnic groups in multiple

contexts can acquire racial literacy. Importantly in this formulation, it is a relationship to

knowledge, not a fixed process or predetermined outcome that emerges from identity or

experience (2010:113). The contribution of Twine is relevant for my work in further                                                                                                                19 The concept of racial literacy is also discussed by Lani Guinier (2004). Guinier contrasts racial literacy to racial liberalism which has focused on the effects of individual prejudice and the need to promote interracial contact to develop tolerance (2004:95). She proposes racial literacy in response to the ongoing and deeply embedded structures of inequality that persist fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education. In order to confront ongoing racial hierarchies, Guinier argues that a new racial literacy is required, “meaning the capacity to decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies and frames the narrative of our republic” (2004:100). 20 Twine and Steinbugler elaborate the components of racial literacy as follows: an understanding of the value of Whiteness; locating racism as a contemporary problem, rather than an historical artefact; appreciating that racial identities are not essential and unchanging but rather, they are learned and effects of social practices; a vocabulary with which to discuss race, racism and anti-racism; the facility to interpret racial practices; and finally, an ability to analyze the ways in which class, gender and sexuality mediate racism (2006:344).

52

linking racial hierarchies with everyday practices, as well as thinking about the diverse

range of sites and ways in which racial literacy can be cultivated. She attends, in

particular, to the role of intimate relationships and family as important sources in the

development of racial knowledge and proficiency. This is particularly important to this

project given the very few opportunities that the women of colour in this study had to

develop their racial literacy in public places. In some cases, the home was a critical space

of learning to understand racism and withstand its effects. Essed similarly notes the

significance of black women’s home lives in shaping knowledge about racism and

compensating for the lack of education about racism that was available in public schools.

Twine and Essed’s work together help me to think about multiple sites of knowledge

production that foster knowledge about racism. In their own ways, they draw attention to

the importance of practices in the home that contribute to the development of racial

competencies. This labour is essential but often overlooked or invisible in thinking about

projects of social change and the conditions that enable and constrain it. Overall, I work

the concepts of everyday racism and racial literacy that Essed and Twine offer to explore

their operation and effects in neoliberal multicultural Canada. Throughout the

dissertation, I draw attention to some of the tensions and contradictions of racial literacy

under pressure from neoliberal forms of understanding oppression and its remedies. So

often, participants were caught between feelings and experiences that materialize

oppression in their daily lives and “post” and “neo” horizons that evacuate collective

histories, interventions and possibilities. “What happens to anti-racism when we are post

race?” Alana Lentin worries (2011: 159). This dissertation contributes to exploring what

53

happens to racial literacies and the possibilities for anti-racist political formation in

“post” and “neo” times.

Feeling Racism In trying to account for the effects of racial violence as well as the lessons that people of

colour learned from living it, participants did not only recount learning words and ideas.

They detailed, often at great length, the feelings that racism produced. In other words, in

response to participants’ reflections, I needed to expand my conceptual tools beyond the

ability to read and articulate knowledge about racism, implied by literacy. Some

recounted prolonged periods marked by the absence of words with which to understand

and name experiences of racism. They recalled the emotional reverberations and bodily

effects of experiencing something that they could not yet name or understand. “Emotion”

Hochschild writes, “is one way to discover a buried perspective on matters. Especially

when other ways of locating ourselves are in bad repair, emotion becomes important”

(1983:85). The larger social context in which racism gets buried requires attention.

Racial neoliberalisms have a profound effect on the acquisition, contours and absence of

racial literacies, variously recounted throughout the interviews. The obscuring of racism

means that while the words may be missing or where they exist, be deeply impoverished,

the affective consequences of racial harm are profoundly felt. I have endeavoured to dig

through these emotional landscapes and to understand their force in the racial formation

of the participants.

Even those who were able to more quickly find the words to match their experiences,

primarily through their parents, the words furnished some form of protection but racism,

as I elaborated earlier, is not static. The literacies that some parents imparted reflected

54

their own experiences but did not always adequately respond to those of their children.

In all cases, participants recounted the emotional landscapes through which racism was

lived and the harm that it deposited in their lives. I reflect, in the following chapter, at

some length on the dilemmas and challenges that I have encountered in thinking about

feelings and emotions in writing this project. For my current purposes I explain, in broad

strokes, that my attention to understanding the effects of racial violence and the

conditions under which people of colour were learning to apprehend racism, was not

possible without paying attention to the harm of racism, what it did and how it felt.

My analysis of participants narratives draws eclectically on feminist, critical race and

queer scholarship that recuperates emotion to account for the harm that racism creates

and also to trace the role of emotion in producing knowledge (Million 2013; Lewis 2012;

Berlant 2011; Ahmed 2010; Gould 2009; Love 2007; Cheng 2001; Boler 1999; Jaggar

1989; Hochschild 1983).21 Rather than conceptualizing emotions as private and interior

to the lives of individuals, this scholarship encourages us to think socially and historically

about the affective landscapes through which racism and oppression more broadly are

lived. Chapter 3 in particular, recuperates much earlier, and often overlooked, feminist of

colour and more specifically, black feminist theorizing on emotion (Davis 2008;                                                                                                                21 The contemporary literature on emotion and affect is varied, contested and voluminous. There are some scholars who use affect to mean the study of “human emotion” and “embodied meaning-making” (Wetherell 2012:4) while others make distinctions between affect and emotion (see Harding and Pribram 2009:17). Margaret Wetherell explains that Brian Massumi and others build on the work of Deluze and Spinoza to delineate emotions as the process of registering “body states” in social, cultural and psychological terms (2012:58). Affect, on the other hand, is a bodily intensity that “has not yet been closed down, represented, labelled, communicated, shaped and structured” (Wetherell 2012:59). I use emotion and affect interchangeably, to reflect more ordinary uses of the terms in everyday life and throughout the interviews I conducted. While I reference some of the more contemporary literatures in this field, I rely on earlier, often overlooked feminist of colour contributions to think about how racial oppression is lived and meanings made of it. Quite simply, this was some of the most relevant and insightful work for my purposes. This is particularly the case in Chapter 3 but discussions about emotion, racism and social change recur throughout the dissertation.

55

Williams 1991; Lorde 1984; Lorde 1982). I return to these texts as a way to foreground

their contributions and to insert them into the scholarship on emotion and the affective

registers through which racism is so often lived and the importance of this living for

understanding the effects of racial violence. While some of this scholarship is not

organized explicitly around emotion, it does speak centrally to how racial violence is

lived and the toll it exacts.

As Fanon (1967) reminded us so long ago, feelings have histories. More specifically,

Fanon draws attention to the colonial conditions that objectify and dehumanize black

male subjects. It is these historical and racial systems that produce the fact of blackness

(1967:109-111).22 Fanon incisively understood that racism is a project of accumulated

hatred and harm. It is much more than interpersonal and individualized. As Sara Ahmed

so simply and insightfully puts it, “it is not simply that any body is hated” (2004:54). W.

E. B. Du Bois elaborates important dimensions of what it means to live within structures

of white supremacy and the knowledge this generates in relation to structures and in

relation to oneself. For Du Bois, this meant a “double consciousness, this sense of

always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the

tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1989/1903:5). My work

draws centrally on the analytical work and resources that investigate the everyday ways

that racial hierarchies have the power to profoundly inform our most intimate desires and

                                                                                                               22 See Jared Sexton (2010) for a careful and nuanced reflection on the need to think about the specificities of anti-black racism in Fanon’s work, something that Sexton argues is too often overlooked. In using Fanon’s work, Sherene Razack also points out how much “contemporary realities of oppression” are shaped in “historically specific ways” that require attention. However, she also adds that encounters between colonizer and colonized reveal powerful moments when oppressed peoples are turned into objects (1998:3). I use Fanon here in the tradition that Sexton acknowledges but also critiques and that is in relation to Fanon’s more general pronouncements on racism, colonialism and its effects.

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relationships, including to and within our own bodies. Drawing on Said’s insights about

the constructions of difference and Othering practices, Stuart Hall argues that the power

of such practices is precisely in their ability to “make us see and experience ourselves as

‘Other’” (2005:236, emphasis in original). Describing this “compulsion” (2005:237) of

Otherness, it is Hall’s ability to understand the strength of structures of domination in

relation to ourselves, and more specifically our bodies, as well as its contemporary power

that is instructive in reading the narratives of the participants in this study.

I also employ the scholarship on emotion not only to understand how structures are lived

and the tolls they exact but also to consider how responses to them are developed. In

following how racism was lived and its lessons learned, I was not fully prepared to

appreciate turns away from race and refusals to engage it publicly, particularly when

participants were able to articulate a sophisticated reading of racial logics and practices.

The relationship between reading race and acting to change it was much more tenuous,

complex and contradictory than I had expected it to be. Everywhere I looked, the women

challenged the linearity between analysis and action that I had naively assumed at the

projects outset. I have had to pay much more attention to despair, exhaustion and a

whole range of emotions which not only enable responses to and against the racist

practices with which the women were regularly confronted, but also foreclosed others. In

other words, oppression resulted in action and inaction (Gould 2009:19). Referencing the

work of Anne Anlin Cheng, Heather Love insists on the need to take seriously “ways of

feeling bad that do not make us feel like fighting back” (2007:14). I write at length about

feeling bad and the different directions in which it takes the women in this study. As

57

Megan Boler also observes, emotions are not straightforward. She argues that “emotional

rules” have the potential to secure or subvert “particular hierarchies of gender, race, and

class” (1999:xxi). They can encourage us, through “learned emotional expressions and

silences” to maintain relations of power or to get angry in ways that enable collective

forms of analysis and engagement to emerge (Boler 1999:xxi). Sometimes the women

did get angry in these ways but not many and not often. Together the racial literacies

and practices of the participants are useful in analysing how racism is lived and the

lessons that it encourages people of colour to learn.

Much of the critical race and wider literatures on which I draw importantly focus on the

structural conditions that create oppression. This project has reaffirmed my commitment

to drawing attention to these conditions and the conditions in which knowledge about

racism is produced. As I argue in specific places, the pain of participants reveals a larger

pattern and accumulated history of racial harm. Essed’s observation, long ago, remains

relevant today; the stress, humiliation and pain of everyday racism is not a unique or

isolated experience. It is widely shared (1991:148). While the incidents recounted

throughout this dissertation may be awfully familiar, I pause at their familiarity, to

understand how enduring their effects continue to be. This project has challenged me to

think about deeply hurt individuals. Their pain with all of its particularities and attendant

memories requires a response. Understanding and observing the “social and political

effects of these quotidian injuries and violences” (Lewis 2012:35) occupies a central

place in this dissertation. While referring back to and challenging the historical and

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structural constraints that create harm and violence are necessary, so are individual and

structural remedies for and responses to racial harm.

Power, Resistance and Everyday Politics My approach to theorizing power is very much shaped by Foucault’s insights on power.

As he explicates, his concern is not to understand power as only, or primarily, repressive

and individualized but also productive, occurring through the entire social body and in its

external practices and mechanisms (Foucault 2000:120; Foucault 1980:97). There are

two major points of significance for these ideas in relation to my own work. The first,

that power is not only or necessarily about punishment, restriction, prohibition and

repression but that “it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse”

(Foucault 1980:119), is critical in apprehending power as diffuse and articulated from

multiple points.23 For Foucault, the dispersal and productiveness of power are precisely

what make it accepted, what makes “power hold good” (1980:119). As an important

qualification, Foucault also elaborates that while power circulates in networks, it is not

evenly distributed or available in the same fashion to all (2003:29-30). In the second and

related point, Foucault is instructive in locating resistance within circuits of power, rather

than in opposition to or outside power (1990/1978:95). This is important in my work in

terms of critically engaging with processes of negotiating racism. This way of

approaching power moves the discussion to a more nuanced analysis of living within and

responding to racist oppression, rather than seeing people as only complicit or heroically

resistant. It seeks instead to locate resistance in specific material and historical

conditions, in the stuff of people’s everyday lives. As Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai argue, in

                                                                                                               23 My use of Foucault’s ideas on power should not be read to suggest that power only operates productively, but rather through multiple registers of discipline and control as elaborated in footnote 4.

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considering our social justice efforts, we “must confront the network of complicities that

structure the possibilities of resistance” (2002: 140) and so I will constantly return to the

ways in which participants’ responses to racial inequality are structured by the complex

workings of power. Sometimes they reinforce the things that they seek to contest. I

resist using the framework of anti-racism in order to more fully capture people of

colour’s complex engagements with and negotiations of racism. Throughout this project,

my own assumptions about anti-racist politics always being identifiable or uniformly

articulated were constantly undone. While I am committed to and aware of the need to

mobilize and organize around specific anti-racist projects and strategies, my focus is on

understanding the conditions that produce political positions and insights, how people of

colour arrive at meanings of racism and how these are variously mobilized in their lives.

In appraising the centrality and complex meanings of freedom within democratic

political life, Wendy Brown describes the ways in which freedom continues to mark our

understandings of agency. She usefully posits “conditions of coercion and conditions of

action” (1995:5) as a way to consider the relative control that individuals in a range of

power relations are differently able to access and claim, “between domination by history

and participation in history, between the space for action and its relative absence” (Brown

1995:5). Again, this notion of conditions of coercion and action moves us away from

more rigid and binary ideas of powerful and powerless to consider the multiple ways in

which peoples lives are structured (through vectors of racism and other forms of

domination and privilege) as well as the ways in which they act in response to coercion

and in bids to enlarge spaces of action. As Michael Hanchard argues, vague invocations

60

of human will, agency and resistance do not provide us with much “insight into the actual

formation, development, and deployment of micro- and macropolitical responses to

actual, historical or imminent practices of coercion” (2006:47). My work, then, centres a

more dynamic notion of negotiation in which people act in unpredictable ways in

response to oppression, ways that require attention and explanation in order to enrich and

expand ideas of anti-racist politics.

My thinking on resistance is also shaped quite centrally by the work of Michael Hanchard

who works towards an analysis of quotidian politics as a corrective to the ways in which

both social movement discourses and political theory limit our understandings of

complex and lived responses to racist oppression, to what properly constitutes the

political realm. He insists on a political analysis that is not reducible to the state or

macroeconomic factors, particularly in relation to black politics (2006:27-29). He argues

that due to a restrictive definition of what constitutes political action within the domain of

political theory science in primarily Euro-American traditions, black struggles for rights

and responses to racial domination fall outside the domain of politics (2006:27).

Hanchard importantly considers the ways in which slavery and colonialism circumscribed

access to the political and required people variously oppressed to engage in politics in

spaces not understood to be political, but which brought themselves to bear on formal

political spheres (2006:12). He argues that cultural practices are central to political life

and looks to enrich our understandings of domination and resistance to include contours

and shades between “outright acquiescence and social mobilization, between total

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repression and total revolution” (2006:28).24 Instead, he works towards an analysis of

politics embedded in daily life.

Like Hanchard, I am less interested in the search for absolute positions of refusal or

capitulation as positions in relation to structures of domination are structured by a much

complex set of relationships and contingent conditions. My work is guided more by

engaging critically with what different responses to racism and oppression open up and

foreclose. Hanchard’s work is also particularly significant in helping me to look at how

everyday racisms fashion everyday politics. Politics in the everyday lives of my

participants were murkier and more complicated than I expected. People and their

practices were less easily categorizable than I sometimes wanted them to be and often,

they did not follow or reflect linear progress, from uncritical to critical. As I explain in

the following chapter, most of my participants unequivocally refused the term “activist”

to refer to themselves and most were not participants in organized social movements.

Yet, their various engagements with and understandings of racial oppression are

important for thinking about processes of social change and for amplifying the tensions

and dilemmas of confronting and looking away from racial harm and injustice. They

help us to appreciate why things change and why they stay the same.

In exploring the practices and deployment of racist categories in the everyday, the work

of Ghassan Hage (2000) further anchors my project. Drawing on the work of Pierre

Bourdieu, Hage shows that in focusing on the sociological veracity of knowledge, we

                                                                                                               24 Hanchard importantly clarifies the centrality of considering relations between political, economic and cultural practices (2006:251). For more on his critique of popular culture, particularly in the American context, see his concluding chapter.

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miss the fact that knowledge of the social world has a practical purpose, it achieves

particular things. Applying these insights to the sociology of racism, Hage argues that

racist practices are practical insofar as they are about securing particular social and spatial

arrangements. Individuals participating in everyday acts of racial violence are not

preoccupied with arriving at accurate explanations of racial categories or thinking about

their implications in knowledge production. In looking at racist articulations as true or

false, good or bad, we miss or peripheralize the productiveness of racist practices (Hage

2000:30-31). I find this idea useful for thinking not only of racism’s productiveness but

also in approaching resistance practices. Specifically, my analysis looks beyond people’s

theoretical consistencies and coherence in responses to racism to focus instead on what

their responses to racism actually achieve in their lives and contexts. What are the range

of strategies and repertoires on which people draw in their everyday lives and what are

their effects? What do they help them to do?

This project is anchored in participants’ recollections of racism and the meanings they

made of it. As the data chapters demonstrate, the narratives I compiled and analyzed

illuminate that negotiations with racism and the development or racial politics are

ongoing, always with the potential to be revised and revisited. As Deniz Kandiyoti

argues, “new strategies and forms of consciousness do not simply emerge from the ruins

of the old and smoothly produce a new consensus, but are created through personal and

political struggles, which are often complex and contradictory” (1988:286). My analysis

captures this complexity by tracing networks of power and processes of learning about

racism, as well as participants’ attempts to loosen the conditions of constraint in their

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lives. People are not heroes or victims. Instead, following Robin Kelley’s writing on

black working class struggles, I “try to make sense of people where they are rather than

where we would like them to be” (Kelley 1996:13). I try to write this complexity without

letting go of the need to image collective horizons of life not so heavily governed by

racism and its harm.

 

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Chapter 2: Methodology and Research Dilemmas  Monica: I can’t wait to read this. Gulzar: I can’t wait to read it either. I’m really interested in stories that will help us to think about how racism and systems of power work and how we can take them apart and change them. Monica: I hope I helped in that sense. I think I gave you like 30 stories to tell. Gulzar: People’s lives are very complicated. That life is complicated is a fact of great analytic importance (Williams 1991:10).

My research explores how people of colour are living with racism and what they are

learning about it. In order to investigate how structural conditions of racism are lived and

interpreted, most of the data for this study is based on in-depth interviews with people of

colour. These people are not drawn from identifiable activist or social justice circles.

This is significant as their understandings and navigations of racism are more ordinary

than exceptional. Throughout the dissertation, I intersperse the data I collected with my

reflections and observations of teaching and working for many years as a teacher and

equity worker in public schools and as a teaching assistant and instructor at the university

level. A number of the interviews ended with some variation of the conversation

excerpted above between Monica and me. Participants expressed an interest in seeing

what I would do with the many experiences they shared, insights they offered and stories

they told. As I sat in the interviews, I too wondered, how I would make meaning from

what the women of colour shared about their lives. How would I turn it all into

something recognizable as a dissertation?

Recruiting Participants I circulated a call for participation widely through listservs, community and personal

contacts and various undergraduate associations. I contacted people who knew about my

65

research and had expressed an interest in participation through email or by phone,

including former students. I asked a network of professors and teaching assistants across

a range of university sites and disciplines to circulate the information to undergraduate

students whom they teach. I was very clear that I was not looking for a rarefied group of

people called “activists.” While teaching interdisciplinary social justice courses at the

undergraduate level, many students explained that they did not identify as or relate to

activists because they did not participate in organized or overt political action. Over the

years of teaching these students, we often discussed the quiet and important ways that

they were living and struggling with racism and injustices of many kinds that I amplify

and examine here. Expanding what counts as politics, who does it, where it takes place

and what it looks like, form an important backdrop to this dissertation. I am hoping that

other people of colour who read this dissertation will find the people here relatable, rather

than exceptional and that this might enable reflection about their and our political

horizons and ways of living race.

Criteria for Participation In my call for participants (see Appendix A), I asked specifically for people who: were

currently pursuing undergraduate studies at a Canadian university; self-identified as

people of colour (Black, South Asian, East Asian, African Canadian, Middle Eastern,

Indo-Canadian, non-white, mixed race, racialized etc.); were born in Canada or had spent

the majority of their childhood and education in Canada; and thought ideas of race and

racism were important in their lives. Conversation topics listed included the effects of

racism in their lives (the university and beyond), their responses to it, the connections

between racism and other forms of oppression and their changing ideas about racism.

When participants contacted me, I asked them all to confirm that they fit the criteria for

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participation in this project. Each of the participants was sent a consent form in advance

of the interview (Appendix B). At the start of each interview, I went through the form

and answered questions about the project or the process of being involved in it. Prior to

being interviewed, each participant signed a consent form.

I interviewed 22 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.25 I

interviewed undergraduate students because it was through my interactions with them in

classrooms that this research project crystallized for me. I asked specifically for

participants who were Canadian born or those who had arrived as young children and

spent the bulk of their childhood and formative years in Canada. I wanted to investigate

how race was learned in a specific national context, a theme elaborated in Chapter 6 of

this dissertation. I also interviewed 2 additional women of colour, Sara and Nimat, both

of whom I know personally. They arrived in Canada as young children and all or the

majority of their educational experiences were in Canada. While they were not

undergraduate students at the time of the interviews, they shaped this dissertation in

important ways and were also instrumental in helping me to arrive at this particular

project. In total, I conducted 24 interviews. In order to protect their anonymity, each of

the participants is referred to by a pseudonym. I gave all of the participants the

                                                                                                               25 There were a number of racialized undergraduate students who responded to the call to participate via email and asked about remuneration for their time. I responded that while I appreciated that I was asking for a couple of hours of their time, I wasn’t able to financially compensate them. None of these students decided to participate in this project. Of these participants, about a dozen, some wrote back saying that political studies and psychology departments that regularly looked for research participants compensated students for their time and unless I was willing to do the same, they were not available for the study. I was surprised and not entirely sure what to make of these emails, offering time for money. On the one hand, I read them in the context of the increasingly precarious financial situation in which students in the academy may find themselves, resulting in more judicious uses of their time. On the other hand, I wonder about increasingly monetized ways that value and time are calculated and its effects on research.

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opportunity to choose their own. A few did but most left it to me to provide them with

one. “Don’t give me a white name,” a few women laughingly warned me. I tried my

best to give participants names that reflected their cultural backgrounds.

Surprising and unexpected to me was the fact that apart from one participant who ended

up not fitting the criteria for the study, all of the people who volunteered for the study

were racialized women. I do not know, with any definitiveness, what may have made the

project appeal more to women or how the research design itself and talking about racism

may itself be a gendered activity or read as such. It is also the case that many of the

professors and teaching assistants who helped to disseminate the research call were

connected to women and gender studies programs and other critical or interdisciplinary

social justice courses that often have higher enrollments of women students. I didn’t set

out to write a dissertation that exclusively examined the experiences and racial formation

of women of colour, nor did I make efforts to deliberately recruit men of colour. This has

turned out to be much more than incidental in analysing the data as the gendered effects

of racial oppression are prevalent in many of the interviews. This poses real challenges

in organizing the knowledge and analysis presented by the women in the study as well as

writing my own. While these ideas are explored throughout the dissertation, Chapter 5,

in particular, analyses how racism and its interlocking effects are lived by women of

colour.

Interviews I conducted loosely structured interviews that were audio-taped, with the exception of

one participant who asked that her interview not be taped. I found it difficult to conduct

this interview as the pace of trying to keep up with hand written notes during the

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interview was incredibly challenging. This participant was also the most directive in

asking that specific information from her interview not be shared in this dissertation. She

was very concerned about preserving her anonymity. In the end, I use her interview in

composite ways, rather than revealing specific details about her life, in order to allay her

fears. While all of the other interviews were recorded, some participants asked me to

stop taping at various points because they did not want certain information to be recorded

or used in this dissertation. Others did not ask me to stop taping but indicated specific

incidents, relationships or reflections that they did not want me to include in my analysis.

I respected all of these requests. The shortest interview, at just over 36 minutes was

anomalous. Most interviews lasted well over 2 hours and some of the longest ran

between 4 and 5 hours. A list of initial questions that I set out to ask participants is

included in an interview questionnaire appendix (see Appendix C).1

I contemplated conducting focus groups as a follow up to individual interviews to enable

me to discuss in more depth participants’ processes of developing racial literacy as well

as to have participants talk with each other about such processes. The logistical details of

setting up such groups up, participant concerns about anonymity and hesitations about

sharing experiences and analysis of racism in a larger group environment meant that in

the end, the focus groups did not materialize.

In response to the question with which I started all of the interviews: “So tell me what

made you interested in participating in this study,” many people came with very specific

racist incidents that they were keen to discuss and the interview provided them with a

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place to look at these events; others detailed the importance of research to document and

share the ways that racism harms people of colour, speaking to a kind of political or

educational purpose that they hoped would result from their participation; a number were

thinking about pursuing graduate school and were keen and curious to experience the

process of being involved in doctoral dissertation research. One such student described it

almost as research karma, “why not put that positive karma out there so that when it’s

time for me to do my research, I’ll have the same reaction, the same response.” A

handful of interviews ended with participants asking me many questions about my own

graduate studies, the process of applying as well as different kinds of graduate programs

and employment options with graduate degrees. This speaks to the shifting roles that I

assumed during the interview process. While I was a researcher, I was also called to do

and be other things. Many of these women were the first in their families to attend

university in Canada, few had access to networks of university educated mentors who

could help them to navigate the process of researching to and applying for graduate

school.26

A number of the students had a professor, teaching assistant, instructor or in one case, a

parent, send the call to them and suggest that they take part. For the students who were

forwarded the information through a past professor or teaching assistant, the fact that

someone who knew them felt that they had something of value to offer to the study

motivated them to get in touch with me. A few of the women were urged to participate

by other women who were interviewed.

                                                                                                               26 While some did mention institutional supports that they did access, both in high schools and university, not having people in their immediate familial networks that had attended university in Canada was recounted as a significant barrier to accessing and researching postsecondary education options.

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Finally, a number of the participants were students that I had previously taught.27 Many

of them referenced our student-teacher relationship as being quite central in their

participation in the study and did say that without that connection, they would be far

more reluctant to participate in such a study. In addition to thinking that the content of

the study was important, one of my previous students joked: “And I liked you as a TA,

so (laughter) that helped.” Interviewing past students was a real joy. I reconnected with

some very memorable, insightful and sharp students and it was clear to me through the

interviews that our prior student-teacher relationships provided a rich context for our

conversations as well as jumping off points for things we knew about each other through

prior interactions. It also reminded me of how deeply my own research preoccupations

have been shaped through my teaching, both in public schools and the university.

In one of the most unexpected and in some ways hilarious answers to the “what made you

say yes to participating in the study” question, the first person that I interviewed disclosed

that while she did want to discuss a very affecting incident of racism, “my ulterior motive

for participating in this research is that so many queer women are political and I have to

cultivate that a little bit.” As a person who identified as not being very inclined to

activism but also being queer, she was finding it difficult to navigate the world of queer

dating which she described as being very activist focused. Taking part in the interview,

she seemed to suggest, was a way to make herself more attractive to other queer women.

Her plan was to widely advertise her participation in this project to secure some dates.

                                                                                                               27 The students that I interviewed took courses in an interdisciplinary social justice program where I was both a teaching assistant and instructor for four years.

71

She later said that she hoped she hadn’t offended me through this disclosure and I assured

her that she hadn’t, I quite appreciated her candor. I hope that she found some good

dates.

Negotiating Interviews Just as I arrived at the interview, initially with a purposeful sense of what I was doing and

attempting to distill in the lives of people of colour, my participants also arrived with

their own agendas, priorities and preoccupations. For example, as I described earlier, in

my call for participants, I asked for people who refer to themselves as people of colour

and in parentheses, I included a variety of racial designations. For me, these are not

merely or primarily descriptive, they are political categories and my project emerged

from an interest in tracing itineraries of becoming racially literate. But people came with

their own reasons to the interviews and not all participants referred to themselves in racial

terms. Even when they did, there was no consensus on what these terms meant to them.

Sometimes they were used descriptively, others used them to reference political or

cultural affiliations and for many, the terms they used changed over time and were

context specific. A few people unequivocally refused such terms. Throughout my

analysis of the narratives, I reflect on the political formations and practices enabled and

foreclosed by different identity claims and categories.

While I certainly shaped the interviews, asking the questions, opening up conversations

about particular aspects of their lives, many of the participants were also instrumental in

determining how the interview would proceed. In some cases, participants set the

parameters of the interview, their reasons for showing up, what was on the table for

discussion and when the interview was over. In most cases, the agenda of what we would

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discuss and the interview focus was jointly negotiated, at least this seemed to be the case

to me, and many interviews continued on for hours, well beyond the two hours I

anticipated that most interviews would take.

As I looked over the stacks of interview transcripts, what has materialized is a negotiation

of what I set out to know and understand with what the participants, all racialized

undergraduate students, brought to the process. The two do not always sit easily together.

In my exchange with Monica, with which I start this chapter, I explain that I am

interested in the stories that can help us to think about how social change takes place,

how people of colour learn to read and act against racism. The research process

challenged and shifted this question but also provided an occasion for the emergence of

new questions and ways of thinking, many of which I had not anticipated. While this was

generative, it was also difficult to sort out how to prioritize, resituate, contain and put

peoples’ lives in conversation with each other and academic literatures.

As Monica astutely points out, she told me many stories, many more than I could

possibly represent. This complexity is also part of the tale of the challenge of writing this

project. Talking to people about their lives leads to many detours and side streets,

tangents and details. While these were interesting, I wasn’t always sure how they were

relevant to my study. However, most times, I chose not to redirect the conversations.

This became a source of frustration for me as I was transcribing the interviews and I

wondered why I hadn’t been more directive. I grappled with the unevenness of the data

across interviews. In some cases, I have a much broader and richer sketch of participants,

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their educational trajectories, family experiences and the concerns that animated their

lives. In others, interviews were much more contained to specific instances through

which I attempted to glean details of the kinds of lives and racial formations with which

people were struggling. These people are more faint on the page. We don’t know much

about them, it’s hard to picture their lives. This might be frustrating to readers. It was

sometimes frustrating to me. Over time, however, I came to appreciate the different ways

that people showed up and responded to the interviews, the reasons that motivated their

participation and the varying disclosures they were willing and unwilling to make. When

I reflect now on my unwillingness to be more directive about the interviews, it had partly

to do with honouring why people themselves had come to this space and chosen to share

with me things that were difficult to speak about and often painful to revisit. I felt some

sort of obligation to allow participants to also guide that process. In retrospect, I attribute

this lack of direction, in part, to my discomfort with the balance of power that I held in

the research process. In the interviews, I got to set the conditions for how and what to

ask. Putting aside what was initially a very scripted list of interview questions also

helped me to feel, perhaps naively, that I was willing to set the agenda with my

participants, rather than asking them to respond only to my own. This also meant that I

tried to remain open to the questions and curiosities of participants, including their

interests in the genealogy of my intellectual preoccupations and priorities. Some people

asked me quite a lot about my own life, the process of doing research, how I would

undertake analysis of the interviews while others asked little or nothing.

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Finally, in many instances, I wasn’t sure how to determine or adjudicate what was

relevant partly because tracing the development of an analysis of racism is a multifaceted

and never-ending proposition. Through the interviews, participants traced both banal and

extraordinary incidents in countless places, including classrooms, restaurants, buses,

subways, cars, fields, principals’ offices, books, films, work places, playgrounds,

neighbourhoods and homes. Interactions and relationships with guidance counsellors,

principals, lovers, peers, friends and teachers, in families, as parents and children,

profoundly shaped their analysis of the racial logics operating in their lives. I do not

provide life histories of the participants or comprehensively engage or represent their

experiences. Instead, I focus on how the women acquire knowledge of racism, how they

remember and recount memories and effects of racial violence and almost forget them.

Throughout the chapters, I drop anchors at various sites and points around which certain

ideas, processes of meaning making or memories cluster. Chapter 3, for example,

excavates early racial memories and how racial literacies are variously cultivated in

families. Schools are a focus of Chapter 4 but also provide the context for reading race in

other instances.28 Some people narrated their lives chronologically, from the past to the

present but in most cases, I impose a chronology in my organization of the narratives.

Racism was not lived or recounted so linearly.29 At times, I present the data through

                                                                                                               28 Much of what is contained in these interviews is reflections of what participants remember when recounting experiences of racism from their childhoods and as young women. What was so interesting about this were their attempts to both capture thoughts and feelings from another time as well as their presentist perspectives on their younger years. While I did not expect the analysis of this work to be so heavily governed by attention to childhood, studying race and childhood from the perspective of adults looking back has been remarkably interesting. In the conclusion, I reflect on some of the openings that studying childhood and youth in this way might yield. 29 See Mona Oikawa’s (2012) book on the internment of Japanese Canadians and the legacy of internment in families and how Japanese Canadian women in particular, remember and pass on memories of the internment to their daughters. Oikawa explains that the memories of the women that she interviewed, women who were interned and their daughters, “disrupt clear delineations between past and present; their

75

compilations of recurrent or dominant themes as well as those that were more anomalous.

The second half of Chapter 6, for example, hinges on a question that one participant,

Ayanna, asked about the relationship between racialized and Aboriginal people in

Canada. This question provided an opportunity to reflect on how and why reflections

about white settler colonialism go missing in participants’ narratives and the conditions

that limit racial literacies. While racism is structural and leaves some predictable

imprints, the more anomalous themes index the specificities with which racism is felt and

lived. In other instances, I pry open certain experiences that participants articulated as

defining moments in their lives to excavate their many sedimented meanings which

continue to have a force in the present. Sometimes, I follow stories that I could not forget

or compelling questions. I peer into them, not to suggest they are widely representative,

but because they open up spaces to think about processes of racial formation, the

meanings of racism that are fostered and actions in relation to it that seem possible. In all

cases, I emphasize the racial conditions that create these experiences.

On Demographic Disclosures or “Who are the Participants?”30 It is standard practice in most social science research with human subjects to detail

demographic information about the participants and, quite often, to locate oneself in a

similar way. The places we come from, live and learn, how we call ourselves and how

we are called in the world, all matter. At times, I do provide some of these details in the

ways that most readers have come to expect. While the birthplaces, cultural and racial

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         memories are a testament to how survivors and their children live in multiple time spaces” (2012:86). This was also the case for many of my participants. Latifa, for example, explained that she didn’t remember her life in order. When I asked her to explain how she remembers, she says: “ I think like in memories and I think of instances and things like that so it’s always all over the place…so yeah, it’s kind of hard cause I don’t know, I don’t have like a linear sense. So it’s just like instances (1:12:29). Their own lives were also often recounted in the context of the lives of their families, weaving their own pasts with communal pasts and stories. Other participants hurried past particular parts of their lives, only to circle back later. 30 This title is taken from Gonick and Hladki 2005.

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backgrounds, migrations and family configurations of the women in this study are

important, they also do other things, they make us think that we know who people are and

who they might become. Unlike projects that report on populations under study, I look

more squarely at the conditions that produce people of colour as a category, in some ways

a homogenized one and in others, highly differentiated. Much of this dissertation turns

on the space between the various ways that people of colour are named and their efforts

to wrestle with these categories and their effects. They respond in a variety of ways to

these racial meanings and their accompanying consequences.

Throughout the dissertation, while I disclose information about how the women self-

identify, how their bodies are read in particular instances and moments, I don’t

consolidate this information in an appendix that outlines each of the participants’

biographies. At other times, I disclose details in more diffuse ways, withhold them until

the end of chapters or reveal more in subsequent chapters. Readers will infer racial

designations through names of participants, close reading practices and by connecting up

participants throughout the study. I appreciate that this might be frustrating, even

disconcerting to readers but it’s a purposeful frustration. While not discounting the value

of how people are read in the world, racism works partly like shorthand. This became

clear to me in my own life when I tried to teach my daughter about the meaning and uses

of a dash. She was no more than 4 and we were travelling home from an academic

conference, looking for our gate at the airport. There was a sign directing passengers to

gates 34 - 45 and our gate was 37. My daughter did not know what a dash was and I tried

to explain that the dash stood in for all of the numbers between 34 and 45. She found

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this confusing or perhaps I take it so for granted that I didn’t explain it carefully enough.

In the end, I got out a piece of paper on which we wrote out all of the numbers between

34 and 45. The dash, I said, took the place of all of those numbers. She was amazed that

a dash could do all that. In describing the work of the dash and how to read it, it occurred

to me that racism works in a similar way, it comes to stand in for all kinds of things that

do not need to be articulated, abbreviated ways of reading people and bodies.

By sorting people into racial categories, by reading them through demographic profiles

and assignations, we can get sloppy, think that we know who people are and how they

experience the world. We probably would not be entirely wrong but I endeavour to write

against these reading practices whereby in thinking we know and in looking for familiar

sign posts with which to make meaning, we can foreclose remaining surprised or

reflective about our own habits of reading or miss invitations to think in ways that don’t

confirm already existing ideas. I struggled with and against my own investments in

knowing the racial identities of my participants, particularly in earlier stages of the

research project. The more that people of colour shared their own quarrels against

racisms reductive knowability, and the more that I reflected on my own, the more I felt

challenged to gain some distance from slotting people into categories. Racial categories,

as I mentioned earlier, were not uniformly assumed, they were much more contingently

articulated. In other words, naming racial identities in a more diffuse way is not a tactic

of evasion, it is “part of the pedagogy” of this research.31 In encouraging researchers to

reflect on representation in writing practices, Marnina Gonick and Janice Hladki turn

their analytic lens to how identity categories are mobilized in research. Questioning the                                                                                                                31 Personal correspondence with Marnina Gonick. December 18, 2014.

78

proffering of categories of race, class, sexuality etc., they argue that people researched are

“assumed to belong to these categories in an uncomplicated and straightforward way”

(2005:289). They approach the categories not as something given in advance, but as

openings for investigation and urge researchers to “re-think this knowing” (2005:290).

Like Gonick and Hladki, I try to balance the material weight, histories and effects of

categories with the ways that they appear to render people “knowable” (2005:290).

Sara Ahmed, in her book, On Being Included, also refuses to acknowledge the diversity

practitioners in her book based on their usual identity descriptors. Because of the small

number of people who participated in formal interviews, she too worries about simplistic

renderings of the material presented (2012:196-197). At times when I read her book, I

did wonder about the specificities of how bodies were read racially and how this would

matter in the context of institutional work about diversity in higher education. I also

appreciated the tensions that she was also trying to balance of both providing a picture of

the racial logics in diversity work but also working against the tendency to read

simplistically based on identities. I’m not entirely satisfied that I’ve figured out this

balance but it’s one of the struggles and tensions in the process of writing. I am not

arguing that the women’s lives and experiences are singular or individual, nor am I

arguing that they can stand in for the experiences of all racialized women. People’s lives

are necessarily an interface between the particularities of their biographies and the social

conditions and constraints into which they are placed and to which they respond but

racism does not make this complexity equally available to all people.

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We see through the analysis of women of colour in this study, the emergence of multiple

racial literacies and complex political formations. There is no singular story that

emerges, except that racism weighs people down in profound ways, requiring the

reduction of people of colour to a category, group or type that belies their material,

historical and biographical complexities. In other words while racism is a lived

condition, it is lived differently. Following Avery Gordon, I wanted to afford these

women the right to complexity in their lives (1997:4). The “right to complex

personhood” as Gordon puts it, “means the people suffer graciously and selfishly too, get

stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves…at the very least,

complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming

that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously

subtle meaning” (1997:4-5). The participants sometimes confound easy delineations of

conservative and progressive, left and right; we are left liking some of them more than

others, some of them may feel and seem more familiar and some we can more easily

sympathize with but my goal has been to write them in the spirit of Gordon’s complex

personhood. I try to avoid making them representative of various racial or ethnic

groups.32

Who Am I? Similar to how and what I reveal about my participants, my practices of self-location are

also decidedly diffuse. At times when I believe that my own experience is relevant to

something I’m writing about or where the participants’ stories evoke my own, I include

                                                                                                               32 See Marnina Gonick (2003) for a discussion on the challenges of representing how girls variously mobilize categories of difference while also trying to make apparent the conditions that make available certain legibilities of “girl.” Gonick also speaks about preserving the complexity of girls without “making them representatives of their different racialized and ethnic categories” (2003: 16).

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them if they enrich the narratives. Writing about my own life might also provide some

insight into my own investments in this project and how I myself make meaning. To me,

this is more weighty than a few lines of self-disclosure that are often left on the page

without any further engagement or a consideration of the relationship between who we

are and the knowledge we produce. I often wonder what the listing of one’s social

location accomplishes. Is it a reflection of a political commitment, an effort at

accountability or transparency or is it something that scholars do to be done with it? I

had to sort out how to reach for a practice of meaningful embeddedness in my work.33

I came to these decisions partly by way of a participant, Ayanna, who explained that she

often does not disclose her racial and cultural heritage, even when her body or ways of

being in the world were read as suggestive of her background.34 While being Canadian

born, the question often asked of Ayanna is about the birthplace and background of her

parents. She describes her reluctance as not being about shame but partly her resentment

at efforts to pin her down as clearly from this place or that and the persistent need that

people have for her to be from elsewhere. Her way of fighting the readily waiting

meanings of who she is, is to wait as long as she can, to defer the questions and to avoid

offering up her life as someone who is reduced to a racial designation. For as long as she

could, she refused to allow people to turn her life into a dash.

                                                                                                               33 Scholarship on feminist methodologies that both dispute “perspectiveless” approaches to knowledge and knowledge production (Grosz 1993:191, emphasis in original) but also eschew a narcissistic reflexivity are particularly useful in considering the relationship between people and knowledge production. As Sandra Harding argues, it is not possible, nor is it desirable, to “completely erase the fingerprints that reveal” the process of producing knowledge (1993:57). See also Kirby, Greaves and Reid 2006; Gunaratnam 2003; Haraway 2003; Smith 1999; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Fine 1998; Alcoff and Potter 1993 for analysis of the power relations and positions necessarily involved, but often elided, in knowledge production. 34 In Chapter 6, I consider the selective contexts in which Ayanna does disclose connections to her ancestral home.

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Locating myself as a person of colour within this project does not dissolve the critical

distinctions and power relations between me and the participants in this study.35 In

tracing the history of the Atlantic slave trade and in her travels in Ghana, one of Saidiya

Hartman’s enduring cautions is her reflection on the dangers of “waiting to hear a story

with which I was already familiar” (2008:233). As she remarks towards the end of her

journey, she realizes that in setting out to find her story, of the “children of the captives

dragged across the sea,” she almost misses the different stories, of “those who stayed

                                                                                                               35 Also see Twine 2000; Hanchard and Islam 2000 for related complexities of doing critical race research as racialized people. They variously complicate meanings of racial identity and its impacts in conducting anti-racist research. Twine, for example, explains that during her research in Brazil, while she did not expect to be a racial insider in relation to Afro-Brazilians, she was entirely unprepared for how some Afro-Brazilians reproduced racist discourses, some of which were directed towards her. She explores the distinction between racial identities and political formation; in other words, being a person of colour does not necessarily result in anti-racist politics. Twine also explores the multiple meanings of blackness, in relation to specific histories, national affiliations, age, education, sexuality and other social markers of difference (2000:9). As Twine and others argue, the “instability” and “uneven meanings of racism” have important methodological implications for researchers (2000:27). Islam explores the complexities of doing research with the Bangladeshi immigrant community in Los Angeles as a Bangladeshi-American anti-racist researcher, particularly as it relates to taking up “routine racialized hatred” (2000:47) against blacks and Latinos alongside the racialized exclusions and oppression that her participants experienced; Hanchard explicates the complications of doing research in Brazil as an African-American male researcher, particularly in terms of how race, nationality, gender and personality together interacted to make him an object of suspicion, curiosity, hostility and acceptance (2000:169-170). Examining the process of doing fieldwork in the American South and Guyana as an African American, Brackette Williams observes the shifting landscapes and differential implications of sharing race or having a “skinfolk” connection with research subjects. Drawing on Zora Neale Hurston, Williams points out the distinctions between “skinfolk” and “kinfolk,” that is the many cases in which the category of people who supposedly share race, breaks down or is more complex than signaled only by race (1996:76-77). Williams cites regional affiliation, national status, marital status, educational attainment, gender, race, class and political commitments as differentiating Black people in a multitude of ways. As a result, categories and connections such as insider or outsider, foreigner or native are constantly complicated in specific times, places and research relationships. However well intentioned researchers might be and whatever sense of connection we might assume to our research participants, Williams insists that situating ourselves in our work is a continuous process. Addressing herself to researchers, she argues, “in doing their homework, they must continually try to figure out the power implications of who they are (or, better put, how they are being constructed and by whom) in relation to what they are doing, asking, and observing” (Williams 1996:73). “Who are you and what are you to me?” is the question for Williams that displaces a more generic desire to fix and figure out participant and researcher identities (1996:79). Collectively, the dilemmas that these scholars encountered intervene to complicate frameworks of racial insiders and outsiders. While not unimportant, such frameworks do not adequately or fully capture the complexities and nuances of race and racism, nor do they allow racialized researchers, myself included, to escape relations of power within and between racialized communities. For further reflections on transnational feminist collaboration and hegemony see Rey Chow 2003 and Sherene Razack 2000.

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behind” (2008:232). The stories signal not only different orientations to the past and

longings for a future, they are also fashioned from different circumstances and what

Hartman describes as contested and plural African identities and histories (2008:231).

Hartman’s caution also gives me pause in thinking about and rendering explicit the

stories that I was listening for, the ones that were more familiar and the ones I wanted to

hear and the ones that I had missed in the process.

At times, participants would truncate incidents and interpretations of racism, trailing off,

“you know what I mean.” This was not stated as a question but as an invitation.

Participants were asking me to “fill in the blanks” about what racism is and what it does,

assuming that I knew without them having to articulate it. They were relating incidents

to me as someone whom they assumed would “get” what they were trying to say about

racism. Often I did relate. Many of the participants recounted experiences and

reflections that were awfully familiar. For example, because of my childhood, some

working class lives and families seemed more familiar, I related more to white

educational spaces because of the halls I had walked in for most of my school life, I was

good at reading for cues about queerness. How I experienced racism and life had a lot to

do with how I listened and made meaning, the things that resonated and came alive, and

the stories that felt more compelling. Still in the interviews, I would insist, “I think I

know what you mean but please tell me.” I was surprised by how halting and slow it

sometimes was for participants to fill in the blanks. It seemed to be not only a

shorthanded way of recounting experiences that circulate between people of colour, it

was also a way to circumvent having to say certain things at all.

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In other instances, participants recounted stories, desires and ways of understanding that I

didn’t “get,” at least not in the same way. Sometimes this was due to our different racial

locations, cultural experiences or how differently we had made sense of our lives.

Writing about and listening to racial experiences that I do not share reminded me, as did

Hartman, that racial identities and histories are not monolithic. There is no definitive or

all encompassing experience of racism. As the subsequent section on experience

elaborates, knowledge production is embedded in interpretive processes that are

themselves reflective of relations of power. All knowledge is produced from somewhere

and from someone. My participants remind me to listen carefully, to things that I think I

already know and to things that appear less familiar.

Experience Using interviews as my primary data for this project requires that I engage the ways in

which individuals narrate their experiences and analyses. I found feminist post-structural

and Foucauldian approaches to power, knowledge and subject formation to be

particularly productive in opening up complex and rich lines of inquiry and investigation

that guided my analysis of interviews with participants.36 Post-structural theorists point

out that language does not offer unmediated access to reality or experience but in fact

constrains, produces and makes intelligible and possible certain tellings that are always

partial and contradictory (Britzman 2000:32). I approach language as embedded in

discourse; that is, in addition at looking what people say or understanding discourse as a                                                                                                                36 Selected post-structural feminist resources include: Britzman 1995; Britzman 2000; Butler 1992; Guanaratnam 2003; Rosenberg 2004; St. Pierre and Pillow 2000; Saukko 2003; Scott 1992; Valverde 2004; Walkerdine 1990; Weedon 1997/1987. My interest here is not to rehearse what properly counts as post-structural or to weigh in on the interventions that post-structural theorizing makes. Instead, I focus on the different ways in which various ideas drawn from a literature that is identified or that identifies itself as post-structural is useful for my project.

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linguistic concept, a Foucauldian discursive reading embeds language in social

institutions, history, systems of knowledge and power (Weedon 1997:34; Hook

2001:522).

Recalling the insights of critical race scholars from the previous chapter, I consider the

relations of power that make the recounting and naming of racism more and less possible,

more and less believable. Discourse analysis is particularly useful for my purposes as I

endeavour to illuminate the larger context against and within which people of colour are

able to produce accounts of racism. Centering discourse in this way alerts us to how

prominently they feature in meaning making and also how difficult it is to “think outside

of them” (Hook 2001: 522). In tracing these moments of meaning making in the

contemporary moment, it becomes apparent that people of colour are under enormous

pressure to enforce structures of racelessness (Morrison 1993:46) and neoliberal logics in

their own lives. However, in tracing interpretive processes, there were also gaps and

elisions for which I have tried to account. My writing vacillates between long stretches

of narrative driven engagement, particularly evident in Chapters 4 and 5, and another

style of writing in which the participants are much sparser. In other words, sometimes I

focus on the texture of what is there in the data while in other instances I think through

ideas that are barely perceptible. In this way, discourse analysis is also instructive in

illuminating the conditions and relations of power that make certain ideas harder to reach.

As I principally argue throughout this dissertation, these are racial conditions. Struggles

to arrive at the word racism, for example, are described at the start of Chapter 3 as are the

accompanying effects when it is felt but can not be spoken or heard. Chapter 6 is partly

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organized around racialized structures of citizenship but also takes as its locus of analysis

the missing reflections about settler colonial practices in Canada. While many of the

interviews were bursting with life, how and what people thought about racial formation,

the ways they talked about and felt it and what they left out, together furnish the analysis

for the data chapters.37

But discourses are not only constraining, under certain conditions, they can also enable or

open up “forms of critique and resistance” (Hook 2001: 522)? This project also examines

the conditions under which people of colour struggle to find alternate ways of

apprehending their lives and naming racism as a force that structures their experiences.

Discourse analysis also enables me to explore how anti-racist ideas and practices are

themselves embedded and invested in particular relations of power. While anti-racist

discourses can be understood as oppositional and part of marginal or subjugated

knowledges (McHoul and Grace 1993:15), my work also expands the possible meanings,

practices and strategies of political action in relation to racism. How women of colour

understand and respond to racial harm in their everyday lives is important for thinking

more expansively about social change and the development and curtailment of racial

politics.

                                                                                                               37 The research questions and context of the interviews also curtailed what participants disclosed and what I imagine they left out. In a couple of instances during the interviews, participants asked me “if I was getting what I needed.” In each case, I responded that they should share whatever they were comfortable doing so. Participants’ question, however, signals the pressure that some participants experienced to be “good” research subjects who could make relevant, helpful disclosures. They were preoccupied to deliver what they assumed I needed or was looking for from the interview process. In Chapter 5, in particular, I reflect on how queerness presented itself in the interviews and the parameters of this project that participants experienced and sometimes tentatively or more forcefully expanded. Part of documenting the interactions in the interview is to make explicit the conditions of knowledge production that enabled or promoted certain disclosures, assumed to be helpful or expected, while precluding others.

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Post-structural insights are also relevant in theorizing individuals not as the originating

authors of our lives and experiences but rather as subjects who are produced historically

and embedded in a range of competing and conflicting interests, exclusions, institutional

arrangements and relations of power (Weedon 1997:32-33; Butler 1992:9).38 Rather than

attempting to construct coherent and unified narratives of anti-racist subjects and

practices, my work attempts to trace forms of political engagement in ways that are much

more contingent and contextual, as I elaborate more fully in Chapter 1. Finally, I draw on

post-structural ideas to engage critically with experience, more specifically, to resituate

and make explicit the ways in which we derive knowledge from and make meaning of

experience. Joan Scott challenges the notion of experience as evidence and advocates an

approach in which experience requires explanation and interpretation, rather than

assuming itself to be explanatory (1992:37-38). Scott argues that it is only by attending

to discourse and historical processes that we come to understand the complex ways in

which experience is structured and produced (1992:25-26). As Couze Venn further

elaborates, “the models or plots or scripts which we use to make sense of our experience

exist as a given in the culture; we do not invent them from scratch or choose them as

‘free’ agents, through clearly new models and emplotments are constantly generated”

(2002:58). While there is often a deep attachment to experience, a belief that it is

personal, intimate and unique, in addition to situating experience within the social, my

work asks that we consider the ways in which our interpretations of experience are also

                                                                                                               38 While I draw on the important and productive insights of post-structuralism, I do so with the understanding that “to end specific hierarchies at specific sites,” (Razack 1998:161) more essentialized approaches to power and political organization are sometimes required and necessary. For this reason, I find feminist post-structural work particularly useful given its commitment to understanding the complexity of power and subjectivity while simultaneously remaining committed to projects of social justice, consistent with my own theoretical and methodological preoccupations.

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situated in social processes of meaning making which constitutes particular kinds of

subjects. As Scott reminds, “it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who

are constituted through experience” (1992:26). In this way, experience as well as the

subjects it produces, as man/woman and white/black, for example, becomes an object of

analysis and inquiry, rather than assuming the categories themselves to be ahistorical,

fixed and immutable (Scott 1992:25-27).

Finally, in using interviews as my primary research methodology, I take seriously the

work and insights of feminist anti-racist scholars who insist on the importance of

investigating the social world from the perspectives of those subjugated by practices of

domination. My project seeks to amplify these perspectives and to attend to the complex

ways in which racialized people encounter, navigate and apprehend the racial

organization of their lives. I am cognizant, however, of the danger of romanticizing or

celebrating such perspectives, as well as the desire for tales of heroic resistance. As

Donna Haraway importantly cautions, coming to “see from below” requires sophisticated

skills of observation and analysis, a project that is “neither easily learned nor

unproblematic” (2003:29). I trouble the assumed link between experience and

knowledge, or subjugation and insight into oppression. As Haraway further advises,

“subjugation is not grounds for an ontology; it might be a visual clue” (1988:586).39 I

agree with Haraway that we can not assume a particular politics or analysis by virtue of                                                                                                                39 Haraway (1991) and Harding (1991), among others, were particularly invested in making transparent the relations of power that mark all knowledge production. Arguing against declarations of objectivity, universality and neutrality that masked the specificities of knowledge and its often attendant role in reproducing dominance, they advocated instead, more transparent and accurate forms of knowledge that were necessarily partial and situated. Being clear about the places from which all knowledge is produced was articulated as a feminist practice of being accountable. No forms of knowledge production are innocent, universal or outside relations of power but some obfuscate these relations. I draw on ideas about situated knowledge while also emphasizing that locations do not fix or determine knowledge.

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the body while at the same time not denying the importance and potential of our lived

experiences as providing insights into social organization and relations of ruling (Smith

1998:8). As Uma Narayan articulates, individuals who experience oppression (insiders)

may have epistemic privilege40, that is, they may be able to apprehend structures of

oppression with more subtlety and clarity than those who are dominant (outsiders)

(1988:35). However, she also importantly expounds that the everydayness of oppression

does not necessarily translate into an analysis of historical or systemic relations of power

nor does it account for the ways in which insider and outsider status change and overlap

given that our social realities are constituted by multiple systems of domination and

subordination simultaneously (Narayan 1988:35-36; Razack 1998:11-14) or as Bat-Ami

Bar On argues, the “dispersion of power among multiple centres” (1993:94). Drawing

on the work of Essed, Fanon and Memmi, Twine similarly argues that “racial

subordination does not mechanistically generate a critical stance vis-à-vis racism any

more than colonialism created anticolonial subjectivities” (2000:15). How people of

colour are experiencing, making sense of and navigating racial hierarchies in their

everyday lives, the complexity of these processes, is the topic of this dissertation.

From Interviews to Analysis I conducted interviews over 3 separate weeks. During the process of interviewing, I kept

notes as I interviewed or sometimes, if the time was short, I made audio clips of things

that I was thinking to circle back to. Often, after each interview, I jotted down notes to

myself, memorable moments, non-verbal cues, things that stood out, ideas that were

                                                                                                               40 In discussing the concept of epistemic privilege, Narayan cites the work of Sandra Harding, Nancy Harstock and Alison Jaggar (Narayan 1988:35). However, Bat-Ami Bar On, argues that the idea of epistemic privilege being attributed to oppressed groups is borrowed from Marx’s writing on epistemic privilege among the proletariat and extended and reinterpreted by socialist and later, other feminists, including bell hooks and Nancy Harstock (1993:85-88).

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starting to repeat themselves and others that were unexpected. I sometimes recorded how

I felt, questions that I wished I had asked and things that perplexed me. Transcribing

was a very laborious process, particularly considering the length of many of the

interviews. However, this also meant that I sat with the data for a long time. It forced me

to listen over and over again to stories and memories, to interpretations of life.

During the transcription process, I kept a pad of paper near by and I jotted down themes.

This was the first and very rudimentary coding phase of the project. Each interview had a

long list of themes and ideas. Some of these initial ones included family stories, the

body, the nation, schools, love and empowerment. As I transcribed, I also created an

ongoing journal called General Notes for Analysis that started to map out ideas across

interviews or words that kept coming up. The word “crazy,” for example, circulated

across interviews in remarkably similar ways. I started to track it. Ideas about putting

racism away or quarantining memories of racial harm were also abundant and so I started

to notice and organize them together. They were often told in the context of imagining

futures and so “futures” became its own category. There were things that were more

anomalous or unexpected. A few references to religion or spirituality, for example,

became prevalent in Chapter 5 of the dissertation. I had an unnamed category in which I

kept track of things that I found moving, wondrous or perplexing.

At this point, I took my rudimentary codes and started to refine and organize them into a

larger system of codes. I used Nvivo, a qualitative software data management tool, to

code all of the interviews in themes and subthemes. This involved taking excerpts of the

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interviews and using the software to place them into themes. Racism, for example, was

broken down into: descriptions, survival strategies, family stories, silence, beauty and

body, anti-black racism, Islam and complicities. Other large thematic areas included

schools, early memories, family and university. Class, gender and sexuality were also

prominent. Often, sections of interviews were placed in multiple codes. This process

made it easy not only to retrieve and organize large volumes of data but also to connect

up data across interviews. This process clarified the volumes of information that I did

have but it also illuminated gaps, things, in retrospect, that I wish I had thought to ask

participants. Reflecting on the complexity of conducting qualitative research, Megan

Boler (2008) points out that the research process facilitates the emergence of new and

often, unanticipated questions. As a result, after conducting surveys or interviews, she

describes the frustration of wishing that she had asked an additional set of questions to

explore something that wasn’t visible in earlier stages of the project. Boler underscores

that this frustration can seldom be avoided in the research process (2008:19). I shared

Boler’s frustration. While much of my thinking on racism oriented me to the past, I

wished that I had asked more about people’s hopes, fears, concerns and ambitions for the

future. While I have glimpses into them, racisms pedagogy extended deeply not only into

participants pasts but also into their futures. It did something to people’s sense of what

their futures could be, who they could be, what was denied to them or possible. I began

to think increasingly about how racism orients and disorients people of colour to the

future. Where are they in the future? Is the future theirs? Is it even possible? This

question is not one I asked about nor did I anticipate and yet I read traces of it throughout

the interviews, driving struggles and strategies for inhabiting a future, making meaning

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for the present and living with the past. How they imagined their lives, where they would

work and live, what they wanted to learn and accomplish, who they wanted to love and

what they hoped they might feel, revealed a lot about racism’s power, harm and influence

and the struggle against it.

The interview transcripts and codes resulted in reams and reams of paper, stacked over

and under my desk. I needed a way to see the interviews visually so I also went “old

school,” using flip charts, index cards and markers. Each interview had its own flip chart

with themes outlined on colour coded index cards. This helped me to see across

interviews in ways that stacks of paper sometimes did not facilitate. Depending on what I

was worrying about or thinking on, I saw different things when I stood in the hall and

looked up and down the flip charts.

And some point after all of this, I was supposed to start writing, purposefully. But that’s

not what happened. For a long time I was stuck. By that I mean that I wasn’t able to

write. Pages stayed blank and days turned into weeks and weeks to months. In the

business of producing something called a dissertation, blank pages = big problem. The

task of analyzing the data proved far more difficult than I expected. The lives of the

participants did not present themselves as tidy “answers to research questions” (Smart

2010: 3). I read the work of scholars who documented their own “crisis” points in

writing through qualitative work, the “moving terrain with no clear goals” (Smart 2010:3)

and the many other impasses and tensions in producing knowledge.41 I tried to get some

                                                                                                               41 Enter bird lady. That’s what I call her. I read a book by Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and it changed a lot. I had always thought of the interviews almost as short stories,

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purchase on the ideas, on the stories, on things that could eventually become chapters.

People’s lives were not coherent, they were complex. While this may seem obvious, how

to engage that complexity and be accountable to it (Lather 2000:305-306), has been

another matter. In retrospect, the question that I could not adequately answer was what

kind of knowledge production might be useful for or responsible to the issues and

struggles that the women of colour had encountered, that they were living and remaking?

What insights did I have into the questions with which I started out? Was that question

still as relevant in the context of this data? What unexpected questions did the data open

up? Was I equipped to respond to them?

With lots of questions and few answers, I pressed on. I chronicled all of the scribbles and

words, half-baked thoughts and fragments circulating between participants’ stories,

disparate academic literatures and me. The pages were no longer blank, there were

words– messy and confused. I deferred, as much as I could, dwelling on the mess that I

knew would demand a reckoning. The mess was not going to be an easy one with which                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          snapshots into peoples’ lives, some were tight and contained, pivoting on a central event, others were sparse, profound and perplexing or difficult to get into and others yet were populated by rich characters, heartbreaking moments and hilarious insights. They kept me turning pages. “Bird lady,” as I lovingly refer to her in my head freed me to write differently. She told me a few new things and reminded me of some important forgotten ones. She told me “you don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you” (1995:18). “One small scene, one memory, one exchange” (1995:18) is how the story emerges. I tried to get quiet and stay close to the lives of the women I interviewed. Bird lady told me not to worry about what I was writing, to still the critic in my head and to write what would become my “shitty first draft” (1995:26), the “just get it down” draft (1995:25). I deferred, as much as I could, dwelling on the mess that I knew would demand a reckoning. The reckoning also had to do with the fact that bird lady writes to people writing fiction and I had set out to write something recognizable as a dissertation, with its accompanying demands and scholarly conventions. See Toni Morrison (1988) and the second part of footnote 20 for an important reworking of fact, fiction and truth. Morrison explains that facts are produced at the nexus of power and knowledge. Consequently, she unsettles the status of ‘facts’ as something we can so easily know and assert and returns us instead to histories made absent (not facts but no less true) and histories that are abundantly and selectively recounted (facts). In other words, something that is true may not be recognized as a fact or it may not look like a fact. It may be a story or an imaginative rendering of life.

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to contend and at some point, the confusion would have to go from its current state to

something “enabling” (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000:1) but I was not sure how this would

happen or when. In some ways, my own process of writing and researching mirrors that

of my participants that I write about. Racism with all of its ugliness, the small ways that

it takes up residence in our lives and the big ways that it threatens to diminish and harm

us, make it difficult to stay with for too long. It is difficult to find meaning in it. Yet

even in the most disheartening times, my participants have kept me good company and

the words of advisors closest to me, urging me to choose carefully a topic that I could

sustain and that could sustain me, was some of the wisest advice I got.

On Making Arguments With People’s Lives or Neoliberal Methodologies Writing about methodological dilemmas in the research process, Kari Dehli (2008)

describes the challenges that she encountered while writing a project on the involvement

of parents and community members in Toronto schools. Dehli offers helpful reflections

on some of her blocks as well as what happened when the tools that she expected to use

to write her book were inadequate given the complexity of the research (2008:46). I

found Dehli’s “sweaty fight for meaning” (Morrison 1992:xi) illuminating as I navigated

the difficult terrain of my own research project. Dehli describes being committed to

qualitative, critical studies in education that strive to understand and redress inequities in

schools. She elaborates that while such studies in education are wide ranging areas of

research, overall they seek to establish “what is actually going on in schools” (2008:47)

in order to improve schooling experiences and outcomes. Dehli is also compelled by

Foucauldian inspired studies in governmentality that seek to examine how people come

to take up positions as particular subjects. Such studies ask how realities and subject

positions are constituted and inhabited. Dehli reads these two broad approaches to

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qualitative research in schooling as forming the “rationalities governing the conduct of

education in research” (2008:46). For her, these two “frames” of doing qualitative work

are distinct in what they set out to do and how they seek to do it but more than that, they

disrupt each other. She describes finding herself between these frames and details the

accompanying dilemmas with which she struggled.

In the end, Dehli does not produce the book that she set out to write. She investigates her

“failure” in order to think more broadly about how these methodological impasses and

troubles are not the problems of individual researchers but can be referred to how

researchers are compelled to “assemble and circulate questions, modes of thinking,

orientations to problems, and interventions in education” (Dehli 2005:61). Dehli offers

up the insight that power works through the methodological imperative to produce

knowledge in particular ways, both enabling and constraining researchers who are

compelled to demonstrate their mastery and competence in ways that are intelligible. In

so doing, she notes that researchers are also part of a governing machinery that offers up

populations to study and problems to solve (2005:61). “How did it become so difficult”

Dehli wonders, “to represent how parents and teachers were, or were not, working

together in local school councils” (2005:46)? I read this question over and over again and

wondered how it had become so difficult to write my own project and represent the

women who participated in it.

In her book, Depression: a public feeling, Anne Cvetkovich sets out, among other things,

to account for intellectual labour. She wonders “why is a position of relative privilege,

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the pursuit of creative thinking and teaching, lived as though it were impossible”

(18:2012)? Reflecting on her own depression and trying to write it into the social and

public as something other than medicalized, personalized or pathological, Cvetkovich

reflects on graduate students, “perfectly capable people who fall apart in the process of

writing a first chapter or who wallow in partial dissertation drafts, unable to pull it all

together…how could people be so incapacitated by the relatively nonurgent task of doing

some cultural readings” (19:2012)? As Judith Halberstam provocatively argues in The

Queer Art of Failure, failure, such as the one Dehli investigates, has many lessons to

teach us. By dismantling or calling into question regimes of success and failure,

Halberstam suggests that failure can offer up its own rewards (2011:2-3). I’m not

convinced that we can all afford to fail, flounder or make mistakes in the same way or

that the material realities of living with or acknowledging failures of various kinds are

equally distributed. Writing about the precarity of working class lives, Carolyn Steedman

observes, “there are people everywhere waiting for you to slip up…so that they can send

you back where you belong” (1986:34). Failing or making mistakes can be costly.

Nonetheless, I felt comforted by Dehli and Cvetkovich, by the transparency with which

they documented and shared their own struggles with and insights into knowledge

production. In addition to providing much needed assurances that producing knowledge

was not a process in which meaning could be so easily made, Dehli encouraged me to

think deeply about wording the impasses that I kept coming up against and circling

around. Like her, I do not know if I have “figured out what was really going on or that I

have untied the knot that stopped me from writing” (Dehli 2005:46), but I have some

clues.

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In thinking broadly about these clues under the umbrella of neoliberal methodologies, I

lay out dilemmas in research that are not new. Researchers interested in questions of

social justice, feminist and otherwise, have contemplated the imbrication of power in the

research and interpretive process in important ways. They have also elucidated that

undertaking research that explicitly attempts to investigate power differentials and

oppression, does not escape the tensions, complications and contradictions that they seek

to investigate. While I had read much of this literature, I was still stymied by the

complexity and nuances of these dilemmas as they presented themselves in the context of

my research and more importantly, I was unsure about how to navigate them. By

referencing them in a shorthanded way as neoliberal methodologies, I draw attention to

how long standing questions of and contestations over evidence, objectivity and

rationality are being increasingly used to valorize or dismiss research.42 Scholars engaged

in social justice research, in particular, are not newly but increasingly constrained,

                                                                                                               42 For the importance of these ideas in educational studies and research specifically, see Gerta Biesta’s (2007) comprehensive article on debates relating to evidence-based practice in education. While not discounting the importance of engaging questions about the quality and effectiveness of educational research and practice and the relationship between them, Biesta resituates research and education, not as technical undertakings, but as ones saturated with cultural and political values and judgments. In other words, the focus on “what works” in education needs to be accompanied by “normative, educational, and political questions about what is educationally desirable” (Biesta 2007:22). See also Leonardo Zeus for an exploration of “empiricism’s hold on education” (2010:156) and a fuller articulation of the relationship between theory and data. As he argues, the theoretical lens with which researchers investigate and interpret the world marks distinctions between what “we eventually consider meaningful or trivial, central or peripheral, oppressive or simply natural” (Zeus 2010:157). In other words, just as data can challenge our theoretical orientations, “[t]heory—acknowledged or not—dictates what kinds of patterns one finds” (Zeus 2010:157). As David Gillborn (2010) cautions, statistical methods and quantitative work are likely to be interpreted within dominant assumptions, often obscuring rather than illuminating racial realities. For example, evidence that students of colour are being suspended or expelled at higher rates than white students can be used as evidence of their bad behaviour rather than systemic biases in disciplinary practices. The overrepresentation of racialized, working class students in vocational rather than gifted or academic streams can be used to argue that white students are simply more capable and meritorious, not that schools sort and rank students in ways that reflect racialized and classed assumptions about potential and excellence. See also Patti Lather (2004) for a critical appraisal of the evidence-based movement in educational research.

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monitored and evaluated in an intensifying corporatized and neoliberal academy

(Harrison 2013; Chin 2013).43 As Elizabeth Chin argues, a neoliberal ethos is “biased

heavily toward the positivist, the quantifiable, and a definition of evidence that is

startlingly narrow” (Chin 2013:202). She continues that what is at stake in this “dramatic

retrenchment” (Chin 2013:203) is a vastly shrinking definition of what counts as

research. Not surprisingly, it is specifically feminist and other critically oriented research

that finds itself increasingly under scrutiny and attack. Michael Apple also points to the

centrality of neoliberal logics in advancing an audit culture at all levels of contemporary

North American education (2005:14). He elaborates these new managerial approaches to

education demand individual accountability and efficiency, calibrated through forms of

measurement and evaluation that “crowd out” other ways of imagining and organizing

social relationships and public life (2005:15). Apple is not opposed to accountability;

what he opposes is conceptualizing accountability primarily through high stakes testing

and the narrowing of education to a commodity. Instead, he asks “what the logics of

accountability should be, and to whom it should be” (2005:23).

My research dilemmas stand at this nexus of what I call neoliberal methodologies, that is

the larger institutional context in which academics are required to produce knowledge

and my own struggles with the specificities of this research project. The two are not

unrelated. I consider how difficulties are socially produced and following Dehli, I return

some of these individually experienced difficulties to the institutional conditions of

knowledge production and reception. However, some of the challenges that this research

                                                                                                               43 See also Chatterjee and Maira 2014; Ferguson 2012; Coleman and Kamboureli 2011; Price 2011; Nocella II, Best and McLaren 2010; Searls Giroux 2010; Giroux 2007; Washburn 2005 for varied analysis of the corporatization, militarization and neoliberal restructuring of the university.

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presented exceed the neoliberal, they are dilemmas shared and expounded by other

scholars in the subsequent sections, particularly scholars investigating questions of social

justice and oppression.

Clue 1: Rationalities in Research Like Dehli, I also found it challenging to negotiate between critical studies in education

and more Foucauldian inspired questions and analytics. It was and remains hard to “stake

a position and to be accountable for it” (Dehli 2008:50). I struggled between offering an

account of racism and its effects, the realness of it in the lives of women of colour on the

one hand, and on the other, how women of colour were produced to offer up certain

accounts of racism. I was compelled by critical studies in education, broadly speaking,

and the lives and struggles that the women narrated, to document the constraints and

dehumanizing effects of racism. This was compounded by the desperation that marked

so many participants’ struggles to prove the reality of racism in their lives, evoking the

importance of the post-racial and neoliberal landscapes that I outline in the previous

chapter. As a result of this devastatingly murky and often perplexing landscape, I wanted

to reflect back a clear picture of how the racism that they experienced was organized,

lived and learned. Quite simply, I wanted the racism that they had endured to be

registered as real, to be granted the status of a fact, something that had happened to them

in the world.44 And when it came to schools, as I elaborate in Chapter 4, the ubiquity

                                                                                                               44 In one memorable instance, after I presented a preliminary chapter of this dissertation at an education conference, a senior faculty member in the audience asked me how I could establish the veracity of my participants’ experiences or register them as racist without talking to the teachers or administrators involved. I understood her question to be about the perspectives and intentions of mostly white teachers and administrators. In other words, they had the ability to define, as racist or not, the incidents of the racialized students or at the very least, their perspectives were required before any determination could be made of the nature of the incidents in question. The point of recounting this question here is to emphasize the standards of evidence that people and scholars of colour are asked to produce when discussing racism. It also well encapsulates the need I felt and continue to feel to tell as clear and definitive a story as I

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with which racist encounters were narrated, was simply alarming. As an educator, I had

witnessed so many incidents, not unlike the ones that participants shared. I listened as the

women recounted how profoundly they had been harmed by these ideas, institutions and

sometimes by the people who were meant to educate them. In connecting these incidents

to the racial conditions that produced them, in the tradition of realist sociologies that

Dehli explicates, I was invested in establishing convincing results that would allow me to

confidently report back on the implications of my research findings (Dehli 2008:47).

Clarity was paramount.

On the other hand, Foucauldian analytics opened up a different set of questions.45 Here,

narrating racial realities and documenting experiences was less important than tracing

how things came to be real. I was compelled by what story it was possible to tell about

racism and what women of colour were encouraged to do and think in response to it. In

other words, this rationality directs researchers towards the “conditions that shape

thinking and doing” (Dehli 2008:58). Individual lives are less important than the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         possibly can about racisms organization and effects in order for the story to be believable. Increasingly, however, I also started to resent this demand to prove that racism is real because it kept orienting me to certain audiences and arguments, such as the doubting professor. I am receptive to questions and challenges that further the work of uncovering and intervening in racism and more suspicious about those that question the realities of people of colour who have experienced it or that require these experiences to be verified by white people or scholars. See Toni Morrison (1988) for an important reworking of the distinctions between fact and fiction. As she puts it, “the crucial distinction…is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth” (1988:193). Referencing the absences of documented histories of people of African descent in the archives, she argues that something recognizable as a fact depends on relations of power to which enslaved people were subjected. Therefore she reconfigures these historically enforced meanings by arguing that because something isn’t recognized as a fact, doesn’t make it untrue. Morrison’s insights are relevant here to draw attention to the relations of power which people of colour are required to navigate. They endlessly labour to turn racism into something that is real and true, even where it is refused the status of a fact. See also Mona Oikawa’s relevant discussion on history, memory and witnessing (2012:85-94). 45 It was through a graduate course that I took with Dehli at the start of my doctoral course work that I was first introduced to Foucault’s writing and influence in educational research. In more ways than one, she has opened up the many productive and vexing research dilemmas that I lay out here.

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conditions that produce subjects and research is oriented to analyze power and knowledge

as its objects. The clarity of racism that I was attempting to capture and write started to

fall apart as I traced conditions of meaning making that were available and those that

were occluded. Clear and confident findings, though they rarely felt it, started to feel

even fuzzier and further away. I was not sure how to analyze the data clearly or tell a

coherent story or justify why the story wasn’t coherent. How could I make compelling

claims while also thinking critically about how ideas about compelling claims,

distinctions between real and not, true and false, were circulating in the lives of my

participants and in my own research process? For a very long time, I was unable to

decide which kind of analysis it was more relevant to pursue. In describing a “strategic

practice of criticism,” David Scott (1999:7) argues that it is important to consider which

questions are more pressing, which ones are “worth having answers to” (Scott 1999:7,

emphasis in original). However, Scott insists that even questions worth having answers

to require constant revisioning depending on the political imperatives and exigencies of

the changing present. Quite simply, I didn’t know how to sort out which questions were

more worth having answers to. I couldn’t see a way forward.

In the end, I do not resolve this dilemma. Instead, I offer up an account of racism

alongside an analysis of how women of colour are produced to account for racism in

particular ways. Both frames, I decided, opened up questions and insights that are worth

pursing and having answers to. Sometimes the analysis is more heavily weighted

towards one rationality or the other but both seemed important, in their own ways. In

amplifying the harm of racial violence, I was often invested in tracing its real effects. In

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cases where participants came up against incidents and ideas that they were unable to

have registered as racist, I came down decidedly on the frame of realist sociologies to

establish how racial hierarchies were operating. Other narratives, particularly those that

focused on ways of understanding and living racism, pointed me to the larger post-racial

context with which participants were struggling. How people of colour were produced to

think and act in particular ways in relation to racism, rather than others, became a focal

point of this analysis. Navigating these frames was challenging as a writer and it poses

its own difficulties for readers of this work. Sometimes I switch from one frame to

another and in other cases, I present elements of both. Through this process, I have come

to appreciate the importance of pursuing lines of inquiry that do not sit easily together.

The social justice potential of Foucauldian lines of thinking, while not immediately

relevant in the same way, was not as far removed from goals of critical studies in

education as I had first imagined. Showing the conditions under which women of colour

are making meaning of racial violence in their lives, illuminating what it is possible to

think and do in relation to racism has everything to do with how racism endures and how

it variably harms and seduces people of colour. Insisting that other meanings can and

have been made are small but useful openings. In people’s lives throughout this study, I

trace how powerful they are in turning the lens towards the conditions that produce

racism rather than looking to the people that bear its effects to simply bear them better.46

At the heart of this dissertation, then, is giving an account of racism and its effects and

tracing the accounts of racism that it is possible for people of colour to give.

                                                                                                               46 In advancing this position, I am aware that it may not be the most relevant or needed insight at different political moments or to advance specific political commitments. Sometimes documenting incidents, counting them even, might be far more effective. I am pragmatic when it comes to these matters and do not have an unquestioning allegiance to one rationality over another.

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Clue 2: On Pain and Telling Stories In her book on Act Up’s fight against Aids, Deborah Gould starts a section with the

following heading “when your data make you cry” (2009:6). Much of her book turns on

the role of emotion in social change and activism. Gould explains that she did not

conceptualize emotion to be central to her project at its outset but increasingly, she began

to appreciate how pivotal emotions were to social movements, to moving people in

particular ways and directions (2009:3). She describes setting out to explain the origins

of ACT UP, the political work it did and its eventual decline but ending up with an

archive of materials full of death, grief, sadness and loss that often left her “thoroughly

undone” (Gould 2009:6). For a long time, I also felt undone as people of colour detailed

over and over again, all of the big and little injuries that were piled up in their lives, the

names they were called, the ways they were and are hurt, how their lives were relentlessly

limited and constrained through racist practices and how little accountability or

acknowledgement they were able to exact for it all. Transcribing was a very slow and

laborious process and so I would listen over and over again to the stories that were told,

to the tears, anger and humiliation. With my foot on a pedal that allowed me to move

back or pause the interviews as I transcribed, it was hard to stay with so much pain for so

long and in slow motion no less.

Many of the interviews I conducted were punctuated by long pauses and hesitations.

One, two, three, four, counting silences as I transcribed interviews, poised to catch the

words on my computer keyboard when participants resumed talking or forcing myself to

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let the room be still during interviews, I wondered about all of their meanings.47 I often

asked if participants wanted to terminate interviews, change its direction or take a pause.

Sometimes they did. In recounting racial harm or remembering it, many participants

were moved to tears. On occasion, the tears made it difficult to understand the words. I

wondered what I was doing. I was concerned that I was probing the pain in a voyeuristic

and irresponsible way. On the other hand, nearly all of the interviews were full of

emotions that I couldn’t detour around. I tried to be respectful of the emotional worlds

and responses that came to occupy an important place in the interview process while also

trying to think about the responsibility that I had in creating, following or amplifying

these conversations. I reminded myself not to assume meanings based on things like

tears and I asked all of the participants about the process of being interviewed, including

the reasons for their tears.

For a very long time, I was unable to sort out how to take a lot of pain and hurt and turn it

into the stuff that could form a dissertation. The question of how to extract value or

make meaning from the racial oppression which people endure and their responses to it,

or what value one could extract for that matter, have been ongoing preoccupations for me

in the writing of this dissertation. They are magnified by the kinds of harm I observed

and that students recounted to me over many years of working in schooling systems.

What kind of academic response could be responsible to the magnitude of these harms?

                                                                                                               47 I do not explicitly analyse the silences but I did transcribe the interviews with attention to them. While it may make reading their narratives less seamless, I have also chosen to selectively edit the interviews, leaving in most places where participants stopped, stuttered and repeated words. Where I have added punctuation or done some minor editing, my purpose was to leave the meanings intact but to make the narratives more readable. In places where participants emphasized certain words, I bolded them. Mona Oikawa also reflects on the importance of non-verbal expressions in her interview and how much is lost between interviews and transcriptions (2012:86).

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Was argument what people of colour needed the most? I worried about returning to the

women who shared with me their experiences something that would be relevant or

meaningful, not a piece of academic writing in which their own struggles and lives were

so disassembled that they were no longer recognizable. I was reluctant to repurpose their

pain.

In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman (1997) begins her book with reflections about

the ease with which scenes of brutality against enslaved people circulate. She wonders

what this violated body does and how people are invited to participate in its circulation.

She challenges people to reflect on our relationship to such scenes, our fascination,

repulsion, indifference or ability to witness horror in order to condemn it (1997:3-4).

Does the pain, Hartman wonders, “merely provide us with the opportunity for self-

reflection” (1997:4)?48 It was clear in my mind at the outset of this project that I was not

interested in dredging up the pain of racial violence and injury in the lives of people of

colour. The focus of my work was to look at how people had made meaning of such

encounters, the conditions that had enabled them to apprehend the racialized terrain of

their lives and how they mobilized this analysis in their lives. In short, I was interested in

racial formation and the conditions that enable social change to take place. Where I was

interested in emotion, it was in thinking about how a range of emotional responses could

                                                                                                               48 Rather than trying to convey the violence and aftermath of slavery, Hartman chooses instead “to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned” (1997:4). See also Toni Morrison for her reflections on slave narratives (autobiographies, memoirs and recollections) as the print origin of black literature. As she explains, slave narratives were meant to reflect the individual and wider racial lives of enslaved peoples, their “historical li[ves],” with the explicit purpose of persuading non-black readers of the humanity of black people and the evils of slavery (1988:186-188). In other words, the experiences of people enslaved were required to be palatably represented “to those who were in a position to alleviate it” (Morrison 1988:191). Black and other marginalized people have long had to sort out how to harness, position and represent even their oppression and its pain.

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be mobilized or recast in political development, knowledge and work. What I didn’t

anticipate was that people recounted their analysis of racism through memorable and

difficult experiences and stories, and often, the interview provided a space for thinking

aloud and making sense of racial encounters, many of which the women of colour had

never shared or had themselves not revisited in years, even decades. The interviews

turned out to be pedagogical spaces in which meanings could be made and experiences

could be reflected upon. It wasn’t so easy to rush past the pain and harm or to find

meaning in it.

Despite my insistence that I wasn’t interested in digging up the pain of racial injury in

people’s lives, when I listened to the interviews and transcribed them, the role of

emotion, harm and pain compelled me. I felt drawn to it and kept returning to it.

Sometimes, these were places that I probed in interviews. But more than anything, they

perplexed and remained with me, they were moments that I couldn’t entirely look at nor

could I look away from. I am curious about what racism has done to people of colour and

in turn, what they have done in response to it? Has the pain of it been important in their

political development, has it meant a turning towards or away from race, has it been a

resource that can move them and us to think about our own “education in racism” (Cheng

2001:21)? The interviews are about much more than pain and violence, distress and

unease. They are also about community, resilience, struggle, complicities, regrets,

longings, incredibly beautiful yearnings and hopes for a future. And yet I continue to

circle around injury and violence.49 What does the pain have to teach us? What did it

                                                                                                               49 In dwelling on pain and hurt, I do not mean to suggest that all racialized subjects are hurt by racism to the same extent are or in the same way or that the hurt is without response. Racism, however, does exact a

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teach them? That racism hurts people of colour seems self-evident. Yet when I started to

pay attention to the hurt, it turned out to be a vast landscape that fashioned so many

interesting practices and insights.

For many participants, for too long, racism was something deeply personal, about them

rather than structures of oppression. In the end, the stories are personal and structural,

historical and ongoing. In her book on the internment of Japanese Canadians during

World War 2, Mona Oikawa argues that the internment did not only incarcerate and

produce Japanese Canadians as its subjects, it also secured and continues to secure a

“racial social order in Canada,” one that primarily benefits whites (2012:8). The

narratives of racial harm presented in this dissertation are not written to elicit sympathetic

responses or to help good anti-racists distinguish themselves from bad racists (Thompson

2003). Feeling “bad” for or with people of colour will not end racism. Partly, I

endeavour to recuperate participants’ experiences and harm as something collective and

socially produced but also, as Oikawa does, as something that secures a white racial order

in Canada.

For the women of colour who came to recount their stories, to try to make sense of them

or to share them out loud, Sherene Razack cautions that there are many dilemmas for

both those disclosing their stories and those listening (1998:52).50 She draws our

attention to what it is possible to hear, what and how people tell and the power relations

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         price, a varied price admittedly, in the lives of people of colour. One of the major focus points of this dissertation, particularly Chapters 3 & 4, is to understand this price. 50 Also see Dion 2009; Mahrouse 2008; Razack 2007; Simon, Rosenberg and Eppert 2000; Oliver 2001; Boler 1999; Morrison 1998 and Bannerji 1995 for important ethical dilemmas and social and historical contexts regarding documenting, witnessing and listening to accounts of oppression.

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that undergird such processes. Razack continues, “the chance to speak, to enter your

reality on the record, as it were, is as irresistible as it is problematic. What kind of tale

will I choose to tell, and in what voice” (1998:52)? Here again, traces of Dehli’s

divergent rationalities in research are relevant. Registering one’s reality, Razack

explains, is done in the context of multiple identities and how meanings are made, the

power knowledge nexus (1998:46). Reality, it turns out, is not so straightforward. The

imperative to document reality in order to change it alongside the need to investigate how

realities are variously constituted and narrated, are both compelling tasks.

Clue 3: Trading Pain for Proof Commiserating with a colleague on the struggles of work and writing, particularly in

relation to making meaning from the lives of participants, she patiently listened to my

detailed reporting of the state of confusion and wisely offered the following: stop trying

to do qualitative work quantitatively.51 She had discerned the quantitative preoccupation

with counting and adding things up in particular ways that continued to shadow my

efforts to think and make meaning. I had not set out to prove that racism exists through

the women’s live and experiences. I was not trying to account for racism in this way so I

had to start thinking more seriously about what it was I was trying to account for and how

I could go about building this account.52

                                                                                                               51 Thanks to Sheila Batacharya for this important intervention. 52 To clarify, I am not trying to reify a distinction between qualitative and quantitative data, nor am I suggesting that the former is necessarily ‘good’ and oriented towards social justice while the latter is necessarily opposed to social justice aims or critical social science research. There are good reasons to count and quantify. See Kirby, Greaves and Reid (2006) for a useful contextualization of qualitative and quantitative research methods. In a Canadian context, there is important critical scholarship and policy work concerned with counting and measuring in order to advance anti-racist interventions and to make the claim that racism remains central to inequitable schooling practices and outcomes (Raby 2012; McMurtry and Curling 2008; Bhattacharjee 2003; Ruck and Wortley 2002; Dei 1996; Dei 1997). This work contains or is often supplemented by qualitative work that seeks to understand the experiential dimensions of racial harm. This is important work. These forms of counting and accounting for harm often relying on turning harm into evidence.

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How many people of colour need to attest to a similar experience of racism and racial

injustice to make the accounts believable? What would the counting add up to? Would

it provide proof, would the tally of pain and woundedness add up to evidence in the

sociological study of education and race? And if such proof could be offered, the

evidence served up, what then? Might it provide justice? Could the pain be traded for

proof? Mulling over these questions has led me to make explicit and wrestle with some

foundational notions of social justice scholarship that seeks to make a difference.

Eve Tuck makes an important intervention into what she refers to as “‘damage-centered’”

research, that is research that attempts to document pain and “brokenness” (2009:409) in

order to make the “damage pay off in material, sovereign, and political wins” (Tuck

2009:414). As a strategy to remedy oppression, Tuck appreciates the impulse to both

participate in and conduct such research but she also worries about the long-term effects

of “thinking of ourselves as broken” (2009:409, emphasis in original). Centering

Indigenous communities in particular, Tuck recognizes the need to expose the ongoing

colonial consequences of life but she cautions that often the social contexts of damage are

acknowledged but then “submerged” (2009:415). In the end, we are left with damaged

people and communities outside of history, colonialism and racism and, as Tuck points

out, damage, not sovereignty, is often all that is offered and reflected back to Indigenous

peoples (2009:415,423). Tuck does not turn away from the consequences of damage but

is adamant that collective struggles, hopes and survival temper the focus on damage and

its production. Damage is not a quality of variously disenfranchised communities and

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people, it is an outcome of social and historical conditions, to which Tuck insists that we

remain attuned (2009:416).

Implicit in Tuck’s reservations about damage centered research is the question of

audience, that research is directed to people in charge with the hopes that the damage will

be devastating and convincing enough to trade in for some measure of response, if not

justice. bell hooks discusses the risks of being seen as spectacle or entertainment for the

benefit of white audiences. Razack similarly points outs that there is an expectation that

people of colour will “tell our stories for your (white people’s) edification” (1998:48).

But what if the stories aren’t for white people? hooks centres the importance of turning

away from dominant forms of recognition and asks instead what can be gained from

turning towards “recognizing ourselves” (hooks 1990:22). The process of conducting

this research and listening to the women who participated in it, has convinced me of the

need to clear space beyond convincing and proving or trying to register our pain in ways

that are intelligible or useful. Increasingly, I have come to understand this dissertation as

a space to look collectively and publicly, rather than in the lonely legacies and burdens

that the women here often took on as their own, rarely having been afforded the space to

word them, to sort out what had gone on or to articulate what it means to live with racist

harm and dehumanization. Perhaps in turning to each other the racism with which we

live might stop being the property of our own private memories and experiences and

become instead a public archive of racial injury that makes differential demands of us,

collectively, in the present.

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The tension that I try to balance in what follows is one that Tuck outlines and that is, to

attend to the damage of racial harm, injury and injustice, but to insistently draw attention

to the conditions of its production. In the previous section on pain and the stories that we

tell with it, I explore the pedagogical value of pain and emotion in the lives of

participants, how productive it was in processes of meaning making. Here, the analysis

that I pursue is guided by the following questions: What creates the damage and how are

people living with it? What is it costing them? At times, these costs are harder to count,

to add up and turn into something and in many cases, I turn away from the question of

evidence, I set it aside momentarily to think about how I might listen and respond to the

narratives outside of counting and proving. I dwell, perhaps too often and too much, in

the landscape of damage that Tuck warns against but for a moment, I want to stop

counting and against neoliberalism’s casting of “all dimensions of human life…in terms

of a market rationality” (Brown 2005:40), I resist the need to make everything, including

pain, count. Sometimes the damage doesn’t pay off or get transformed into something

productive or hopeful. It simply hurts people. Documenting that hurt, observing it and

insisting that it matters is part of the contribution that this work seeks to make. While this

might be understood as another way of accounting for harm, as I explicate in the previous

chapter, particularly in the section on feeling racism, it is a way that exceeds neoliberal

forms of making things count. Anne Anlin Cheng argues that the pain and sorrow of

racism are dismissed by racist culture but they are also seen to be threatening to advocacy

or activist projects. Not being the “proper” stuff of politics or organizing and being

written off by those who wish to cast racism aside entirely, this leaves “no place for such

anger and grief, which must go into hiding” (Cheng 2001:18). And while “it can be

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damaging to say how damaging racism has been…it is surely equally harmful not to talk

about this history of sorrow” (Cheng 2001:14). It is a response to the ways that grief,

sadness and emotional life are dismissed, peripheralized and cast away, to follow and

take seriously racism’s consequences and the labour required to manage it in the

experiences of women of colour.

Clue 4: Becoming a Neoliberal Researcher To return to Dehli, I began to think not only about the tensions and pressures that

participants described in their own processes of racial formation, I started to think

increasingly about the related pressures that I was under, to demonstrate that I could be

the right kind of researcher, one who could bring order, clarity and analysis to life, one

who could put academic literatures and lives into conversation in illuminating and

masterful ways. Bronwyn Davies (2003) investigates the far-reaching implications of

new managerialisms for its focus on surveillance and accountability. For her, neo-

liberalism compels a striving and commitment to “continuous improvement” (2003:93)

so that surveillance is not only enforced from outside, it is encouraged as a condition of

becoming “legitimate” (Davies 2003:92). Academics, even those of us thinking and

writing about post-racial and neoliberal configurations of power, are not outside of its

circuits. In short, I was fighting against becoming an “entrepreneurial researcher” (Dehli

2008:62). I felt caught up between the responsibility that I felt for the women in this

study and the conventions of knowledge production in the academy. I felt myself

pushing against neoliberalisms disciplining logics. The conventions of which Dehli

speaks, the need to assemble and produce knowledge in particular ways, new knowledge,

to demonstrate sufficient mastery of academic concepts and the ability to apply them,

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became less important to me than trying to understand the struggles that the women of

colour had offered. Perhaps relevance is a better horizon than newness.

In their analysis of American studies in the academy, Barbara Tomlinson and George

Lipsitz, argue that while scholars concerned with issues of oppression and social justice

have rightly criticized neoliberal policies and forces, they often overlook how centrally

neoliberalism is “learned, legitimated, and implemented” in the academy (2013:7).

Similar to Dehli, they elaborate that neoliberal assumptions drive what counts as good

research, successful arguments and evidence (2013:8). In particular, they detail how the

search for new paradigms and results is not naturally occurring but “speaks to desires for

novelty, diversion and distraction” endemic to neoliberal formations (2013:8). Often,

scholars unsettle, critique or discard the work of previous scholars, in order to claim for

themselves and their work, the status of new or groundbreaking. Tomlinson and Lipsitz

reorient our focus from newness and argument, suggesting that it is far more promising

ground to think about “what we want our work to do” (2013:9). They helped to further

word and clarify the research conventions of empiricism, argument and newness against

which I kept quarrelling. Along with Dehli, they helped me to understand the implicit

limitations of what I increasingly have come to identify as neoliberal methodologies. It

was hard to discern the relations of power in which I was embedded, to give them words,

form and analysis. It’s not lost on me that this is precisely what I was asking my

participants to do, to trace how they learned to see and navigate racial structures and how

they learned to give words to them. It can be difficult, slow work, seeing what surrounds

us.

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I was coming up against conventions of knowledge production that left things out that I

wanted to think and care about, things that I wanted to observe and notice, not always

place in an argument. Argument relied on a kind of certainty that I often felt slipping

away from me. I did not want everything about peoples lives to be something that was

turned into something else. I was fighting against instrumentalizing the experiences,

analysis and pain of people of colour or knowing for certain what I could say about them.

I was reluctant to become proficient in theorizing their pain. Just as many of the

participants were caught up in mastering pain, I too was caught up in it.

Eventually I had to sort out how to follow some scholarly conventions but still hold onto

what I wanted to do in this dissertation and what I hoped the dissertation might do. This

was all part of the slowness of producing knowledge, of being slowed down. In turn, I

have written to slow down readers, particularly academic readers. Racism is hard.

Reading about it shouldn’t be so easy or efficient. I leave things on the page that aren’t

required for a line of thinking. Not everything is tied up and folded into an argument.

Academic texts are often confined to certain places in the text or to footnotes so as not to

disrupt the flow and emphasis on stories I sometimes wanted to centralize. Academic

readers looking to skim the data for analysis may be frustrated. I don’t take the shortest

route from data to analysis nor do I see them as being disparate. Sometimes, I dwell in

stories and other times in faint memories or absences. I turn, in the first data chapter, to

participants’ early impressions of race, landscapes of emotion and feeling, with and

without words.

 

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Chapter 3: Early Racial Pedagogies – Becoming  This chapter concerns itself primarily with the emergence of racial literacies, how women

of colour apprehend and give words to structures of race and racism in which they are

embedded or alternately, how racism presents itself as a set of feelings and orientations to

one’s body in advance of being able to name it as such. While acknowledging the

complexity and diversity of participants’ narratives and experiences, this chapter

highlights two major themes. First, I explore what the women inherit from early

encounters with racism and the profound place of early racial memories in their

narratives.53 The home, school, childhood, family stories, and parental instruction are

interspersed as the women return to memories that are both difficult to remember and

forget. The memories are sometimes small snapshots but most people discussed how

profoundly these “inaugural moment[s]” (Hartman 1997:3) with racial violence shaped

them. The women recounted how their own experiences, and in some cases family

stories and knowledges, were passed on, refused and reworked as important early

resources in their racial formations. I trace through these experiences, the familial

conditions that cultivate particular racial literacies, that is, ways of understanding and

responding to racial harm (Oikawa 2012; Twine 2010; Essed 1991). I highlight the

intergenerational transmission of racial literacies and the familial care and labour to

protect loved ones from racial harm. While this labour was often maternal, grandparents,

fathers, other family members and caregivers were also part of familial landscapes.

                                                                                                               53 I adapt this notion of inheritance from the work of various scholars. Foremost among them whom have shaped my thinking are: Dian Million 2013; Mona Oikawa 2012; Sara Ahmed 2007; Saidiya Hartman 2007; M. Jacqui Alexander 2005; Philomena Essed 1991; Patricia Williams 1991 and Carolyn Steedman 1986.

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Childhood and parental anxieties are intermingled as participants reflect on their parents

and childhoods as well as their own preoccupations as parents of racialized children.

While some of the narratives reveal explicit racial instruction, in other cases, the women

are left with silence and confusion in the process of sorting out, returning to or trying to

forget earlier scenes of racial harm. For these women, racism was an amorphous burden,

often without a name. It turns out that both the naming of race and its occlusion are part

of the powerful racial inheritances that the women shared. I explore how the silences and

words work in their lives to facilitate shifting orientations to race and racism. This

chapter weaves together these stories and analysis with autobiographical feminist and

black feminist scholarship (Davis 2008; Williams 1991; Steedman 1986; Lorde 1984;

Lorde 1982) in order to explore the complexities of racial formation, the histories, forms

of survival and longings for futures into which they are folded. I use this scholarship to

explore the complex ways that racism is structured, illuminated and obscured as people

are confronted by racial slurs, practices and feelings often without the language or

analysis to understand what is happening around them. I also consider the conditions

under which feelings find words.

Secondly, the participants and autobiographical texts I gather together insistently draw

attention to the emotional reverberations of racism as a rich, often puzzling place from

which to piece together racism as both “affective, felt, intuited as well as thought”

(Million 2013:57, emphasis in original; Essed 1991:63). Collectively, they reflect what

Dian Million calls a “felt theory,” that is a “dense web of affective discourses, stories and

narratives” (2013:56-57). The larger theoretical explorations of racial neoliberalism,

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sketched out in the previous chapter, also form an important backdrop to the discussion

here. They also provide the context for understanding why vocabularies and robust

analytics to understand racism are so missing from public life and institutions. Often,

people are left feeling their way through racial landscapes and histories and their

experiences of feeling provide some openings into how racism is organized, lived and

interpreted. In particular, we see an often-articulated struggle, in both some of the

autobiographical scholarship and through the interviews that the women come up against,

of proving the more subtle and evasive racist practices which they endure. There is a way

that the women are haunted by searching for proof that proves elusive but that also makes

it difficult to pin racism down, as something that is real and that really happens. This

chapter recuperates much earlier, and often overlooked, feminist and black feminist

theorizing on emotion. I return to these texts (Davis 2008; Williams 1991; Lorde 1984;

Lorde 1982) as a way to foreground their contributions and to insert them into the

scholarship on emotion and the affective registers through which racism is so often lived

and the importance of this living for thinking about processes of social change.

As I wrote in the previous chapter, I did not initially set out to explore the emotional

dimensions of racism or the interior lives of people of colour. Skeptical of potentially

voyeuristic incursions, I wanted to trace the development of people of colour’s racial

literacy, tracing how they learned to make meaning of racism and act against it. I did not

want to hear stories of hurt, I wanted to know what people had done with the hurt, what

they had turned it into. However, stories were not recounted in such bifurcated ways. I

was not able to detour around the hurt and humiliation, as I had initially intended. As I

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was struggling to come to terms with this, I returned to some earlier and still incredibly

relevant feminist lessons, about attending to emotions attached to experiences and

memories of oppression. I had to rethink my own assumptions about what constitutes

political life, talk and analysis.

It was through well-remembered instances of racial aggressions of various kinds and

“emotionally saturated” (Gould 2009:12) interviews and memoirs that the women offered

important insights into how racism is lived and how sense is made of it. I thought that the

hurt of racism would be self-evident but it was, in fact, a much more complex terrain than

I had anticipated. How sense was made of the hurt, how people worked to hurt less, to

understand how the hurt was put together or to gain some distance from it, quite simply

how people felt when subjected to racism, had quite a lot to do with the kinds of action

and inaction (Gould 2009:19) that resulted. People did not only act against racism.

Racism both motivated certain kinds of turns toward and away from it that have much to

tell us about the starts and stalls of anti-racist politics as well as an insistence on

expanding what counts as politics in the racial formation of people of colour.

In both the interviews and in the process of writing this dissertation, I ended up mining

these microsites of racial aggression and connecting them to feminist and feminist of

colour scholarship to understand how the political horizons of participants were caught

up in the feelings and meanings that racism produced. Feelings became a “useful set of

clues” (Hochschild 1983:31) in the process of making knowledge, ways to know that

something was wrong, even when that something could not yet be specified. Emotions

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pushed up against ideas and processes of racial literacy that I was so keen to understand.

Participants narrated feelings that were not always accompanied by words or analysis. In

other words, they could feel the effects of racial injustice even when they could not name

it as such. While the pain of racism was often lived as individual hurts and slights, I also

refer to them and write them as a collectivized pain. This chapter follows the circulation

of this pain to trace how it is socially situated and lived.

There is no singular story of racism except that it requires the reduction of people to a

category, group or type that belies their material, historical and biographical

complexities. People of colour are created and weighed down in profound ways by

racism. This requires a reckoning, even if that reckoning is to turn away from the thing

that hurts us. Throughout this chapter, I centralize the hold that early racial encounters

continue to have on the racial formation of the women in this study.54 They return to

these pivotal memories but their influence lies not in the memories themselves but in the

                                                                                                               54 As I explained in the previous chapter, my writing vacillates between long stretches of narrative driven analysis and much sparser inclusion of participants, depending on what I am trying to accomplish or demonstrate. Readers will notice that for much of the earlier part of this chapter, I do not provide much by way of biographical information about the lives of participants. Only their names are given alongside very small bits of information about their early racial encounters. This deliberate decision on my part was meant to mirror the ways that racism came at them, with little context or understanding, beyond the visual practice of marking them as non-white. It did not afford them complexity, history or specificity. It reduced them to a word or to acts committed against them. This way of writing is also purposeful in that racism was a deeply isolating and confusing experience for many of the women and they managed it as a private or individual experience. Some of the participants, introduced only briefly in the Inheriting Silence section, recur in the later sections of this chapter. It was also the case that not everyone wanted to talk at length about their families, childhoods or early encounters with racism. Some participants shared small but impressionable incidents without elaboration. Others hurried past their childhoods only to circle back to them later in the interviews. It is only when readers get to the section on Inheriting Words for Feelings, that I provide more details on the social and familial relations in which some of the participants are embedded. This again was relevant to understanding what and how racial literacies were passed on, particularly in their early years. These participants returned home with the words they were called and they were afforded some context for understanding the history of racist words and practices so I write them as embedded in familial, often maternal, efforts to offer protection. Because most of the participants recur through the dissertation, information about them is disclosed slowly rather than as composites at the time of their introduction.

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interpretations they are accorded and the uses to which they are put (Steedman 1986:5-6).

They continue to have a force in the narratives and the lives of the women that proves

both difficult and productive. The point of stopping to think alongside these experiences

is to enlarge the spaces to think of the racial legacies the women have differentially

inherited, their instantiations in their lives and their messy responses to them. In select

places in this chapter, I also insert myself into the narratives. Sitting for so long with the

lives of the women of colour in this study, I wondered how I would answer some of the

questions that I posed to them and while writing, I recalled things I thought I had

forgotten. Often, I ended up writing between lives and ideas, excavating my own layered

ways of making sense of and living with things that are hard to live with.

Inheriting Silence: Feelings That Have No Name What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? -Audre Lorde (1984:41)

…our relation with our racial selves is an evasive thing, often easier to feel than to express. -Paul Gilroy cited in Hook (2005:74)

It has been exceedingly difficult to write about this place that seemed so prominent in the

lives of many women, this place of feelings that have no name. It’s hard to know how to

write about knowing that something is wrong or sometimes to simply feel that one is the

source of what is wrong, let alone to look at this as a place from which racial

understandings emerge but are also obscured. Reading the women narrate the

wordlessness in their lives and bodies was familiar to me. Like some of them, I just

remember feeling wrong, not in the sense that I had a wrong answer or wrong idea.

Something was wrong and I was that something. There were simply lots of bad feelings

but few words or as Gilroy puts it, I could feel my racial self but I couldn’t express it.

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Words stuck, words all scrambled up, wrong words, words that don’t make sense,

choking on words, words that don’t exist yet. “What are the words you do not have yet?

What do you need to say?” asks Audre Lorde (1984:41).

In reviewing my interviews, I am struck by both participants’ vivid recollections of early

racial memories as well as how the telling of these incidents comes to occupy a

pronounced place both in the interviews and their lives. The memories and the

interpretations ascribed to them, or the absence of racial instruction and guidance when

encountering early racial harm, featured quite centrally in their meaning making

practices. Jasbir reflects this sentiment, widely expressed, that for anyone who has been

made to encounter racism, “their whole life you remember that first moment, you just

do.” Like so many other participants, Jasbir recalls being called a racist slur, a “black

pig” in kindergarten or grade 1 and has a moment of wondering “oh, is my skin really

dark? It’s so long ago but I remember that.” When I ask her about why she remembers,

she comments not only the confusion of these first encounters but also marks them as the

start of an “education in racism” (Cheng 2001:21) that is profoundly disruptive, a lifetime

of “little comments,” as she refers to them, piled on top of each other. I too remember an

early disorientation and the sun shining as I stumbled home, tears stinging my eyes,

hands and squinted eyes shielding the sun. Am I that word that bars me from returning to

a classmate’s house? It’s an uncertain moment, these first recollections where racist

names are questions and confusions, turned into words and connections, where young

people are placed in and learn to see themselves in a variety of ways in relation to racial

hierarchies. They are moments of being called into something – into histories and sets of

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relations that sometimes take a lifetime to sort out and through, into names that transform

a structure into a word, from an idea to an idea about you. White children too were

learning their own childhood lessons of placing themselves and others in racial

hierarchies and no doubt, many of them would become more proficiently schooled in

racial categories and racist insults.

Like many of the women in this study, Nimat traces this notion of knowing that

something is wrong in her body but not being able to give this knowing “life through

words.” She describes a “yucky feeling” in her stomach, a quivering voice, a dryness in

her mouth, a racing heart, changes in her voice or an inability to speak entirely, a

discomfort, a scary feeling. For her, not staying with the discomfort becomes part of her

way of managing racism because of the alienating risks of voicing and addressing it but

she also adds that the way racism “came up” in her life, she “didn’t need to stay on it.”

She distinguishes the violent kinds of racism that some people might experience from

hers, which she describes as a “scary” that passes or a discomfort and distress that “is not

so profound that it stops you.” Nimat, like many other participants, also mentions that

the little exposure she had to developing an analytic vocabulary to discuss racism was

limited to identifying racism as individual acts of hate and extremism. Nimat and others’

experiences are resonant with Melamed’s compelling question: “what counts as a race

matter” (2006:4). They enable us to apprehend some of the constraining consequences

and regulatory effects of defining racism as something exceptional (Hesse 2004;

Goldberg 2002). Nimat wonders what then to make of incidents that fall outside of this,

experiences that don’t correspond to this definition: “what do you name those, right, are

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they real, do they exist, did they happen?” Nimat helps us to recognize the limitations

placed on words even when they are available. While the word racism was a familiar one

to her, it was contained in ways that precluded her from being able to connect her own

experiences of racial harm to something called racism. Instead, such experiences

remained wordless for a very long time and without words, Nimat is left to wonder: were

her experiences “real,” did they “exist?” Nimat says well what many women in this

study wrestle with and that is what to make of this knowing that something is terribly

wrong, tracing bodily effects of racial distress and unease but not having the words to

name race or tell the story as a story of racism.

While her younger self would not have identified racism with that unease, Nimat talks

about finding ways to “move around” the discomfort and to keep her “world sort of

intact,” “to live with it, right, and still be okay.” Her willingness to let it go “continued

for a very long time,” she recalls. She observes that her parents and other racialized

people around her also seemed to let racism go, to work around it, rather than call it out.

As a result, Nimat comes to learn that not contesting racism is a “really legitimate way to

be.” Not knowing what other options exist or having an outlet for them, not having

access to a critical language or community to do anything else, “I could and was learning

how to live with [racism] and learning how to manage it.” Nimat describes this strategy

of managing racism without naming it as such as “just letting things go, right, like

figuring out how to survive in a system where you’re not necessarily part of (pause) the

group that is making the rules, right at its most basic so I don’t think that’s a bad strategy

and I mean frankly, it served me well (laugh).” In her book on the internment of

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Japanese Canadians, Mona Oikawa (2012) explores the legacies of internment in families

and how Japanese Canadian women remember and pass on memories of the internment to

their daughters. She points out that parents and family members had to manage their own

experiences and memories while also sorting out what and how to reveal to their children.

Gaps in understanding, Oikawa explains, are sometimes attempts to “avoid handing down

the pain and grief” (2012:243). I only know from the perspective of young women,

remembering their childhoods, the racial literacies that were learned or absent. I don’t

know the reasons for the absences, nor do I have sufficient information about the fluency

of racial literacy among all parents. However, like Oikawa, the focus of the analysis is to

draw attention to the conditions that make racism appear and disappear and their effects

in the lives of the women. I have learned not to assume that silences or distancing from

racism imply its absence or an absence of analysis.

Nur also talks in revealing ways about not being able to “make sense” of racism in her

life, of years of “guess work” to patch together explanations for why she was “treated

differently all these years.” She describes finally being able to connect up seemingly

random incidents, partly by more “openly racist” encounters but also the sheer volume of

racist slights in her life. They start to add up to something more than random and

something more than her. Nur recounts being made to feel that she’s “not really there” or

that she doesn’t “really matter,” a feeling that’s “weird” and “subtle” and confusing for so

long. For her, racism was a relentless experience of things that were “just always kind of

off, something was always a bit off.” Erica also talks about not being able to “exactly put

into words” certain experiences of racism but notices that she is often subjected to rude

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treatment in the course of daily life. As was the case for Nur and others, it is the

frequency of such encounters that leads the women to eventually consider the relationship

of these events to each other and the reasons underlying them. But for prolonged periods,

these events are not accompanied by such explanations. As Himani Bannerji writes, there

is “still a difficulty in conveying the feel of things,” how words, tones and looks together

create “the fury and humiliation” of racism (1995:169). It is sometimes hard to name

racism, even while it is happening. The question that shadows this chapter, one that I

didn’t set out to ask explicitly is: what happens in the absence of a critical vocabulary

with which to think about race and racism? What other kinds of meanings, analysis and

vocabulary are being made and deployed in the lives of people of colour? What does it

mean to know in ones body that something is wrong but to have no words to convey it?

If racial literacy was what I was trying to understand, was there something called racial

illiteracy, something before knowing or was literacy not sufficient to capture what was

going on? Participants’ experiences pushed back against my desire to elucidate racial

literacy and to search for it in words alone.

Reflecting on the distance between the racial slurs she was called as a child and the more

“subdued, it’s not that in your face racism anymore,” Shani describes “that feeling when

you walk in the room and you state an idea and nobody hears you” but then when that

same idea is later articulated by a white person, there is a warm response and engagement

and you’re left thinking, “did I not just say this?” Shani describes racism as present but

elusive, that feeling that’s still there but “it’s really hard to put a finger on it, it just

always feels like it’s just under the surface.” Thinking back on her schooling

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experiences, Latifa also details the subtleties of racist humiliation with which she has had

to contend. It’s the feeling once again, “you know the feeling but you can’t really

identify it…you feel offended, you feel hurt, you feel marginalized” in the surprised

response of teachers when you get into university or into a prestigious arts program, for

example. For Latifa, being left with the residue of these feelings has meant that it

continues to be “still very hard” to talk about the racist experiences she has been made to

endure, hard to both prove and articulate. This was a theme articulated by many of the

women in various ways and often times, they dwelled on or emphasized the importance

of the more subtle articulations of racism and its accompanying discomfort but also

confusion. For these women, racism was a blurry but felt force, it evaded sharp focus.

As Audre Lorde and Carolyn Steedman observe, “children do not possess a social

analysis of what is happening to them, or around them” (Steedman 1986:28). Steedman

describes, quite relevantly for this chapter, how understanding is built up with layers of

meaning over time, how the “puzzlement” of children becomes a resource or “area of

feeling” that is mobilized in the present to make meaning and “shape response to quite

different events” (1986:29). Sara Ahmed reads Lorde’s childhood encounters through the

practice of “retrospective renaming” (2010:82), that is returning to one’s life and naming

the violence of things that had seemed random or unspeakable. This was certainly the

case for many of the women in this study and for some, it’s a question of “catching up” to

these feelings, to finding the words for these bodily impacts (Berlant 2011:39) but for so

long, there are no words, few words or not the right words, only feelings with which it is

hard to live.

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In Zami, Audre Lorde remembers the experience of being a black child and having white

people spit on her and her mother’s accompanying explanations and responses to this

racist humiliation. Lorde recounts walking in New York City with her mother, in a

tense, racially mixed area with primarily white owned shops (1982:17-18). She

describes being on the street and recoiling from a “hoarsely sharp, gutteral rasp” that

would result in “a nasty glob of grey spittle” (1982:17) on her coat or shoes and her

mother wiping it off with bits of newspaper that she carried in her purse. Accompanying

the wiping off of white people’s spit was her mother’s explanations about “low-class

people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind” (Lorde 1982:17-

18). As a result of this explanation, Lorde assumed that this humiliation of having spit

land on her was simply random. Lorde recalls believing her mother’s cover stories and

they did indeed cover for the kinds of material, racial struggles with which they were

confronted. She understands her mother’s efforts to hide all of the ways in which she was

powerless and unable to protect her family, from racism and poverty. Years later, in

conversation with her mother, Lorde observes:

‘Have you noticed people don’t spit into the wind so much they way they used to?’ And the look on my mother’s face told me that I had blundered into one of those secret places of pain that must never be spoken of again. But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else (Lorde 1982:18).

Her mother couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her child and so she provides her

child with another explanation for what is happening, an explanation which does not

result in the child being the object of hatred. The alibi might have worked for the spit but

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there weren’t enough ways to rationalize all of ways that racism kept appearing.

Reflecting on the weight of white hatred in her life, Lorde explains, “children know only

themselves as reasons for the happenings in their lives. So of course as a child I decided

there must be something terribly wrong with me that inspired such contempt” (1984:146).

Lorde details incredibly painful and enduring encounters with racism that she has neither

the “tools to dissect” nor the “language to name” (1984:147) – “something’s going on

here I do not understand, but I will never forget it…the hate” (1984:148). She explains

how disarming her mother’s silences about race were, “it was a very confusing way to

grow up” (Lorde 1982:18). But Lorde also knows that her mother kept her alive in a

system where her “life was not a high priority” (1984:149). Lorde opens up the issue of

not naming racism and oppression that lingers so profoundly throughout this chapter. In

her case, not naming racism is not meant to further entrench it, it is offered as a form of

protection. Silences are not uniform in their meanings or intentions but in varied ways,

the women are left to struggle with the consequences of these absences. And in Lorde’s

life as well as in the narratives of the women offered here, we can not assume that

parents, caregivers and family members are themselves all equipped with a racial literacy

that they are able to pass on to their children. They are embedded in their own social and

historical contexts out of which understandings of racism emerge or are occluded. We do

not always know what the familial silences mean but the burden to educate children in

order to try to keep them safe is created by the violence of racism. For most participants,

as we see throughout this dissertation, the gaps are filled in slowly, over time. But until

then, what happens when racism is made missing as a way to understand the social

relations with which one is confronted, the hateful, deliberate spit that is turned into the

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random landing of spit in the wind? It is to “these secret places of pain” (Lorde 1982:18)

that much of this chapter turns.

Participants recount racism’s subtlety and might, its polite wrapping and brute force, its

fleeting impressions and bold imprints. Usha also details a relentless anxiety and unease

that can’t be worded, “I most certainly didn’t have the tools, I just felt uneasy all the time,

I just felt anxious all the time…feeling like I had no recourse or ways to speak,” a

knowing that “there was something wrong like on a guttural level like viscerally, I felt

okay something isn’t right, quite right here. I shouldn’t feel the way that I feel but I

never - I didn’t, I didn’t and I didn’t have the words. I didn’t know how to string together

the words to say what I felt.” Usha points to the way racial difference is at once

reproduced and denied so that she is left with bad feelings but without the language and

analysis to reflect her experiences and their affective harm. She also importantly notes

that this unease without recourse results in an inability to articulate or understand what is

happening or to intervene in it. In the absence of words or their curtailment, the women

did things to make the discomfort end, such as very careful calibrations at times on places

to sit, how to dress, what space and contexts to avoid, comportments that were more

likely to result in moving through social spaces with more rather than less ease. These

everyday techniques were not necessarily grand or heroic nor were they about forcing a

confrontation with racial injustice. Often, they were about feeling better, staying safe,

fitting in or just trying to get by and they were accompanied by a turning away from bad

feelings. Sometimes it was easier to let bad feelings pass or to sort out how to make

them appear less often and with less intensity.

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As the excerpts from the interviews throughout this chapter illustrate, racism was subtle

and slight, an “uncomfortable nudge” or “a scary” that passes but it was also direct and

explicit. Thus, while no one ever told Nur that she was a “dirty poor kid, brown kid,”

Miriam recalls overhearing a parent telling her young child to move away from Miriam

because “black people were dirty.” In fact, the interviews are replete with both incidents

of direct racism in the form of racial slurs and physical harm, what Nimat describes as the

racism that “stops you” as well as ongoing unease and discomfort, anxiety and pain.

Many participants reference feeling “crazy” which they explain as having feelings and

impressions of unease and distress, among others, but being unsure about what to

attribute them to but the feelings persist and so the women try to sort out what is going

on, they try to pin it down but quite often, it turns out to be elusive. Yet, they continue to

feel pinned down or contained by something that they can’t identify and so the circulation

of these forms of racial containment and injury become “crazy” making. In the absence

of language are feelings of unease, distress, confusion, isolation, fear, anxiety,

“scrambled” thoughts and weird subtleties – quite often, feelings with no name. As Sara,

the woman who in many ways started this dissertation reflected to me in one of our

subsequent conversations: “There’s something there – it’s slippery. In your brain, you

think okay, post-race and Obama and whatever but in your body, you still feel like

something’s wrong but you’re afraid to say it. You can’t say it because people think

you’re fucking crazy but you know there’s something weird there.” Here, Sara draws

our attention not only to the difficulty of naming what is going on but of it being

recognized so the “crazy” becomes not only what the women of colour feel but the

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response to their articulations or impressions that what they are experiencing is about

racial oppression. As Arlie Russell Hochschild writes, “authorities on how a situation

ought to be viewed are also authorities on how we should feel” (2003:75; see also Jaggar

1989; Lorde 1984). The circulation of “crazy,” I argue, can be read in the context of the

unintelligibility of racism, sometimes to the women themselves and also to the people to

whom such feelings might be directed. If racism only works in very circumscribed ways

or no longer exists at all, then the feelings must be misplaced, mistaken or simply a

reflection of the individual people who feel them. The people and histories that decide

what racism is and what it can mean, also decide how people of colour can and should

feel about it.

I remember so vividly being an undergraduate student and reading Patricia Williams’

Alchemy of Race and Rights. I still have the abundantly highlighted and dog eared copy

that I read with such awe, feeling as though Williams was writing secrets that I had never

dared to look at in daylight, forget about in the institutional context of the academy.

Were these quiet thoughts the stuff of knowledge? Was that possible? I got another copy

because I have so marked up the first one that it is now difficult to read but I still love my

old copy and when I hold it, I remember connecting feelings to words, history to life,

knowledge to justice. I can still trace the moments of finding words to match things,

much like a kids book where you have to match up the image with the word to describe it

or the food with the animal that eats it. The places that I’ve underlined with a forceful

hand and large asterisks remind me of a much younger self, understanding the power of

words and knowledge to breathe life into places that have been neglected, overlooked and

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almost desperately forgotten. Weaving deftly between legal scholarship, polar bears,

teaching law classes at Ivy League schools, everyday life and the difficulty of getting

dressed on some days, Williams provides us with rich, difficult and nuanced insights into

the legal and lived inheritances of racism. I have gone back to this text many times in

my search for a language to capture some of what the women have shared and I have

appreciated the plainness and complexity of how Williams relates to us, through “little

bits of law and pieces of everyday life [that] fly out of my mouth in weird combinations”

(1991:14). While her reflections are saturated in the affective dimensions of racial

legacies, she engages in a more familiar way with emotions, a way that speaks to their

depth, ordinariness, sociality and relationship to history.

I had forgotten until I picked it up again, the postscript in which Williams provides us

with a composite of the responses to and rejection of a chapter of her now book from a

prestigious law review: A composite because legally, she can’t reprint the rejection

letter, even anonymously, without permission of the authors, which she is not able to

secure. The grounds of the rejection are illuminating:

Your piece has some really great ideas in it, but not once do you give a good, clear statement of what the issue is. We understand that your life must seem hard and complicated, but frankly the events you describe are mild and quite ordinary. It is unclear to us why they should leave you on the edge of such self-described psychological trauma. There is nothing in either the content or the calculated calmness of your prose style that indicates any climaxing of emotion (1991:214).

The rejection letter goes on to chastise her referencing mental illnesses to describe her

experiences and also suggests that she rewrite her piece as an “objective commentary”

(1991:214) with appropriate legal, social science and scholarly references if she intends

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to seriously engage with disability and its risks. Alternately, the reviewers suggest that

she write short stories, given how personal and inappropriate her work is for publication

in a legal journal, not to mention that it is likely to make her appear “quite unstable in the

public eye” (1991:214-215). Almost but not quite hilariously, the letter concludes with a

correction to an inconsistency in the date of a conference cited and an invitation to

rewrite some of her ideas, to express them to be “truly successful” (1991:214-215) and to

resubmit her article for publication.

I bring up Williams’ work for a number of reasons. I find it instructive to attend to how

her work is read and received and its dismissal in the context of my own work. Like

Williams, much of what my participants describe may not be all that surprising. They

detail what critical race feminist scholars have long established, that “quotidian racism

can seem rather unremarkable” (Holland 2012:5), “pedestrian rather than spectacular”

(Holland 2012:3). There are of course horribly racist encounters alongside the more quiet

and polite methods of shoring up racial hierarchies, and ways of thinking and knowing

that simply pass for common sense and yet the emotional effects of these encounters

which some might read as mild, ordinary or simply cruel exceptions are profoundly felt.

They linger. They disturb. For most of the women interviewed, they are not singular

incidents or anecdotes; they connect up to larger and much more entrenched historical

trajectories, systems and events. Indeed, racism continues to be very ordinary and

everyday (Holland 2012; Essed 1991). Much like Williams’ anonymous reviewers and

Sara cited earlier, “you can’t say it because people think you’re fucking crazy” or people

simply don’t know why you’re making such a fuss, why such ordinariness would leave

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you on the edge of such anger, rage or crushing silence. The interviews are replete with

references to “crazy” and also stories of family members and participants who are

described or describe themselves as having break downs, being depressed, in need of

counselling and various other kinds of support. These narratives also present me with the

challenge of acknowledging the different and many ways that racism presses down on

people’s lives and possibilities. In many of the interviews, references to “crazy” and

“depressed” were not mobilized as clinical diagnoses but more an everyday apparatus of

describing what it means to live with racism. As articulated earlier, I recast these various

emotions and aftermaths as being part of the structural implications of racial injury.

Williams’ reviewers also seem to be looking for a formula of what the emotions should

do or where they should go, how they should be resolved. Apparently the “calculated

calmness” of her prose doesn’t provide the requisite emotional climax followed no doubt

by some kind of satisfactory resolution. Would a description of Williams on the floor of

a lecture hall, “split at the seams” like the Judge Maxine Thomas, a black female judge

found by her clerk crying and singing in her chambers in fetal position, that Williams

describes, suffice (1991:196-197)? Quite simply there is no resolution because racism

persists. As is the case in many of the narratives I present, racism has no clean

resolution, no climax and waning, nothing comforting or heroically transformative with

which to leave us. It doesn’t follow the conventions of a good story.

I also point to the need that some participants have for life to be manageable and

consequently, their own affective and material responses reflect this desire. Their desire

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for resolution, however, comes from a place of looking for a reprieve from racism, trying

to contain its occurrence and effects in their lives and in some cases, looking for a way

out, or as Grace, one of the participants puts it, looking to “escape it all.” In tracing their

meaning making and material responses, we get a glimpse of both the enduring ways that

racism adapts and entrenches itself but is simultaneously, hard to pin down, word and live

with. I write about these emotion-filled worlds because many of the women I

interviewed describe the distress, anxiety and confusion of feeling that they are imagining

things, the careful building of proofs that rarely withstand the structures of denial and

racelessness which they come up against. Racism keeps them scrambling for these often

elusive proofs. Quite simply, when I asked all of the participants what they wanted me to

prioritize in the writing of this dissertation, many of them referred back to sharing the

knowledge and insight with other people of colour that we do not imagine much of our

lives, that they are indeed racially inflected in big and small ways. In contexts where race

is forever vanishing from public life or is turned into something inconsequential, this is

no small feat.

As the rejection letter to Williams explains, her personal stories of racism and its effects

are best suited to the medium of short stories. In other words, the reviewers suggest that

she write fiction. They further underline the distinction between fact and fiction and their

commitment to the former by correcting a conference date that she cites in her work.

Recalling the insights of Toni Morrison (1988) from the previous chapter, Morrison

insists that facts are produced at the nexus of power and knowledge. Specifically

referencing the absence or traces of people of African descent in the archives, Morrison

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asks where one goes for these historical records. Morrison turns to stories and

imaginative writing to fill these gaps and in so doing, she unsettles the status of facts.

She returns us instead to histories made absent (not facts but no less true) and histories

that are abundantly and selectively recounted (facts). In other words, something that is

true may not be recognized as a fact or it may not look like a fact. It is the power

relations that undergird these distinctions and their effects that interest me. In Williams’

case at best, her experience is met with suspicion and skepticism and at most, it is

discounted as untrue. Additionally, it does not look as a fact should look and it certainly

does not look sufficiently like scholarship. It is missing the clarity and rigour of

academic work. To put it simply, it looks like the stuff of short stories. Morrison’s

insights are relevant here to draw attention to these adjudications between what is real

and what is not and how things that are real and not real ought to appear. Cast aside as

experience, anecdote or fiction, the reflections of women of colour are rarely taken

seriously as providing important sociological and political insights into the organization

of racism. The reception of Williams’ work and the struggles recounted by women of

colour to understand and articulate experiences and effects of racism, underscore their

endless labour to turn racism into something that is real and true, even when it is refused

the status of a fact, as it so often is. Whether or not the racial structuring of our

experiences is more widely recognized, the focus here is twofold: to insist that the space

for this recognition be enlarged and to draw attention to the conditions that continuously

limit the ability to have racism registered as real, publicly acknowledged and connected

to our lived experiences.

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Struggles for Language The struggle for language detailed above, to name and describe experiences, has much to

teach us about the availability of language and its curtailment in relation to issues of

racism. Having or not having the words is not only an individual problem but it turns

out, a problem of the circulation of some words and not others, the availability of some

ideas, how easily they are offered up, and others are denied. It is a collective problem, a

problem of words close by and words out of reach. Quite simply, it is a problem of

power. When I ask Shanice why it is so important to have the words, she reiterates that it

is through language that she and others can know “they’re not imagining things, so that

they know that they’re not making stuff up or over-reacting.” For so many of the

participants, there was a hope placed in words, that they could take difficult feelings and

make them into something that was not about their interior, private lives but about social

relationships that exist in the world. Words were what could link feelings to knowledge.

Shanice continues, “I always go back to science so you can say there are small little

particles moving around but it’s not until you have a name for them and you can

characterize them and you can label as something, that you know they’re atoms, right.” I

remember her grabbing things in the air as if to bring the atoms into some kind of order

as she explained to me the importance of being able to have the language to name racism,

understand its properties and relationship to life. Eventually, Shanice hopes that in being

able to look at racism and name it, we might be able to individually and collectively

change it. At the very least, she hopes that life for people of colour might be made easier.

It is not only the participants who struggled to find language. I also struggled to situate

their narratives in relation to various literatures that engage centrally with emotion and

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affect. Which words should I use? Part of the challenge was my own reluctance to use

the language of trauma and psychology. I am hesitant to deploy psychoanalysis and

psychological frames for understanding the effects of racism while also working through

the distortions and affective legacies of racial injury that the women in this study so

painstakingly recounted. My concern is twofold; first, I want to take the effects of racism

seriously in the lives of individual people while also paying attention to the wider

historical and social context that produces racism as a collective problem. I remain

concerned about the psychologizing of structural violence or the ways in which “a

problem of social power” is turned “into a problem of individual psychology” (Hook

2006:209), either in terms of racisms perpetrators or beneficiaries, as well as its targets. I

address living with the effects of racism and the varied ways that women encounter and

interpret racist practices in their lives while also insisting that we connect up racism in

people’s lives to the structural circulation and distribution of harm, opportunities and

differential conditions of life and learning. Racism, as these interviews point out, is not

exceptional. While the language used in more popular contexts to describe it might imply

an exceptionalism or extremism, these interviews suggest otherwise. Rather, everyday

forms of racism, as Philomena Essed observes, reflect the heterogeneous ways that the

structural forces of racism work themselves out in everyday life (1991:50). Helpfully

reflecting on the ordinary, Lauren Berlant describes it as an “intersecting space where

many forces and histories circulate” (2011:9). Refusing the bifurcation of the ordinary

from the crisis, Berlant argues instead for an ordinary that is “shaped by crisis” (2011:8).

I find this and Essed’s insights useful for understanding how everyday racism, which can

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appear so banal and ordinary, is supported and facilitated by a much more entrenched and

enduring system of racial violence.

Secondly, psychologizing racism can further elide the social relations that underpin racist

acts. How to engage the harm and pain and the conditions that produce it together has

been one of my biggest challenges and the goal throughout this project. This means an

insistence on calling attention to the unnamed white people in the narratives, the ones

creating unease for some, repeatedly and uncomfortably and moving their child away

from others. While this dissertation does not centrally take up perpetrators of racial harm

and injury, it would be politically and academically remiss of me not to point out the

ways that racism is constituted relationally. It is about the ordering of people into

hierarchies and as it turns out, these women have much insight into the operation of

whiteness and the structuring of domination and subordination, oppression and

entitlement. While this chapter focuses on the ways that racism shapes the experiences

and realities of racialized subjects and their ability to apprehend it, I am also mindful that

racism isn’t a homogenous system and it doesn’t produce one effect or affect, nor can we

know in advance how people work to mediate these in their lives.

However, the turn to emotion is also not without its risks, primarily that emotions too can

be easily individualized and ahistoricized, telling us little about the social organization of

racism, oppression and its effects. Yet, the interview narratives are littered with

references to deeply felt and affecting emotions that require thought and response. While

I do not endeavour to offer up a psychological account of racism, I do present an analysis

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that involves its affective dimensions and consequences (Hook 2005:81). Racism is

structural but its effects are also deeply personal. It is in feminist and feminist of colour

scholarship that I found some of the most compelling ways to situate emotion historically

and structurally and to take it seriously. What I find most helpful in this scholarship,

cited throughout this chapter, is the attention paid to the psychic damage done by racism,

the rich language to explore not only its material effects but also the sense of

dispossession and sorrow and so I rely on some of these insights but mobilize emotions in

a more ordinary sense that the women interviewed discuss. Rather than a turning away

from political life, the narratives push for a politics that can be responsive to racial

despair and suffering and insist that these emotional life worlds be considered in the

context of making meaning of and responding to racism. I am not calling for an embrace

of emotion and affect that are sentimental. Instead, the narratives call for me to rethink

politics in ways that might be generative so as Lauren Berlant and Ann Cvetkovich

advise, it might be worth it to “slow down” (Cvetkovich 2012:135; Berlant 2011:83) and

pay attention in ways that I had not initially expected when I set out to conduct this

research.

Inheriting Words for Feelings In her lecture, How Does Change Happen,55 Angela Davis starts by recounting one of her

earliest childhood memories, living in racially segregated Birmingham, Alabama. Struck

even today by the “invasive memories” of racially demarcated bathrooms and water

fountains, Davis recalls crying when she realized, at the age of three or four, that these

prohibitions meant that she couldn’t go to this library or to that amusement park because

                                                                                                               55 How Does Change Happen? The Women’s Resource and Research Centre at the University of California (Davis), February 7, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RhtEbiOA, accessed October 6, 2012.

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they were designated for whites only. It is only when Davis’ mother explains to her not

only the grammar of racial geography but also its impermanence that Davis learns not to

cry:

But I learned how not to cry when my mother explained to me, and perhaps I was about 3 years old and I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4, my mother explained racism and segregation to me and what she said and I’ll never forget this, was that she said this is not the way things are supposed to be, this might be the way they are now but they are not supposed to be this way and she said, they will not always be this way.

While Davis doesn’t spell out how she learns not to cry, she implies a relationship

between learning not to cry and the importance of understanding that systems that appear

to be impenetrable, can and will be transformed. It becomes possible for Davis, through

the lessons transmitted by her mother, to imagine “what it might be to live in a world not

so exclusively governed by white supremacy.” In short, Davis’ mother opens up the

possibility of a future that does not yet exist for her child and so many others. In the

lecture, Davis reflects on her own history as a way to think about the importance of

passing on “certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination” alongside social

struggle and collective action. It is, as she reminds us, critical but not enough to imagine

a different world; it requires work and intervention to create it. I insert Davis’

recollection because I am struck by her account of early memories of racial pedagogies,

what the instruction gave to her, how she reconstructs it in the present as a political

resource that was central in her analysis of the world as a small child. The instruction

also changed her affective response in some way, her ability to relate to a world of racial

restrictions without crying, perhaps without the same intensity of grief and loss.

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In this section, I explore what it means for the women to receive explicit racial

instruction, not unlike what Davis describes above. The instruction is received in

different ways and has varied consequences and meanings. I turn first to Miriam’s

memory of her first day of nursery school where she recalls overhearing a parent telling

her young child to move away because “black people were dirty.” Miriam describes her

subsequent confusion and not being able to sort out what is going on – is she black, is she

dirty, is this about her, has she done something wrong? Miriam is one of a small

number of women who receives explicit and direct racial instruction at home. She details

how her mother tried to shield her from racial harm and also prepared her for its seeming

eventuality. When she returns home, Miriam relays this incident to her mother and she

recalls her response: “My mom was like this is what’s going to happen. It has nothing to

do with you. It’s about other people.” Miriam reflects how helpful this understanding

was to her, to decipher ongoing incidents of racism and to learn “not to take them

personally.” Towards the end of our interview when I ask her about the kinds of

conversations her mom had with her at a really young age, Miriam expresses how

grateful she is to her mom. Because her knowledge of racism was acquired from a very

young age, the ability to place her own encounters within a context of racial oppression

did much to help Miriam manage the kinds of confusion and wordlessness that lingered

for many years for other participants. Miriam also observes this kind of confusion among

her friends and peers who lack this facility and she wonders aloud about people who

claim not to notice racism or aren’t able to place their individual experiences within a

larger context: “How do you not know? Can’t you feel it like when you’re even on the

subway and someone moves away from you or moves their bag closer to them?” She

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also notes that because there were so few opportunities to develop an analysis and

vocabulary about racism in schools and other public spaces, if her mom hadn’t helped

her: “where would I have gotten [this knowledge] from? Nobody else really talks about

[racism].” To return to Oikawa (2012), she explains that because public knowledge of

the racial violence against interned Japanese Canadians and its effects are eviscerated,

homes were the only places where the Internment was named and understandings of it

developed (2012:17). Like Oikawa and her participants, Miriam confronts the

impoverished or absent discussions about racism that characterize her life and turns

instead to her family as a way to sort out how racism appears, how it makes her feel and

what she might do about it.

Reading Miriam’s narrative alongside Nimat introduced earlier in this chapter is useful in

seeing how Miriam’s sense of confusion is filled by her mother helping her to sort out the

meaning of racist oppression experienced in childhood. Of course this explanation does

not remedy the oppression that Miriam faces in her life but it gives her a language to look

at her experiences and to see what racism has to do with the kinds of encounters that she

comes up against. Most importantly, like the other women who had such kinds of

explicit racial instruction in their families and homes, they received the message that the

problem of racism was not theirs, it was primarily a problem of “other people.” While

they were made to feel that they were the problems, interventions like the one that

Miriam’s mother makes, provides young racialized children with some form of protection

against racism. While it is experienced as personal, and such participants also detail its

harm and injury, they are able to provide some space to learn that racism is an

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impersonal, structural force even when it comes at them in quite intimate ways and in the

course of everyday life. Miriam describes this as being able to place herself in a “bubble”

and learning to differentiate between things that are about her and things that are about

ideas people have about her. The bubble allows her to insulate herself from difficult, bad

or confusing feelings and gives her the ability to think about these feelings in a context of

racial histories and hierarchies. She explains that it is really important to have a “really

solid” bubble so that she is able to find some comfort when confronted by racism and

learn to survive it a bit better. Like Miriam, Shanice shares how important it is to place

humiliation and a lifetime of being belittled into a racial context, otherwise she says, you

can go through life and “think it’s just because it’s you and really it’s not. That can

completely change the way you look at yourself, the way you approach life, the way you

approach the things you do.”

There is much scholarship, particularly black feminist scholarship, on the role of mothers,

parents and caregivers in preparing black and mixed race children to navigate the racial

hostilities that they will experience (Twine 2010; Collins 2000; Tatum 1997; Ward 1996;

Tizard and Phoenix 1993; Essed 1991; hooks 1990; Lorde 1984). As Philomena Essed

insists, this knowledge about racism is a form of political knowledge (1991:9). These

insights and practices not only contribute to the study of racism and political formation,

they also endeavor to keep racialized children safe. Recalling the work of France

Winddance Twine (2010), she points out the need to recuperate the family to understand

how racism is deciphered and contested. She draws attention to the often invisible and

everyday parental practices and familial labour that are so necessary to managing racism

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(Twine 2010:5). By learning to spot racism and oppression, Beverly Daniel Tatum

similarly argues that racialized and more specifically, black children are better able to

resist the effects of oppressive messages, rather than when they are invisible (1997:47).

Miriam, Shanice and most others who grew up in families where they developed a varied

vocabulary and analysis for thinking about racism, in other words, racial literacy, agree.

It is better to see it coming and to know what it is than to not be equipped to understand

what is happening and why. Left without an explanation, children mistakenly assume

that they are the reason for the violence. But even with all of the love and the bubble to

fortify her, Miriam shared how deeply isolating it was, to experience racism and to not

have public places and ways to address it. “The biggest hurt of my ever experiencing

systemic racism,” she laments, “is having nobody to talk to about it.” She was not alone

in her despair.

Participants who were themselves parents shared the kinds of anxieties and fears they had

about raising their own children in the shadows of white supremacy. Trying to instill in

her daughter the feeling and knowledge that she is “worthy and valuable,” Shani explains

how important it is to “know who you are (pounding hand on table). You don’t let

anybody touch that.” Fighting against the focus on beauty that reduces girls and women

to their bodies and the focus on whiteness against which racialized girls are marked and

judged, Shani shares the struggle to “arm” her daughter against the systems that shape her

life. Erica worries that because of all the racism her daughter observes and experiences,

she will end up bitter and angry and unable to achieve “something positive” in her life.

For Erica, it is important to try and protect her child from the material and affective

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consequences of racism but she is torn between the desire to try and exact some justice

from the ruinous effects of racism in her life and trying to preserve a space of hopefulness

and possibility for her child, a future in which she does not have to be so careful in order

to stay safe or so angry about racism’s relentless appearance in interactions with

neighbours, police officers or school officials.

Grace also describes feeling devastated by the relentless appearance of racial harm in her

life and at times, explains her deliberate turn away from racism, a refusal to think about

or engage it, even when it appears. She can rarely sustain this effort but after having a

child, Grace also knows that there is no escaping race, no putting it behind her. To keep

her daughter safe, she will have to engage it, help her daughter to make sense of it

without being “crushed” in the process, as she too often feels she is. Shani also straddles

the tension of noticing the structural forces of racism and oppression in her life and that

of her daughter’s but wants to love and encourage her to value her own worth so that it

can not be so easily diminished in the world and in the face of all of the ways that it could

be taken from her. Shani also decidedly comes down on the side of individual

responsibility in thinking about the interface between structures and individuals. While

acknowledging the force of history and oppression, of all the “insanity going on around

me,” Shani wishes that she had been able to deal better with “angry situations or with

angry feelings,” that she had made better choices not to believe the hateful messages and

respond in such destructive ways. She tries to find some space where she can respond to

racism and oppression in her life, not only have her life so determined by it.

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Growing up in what she describes as a very Punjabi home in terms of music, family and

cultural influences, Monica describes how shocking and difficult it was to start

kindergarten. “I vividly have flashbacks to kindergarten, like I remember things, like I

remember I wouldn’t understand sometimes what they were saying…so like it was really

hard to like read books and like kind of understand what was going on for a while,”

Monica recalls. When I ask her specifically about her flashbacks, she describes trying to

read but instead, just being mesmerized by the pictures, touching them with her fingers.

There is a care bear book that she remembers in particular, touching the bears, looking at

the pictures and turning the pages without being able to read them. “So I started acting

out,” Monica tells me “I used to get really angry really easily, really angry…I think that

most of it was because of the fact that I always felt like I had something to prove kinda

thing, cause like I was a little FOB kid and everybody else was white.56” Trying to

prove something without the linguistic competence in English or the ability to achieve

academically what was required, leaves Monica lashing out, pushing back and with lots

of anger. Monica and others are caught between proofs, proving that racism is real or

that they are smart and capable enough despite it. Her days are punctuated with, “you’re

not allowed to play with us or you can’t build this with us or you can’t be in the fort or

you can’t come ride bikes with us” and by grade four, these racial exclusions have turned

into “you’re such a fat p--- blah blah blah blah blah,” “go back to India, you hairy fat

piece of shit blah blah blah.” “I was so like sad all the time. I remember I used to come

home crying,” Monica shares. Here the racism that comes at Monica singles her out not

                                                                                                               56 FOB is a shorthanded reference meaning “fresh off the boat.” It is a degrading term, often used to describe newly arrived immigrants whose cultural practices (ways of dressing, eating, speaking etc.) are not yet ‘properly’ adapted to Canadian ways. In this case, while Monica is Canadian born, it is used to reference her cultural life which is not adapted to dominant, white Canadian norms. The term also becomes a powerful way to differentiate between immigrants. See also Thobani 2007; Handa 2003 and Maira 2002.

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only for her cultural practices and skin colour, but also for markers of femininity to which

she is not seen to properly conform – her size and body hair. The racism also places

Monica and her family as outsiders to Canada, something that is examined with more

attention in Chapter 6.

Reflecting on the ways in which she let people “run me down in different ways,” Monica

shares, “I can’t blame anybody else for that but myself and I’m not gonna hold anyone

else to blame for that.” She accepts that she made choices to “let people affect you…to

let people run you down and that’s what I did for a lot of my life.” Monica is also

profoundly influenced by her maternal grandfather, now deceased, and with whom she

had a very close relationship. Monica confides in him about the struggles of life and he

tells her quite bluntly, that “people are gonna be horrible to you in your lifetime. There’s

gonna be people that treat you like the dirt under their feet,” but he also insists that she

should not turn around and “belittle someone because of their ethnicity, because of their

status in life, because of things that would seem kinda wrong to you.” Monica takes her

grandfather’s advice to heart as an approach to life. Much like Latifa’s mother, whom we

meet towards this chapter’s end, Monica’s grandfather counsels her to work hard and

from back in the days when she was tormented by the white kids, Monica resolves that if

“I start screwing up in school and I start messing up my life, they’re gonna win and I

don’t want that…my theory is the best revenge you can get is moving on with it.” And so

she moves on and the only way that she can do that is by deciding to stop caring. “I have

to let things that happened to me when I was a kid go, I have to just stop being angry, I

have to just let everything go,” Monica explains, “I just need to move forward.” We see

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echoed in the lessons that Monica derives from racism and oppression, the need to move

on, to stop being angry and let go of the past. For her, all of these memories are to be

quarantined and cast away and as she reminded me in the interview repeatedly, few

people knew about the conditions of her life. They were well-guarded secrets. Almost

forgetting them provided her with the possibility of a life and future that she desperately

wanted (Hartman 2007:15).

These individualized ways of responding to racism and oppression, through choice, hard

work or responsibility, for example, can be easily recuperated into neoliberal frames of

rising above or individual empowerment. In her work on how self-esteem functions as a

form of self-government, Barbara Cruikshank argues that women, in particular, are

“persuaded to participate in their own ‘empowerment,’” rather than mobilizing against

racism, oppression and inequality (1999:91). Julia Sudbury similarly warns that when the

confidence or self-esteem of racialized women becomes the focus of interventions, it

leaves unaltered “discriminatory structures and practices” that entrench their

disempowerment in a vast number of ways (1998:61). Like all things, our ways of

wording the world, our struggles and conflicts are not merely given to us, nor are they

entirely of our own making, they are selected from available discourses, ways in which

we are invited to see and interpret social relations and subjectivities. It makes it

exceedingly difficult to think otherwise, to simply choose other ways of seeing and

making sense. At times, the participants speak to the need to have greater self-

determination in their lives and in the lives of racialized people that recognize and

confront the power of structural forces. In other cases, their analysis falls more in line

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with individualized neoliberal interventions of agency and choice. However, in the case

of some participants, I read them as more than that. I read them also as efforts to stay

safe, to find a place where a secure future is more likely or possible, where love,

positivity and distance from vivid flashbacks and hard memories might be a way to

withstand the force of so much hatred and harm.

Patricia Hill Collins, in her seminal work, Black Feminist Thought, explains how

important African-American mothers have been in providing protection and encouraging

a “sense of specialness” in their daughters (2000:186). These and other expressions of

love, she argues, have been necessary to withstand oppression. Reflecting on the

importance of home, bell hooks also points out that it was often, however tenuously, the

only place of refuge from racist dehumanization (1990:42). These traditions of care are

not the stuff of privatized, individualized love. These familial practices and pedagogies

are rooted in more radical traditions of communal survival. Understanding these

distinctions is important. In the interviews, families and homes were complicated places,

full of love and sometimes full of love, struggle and violence simultaneously. For now,

what I wish to point out is that the love was communicated in so many ways, in

transmitting stories of places of origin, knowing that you had come from a place that

mattered, knowing that you mattered.57 Quite simply, love gave young people another

way of knowing who they were, a way to withstand all of the ways that they were

“betrayed by the everyday” (Das 2007:9). This did not evacuate the harm of ugly racist

names, encounters and structures but it did provide young people with another place to

stand in the face of it, other names and things that they were and could be – smart,                                                                                                                57 Chapter 6 examines in more detail stories of places of origin.

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beautiful, special and capable. Seen in this way, love is a way of fighting but not all

“measures of survival” are easily recognized (Bobb-Smith 2003:1). Referencing June

Jordan, Collins points out how important empowerment and love are in order to endure

and counter oppression: “‘the decisive question is, always, where is the love’” (Jordan in

Collins 2000:171)?

Family Stories Racial literacies were also developed through observing racism in their families or the

family stories that circulated of an aunt, parent, uncle, cousin or sibling navigating racism

in the workplace, at schools and on the streets. Miriam recounts one of the more

memorable examples of the family stories about racism that circulated and in so doing,

further illuminates the need to find ways to live positively in the face of bad feelings and

harmful racist practices. Her uncle had received a scholarship to study mathematics at an

Ivy League university in the United States, eventually securing employment at a top tier

university. Recalling a story told to her by her mother, Miriam describes the “serious

mental problems” that he developed when someone called him the “little n----- boy at

work and something just snapped in him, because it was like no matter how far up I get,

I’m always just going to be that to them and he ended up just completely going off the

edge and he has completely abandoned his career.” While we can speculate on the many

points of anti-blackness between this comment and “going off the edge” that Miriam’s

uncle may have endured, for Miriam, this story reminds her of how precarious racialized

futures are, how there is “no winning” when racialized people are vulnerable to being

made so “small,” despite their successes. The future turned out to be one of racism’s

most enduring casualties, bringing to life Jose Esteban Munoz’s insight that “the future is

only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of

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futurity” (2007:364). Very much like the story of Rosa N. that Essed recounts in her

canonical Understanding Everyday Racism, Rosa keeps waiting for the racism to pass.

Perhaps it will diminish when she becomes more educated or eventually a doctor

(1991:156). Maybe then her life would meet a standard of proof that would make the

racism end - proof of competence, proof of accomplishment, proof of excellence.

Eventually, Rosa comes to understand that proving herself has no end point. Racism will

never take its place in the past or in the past tense. Describing the effects of racism in

Rosa’s life, Essed writes, it is a “lonely struggle to keep breathing” (1991:156). The real

harm of racism, Essed helps us to understand, is the expectation that it will always be

there.

For the women here, not unlike what Essed describes, living in conditions so over

determined by racial violence, they try to make life possible today and imaginable

tomorrow, materially and affectively. Miriam does this by striving to live positively. She

describes navigating between caring about racism, the importance of not being

“oblivious” to how it shapes life for her and others but not caring so much that the stress

of it literally kills her and shortens her life or her ability to live it meaningfully. “I would

like in life to not have racism get to me to the point that I die before other people,” she

explained in the interview. Miriam does not turn away from the structural reasons why a

positive life seems so far out of reach and from the story of her uncle and the lives of

other racialized people, she recounts the many ways that racism not only makes people

feel bad, the stress and bad feelings sometimes makes them very sick. She tries to find a

place in which she can care enough about racism but not so much that the burden of it

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makes life impossible. Miriam gives more nuanced meaning than is often suggested by

the turn to a positive life. Sometimes, it is required not to get ahead or to secure for

oneself an upwardly mobile life, but simply to stay alive.

In all of the many ways recounted by participants, racial literacy and the lessons of white

supremacy were gleaned in quite important ways – how to survive, how to cope, how to

withstand its force, how to stay as safe as possible and sometimes, how to organize and to

remember that things can and ought to be different. But as Audre Lorde recalls in

parenting her own daughter and reflecting on her own life as a child, the lessons often fall

short and the protections fail. Trying to love her children into “some strength” as she

sends them out into the “white labyrinth” of the world, Lorde recalls her daughter

returning home from university to recount the forms of racist invisibility that she endures.

As she weeps, Lorde longs to place “her back in the web of my smaller protections” and

as a parent, she is confronted with her own desperate desires to help her child secure “less

costly pathways to survival” (Lorde 1984:157-158). Similar desires meant that in

becoming parents, participants struggled to understand how best to protect their children.

Would naming racism be too disempowering and heavy a burden or would it provide

children with a way of naming childhood cruelties that might just cost them a bit less?

How was it possible to convey to children of colour, a world of “infinite possibilities” but

also teach them about “absolute limitations” in order to ensure their safety (Hartman

2007:132; Collins 2000:183)? The participants in this section detail their own complex

navigations with this question, straddling their own lives and race making, with that of

their children, parents and other family members. They insist that the affective burdens

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of racism are not the property of people of colour and their interior lives but the result of

racist practices and conditions. They remind us, as do the women of colour scholars here,

of a very long tradition of labouring to keep their families safe. Because so many of

these practices are informal, take place in the home and respond to everyday life, they are

not adequately registered in sociological analysis nor are they sufficiently reflected in

social science literature on political activism (Twine 2010:122; Collins 2000:202; Essed

1991:9). Yet understanding how knowledge of racism is cultivated, where it comes from

and the everyday practices that it engenders are of enormous, overlooked significance. I

return in the conclusion to think more about the importance of these familial practices.

The “map of racial power” (Hartman 2007:132) that children inherit or that are passed

down in stories and bits of life are not simply received by the women in this study nor are

they always so neatly or directly communicated. They rework the instructions and

inheritances over time, make them their own, struggle for their own meanings in ways

that help us to think about both the same and changing articulations of racial

oppression.58 To return to Miriam, she explains the changing face of racism and when

she looks across the generations in her own family, she tracks some of these changes

                                                                                                               58 In their study of adolescents of mixed black and white parentage in the UK, Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix (1993, 1995) point out that a combination of parental and peer influences as well as the particularities of young peoples experiences are required to appreciate their varying relationships to racial identities. In particular, they argue that during adolescence, peer groups and school experiences are much more pronounced in shaping how mixed race youth affiliate and disaffiliate with black, white or mixed race identities. Their research is conducted specifically in the context of policy debates on interracial adoption and the familial conditions best suited for the healthy racial development of racialized children. In their observations of 3, 4 and 5 year old daycare students, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin also point out the salient role of early friendship groups and interactions on later peer affiliations. They argue that “these early relationships are the foundation for social understanding, intelligence, self-evaluation, social comparisons and social competence” and are very relevant for understanding racial relations among adults (2001:127). France Winddance Twine importantly cautions that familial and intimate relationships across racial groups may be one of the conditions for acquiring racial literacy, but it is an insufficient condition (2010:28).

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through the kinds of challenges that racism creates for securing employment. In

Miriam’s grandmother’s case, “people would just be like you’re black, we’re not going to

give you a job.” For her mother, the racism is not as blatantly articulated: “people are

like, oh yes, you’re very qualified (white accent) but we know someone else who is better

for the job even if they don’t.” Miriam observes that her difficulties finding a job

resemble more closely her mother’s, often with more enthusiasm on the part of

employers, but very little difference in outcome: “I can’t get a job for very similar

reasons to my mother but they’re also slightly more like, oh (pause) yeah you seem really

great and like we’re gonna put you through all of this stuff (white accent) and even

maybe get you to work for a while but then not really move you up or keep you in the

same place just cause that’s where we feel comfortable having you.”

Miriam reflects on the ways that the women in her family don’t always appreciate each

other’s struggles given the changing racial landscape that they encounter and navigate.

For her, the coding of racial ideas into institutional practices is incredibly harmful and she

longs, in some ways, for racist articulations and practices to be transparent. She reflects

on people who may not openly express their racist inclinations but they will use them to

withhold a job or to unfairly evaluate student work. For her, the most unpleasant kind of

racism is the one that appears in a friendly guise, the monster in a pretty and mesmerizing

dress, to paraphrase Miriam. As Patricia Williams points out of changing racist

expression, “if the last fifty years have taught us nothing else, it is that our ‘isms’ are no

less insidious when beautifully polished and terribly refined” (1997:33).59 For Miriam,

                                                                                                               59 See Vincent, Ball, Rollock and Gillborn (2013) for an interesting discussion on the continuities and differences in racism experienced by parents and children of Black Caribbean heritage in the United

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they are no less cruel but they are harder to spot. Describing people who appear to be

nice, a “faux nice” but use politeness as a cover for their racism, Miriam experiences a

relentless frustration, the awfulness of being left with the “sense that there is something

there” but “no proof” or “solid evidence” of the racism, simply made to live with its

effects. In the interview, Miriam returns to this analysis, reflecting on both the obvious

and more subtle articulations of racial hierarchies in her life. “All racisms do not behave

in the same way,” M. Jacqui Alexander observes (2005:115). Miriam reminds us of the

need to develop racial literacies sharp and agile enough to read contemporary and

historical racisms and to understand the connections and changes between them.

Shanice describes observing her parents, both teachers, advocate for their children in

schools. “They hear teachers talk about kids, they hear the stuff they say,” Shanice

shares, explaining that her parents understood what they were up against in schools.

While this doesn’t stop the racism, it does provide Shanice with a sense that her parents

will support her and speak back when she experiences arbitrary and unjust exercises of

power. It also provides her with examples of speaking back to teachers both with her

parents’ support and eventually on her own. Shanice is also well aware that her parents

support was not unequivocal, “they wouldn’t back me up if I was wrong…my mom

would have like sent me back to Jamaica or something” she laughingly relays. From

their example, Shanice learns to manage the racism and disrespect she so frequently

encounters in schools and life more generally.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Kingdom. They also argue that for the children, often third generation Black British citizens, “racism may be less likely to assail them as explicit vicious abuse, but still retains the potential to undermine, to marginalise and to threaten” (Vincent et al 2013:943).

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“I’ve been in the [principal’s] office, I’ve been kicked out of class, had it all happen,”

reflects Shanice of her time in schools, “I had a lot of run ins with teachers.” Like most

participants, she describes a very long itinerary of these runs ins, including being accused

of forging a parent’s signature, having to prove herself constantly in the face of teachers

who assumed she would not be capable of making it to university. When I ask Shanice if

these incidents were contained to a specific teacher, she talks about an experience of

schooling in which racism is much more diffusely distributed. Coming up against

teachers who are “rude,” “out of line” and “disrespectful,” as Shanice puts it, is how

racism gets transmitted over and over again.

In describing this long education in racism that started from when she was a young child,

Shanice explains the labour of “always having to prove myself, always having to speak

up for myself or defend myself, it’s always been like that, ever since I was young.”

When I ask her what it is she’s proving, she responds, “you have to make sure that people

know how to address you. I’m not some kind of idiot who’s here by chance.” Describing

how she has learned to manage racism from her parents and how she in turn helps her

nieces to sort out and disrupt racist practices, Shanice explains that racism is a family

affair, “there’s always been this talk about being in school and understanding what’s

going on,” Shanice reflects of family life, “it’s always going on in my house.” She

counsels her high school-aged nieces of what they are up against and how hard they will

have to work to counter the ideas that people already have of them, their place and

potential. Mistakes, even small ones, can make it very difficult to move out of these

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racial rankings.60 Things are always precarious. Then and now, Shanice reflects on this

continued work in her own life to ensure that people know that she is serious about her

academic and professional life and future. “You have to put on your game face, you have

to show what you can do,” she tells her nieces of the work she needs to do and the work

that she expects them to do.

Jasbir recalls being in grade 5 and playing tetherball with this “white guy.” “I was

beating him and I just feel like he couldn’t handle it,” she recalls. “He called me a

Jamaican p---, like out of nowhere, he called me that and I remember instead of crying

and getting upset, he had got this really bad haircut so I remember, I attacked his haircut.

I’m like your head looks like you shaved it with a lawn mower. I remember saying that

to him. He bawled his eyes out, he bawled and he told on me. We went to the principal’s

office.” The principal’s office, to be summoned here is no small matter and here the boy

cries again. “I remember just being pissed off, like I wasn’t impressed” by his tears, says

Jasbir. Jasbir refuses to apologize to him because she simply wasn’t sorry, “I don’t feel

bad for what I said.” From being quite shy and quiet child, Jasbir recalls being

emboldened by this moment of refusing to bend to the demand for an apology, “I’m in

grade 5, look at how I’m defending myself.” Learning to hold her ground and not bend to

the demand for an apology was recounted with a measured satisfaction.

                                                                                                               60 In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon reflects on how racist legacies shape ideas about competence and intelligence. He writes: “I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a Negro physician? As long as everything went well, he was praised to the skies but look out, no nonsense, under any conditions! The black physician can never be sure how close he is to disgrace. I tell you, I was walled in; no exception was made for my fine manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of quantum theory” (1967:117).

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Racism was very much a topic of conversation at Jasbir’s house and she recalls how upset

and concerned her parents were when finding out about the incident, but also proud of her

refusal. Looking back, she remembers clearly that feeling, “he thought he could get

away with saying that to me.” Refusing to offer up an apology and most importantly, she

recalls, with her parents backing, Jasbir learns an important lesson, that she could make

sure that people didn’t get away with their racism, that she could slow it down or return it

back to people – at least sometimes and in some cases. She also learns that when called

to account for their racism, people can offer up tears and their own bad and hurt feelings,

to dissolve the critical differences between “Jamaican p---” and an insult about a haircut

or conveniently rush past the racist origins of an altercation. Having had to develop the

skills to survive in primarily white school spaces and with encouragement from her

parents and grandfather, Jasbir derives a great deal of pride from learning the history of

Punjabi politics and Sikhism, in particular. Jasbir instructs us on the importance of

broadening the sites that we count as political. She pushes the work that culture can do

for her beyond the often cited cultural markers of Bollywood and Hindi songs or more

conservative interpretations. From anti-colonial histories, religion and her own family

displacement and migration, she learns to fight back against racism and injustice.

For Aaliyah, discussions of racism growing up were also common-place and she

describes knowing from a really young age that she was “different,” as a “black little girl

in Canada.” She also recounts the honesty with which her family, her mother and

grandmother in particular, communicated to her that she would have to “work extra

hard…it’s gonna be different for you.” Looking back now on these earlier discussions,

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Aaliyah too reflects on their usefulness but also in her case, like Nimat and others, the

curtailment of racism, to specific racist people that she might encounter. Nothing

prepared her to understand the institutional force of racism in her life and so Aaliyah

describes her thoughts being “scrambled” or “incomplete,” things that “didn’t make sense

sometimes,” a definition of racism that wasn’t adequate to describe how it appeared in

her life. As the women in this study detail, this often cited definition of racism leaves

out and diminishes so many of the ways that racism is lived, felt and experienced. In this

case, it’s not a question of no words but it’s the struggle to find the right words, the words

to accurately describe what’s going on – to capture the vulnerabilities, the harms and the

workings of racism. Finding the words turns out to be difficult their meanings are not

guaranteed but I continue to be interested in the conditions that create words and words

out of reach – the institutional, national and familial conditions – that at various times are

foregrounded throughout the dissertation. The moments of searching for words, losing

and finding them, trying them out and on, finding them awkward, incomplete, too big or

not big enough to match the conditions of life has turned out to be critically important in

my reading of the women’s lives and their own reflections.

For Aaliyah also, observing the precariousness of her mother’s life from the time that she

was a child, the temporary work, poor working conditions and stress that she endures,

leads her to live with a never ending anxiety about her own future and her mother’s. She

explains that when her mother was able to secure work, things at home were good, there

was food and money but then the work would dry up. Although Aaliyah explains the

many ways that she and her mother were each other’s supports, she also explains the

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efforts they both made to gloss over and shield each other from the difficulties and pains

of life but the constant slide to and from poverty were tough to hide: “we had times

where there was like no food in the fridge, right and you know, I mean there’s no hiding

that, right when there’s no money to buy food or you’re just buying little things that can

sort of, you can kind of stretch or last so some of it is sharing and some of it is just like

when the fridge is empty and the cupboards are empty then there’s no way around that.”

Aaliyah goes on to explain the kind of fear and anxiety with which she is left: “I always

have this fear that we’re not have money and that, you know what I mean, like I always

have this fear that money’s gonna run out and it’s never gonna be there…I’m never

comfortable, I never feel safe, I always feel like well you never know, something could

happen and it can all disappear.” She and her mother live with the physical effects and

stresses of food, money and work appearing and disappearing. For Aaliyah and others,

the economy is racialized and gendered to create futures of fear, precarity and hunger but

without the analysis to name it as such.

Dianah, another participant, also provides a glimpse into the reworking or expansion of

the critical tools that her parents encouraged her to develop. Much like Miriam, she

details at length the kinds of instruction that her parents provided to her, the rich cultural

knowledge, stories and the consoling when she returned home from a play date as a very

young child, age five, having had someone call her “black” in a way that she understood

to be harmful and insulting. Like Miriam, Dianah has a moment of trying to sort out

what this word or category “black” is in relation to her. Like the narratives with which

this chapter opened, these are moments when the women as girls, are made to notice their

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skin and bodies in relation to racial hierarchies in which others place them. These

encounters are filled in various ways or left as gaps, unanswered questions and confusing

feelings. Also important are the interventions of parents where black is transformed from

a racial insult and injury to a resource, where racism is not only about harm and injury

but also about community and histories to rely on and turn to, however fractured, fleeting

and contingent some of these forms of comfort or solidarity turn out to be. Of course

these connections are constantly renegotiated and remade, just as racism, its articulations

and meanings are thrown up and reworked in the lives of the women of colour. They

don’t stand still, the lives or the meaning makings, even though to work with them and to

write with them, I remove them from time in a way, resulting in a stillness that belies the

iterative processes through which meanings are extracted and made, recycled and

discarded. Race is also made real through constant and repeated racist interactions,

through the force of relations that the women experience, not through their own

imaginings of who they are. It is as much about how they are placed in, defined by and

read through racial meanings as are their struggles, questions responses and reframings of

who they understand themselves to be. Of course, much of this comes later. Early on,

the question that lingers is: “I don’t really know what that means like is that about me,

did I do something wrong, like am I dirty” (Miriam)?

In Dianah’s case, her mother tells the story of letting her daughter know that “yes, you

are [black] but you know there’s nothing wrong with that and you know so am I and so is

your dad.” In reflecting on her own struggles of being a black girl and woman and the

roles that her parents played in her racial education, Dianah reflects, “I think my parents

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and my upbringing made a lot of things just fall off my back.” In explicating the falling

away of some of the effects of racist oppression, Dianah recounts having the language

and analysis to manage racist encounters. She also helps us to see the different affective

repercussions of making sense and living with racism that her parents’ guidance affords.

Much like Miriam’s bubble, Dianah describes the routineness of coming up against racial

ignorance and constantly having to respond to it. She compares it to something you have

to do, “like washing dishes” and recounts the regularity with which people would make

comments or ask questions about her hair or inappropriately touch it. With her mother’s

guidance, for Dianah, it’s “almost second nature” and she knows the “spiel” in terms of

hair, accompanied by the exasperated rolling of her eyes. Like Miriam, this doesn’t

evacuate the struggle but it changes its terrain, diminishes its surprise when it does

appear, enables a placing of race within a social and political context, rather than a purely

personal one, and it helps these women figure out some kind of response. It also helps

us to see the effects of explicit racial instruction being not only about transmitting certain

kinds of knowledge and histories but also about affective instruction, that is about

teaching children how to feel or not to feel, learning to know and to feel oneself as

something more than, other than the racism, learning or struggling not to feel bad because

your mother tells you that being black is nothing to feel bad about, learning not to cry

because your mother tells you it ought not to be this way, learning that racism is real but

it’s really not about you. The transmission of these habits of feeling are meant to protect

these children, to withstand the intimate effects and force of racism, to provide some

shelter and relief from the racial harm that circulates and the vulnerabilities it engenders.

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Dianah, Jasbir, Shanice and others are provided with an analysis for thinking about and

responding to racist encounters from their childhood. Knowing that their parents have

“their backs,” they learn from their own experiences and in Shanice’s case, also from

watching her parents, how to advocate for themselves. The knowledge acquired in their

homes is critically important in teaching them to see the racism coming and to resist it.

They not only inherit and interpret these racial literacies, they pass them on, continuing a

practice of helping to teach and protect other family members. In her work with

Caribbean women in Canada, Yvonne-Smith importantly posits the home as an

“educational institution” where histories of struggle and resistance are passed on and kept

alive (2003:10). It is through the “memory of home” and the lessons taught there that

Caribbean-Canadian women are able to understand and challenge the racism and

oppression that they experience and to develop collective responses to it (2003:221; also

see hooks 2005). As Essed also observes of the women in her study, it was only the

black women, who had received explicit racial instruction in their homes, as children and

young people, who were in turn, able to name and interpret racism as it appeared in their

lives (1991:100). These women were overwhelmingly black women from the United

States where, in most cases, knowledge about racism was openly and explicitly discussed.

The black women from the Netherlands, of Afro-Surinamese descent, inherited many

more gaps and silences as a result of the legacies of Dutch colonial education with which

they had to contend (Essed 1991:90). It was the case for the women that I interviewed,

for the most part, that the parents and grandparents who came with critical perspectives of

anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, were more likely to pass them onto their children.

Even where this knowledge was evacuated from public discourses, institutions and

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spaces, there was a base of knowledge in the home that enabled them to situate their

experiences in longer histories. Of course this was not uniformly true. Not all colonial or

racialized subjects learned or embraced the lessons of anti-colonialism or anti-racism

(Alexander 2005:129). Some of them had been well schooled and stepped in colonial

and domesticating educations, as were Essed’s participants and others simply did not talk

about their pasts. Many kinds of silences were inherited. But racial literacies did not

disappear primarily because of families that did not sufficiently teach their children to

understand them. They disappeared because of the lack of public acknowledgement that

racism is real and that it continues to structure the lives, experiences and opportunities of

its beneficiaries and its targets.

Returning to Dianah, she also recounts how central her parents have been in encouraging

her to develop the tools to think and engage critically while also reflecting on the

unexpected places that this encouragement has taken her, particularly in relation to her

father: “So my dad is (pause) great and has taught me to challenge and question

everything and everyone. I don’t think he factored in that I’d also be doing it to him who

is uhm a 1950s, 1960s black Caribbean male uhm, grew up in England so there’s a lot of

his own upbringing, do you know what I mean so (pause) I love him and all that’s great

but that, like we have our conflicts because I expect him to be better.” When I press her

on what this means, Dianah references the influence of feminism on taking on questions

of patriarchy and homophobia within her family in ways that disrupt and create different

sorts of conflict with her father. It’s from the critical engagement around racism that she

derives the habits of mind to ask questions about hierarchies as they relate simultaneously

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to patriarchy and heterosexuality. Returning to Angela Davis’ reflections on her

childhood, she reminds us of the need to think expansively about the logics of oppression,

even where our experiences, analysis and entry points might be much more limited:

just as it was once possible and important for people to imagine a world without slavery, a world beyond slavery, just as it was important for me personally to learn how, as a child, to imagine a world without racial segregation and then later to imagine a world in which women were not assumed to be inferior to men, it is now important to imagine a world without xenophobia and the fenced in borders that are designed to make us think about the people of the south as the enemy, it is important now to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation and association and one in which violence is eradicated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives, regardless of how we position our sexuality.

Dianah reflects the insistence of participants to think about the shifting, continuous and

contingent landscapes of racial harm in the lives of racialized women as well as how their

lives open up onto issues that are difficult to parse out and isolate. In Chapter 5, I

consider how the women themselves expand the vocabulary, analytic and affective tools

to explain their lives and social worlds through queer and feminist lenses. In the next

chapter that focuses on racial literacies and institutional landscapes of schooling, I return

again to family stories and observations of racism that participants recount as a way to

figure out the racial terrain and how to respond or not respond to racism. While this

dissertation is about the women, they also insistently draw our attention to the structural

conditions that produce racism, its social organization, its relationality as well as the

historical and institutional relations that they live and negotiate.

Burdensome Inheritances Latifa, perhaps more than any other participant, reveals a more conflicted relationship

with the explicit racial instruction she receives at home and a more ambivalent take on

racial literacy. While she continues to be perplexed by some of the ways that racism

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creeps into her life, she describes her mother as someone who is “very concerned about

race.” Discussions of racism were routine in Latifa’s home life and she shares how

invaluable her mother has been in helping her to understand and navigate racism,

particularly in schools.61 But even then, like many others, Latifa describes the confusion

of encountering racism as a young child and wondering what it is. “I mean there was the

comment, the lawyer comment,” she tells me of one such memory. The ‘lawyer

comment’ is Latifa’s shorthanded reference for the response of her grade five or six

teacher when she expresses her aspiration to be a lawyer to which her teacher responds,

“that wasn’t a realistic goal for someone like me.” ‘Someone like me’ is a phrase that is

repeated in several of the interviews, a code of sorts for racial assignations without

directly referencing race. For Latifa, this comment results in confusion - it’s not that she

doesn’t clearly understand the message that being a lawyer is simply not achievable for

her, it’s that she isn’t sure what to make of the “someone like me” part of the message. “I

didn’t really know what someone like me was so I, I couldn’t grasp that,” Latifa recalls.

“It’s when you, it’s when you look back, it’s when you’re older and you think about these

things and you’re like oh, well I understand what that means now whereas at the time, it’s

it’s just boggling, I think, because at the same time, I was trying to figure it out but I

didn’t, I didn’t know really what there was to figure out.” Just as racism was described as

subtle nudges, they were also in the observations of young children, trying to making

sense of professions to which they should aspire or not and trying to name and figure out

“what there was to figure out.”

                                                                                                               61 In Chapter 4 which looks specifically at racism in schools, I elaborate in more detail and more relevance for that particular chapter, the kinds of racial literacies that are passed between Latifa and her mother.

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Latifa’s mother counsels her often on how to respond to racism without giving up on her

education but Latifa wonders if the effort is worth it. When I ask her what makes her

wonder that, she explains all of the ways that she has observed the effects of racism in her

mother’s life. Growing up doesn’t make it end. Latifa’s mother’s racial harm also

becomes part of the landscape of her education in racism. These worryings and

pedagogical crossings 62 across generations of parents and children appeared with

regularity in the interviews and in multiple directions. Parents and children worried

about protection, futures and passing on or shielding each other from these difficult

encounters.

Though discussions of racism were routine in Latifa’s house, she describes the anxiety

she continues to feel in sharing racist encounters she has with her mother. When she

does, Latifa is often met by many questions to assess the situation and develop a course

of action. While Latifa acknowledges the importance of talking about and addressing

racism, she also describes how tiring, painful and relentlessly demoralizing it is to do so.

“I kinda just want to live my life without always constantly thinking about race,” she

explains. While living with feelings that have no names was and is difficult, Latifa helps

us to appreciate that so too is the burden of feeling, noticing and responding to racism. It

was sometimes acknowledged only reluctantly. Here too there are losses and pain that

Latifa and other participants similarly express. Dianah, introduced earlier, also grows up

with parents that are very conscious about racism. While she understands the benefits of

                                                                                                               62 I’ve adapted the phrase “pedagogical crossings” from M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005).

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growing up this way, she also explains that because racism was such a tiring and

“draining” condition of life, “I can’t fight all the time.”

Unlike Shanice who conveys a more hopeful investment in racial literacy, for Latifa,

having an analysis of racism, while important, can feel tiresome and without reward.

Despite the clarity with which she slowly learns to understand racism, not only through

specific encounters, but as something with a much more profuse and insidious reach, she

struggles with the burden of this knowledge. “So this is racist, what kind of justice am I

gonna get for it? Am I gonna get justice?” she wonders. Getting to the words isn’t

enough, Latifa argues, “it’s what happens after that matters.” And in Latifa’s experience,

what happens after is worse than nothing because “we live in a society where people just

tend to think that racism doesn’t exist or refuses to believe that racism does exist. If you

say something’s racist, then you have a chip on your shoulder (pause) or then you’re the

crazy black girl or the crazy south Asian girl or the crazy Asian girl who says, hey, well

this is racist. So, (pause) what do you do?” Latifa desperately wants to get to another

place, to a generative place where we can say, “so this is racist. So what are we gonna do

about it?” She doesn’t know how to get to this place because it relies on a larger

recognition of racism, something she is unable to secure, even with her mother’s

interventions and guidance. “So, (pause) what do you do” Latifa wonders? As M. Jacqui

Alexander observes, being able to put forward individual and collective claims about the

world relies on the will, means and opportunity to do so. It also requires the “standing to

have those claims accepted as credible” (2005:122, emphasis in original). She elaborates

that people need structural authority in order to have a chance to have their perspectives

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registered, to have a say. Latifa keeps bumping up against these conditions that

Alexander describes and she keeps finding herself on the losing end. She can’t figure out

how to have a say and how to make it count. Racism keeps winning.

Latifa’s narrative instructs us in the contradictory stance that people of colour can

develop to racial literacy. Knowledge about racism was not uniformly welcomed or

embraced and as is the case in Latifa’s life and narrative, it generated divergent pulls and

discrepant desires. It was embraced and burdensome, clarifying and despairing, refused

and sought after. While racial literacy can illuminate the relationship between

experiences and structures and cultivate new insights and practices, it can also feel

disempowering and exhausting.63 As much as learning to see racism and becoming

racially literate offers the potential to return to racism and its memories and for it to be

something else, something other than bad and difficult feelings, to turn away from it or to

learn not to see racism is also a “way of bearing the pain” (Ahmed 2010:83). Forgetting

has its perks. Seeing racism comes with a cost and sometimes that cost is that in

“noticing limitations,” life can “seem more rather than less limited.” The knowledge of

“just how much there is to be unhappy about” (Ahmed 2010:70) isn’t always an easy

knowledge with which to live. It sometimes offers little comfort. Learning to interpret

                                                                                                               63 In a divergent context, Priti Ramamurthy deploys the notion of the perplexity to index the simultaneous feelings of “puzzlement of [Dalit smallholders] as they experience both the joys and aches of the global everyday” (2003:525). Following their incorporation into the global commodity chain through cottonseed production, she focuses a feminist analysis to trace their contradictory desires as both producing and consuming subjects. Challenging the notion of a coherent, fully formed and uniformly articulate subject, she argues instead that people are subject to competing, overlapping and even opposing desires (Ramamaurthy 2011:1037; Ramamurthy 2003:525). Ramamurthy’s use of perplexity fits well with my analysis as I am trying to draw attention to the divergent pulls, desires and responses that racism and knowledge about it generate.

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the world is no guarantee of being able to change it (Ramamurthy 2003:543) or to live in

it with more ease. Latifa teaches us how hard it is to learn about racism.

The question of bad feelings does not just turn participants to a past, it also opens up onto

the question of the future in different ways. Everywhere concerns about bad feelings,

fighting against them or turning towards them, also contained preoccupations about what

kind of futures might be possible for the women of colour and their families. Would the

racism end or change as they grew older? Is racism something they could outgrow or

outsmart? Would they be able to exert more influence over it, to make it matter and hurt

less? In the next chapter, these questions are taken up in the context of life in schools,

where so much turns on lessons in racism and the kinds of futures it forecloses and

enables. But here too, making life livable and imagining futures was sometimes made

more or less possible through the feelings and knowledges onto which racism opened.

Not everyone wanted to fight back or knew how.

And so the silences and the words are or can be about different forms of offering up

protection that turn out never to be enough but for some of the women, the knowledge of

racism becomes a burden to notice and to carry, one they wish to refuse, however

impossible such a refusal becomes and for others, finding the words becomes about being

able to step out of confusion and randomness. The learning of young people was most

potent when it was accompanied by the lesson that Davis inherits from her mother, that

the world ought not to be this way and that it won’t always be. In other words, when they

understood that in a world so big and in the face of structures so entrenched and

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tenacious, things could and had changed, they were more likely to learn to act on the

world, sometimes and in some ways, not only endure it or to learn to act on themselves.

People take cover in different ways. The work of becoming racially literate, the labour

of it often requires an engagement with or a return to the pain and harm of racism.

Wanting to forget, trying to forget – it’s understandable but critical scholars turn us to the

potential pay offs of remembering. It offers openings that can be politically useful, to be

mobilized as a way to make sense again, to give names to things and to attend to

“‘feelings of structure’: feelings might be how structures get under our skin,” in this case

into the distribution of racial privileges and harm, as Ahmed puts it, as a reversal of

Raymond Williams’ often cited call to explore structures of feeling (Ahmed 2010:216).

Things you don’t understand but can’t forget. To learn to name the feelings as a result of

the structure and its circulation is to refuse to own it as one’s own, as personal or private.

It is to refer them back to the social conditions that create and enable them, it is to insist

that feelings are not psychological but rather “social and cultural practices” (Ahmed

2004:9). In this way, turning towards bad feelings, not simply to dwell in them, but as an

opening to pinpoint how they are relentlessly created is part of what can be offered with

and through suffering and hurt. The mess that they deposit in our lives can become the

stuff we notice to “produce critical understandings of how violence, as a relation of force

and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others” (Ahmed 2010:216). The

tension that recurs throughout this dissertation is that the mess is not only interpreted to

produce critical readings of the world or actions in relation to it. Sometimes, people are

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left simply trying to salvage some measure of safety and relief that comes from resolutely

refusing racial categories and histories.

To think more meaningfully about these refusals, I turn to Carolyn Steedman’s

Landscape for a Good Woman. In it, Steedman elucidates a South London working-class

life through the telling of related childhoods, her mothers and her own. She elaborates

how her mother’s wantings, of both material things and social standing, shaped her own

childhood. Steedman insists on the sociality of this story and also on the political

importance of her mother’s story and the story of girls and women’s working class lives.

At its core, Steedman, resonant with Patricia Williams’ work cited earlier, uses these

biographical and autobiographical “bits and pieces” of life, “tak[ing] them beyond the

point of anecdote and into history” (1986:21). Drawing on the profound forms of

exclusion her mother lived and felt, as did she, Steedman traces the different expression

and uses to which it is put (1986:18). Her analysis is both lucid and circumspect and she

refuses to fold these stories into an essential story about working class lives. As

Steedman so evocatively illustrates through her mother’s life, class consciousness is

learned but it comes with no guarantees, it can be “uneven and problematic”(1986:14).

The profound sense of unfairness with which Steedman’s mother lives, for example, does

not translate into what might be recognizable as a “politics of class” and yet Steedman

insists that we do not simply read this as a “political failure” (Steedman 1986:8) on her

mother’s part. Instead, she endeavors to trace her mother’s political formation and the

kinds of political analysis that can be made of her mother’s envy and desire for things.

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I find Steedman’s work on gender and class to be instructive and relevant in a number of

ways. She reminds us that attending to the lives of ordinary women and girls, much like

the women in this study, can offer an important lens through which to investigate political

formation and knowledge production. She is attuned to the ways in which marginalized

people often deeply desire the things from which they are excluded. They do not

necessarily turn their exclusion into a struggle against racism and oppression; sometimes

they simply long for life to be easier and less painful. Drawing from Steedman and

others, I try to capture these divergent pulls, tensions and contradictions as people live

with and labour to turn racial oppression from feelings and hurt into words, meanings and

analysis.

Conclusion This project, this chapter in particular, has made me think quite a lot about pain and bad

feelings in early encounters with racial violence. This initially took me to Sara Ahmed’s

The Promise of Happiness. While not all the participants stake a claim to happiness, it is

also the case that in some ways, happiness does construct or “provide a horizon for

experience” (Ahmed 2010:14) for some of the women. Ahmed’s provocative call is to

imagine what other horizons exist for experience when a collective preoccupation with

happiness makes room for perhaps the “killjoy” (2010:20) or those “who are cast as

wretched” (2010:17). Looking specifically to feminist, queer and anti-racist sources, she

traces an “unhappy archive” (2010:18) as a way of locating happiness as sites of privilege

and dominance but she also takes seriously the productiveness of happiness talk, the

exhortations to be happy and to be the cause of happiness for others. Ahmed opens up

many rich points of analysis that are relevant in the context of the women in this study

and more specifically, in concluding this section. The scholars and participants cited in

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this chapter remind me so urgently of the need to understand hatred and harm as much

more than interpersonal and individualized but as processes and practices that ask us to

attend to histories, to how bodies are read and engaged. As Sara Ahmed so simply and

insightfully puts it, “it is not simply that any body is hated” (2004:54).

Thinking about feelings as more than a site of individual animosity or dismissal but rather

as socially and historically configured relations, helps to open up these experiences and

connect them to the histories into which we are read and called. It is and isn’t about us.

It’s both personal and impersonal. It’s not one story, it opens up collective histories,

harms and social relations. “Emotion” Hochschild writes, “is one way to discover a

buried perspective on matters. Especially when other ways of locating ourselves are in

bad repair, emotion becomes important” (1983:85). The larger social context in which

racism gets buried requires attention. How, after all, can we learn to confront and change

something that has no name? The obscuring of racism means that while the words may

be missing or where they exist, be deeply impoverished, the affective consequences of

racial harm are profoundly felt. I have endeavoured to dig through these emotional

landscapes and to understand their force in the racial formation of the women of colour.

Racism can have the effect of creating communities of people who are racialized, where

complexities are flattened out, but this doesn’t mean that all racialized people experience

racism in the same way nor word it so. Racism works by differentiating, sorting,

classifying and organizing. It is not a totalizing or homogenous system. Even while we

can follow some of its predictable patterns, it does different things, the impressions it

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leaves are refracted in multiple ways and we do different things with and to the racism,

just as it does different things to us. The narratives do, however, open up a way to think

about racism as a process that is always about becoming other, being called into this

other, but critically, this becoming is not without response. The racial instruction

quickens the response, gives it legs, and helps the women to reflect back on and speak

back to who they are called to become. I try to attend to how the women themselves

manage racism’s aftermath, its affective life and materiality, its harm and the labour of

working that harm into making sense, into a life made livable. But it’s also the case that

the aftermath comes to inhabit a different kind of force, a way in which it works itself

into the women’s lives and ideas about who they are, who they can be, the containment of

life opportunities and aspirations.

Together, the autobiographical scholarship of feminists and feminists of colour alongside

the participants in this chapter, speak to the complexity and fraughtness of the histories

they inherit, struggle with and sometimes, try to escape. Their nuanced attention to

racial formation and knowledge production illuminates and enriches the stories and

analysis of the women who participated in my research. The first recollections of racial

aggression or family stories about it weighed heavily in the development of racial

literacies and they were never finished and sadly but not surprisingly, new stories of the

“daily assignment of racial superiority and inferiority” (Alexander 2005:261) appeared

with unremarkable regularity in their lives; the women returned to them, the old and new,

as events that had happened or were told to them as well as circumstances that produced

memorable, deeply imprinted affective states – of anger, confusion, anxiety, sadness, and

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shame, among others. It is also important to point out that there were a multitude of

understandings and responses to racial violence within the same narratives. Being silent

or feeling silenced, feeling emboldened or ashamed, saying nothing or speaking back,

they were not uniformly experienced or expressed. People did different things in

different times and under different conditions. Following the women as they story their

lives enabled me to develop a more nuanced appreciation for these discrepant practices. I

explore these moments of dislocation and try to trace their importance to the ongoing

racial formation of the women in this study. I also draw attention to the larger political

and discursive context that offers up different ways of learning to articulate political

desires and longings.

As I read through so many narratives of despair and sadness alongside the work of

feminist and feminist of colour scholarship, in particular, I began to locate the narratives

of the women in this study in a much larger trajectory of forms of familial and feminist

protection that have historically been offered through the sharing of experiences (hooks

2005). Drawing on the work of first-person narratives, Dian Million traces the important

contributions of First Nations and Metis women in articulating how structures of colonial

violence and displacement are lived, felt and responses to it generated. Following the

work of Native feminist scholars and cultural producers, Million insists that colonialism

be taken seriously “as it is felt by those who experience it” (2013:61, emphasis in

original). Critically, Million reads this work not only as theory but also as a form of

community knowledge that registers pain and trauma as historical and colonial, they are

collectively lived as the “outcomes of state violence” (Million 2013:97). We learn to tell

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stories in certain ways and contexts, Million points out, and she draws attention to the

kinds of protection that Native feminists, in particular, attempt to pass on within

community and familial formations.

The Native feminist scholarship on which Million draws, shares much common ground

with the black feminist scholarship that I draw on throughout this chapter. This is no

accident. The distance in liberal democracies from the rule of law to the end of a gun,

from the paternalistic to the vicious (Goldberg 2002), is often shorter for black and

Indigenous communities. The scholarship on which I draw reflects this reality. Safety

cannot be left to chance or in most cases, to silence. The urgency in black families,

communities and scholarship to keep children safe has much to teach us about how to

cultivate orientations to social change and justice that are collective. I adapt from Million

and black feminist insights in building an account of racist oppression that is felt,

theorized and historically and socially situated. In so doing, like much of the scholarship

cited throughout this chapter, I amplify perspectives that attend to the centrality of labour

and love in the family to contest and survive racism.

The bad feelings of which Ahmed speaks and the archive she assembles and which I have

assembled in this chapter, remind me of the pedagogical power of these narratives, to

expose pain and despair, to point out the harms ahead or that surround us daily. But as

Million and others remind us, we inherit not only racism’s harm and humiliation, we also

inherit the stories of people who name it for us, who help us to survive and organize and

not be alone in our despair. We inherit people who point us to histories gone missing,

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words hard to find and times difficult to survive. They offer up their despair so that we

do not have to speak ours. In their lives and analysis, full of complex longings and

contradictory desires, they keep us good company and share their own lessons as

protection so that ours may not be so hard or so painful. In reading about so much pain, I

had almost missed their generosity. What we and they make of the lessons is much less

certain. However, given the enduring effects but vanishing public spaces in which to

address racist harm, it is through the creation and circulation of such forms of community

knowledge that we struggle to create a “future that can include each other” (Lorde

1984:142).

 

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Chapter 4: Lessons in Racism  At Jean-Talon Market in the summer, over breakfast crepes and coffee and in the midst of

a conversation on race, schooling and my research project, a friend recounted the

confusion and bewilderment of being a young child unable to sort out the hostility of her

grade 2 teacher.64 “Why does she hate me,” was the vestige of this childhood confusion.

She recounts years later, making sense of the teacher’s behaviour and connecting up that

the hatred was not directed only to her but it was a more generalized hostility to other

black students, including her siblings and friends. Her simple and confused question is

one that lingered and I could imagine her as a child of 7 years old or so, trying to

withstand the force of her teacher’s hatred, everyday during the second grade. It also

reminded me of another recounting from one of my participants, Aaliyah. She too

remembers with a great deal of clarity the condescension of many teachers, but one in

particular, her grade three teacher and its lingering effects on her schooling experience.

She talks powerfully about hearing that “you’re not smart” or “intellectually capable” and

the way that such incidents that:

happen to you when you’re really young within the educational system stick with you. I’m always questioning myself, always questioning my own intelligence. Sometimes I’m apprehensive to speak cause I’m worried about sounding dumb because I don’t wanna be dumb because for so long I felt like I wasn’t, you know what I mean, I was dumb and it sticks with you. It really really stuck with me and it still sticks with me. It stays with, it stays with you and it’ll probably stay with me.

The phrase “stickiness of racism,” recurred in several of the interviews and it was an

evocative way to describe racism and its enduring effects; not only to be stuck in

                                                                                                               64 Jean-Talon Market is a farmers’ market located in Montreal. This story is recounted here with my friend’s permission.

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something but to feel and experience racism as having a residue, something that can’t be

so easily escaped, it keeps returning and returning Aaliyah to “dumb” and “incapable.”

The racism sticks, it has staying power.65

This chapter zooms in on the institutional life of racism through a set of stories that the

women told – compelling and disturbing – on how racism has appeared in their

educational trajectories. Building from the previous chapter, I pay attention to the harm

and prevalence of racism, what racism does, how it is lived, the emotional registers

through which it is felt and the various responses that it engenders. In keeping with my

broader discussion throughout this dissertation, I continue to centralize how structural

conditions of racism are lived and racial literacies developed. While this chapter focuses

on schooling broadly speaking, it also recognizes the ways that the lives of students spill

in and out of places so that school, family and home lives blur and come together in

complex ways. The sheer volume of material that the interviews generated related to

racism experienced in schools was alarming. Schools played paradoxical roles both in

cultivating and containing racial literacies, often providing occasions returned to much

later for thinking about and trying to make sense of the hatred of a teacher or student, a

lack of seeing “you” in the school, as most participants described over and over again

about the lessons in which they were schooled. Part of the focus of this chapter is to

sketch out some of the conditions of life in schools and lessons in racism but also to look

more closely at how the women, as young girls, responded to and understood the racially

                                                                                                               65 See Ahmed (2004:89-100) on stickiness where she explores how things get bound together and accumulate specific meanings and effects. She explores how meanings and affects get attached to specific bodies or racial epithets but also how certain meanings and histories of harm can be concealed through such articulations.

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inflected landscapes of institutional life in schools. Included in the lengthy discussions in

this chapter are: how participants struggled to understand the contours and complexities

of race by living and learning in differently racialized spaces and how deeply injurious

and unsettling many of their schooling experiences have been. In this chapter, I chose to

prioritize teacher student relationships because teachers featured prominently in how

school was remembered and their institutional and affective power was frequently

recounted in interviews.

This chapter contains three large thematic concerns that are interwoven and discussed

throughout. First, it refers back to my previous theoretical discussions that historicize

and define racism and racial neoliberalism. I link these interventions with the work of

critical race scholars in education in order to expand what counts as racism in schools.

This is critical because of the many ways that racism operates but is dismissed and denied

in schooling contexts. Students are thought to succeed or fail or are disciplined “not

because of who they [are], but because of what they [do]” (Ferguson 2001:17). This

chapter resists this bifurcation and argues instead that students are sorted, ranked,

rendered visible and overlooked because of the many ways that they are racially marked

as non-white. This chapter traces the profound consequences of these institutional

practices on the women of colour and intervenes squarely in post-racial turns in

educational discourses. It is not simply that “post-racial positions remain premature”

(Warmington 2009:283) but that post-racial discourses and the contest to define and

cordon off what constitutes racism, to which Barnor Hesse (2011) so insistently draws

our attention, are “redefining the terms for racial politics,” resistance and the “racial

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remedies” available for consideration (Cho 2009:1596). Despite the claims of the post-

racial present, racism has not vanished and so the challenge becomes to trace its more and

less familiar words, practices and forms of governance. The elaboration of these ideas in

Chapter 2 provides an important backdrop to this chapter, contextualizing the ongoing

need to emphasize critical race perspectives in educational discourses.

As I explained in Chapter 2, I did not set out to conduct a study on women of colour but,

this dissertation is, in some ways, one that accidentally investigates how racism is lived

and deciphered in the lives of women of colour more specifically. Increasingly, I have

had to think about how women of colour, such as the ones in this study, disappear in both

the post-racial turn that I outline earlier, and also in the “boy” turn in educational studies

(Martino and Rezai-Rashti 2012; McCready 2012; Keddie 2010; Mirza 2009; Reay

2001).66 This dissertation therefore supports the interventions of feminist scholars who

insist that the post-feminist turn in schooling and elsewhere is premature and elides

                                                                                                               66 As Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody observe, there has been a shift in educational debate from the concern with the underachievement of girls to the low performance of boys (2001:110). McCready (2012) sums up the ‘crisis’ of boys in education as a shift in attention to boys literacy, graduation and overall academic performance relative to girls. Martino and Rezai-Rashti argue that the hypervisibility of the “underachieving boy” (2012:423) obscures class, race and a number of other relevant variables that help us to discern which boys and which girls are succeeding and failing. As Sarah Ghabrial explains, the boy crisis has afforded little attention to boys from marginalized communities or Aboriginal girls and boys (2012:51). In other words, it is a thinly disguised “defence of privileged, normative boyhood” (Ghabrial 2012:44). By reconfiguring boys as a homogenous disadvantaged group (Keddie 2010) and girls as achieving (Ringrose and Renold 2010), there is also turn away from social justice and a dismantling of programs and funding initiatives for girls and for gender equity. Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody insightfully point out that the relative success of middle class girls from professional families “constitutes a serious threat to the academic hegemony of boys from professional families” (2001:16). They argue that the erosion of manufacturing jobs, which previously provided employment options for working class men, have now all but vanished in many previously industrialized societies. It is against this crisis for working class and increasingly middle class men that the success and achievement of a small and select group of women is represented as a “particular problem of the present” (2001:112). Heidi Mirza (2009) provides a much more nuanced reading of this presumed gender gap and echoing other scholars, insists on the need to consider race and class alongside gender to more fully understand educational achievement and gaps. Even where some girls and women have been academically successful, Mirza points out that often, this “has not translated into success in the workplace or better access to other learning opportunities” (2009:4).

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enduring inequalities for women (Ringrose 2013; Ringrose and Renold 2012; Pomerantz

and Raby 2011; McRobbie 2009; Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody 2001) but it does so

within a specifically anti-racist lens. Reflecting on the experiences of girls and young

women of colour in schools reveals that their lives are structured by racism in ways that

are not often not adequately accounted for (Batacharya 2010; Rajiva and Batacharya

2010; Mirza 2009; Jiwani 2006; Jiwani, Steenbergen and Mitchell 2006). This unsettles

both the boy turn in schooling and furthers the important critiques and analysis of the

post-feminist landscape that have been levelled in response to it. In short, women of

colour often fall through the “posts” in both post-racial and post-feminist landscapes. I

hope to strengthen feminist contributions to critical race studies and lend critical race

insights to feminist interventions in educational studies.

Secondly, as the narratives in this chapter demonstrate, a number of complex and

differentiated positions are staked out in the racial landscapes in which people are placed

and to which they respond. I take seriously the divergent and creative strategies

employed to survive in incredibly stressful and dehumanizing educational contexts.

Rather than trying to render these hierarchically, that is to assess which are better or more

or less resistant practices, I focus instead on how people are living, deciphering and

responding to the racial conditions of their lives and the resources available and more

distant to engage these sense-making practices. I foreground the experiences of Neelam,

Usha and Dhanya, alongside others, not to suggest that they stand in for different types of

people; rather, they illuminate different tactics of manoeuvring around, confronting or

navigating racial structures. At different times and in different places, the participants

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move between divergent strategies. They do not set out to respond consistently to racism

or sometimes to respond to it at all; often they simply try to feel better or hurt less.

Thinking alongside the women and their lives encourages an approach to resistance and

accommodation that is nuanced and attentive to the lived conditions and constraints of

people’s lives. Here again, I consider how we might read the gendering of resistance

strategies, of being ‘good’ for example or working hard to outsmart racism while also

drawing attention to how gender complicates readings of race. Resistance or survival

practices are also difficult to look at. Sometimes, in trying to take cover, they can

stabilize, authorize or intensify forms of racial injury against other racialized people or

groups. As we see in this chapter, people with an astute analysis of racial logics can

sometimes disavow racism or consolidate it in various ways as a means of survival,

escape or admission to whiteness, however partial and tenuous. Oppression creates

strange and unpredictable dynamics.

Finally, I argue that while measurements such as high school graduation, suspensions and

expulsions, university and college entrance and completion, employment and income

rates, matter a great deal, measurements do not tell the whole story. This is particularly

the case where the academic ‘success,’ of the young women here, however hard fought

and precarious, is deployed to underestimate or undermine their deeply injurious

schooling experiences. The academic imperative to make arguments and extract value

from people’s lives efficiently is slowed down for me by the kinds of anger, sorrow,

confusion, disengagement, humiliation, devastation and regret through which racism was

felt in schools. Rather than rush over these places in the narratives, I dwell on their

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details, how they are recounted and their resonances in the present. In keeping with

much of my orientation throughout this dissertation and the attention to emotional life

developed in the preceding chapter, I continue to take a “serious look at the more

immaterial, unquantifiable repository of public and private grief that has gone into the

making of the so-called minority subject” (Cheng 2001:6). I try to convey the heaps of

emotion, most prominently, profound wells of racial grief as the women recount stories

never before recounted about how damaging racism in schools has been, the

consequences of inhabiting a racially marked body and the many ways that they have

fought for protection or sought some accommodation, sometimes from the very

categories that have harmed them. I remain astonished at the rawness and force of these

incidents, many of which occurred decades ago. I use this pain as a point of departure, to

investigate its productiveness and the ways it fosters orientations to race, schooling and

futures, all intertwined throughout the narratives. By attending to the women’s struggles

with, for and against various feelings, I argue that we can apprehend not only racism’s

harms but the tensions in adjudicating racism’s possible meanings and efforts to contain

responses to it. Along the way, I point out all of the losses and labour that are not so easy

to see or make productive. By exploring the insights and scholarship on emotion, drawn

eclectically from feminist, queer and critical race scholarship, in the context of these

narratives, I hope to deepen and suggest more expansive ways of reading the relationship

between schooling, emotion, race and resistance. Doing so illuminates other ways of

calculating the costs of institutional learning for women of colour. Their desperation was

often quiet.

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Neelam Neelam told one of those stories that I couldn’t forget. I start here because of the fertile

grounds she provides for thinking about living race. Neelam was also the longest

interview I conducted, just over five hours, and the only one conducted over two sessions,

separated by about a month. After the first almost two hour session, she agreed to meet

again since there were so many questions I wanted to ask her still and we seemed to have

developed a conversation of sorts that she also wanted to pursue. Neelam grew up in

what she describes as a “I don’t really like the word ghetto but (laugh) you know, it had a

lot of you know, we had a lot of poverty issues” with a mix of disparate South Asian,

primarily Tamil, black, primarily Somali, and Latino populations. In the next chapter, I

consider more closely the complexity and sometimes confusion with which she describes

relationships within and between racialized groups in her school and neighbourhood. In

the usual circuitous route that most interviews assumed, she details at great length the

racial conflicts and tensions between the almost all white teaching staff, a constant in all

of the interviews I conducted, and the mostly racialized students in both elementary and

high schools she attended. When I ask her about the effects of these encounters in terms

of her relationship to school and learning, Neelam detailed at great length the “strong

contempt” that she felt for teachers which was generalized to schools. For her, there was

“no confusion whatsoever” on the hatred, mistrust and alienation that she developed

towards schools and teachers.

She connects up this prolonged encounter with racism from grade one to grade eight

which culminates for Neelam, into the story about a story she wrote for a teacher while in

grade eight. “I’ve always been a writer,” Neelam tells me, “I’ve always liked writing and

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I wrote this amazing story. I spent so long working on it, I even worked on it all night.”

Neelam describes the day when all of the students receive their stories back, all except

her and when it’s her turn to get her story back, the teacher asks Neelam to step out in the

hall and asks, “who wrote this story?” Neelam recounts: “I’m like I did. She said I don’t

believe that you came up with this and I’m like, I sat there and I wrote it. You can call

my parents and you can ask them. I wrote this story. She’s like I don’t believe you, it

sounds like something that was plagiarized and I’m like I would never plagiarize like I

have no reason to plagiarize like I was one those kids like, I would, I always did well in

school.” When I press Neelam on why she thinks the teacher accused her of plagiarism

or what it is that the teacher is telling her through this accusation, Neelam replies, “that I

wasn’t, that some - that me, someone like me could not write that story, that story was

too good to have come from me.” In a very quiet voice and with eyes averted, Neelam

tells me “that’s like a really really bad memory for me.” Neelam reflects quite a bit on

this story and it comes to occupy a place of prominence for me, both as she tells the story

and also as I transcribe it, hearing the changes in her voice, the tenor and pace.

As I sit with it now, I am also struck by the fact that I didn’t ask her what the story was

about. I did wonder, both in the interview and after, but given the difficulty she had in

looking at the story, it seemed unfair to ask her to return to the specifics of the story that

she had poured so much of herself into, that was so good her teacher couldn’t imagine

that Neelam was capable of authoring it. It is this same teacher who tells Neelam that she

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won’t make it into an International Baccalaureate (IB)67 program in high school. In

response, Neelam applies to the program, filling in the onerous application, getting

transcripts and attending an interview. Parents attend these interviews but in Neelam’s

case, because her parents were working and weren’t able to accompany her, she recalls

“dragging” her little sister. She recounts with a great deal of clarity her reasons for

applying to the program:

I remember, I just did that IB interview, I know I did that IB interview only so I could get that letter and show it to [the teacher that accused her of plagiarizing] that I’d made it and I did. I got the call saying I got in and I went and I told her, I said I got in (pause) and she’s like oh that’s good for you and I’m like yeah, it is and then I walked away from her and that was it. From that, from then on I (pause), I can not tell you a straight week of school that I went to. I just hated school, I hated the idea of school, I hated the idea of being in a classroom with these teachers. I hated teachers. I couldn’t be in classrooms, I couldn’t so when she did that to me it was like the end all and be all I was like fuck you, fuck this. I’m not doing this shit anymore.

Neelam does indeed tell her parents about this incident and they repeat it to all of their

friends and in other contexts as well, including when they are at a lawyer’s office to

purchase a new home and her father feels compelled to tell the lawyer who is handling

the house closing about this great injustice to which the lawyer responds, “can I read your

story?” She recalls this incident in particular because Neelam often assumed the role of

translator for her parents when it came to navigating bureaucracies such as government

agencies or in this case, accompanying them to the lawyer to look over the details of the

house deed. Neelam recalls her parents’ incredulity as they say over and over again to

friends and acquaintances, “can you believe that happened to her” and despite the need

                                                                                                               67 The IB program is a specialized academic program offered by select schools. Schools have to be authorized to offer the program and there is a selection process for students to be accepted into it. It is widely recognized as an academically rigorous program.

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they felt to share the incident, “they never did anything about it.” When I ask her why

she thinks her parents felt compelled to keep telling the story, she wonders out loud:

I think that maybe they had that feeling too that you know (pause), they knew what was done was wrong but I think maybe they felt like if they were to tell me in the terms of, oh they probably did it cause they were you know, being prejudiced towards you. I think they would have felt worse about saying that to me maybe or it could have just been that maybe they felt that they had no right to go and advocate for me in a place where you know, they don’t speak the same language. It’s not a level playing field and they probably didn’t feel like you know they would be heard anyways and (pause) what’s the point? (laugh) yeah but they felt that you know it was wrong and they needed to say something about it.

Neelam recalls being “so pissed” with her teacher and wishing, “I remember wishing I’m

like I wish I had white parents who would come in here and rip her to pieces but my

parents would’ve just been like that’s unfortunate like you know I’m sorry that happened

to you but I know you [wrote the story]. I remember that was the one time that I wished

you know my parents had been white so they could have come in and gone bananas on

her (laugh).” When I ask her why not wish for parents who could speak English, rather

than white parents and ask her to clarify this distinction of desires, Neelam observes that

it was the white parents who were involved in the parent council at school, who

participated in activities in the school in present and visible ways. The racialized parents

were ones that appeared when their children got suspended or were in trouble. In fact,

this was so much the case that at one point, a classmate asks Neelam “ like do you even

have a mother (laugh)? I remember thinking cause she had, her mom was on the what is

that parent teacher thing and she was always in the school and always putting things

together and she’s like where’s your mom and I was like, she’s working (laughter).”

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Unlike the parents who came to pick up their kids in cars after school, for the mostly

racialized working class students like Neelam, parents didn’t get home from school until

after their work shifts were over. In Neelam’s case, her mom got home at six o’clock.

This meant that Neelam and her friends would play in the school yard while teachers

would insist that they go home. Unable to tell them that they couldn’t go home, they

would hide until the teachers simply left and continue playing. In Neelam’s mind, the

message that crystallized was that “white parents stuck up for their kids more” and if her

parents had been white or if this incident had happened to a white student, the outcome

would have been very different. Reflecting on the desire for her parents to be white,

Neelam says “I knew that I was wrong later on” but she can’t seem to let go of the feeling

that having white parents would have afforded her more protection and advocacy in

relation to school officials, “it just felt like if they had been white, they would have been

able to stick up for me.”

I asked Neelam if she still had the story she had written, the one she had been accused of

plagiarizing and she responds:

I think I do. I think it’s at my mom’s house. I think it, yes, it is at my mom’s house cause when I was, when she was selling the house and we were going through some of the stuff I remember finding it and I just put it back in the box. I didn’t open it, I didn’t read it, I didn’t do any- I don’t think I ever want to read that story again. I never read it again after [the teacher] gave it back to me. I just put it away and I remember after when my mom was, this was about 3 years ago when she sold the house, I remember uhm (pause) it was in the box and I saw it, I remember there was like this picture of this flower on the front cover and I knew immediately what it was and I just put it back in the box and I didn’t read it again. Why not? I don’t know. I don’t think I wanted to. Yeah so she said, my mom said am I gonna take them? She actually, it’s funny though, we’re talking about this and

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she says are you gonna come take your school stuff? She keeps all my, she had kept all this stuff and I said no, I don’t want to take it, I don’t wanna look through it, I don’t wanna look through my young years but for some reason I don’t wanna throw it out either. She’s like do you want me to throw it out (pause)? I said no but I don’t want to look through it either. I don’t know.

When I met Neelam for our second interview time, I returned to this incident, to ask her

again about finding the story but choosing not to read or look at it. I was struck by

Neelam’s immediate recognition of the story but her inability to either look at it or throw

it away. After the month had passed between our first and second meeting, I wondered if

she would reflect more or differently on why this was the case. I open up the issue again

with Neelam and she reiterates her previous response:

You talked about finding the story at your mom’s house but not reading it (yeah) but also the fact that you’re not ready to throw that stuff away and yet you don’t want to look at it. No, I don’t want to look at it at all. I don’t know if I would ever read it again but I just, I don’t wanna throw it away. I feel kinda weird throwing it away but yeah I didn’t want to read the story. I still don’t, like I have no desire to look through that box (laugh) of any of that stuff…I won’t look at at all. I know she has all this stuff, she’s always like come look at it and I’m like no. She’s like see what you wanna keep. I’m like no just keep it all (laugh). I’ll get to it eventually.

Connecting Stories With Racial Hierarchies There is so much that Neelam offers us in this story – the racialized grids of intelligence

that make it impossible, in the teacher’s mind, for Neelam to be the author of this story;

Neelam’s need to prove her competence to her teacher by gaining admission to the IB

program, placing herself within, making herself recognizable as a student with potential

and ability and desiring this on the terms that exclude her body; her desire for whiteness

as a form of protection from the violence; middle class norms which fashion assumptions

about students’ lives and parental involvement and advocacy in schools; a breaking point

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which marks a decisive disengagement and withdrawal from schooling; Neelam’s

inability to look at the story and her parent’s inability to stop talking about it.

We see in the interactions that participants such as Neelam have with schools how racial

meanings and practices come to life. What accounts for the recurrence of so many stories

of being accused of lying, cheating and plagiarizing that students told me over and over

again? How were forms of surveillance and punishment disproportionately enacted on

racialized students? How were such racial meanings and distinctions so readily made and

so readily denied? In Neelam’s case and throughout this chapter, I take categories such

as intelligent, troubled and troubling students; incidents such as angry outbursts and

quiet, seething disengagements; places such as the principal’s office and hallways; and

knowledges, dominant and disqualified, and examine, from the perspectives of racialized

students, how race takes hold in such distinctions, processes and encounters.

In analyzing Neelam and subsequent narratives, I rely significantly on the insights of

critical race scholars who have drawn attention to pervasive racial inequalities in systems

of schooling (Delpit 2012; Leonardo 2009; Taylor, Gilborn & Ladson-Billings 2009;

Meiners 2007; Carr & Lund 2007; Pollock 2004; Ferguson 2001; Dei 2000; Dei 1996).

While these perspectives are not uniform, they insist on capacious readings of race that

bring with them incisive critiques of liberalism and an attentiveness to the embeddedness

of racism in social structures and systems of knowledge (Ladson-Billings 2009; Delgado

and Stefancic 2001). While racism certainly shows itself through racist comments and

individuals, critical race scholarship is attentive to how it circulates as a way of seeing

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and sorting, classifying and organizing; to recall Goldberg, it is a lens for meaning

making. Reshifting what counts as knowledge, critical race theorists, similar to feminist

and queer interventions, also draw extensively on qualitative research methods such as

stories, narratives and the recountings of those racially marginalized (Soloranzo & Yosso

2009). Much of this chapter and project are animated by these important methodological

and theoretical openings. Other scholars importantly connect up racism’s structural

organization with its everyday manifestations in racial microaggressions, drawing

attention to its educational, emotional and psychological effects (Minikel-Lacocque 2013;

Kohli and Solorzano 2012; Smith, Allen & Danley 2007; Solorzano, Ceja and Yosso

2000). Collectively, these scholars have intervened in educational matters from the

development of educational policy, to research methodologies, to curriculum reform and

the day to day life of students, to resituate racism as central to the functioning of schools

and to insist on addressing these and related inequities.

Along similar lines, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine, call for “critical bifocality” in

educational research that links histories and structures to lives and experiences

(2012:174). They articulate concerns about the bifurcation of research and literature into

“structures or lives, thereby eclipsing the critical interactions between socio-political

formations and what takes place on the ground” (2012:174-5). Rather than diminishing

the analytic potential of ethnographic and narrative research with marginalized

communities, Weis and Fine call for research that can illuminate the “structural

architecture” of oppression and how it is lived and contested (2012:175). They focus on

forms of structural oppression and dislocation, such as racism and neoliberalism that are

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“designed to be unseen” (2012:177). Throughout this chapter, I endeavour to take up

Weis and Fine’s challenge to link structures with lives, both in the more obvious and

difficult to decipher ways that racism takes hold.

While I focus on how this story and the circumstances surrounding it decisively shape

Neelam’s relationship to teachers and schools, it is not a singular event. It is one of a

chain that Neelam recounts with a great deal of clarity and precision. Neelam’s story

literally opens up onto hundreds of other incidents of racism littered throughout the

interviews – stories about being accused of lying to teachers, of observing differential

treatment, entering a racial landscape of proofs of various kinds and scales, of figuring

out how to respond and survive, decoding the apparent and sometimes more nuanced and

slippery kinds of racism that were offered up in schools, by teachers, students and other

people in charge. It is not about instances of racism or enumerating and counting up

specific events but the structuring of an institution and public life in particular kinds of

ways. It’s not about swapping out a miserably racist teacher with one that is perhaps not

so horribly racist, though that could significantly improve the lives of some students

within their influence. It’s endemic to the way that schools are sorting, teaching,

assessing and going about their business; it is woven into institutional life and for some, it

is more insidious and harder to see. It almost looks normal.

The racism that comes at them, to return to the collective insights of critical race scholars,

is lost in accounts and conceptual frames that contain racism as aberrant acts carried out

by isolated individuals (Hesse 2004), what Sara Ahmed refers to as the “‘bad apple

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model’” of racism (2012:44). The “bad apples” become another technology of

circumventing racism, of reducing it to things, quite often individuals we can clearly

identify and racial practices that are discrete and apparent. These individuals exist, as the

many narratives in this dissertation attest to, but singling them out not only

“underestimates the scope and scale of racism” (Ahmed 2012:44), it also lets institutions,

in this case schools, off the hook by containing racism to these specific individuals.

Ahmed forcefully argues that it is through such containment and identification practices

that racism continues to be reproduced in institutions (Ahmed 2012:44). As Les Back

disturbingly points out, “there is something in the blanket assertions of institutional

racism that is somehow comforting for its speakers” (2004:4). The rest of us, assured that

we are not racist, become the evidence of institutions that have reckoned with and

remedied their racism. Racism is almost always someone else’s problem and someone

else’s doing. As Kari Dehli points out, in their observations of school officials and

institutional structures, good ethnographers “will notice the many ways in which well-

intentioned people reproduce social and educational inequality” (2008:54).

Responsibility for racism and oppression, for reproducing and interrupting it, are much

more widely shared than the ‘bad apple’ model concedes. However, I do not want to

underestimate the importance of some measure of accountability for explicitly racist

encounters that students are often up against. Sometimes racism is as clear as a rotten

apple but it is also a “perpetual hum” (Mirza 2009:57). The women’s experiences insist

on returning to a much more expansive definitions of racism and the consequences of its

harm. But it does more than harm; it also keeps in place power relations that secure

white entitlement. Racism is smuggled into smart and not, IB worthy or university bound

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and someone who must have plagiarized a story. As in Neelam’s case, race routinely

sums up students lives, capacities and futures. The identification of excellence and

expendable were some of its most enduring and damaging distinctions in the educational

lives of the women with whom I spoke.

It is on the issue of not reading the story but not being able to throw it away that I want to

dwell as well as the contradistinction between Neelam’s response and that of her parents,

repeatedly telling the story about what had happened to their daughter. I use Neelam’s

story as an opportunity to think about how such experiences fashion different orientations

to racism and schooling as well as divergent strategies for managing it. In Neelam’s

case, we see multiple strategies – we see the solidification of a pattern of disengagement

from schools, a refusal to put up with the humiliation and the felt impossibility of being

in the presence of teachers or in classrooms for prolonged periods. Just as racism is

diffusely organized, its effects are diffusely lived. The hostility that Neelam develops

towards teachers and schools follows her into high school and university, where her

inability to be in classroom environments or around teachers threatens her academic

future. In similar ways, many students explained the affective spillovers of racism in

their lives and experiences of schooling, feelings they could not shake and experiences

that were too many and too painful to recall. Classrooms, schools and later lecture halls

and labs sometimes became difficult places to endure.

We also see the circulation of this system of proofs that centres on racialized hierarchies

of intelligence with her “fuck you” to the teacher by getting into the IB program so that

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she can wave proof of something in her teacher’s face, not only that “someone like her”

could get into the program but that equally, someone like her, could and did, in fact

author the story, which she is accused of plagiarizing. It is the bit of justice that she can

work to secure for herself. And for her parents, the injustice of the accusation is

responded to not with school officials at all, where language, cultural capital and time,

what Neelam sums up in some ways as the uneven “playing field” and the likelihood that

“they would be heard anyways” shape the terrain, but in community and social circles,

with their repeated incredulity, “can you believe that happened to her [our daughter]?” I

read Neelam’s parents silence at the school and their constant retelling in various social

and community contexts to reflect their disempowerment in the context of state schooling

but also their efforts to mitigate and share this injustice in alternate spaces.68 Neelam

also speculates that her parents’ reluctance to name the racial reasons for the teacher’s

accusation is because of how disempowering it might have made them feel to say it and

for Neelam to hear it. They could not protect their daughter from racism nor did they feel

equipped to intervene in it. Thinking back to my analysis of racial literacies from the

previous chapter, the tension between noticing and rushing over racism, talking about it

endlessly and remaining silent, and their attendant feelings, appear once again. This was

                                                                                                               68 See Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody for a related exploration of the classed dimensions of being able to fight for your child in the context of institutional schooling (2001:126-131). While it was the case that middle class parents of colour were sometimes able to advocate for their children, this did not evacuate the ongoing racism that their children experienced, nor did it alleviate the harm that these children experienced. Class did not protect them from racism. See Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes for an examination of the experiences of middle class Blacks in America. They illuminate the extent to which money and resources, achievement and effort, are not sufficient to “protect black people from the persisting ravages of white racism in their everyday lives” (1994:ix). While they acknowledge that middle-class Black Americans have access to greater resources to respond to racism, the “presence and use of these resources appear to have had little lasting effect on the magnitude of white racism” (1994:ix). Philomena Essed’s work, on which I draw extensively throughout this dissertation, also considers how race and gender discrimination undermine many of the benefits commonly assumed to accrue to individuals with post-secondary credentials (1991:34). Like Feagin and Sikes she also details the affective and material harms of racism from which middle class Black women are not protected.

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a dilemma with which parents and many participants struggled. For Neelam, it is the one

instance in her life where she wishes for white parents, longing for the influence and

protection that she feels whiteness and its corresponding middle class status might have

afforded her; namely the ability to leverage whiteness to secure fair treatment from

teachers and schools. In short, Neelam understands the institutional power of whiteness

and she knows that it doesn’t belong to her or her family.

And yet, after all of these years Neelam immediately recognizes the story as she goes

through things in her mother’s house before it’s sold. She knows the flower that graces

the front cover and she puts it back in the box, without reading it. She has not read it

since the day that the teacher accused her of plagiarizing this story. Neelam articulates

this tension between not being able to look at or read the story on the one hand but also

not being able to throw it away or let it go, on the other but also not knowing why. She

finally tells her mother to keep it all, not just the story but all of the school materials that

her mother has kept for all of these years, and defers an engagement with it to sometime

in the future that is non-commitally referenced as “eventually.”

The story and Neelam’s recounting of it resonated with me profoundly, partly because of

how deeply it had affected her but also because in this tension of not being able to look

and not being able to look away, she sums up the difficulty of engaging racism that was

recounted over and over again in the interviews. Quite simply, for some of the women,

looking at it was almost impossible, nor were they able to look away from it entirely, to

cast it aside, to throw it away. In telling these incidents to me, they were letting me in on

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them, perhaps hoping that I could look at them, turn them into something for other

racialized people and maybe even for them. They held onto it, perhaps for their own

“eventualities” but it followed and shaped them. I can speculate on the pain and harm

that this story pivoted on but that also called up a much longer history of racial injury

made it difficult to look. In refusing to throw it away, Neelam preserves the opportunity

to look again. To throw it away would mean not only to discard the memory of racism

which it called up, it would also mean to throw away her story, the beautiful words that

she had stayed up all night to craft in grade eight as a student who loved to write.

Neelam, like many others, tries to leave race behind, in the basement of her mother’s

house and, as we see in Chapter 6, where we meet Neelam again, she extends these

meanings of “letting go” of race. There is no clean or neat line from the assessment that

people are making of the racial organization of their lives and their responses. Knowing

what you’re up against, doesn’t necessarily generate politics or familiar political

responses of the kind in which people interested in social justice might be invested.

Quite often, it’s simply about struggling to figure out a way to get by day after day in

hostile institutions that end up feeling and being unbearable. I don’t blame Neelam or the

other women who engage in similar practices as a way to survive. Recalling Nimat from

the previous chapter, letting go of racism is a strategy that can ensure some measure of

safety for people of colour. I am more interested in the conditions that create this

response, rather than others. How, in other words, are schools not only places where so

much racism is visited on racialized students but also places that further mitigate against

students formulating an analysis of and collective response to it? In the subsequent

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section, I supplement Neelam’s reflections with that of other participants to think more

deeply about the tensions of turning to and away from racism which are inextricably

bound up with attitudes towards schools, futures and institutional forms of learning.

Turns to and Away From Race While I have already introduced Mona Oikawa’s (2012) work on how histories of

Japanese Canadian internment are lived, remembered and passed on in families, I

elaborate here, in more careful ways, her attention to memory and its relevance for how

women of colour learn to endure and live with memories of racism. Oikawa considers

how the internment, thought to belong to those interned, is more properly a national

history that belongs to all Canadians (2012:x).69 In this way, Oikawa returns the events

of the internment and its legacies to the nation that created it. She sets out to understand

what is remembered and forgotten of the internment and the power relations that buttress

demands to forget or to properly remember. As Oikawa insists, these are national

conditions. Canada does not easily acknowledge the racism that it perpetrates. People

are persuaded to forget and sometimes they are punished for remembering. The

forgetting, Oikawa argues, does not simply happen, it is “actively produced” (2012:xiii).

Against this national obfuscation, she excavates practices and forms of remembrance in

familial and communal spaces. Survivors remember, not only the internment but they tell

a different national story of well organized and executed racist exclusions and white

entitlement (Oikawa 2012:16). Remembering and forgetting are both collective projects.

In her analysis of the memories of those interned, interviews with 11 survivors and 10 of

their daughters, Oikawa points out that for survivors and their families, remembering in

                                                                                                               69 In Chapter 6, the internment of Japanese Canadians is mentioned by a few of my participants and I examine how they and other incidents of racist violence and exclusion organize understandings of Canada.

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the nation that incarcerated them and that still forgets it, continues to be risky (2012:86).

While their memories contested the forgetting of the internment, they were also shaped in

relation to it. Her participants are left to negotiate naming and not naming. It is

important to attend to the specificities of racism and its effects and my intent is not to

make experiences analogous. Yet, as I read Oikawa’s book, I was struck by how familiar

certain phrases were in my interviews and hers. The women interned recounted putting

things out of their minds, choosing to forget or described blanks in their memories. I had

transcribed these same phrases and more. Others from Oikawa’s study remembered with

a sharp clarity, details of things confiscated, left behind and looted, families and loved

ones scattered and homes that no longer existed. Like my participants, sometimes they

struggled against forgetting and sometimes they struggled against remembering too. The

legacies of racism were not lived or felt uniformly. I dwell on Oikawa because of how

relevant and resonant her analysis and concerns are with my own.

The ability of participants whom I interviewed, to remember racism is regulated by the

dismissal and displacement of racism to the spectacular and exceptional and its

containment to discrete acts and individual behaviours. Schools are a primary place in

which standardized understandings of racism become sedimented as normal. Not

surprisingly, these lessons reflect a commitment to liberalism and the post-racial ethos

with which people of colour are left to contend. While this is detailed in Chapter 1, it is

worth restating that the language and conceptual frameworks with which to understand

racism are deeply impoverished within liberal and neoliberal multicultural frames.

Learning to forget Canadian racism is a carefully cultivated national project and schools

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are central places where this lesson is learned, over and over again. In her work,

Sandrina de Finney examines how whiteness and Canadian multiculturalism constrain the

ability of diverse Indigenous, immigrant and racialised girls to access a critical language

with which to understand the “deep-seated structural inequities” that shape their lives

(2010:477). Caught between narrow definitions of racism on the one hand and

celebrations of difference on the other, de Finney traces how young girls are encouraged

to reproduce the “myth of Canada as a safe multicultural harbor” (2010:477). Mary E.

Thomas similarly argues that American public education fails to provide students with an

education that enables them to articulate their everyday experiences of racism, poverty

and racial-ethnic conflicts (2011:30). Her emphasis is on how multiculturalism, with its

focus on diversity, what she refers to as “banal multiculturalism” saturates the

understandings that young women come to develop about themselves and to the fantasy

of a post-racial society (2011:4). While I reflect on race and nation in more elaborated

ways in the final chapter of this dissertation, throughout this chapter, I draw attention to

how understandings of racism and anti-racist commitments are very difficult to reach. It

is within and against these constraints that racialized people struggle to apprehend and

articulate the kinds of racist harm that they routinely encounter. As Oikawa’s work

powerfully demonstrates, the “ability to speak and be heard,” even the ability to

remember is “clearly connected to power” (Oikawa 2012:50).

Forgetting was also done against deeply injurious racist practices that were difficult to

remember. For some, this was also part of racism’s legacy, having to endure it silently.

Returning to the pain, humiliation, rage and anger of racist aftermaths, revisiting hard and

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difficult scenes and emotional worlds, was too much for many of the women whom I

interviewed. It was not uncommon for the women to tell me stories like Neelam’s, with

the nuances and despair shaping the contours of their lives, following them in particular

kinds of ways, only to be followed by the revelation that they had never recounted the

story to anyone else and that after the interview had concluded and the door closed

behind them, these stories would be returned to distant, yet it seems still accessible

places. For many of the participants, though these experiences had been so deeply

wounding, they wanted to contribute in some way to stopping them from happening to

others or to helping others survive them a bit better than they had. Even then, when many

interviews ended, participants stated that they were simply going to put these incidents

and memories behind them in order to move on. It became so predictable and I started to

wonder not about the longing to put it behind which I found unsurprising. After all, who

would want to return to these memories? But then like Neelam, I wondered about a

turning away from racism as a way of managing it. It was never entirely successful

because the racism still appeared but the turn away seemingly made people feel better,

perhaps because it provided some distance and disengagement from the bad memories.

I return to my thinking about and reading on “bad feelings,” from the previous chapter, to

wonder how returning to these scenes might be helpful and generative, how an embrace

of rather than a turning away from these anguished and awful memories might be

important for something – for learning differently and for thinking about the social

production of despair and racial hardship. Despite its difficulties, it is worth

remembering what they try to forget because the meanings made of the pain are not fixed

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and we can revisit the lessons, understand how they work and make other meanings not

so heavily weighed down in privatized pain and individual survival.

In her efforts to engage depression politically and as a reflection on the interstices

between the personal and social, Cvetkovich similarly argues for attending to the “felt

experience of everyday life” (2012:12) but also being able to sustain “disappointment,

failure and the slowness of change” (2012:7). Latifa, one of the women introduced in the

previous chapter, mentioned the reluctance of many of her racialized friends to engage

conversations about race and racism. It is a reluctance that she sometimes shares, as we

saw in Latifa’s reflections on burdensome inheritances in Chapter 3. When I ask her to

say more about the reluctance to engage racism she explains:

[racism is] so (pause) prevalent and I think that it’s because it’s everywhere but in small ways, it’s a little maddening to think about all the time and I think it was kind of like, that is not my duty, it’s kind of like that has already been done like that issue (pause), that was for other people to do, the older people to do like that was for like Martin Luther King Jr. to deal with and Malcolm X to deal with and things like that, like that’s not for me. I’m, I’m living in (pause) the post of that and so – like so I should just live that. I shouldn’t have to think about it all the time and so I won’t and uhm (pause), I think it’s really kind of just our way of trying to be (pause), trying to be like I’m an individual type thing again like I’m not a part of this collective.

Maddening, depressing, traumatizing, frustrating, crazy-making – all ways that

experiences of racism were described by the women in this study. Latifa and her friends

are caught between racism and the promise of the post, to adapt from Pomerantz, Raby

and Stefanic (2013)70 - post civil rights, post emancipation, post race - and its political

failures, its inability to deliver the material and affective pay offs of good housing,

                                                                                                               70 See their article Caught between Sexism and Postfeminism in School in which they explore teenage girls’ reflections of sexism in a post-feminist context, that is one where gender injustice is assumed to have been achieved.

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opportunity and outcomes in employment, health, education and belonging. They should

be able to enjoy what those struggles were supposed to achieve: the right, quite simply,

as Latifa puts it, to not have to think about race all the time or to not be made to think

about it. In asserting this right, there is a distancing from collective racial identities and

an embrace of forms of individualism on offer. As Anne Anlin Cheng observes, racial

identification is complex and can engender contradictory impulses, the desire to affiliate

and distance, it can offer protection but it is also the source of pain (2001:24, see also Eng

2001:22). Latifa’s observations come down on the side of refusal, refusing to stand with

or identify as racialized others, as a collective.

Not thinking about it or disengaging from racism is still an engagement of sorts, it still

requires an acknowledgement of the thing from which we are turning away. Both racial

engagement and disengagement are fashioned by an understanding of the racial logics at

work in our lives but they reflect different ways of dealing. But sometimes the turn away

from race is lived not as self-interest or the desire for an upwardly mobile life but as

survival and the distinction, I argue, is crucial. Following the racial formation of these

women has opened up the issue of attending to racisms pain and materiality but also to

the compromised and confused politics and practices that it sometimes produces.

Racial neoliberalisms do much more than make race appear “as only ever disappearing”

(Eng 2010:10). Sometimes from wanting to hurt less or live better, different forms of

survival that were shared in the interviews bolstered neoliberalisms insistence on both

privatizing and managing racism. Racism was often taken up as incredibly

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individualized, a system whose harm must be cast away to the basement or to memories

and events hardly spoken. I began to increasingly read the post-racial horizon not as a

promise but as a threat, something that disciplined the women to endure racist harm and

to shift the terrain that would make it increasingly difficult to speak it intelligibly, let

alone imagine organizing collectively against it. This, perhaps, explains the many

ambivalences about and aversions to race talk and the distancing practices from racialized

others that were so prevalent in the women’s lives. Many of the women had learned to

talk quietly, if at all, about racism. Their primary ways of acting were turned not against

racism but against themselves.

My interest in racial literacy had not prepared me to appreciate these kinds of refusals and

turns away from race, particularly when participants were able to articulate a

sophisticated reading of racial logics and practices. The relationship between reading

race and acting to change it was much more tenuous, complex and contradictory than I

had expected it to be. Everywhere I looked, the women challenged the linearity between

analysis and action that I had naively assumed at the project’s outset. I have had to pay

much more attention to despair, exhaustion and a whole range of emotions which not

only enable responses to and against the racial practices with which the women were

regularly confronted, but also foreclosed others. Referencing the work of Anne Anlin

Cheng, Heather Love insists on the need to take seriously “ways of feeling bad that do

not make us feel like fighting back” (2007:14). While Love does not abandon the need to

organize and fight back, she does want us to think more deeply “about how to bring that

aspiration in line with the actual experience of being under attack” (2007:14).

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This tension between the right to have a life free of racism and racism’s insistent

appearance is one that many participants articulated. Many incidents of racism recounted

in interviews reminded me of the polite liberal kind of racism, the kind that’s there but

just barely. “I think we’ve been taught to be polite about our biases, say it quietly,”

reflects Erica of the more subtle articulations of racism that she comes up against. It was

this same kind of thing – slippery, hard to pin down, the rage, the refusal to live with it,

the desire to call someone out, to get some accountability, these desires were quickly

followed with exhaustion, exasperation and concerns about the risks and retaliations of

speaking race.

Some of the participants knew or learned painfully that it was better not to fight with

white people, who often exercised power over their lives in important ways, and so they

tried to sort out which battles to take on and which to let pass. But such practices were

learned quite often, through trial and error, lessons gleaned from prior experiences of

managing racism and in a few cases, explicit instruction from parents and friends.

Learning to soften and be less threatening were repeated frequently in interviews as part

of the affective labour of managing oneself in the face of racism. Dianah, for example,

shares the insight from a colleague of her mother’s on the importance of knowing how to

“appropriately cut someone down with a smile on your face,” to lessen the force of the

message you’re trying to deliver. Dianah hastens to point out that she is not ashamed of

being angry, nor is anger necessarily a bad thing - there are certainly good reasons to be

angry. However, raising one’s voice, getting too angry or animated are all things to be

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avoided. “I want my point to be heard,” Dianah reiterates and I sense a fierce

commitment on her part to being heard and trying to create the conditions for this to take

place, to register her carefully cultivated ideas through her interactions in the social

world. When I ask her to be explicit about what it is she is working so hard to control,

she replies, “I guess it would be how others view me” but the “me” here is not just any

individual me, it is a gendered, racially inflected and storied me, embedded in larger

histories and goings on which Dianah attempts to minimize or manage in some way.

“I’m like the tall black girl, right, so if my presence is going to be there anyway, maybe I

try and control the spectacle.” “Controlling what other people think of me,” she almost

despairs, “maybe it’s just like a futile effort and I should just, not give up, but just not

drain myself from trying to do that. I don’t know (sigh), it’s so complicated.” Learning

to speak constructively so that one might be heard, learning to appear less outraged,

though that seems a fair and measured response when coming up against oppressive

racial arrangements, were major preoccupations of the women in the interviews.

Participants talked often about smiling to make themselves less threatening, and more

palatable, to help them survive, maybe even get ahead or just make it through the day or

the class or to access the opportunities that they constantly needed to prove that they

deserved. Others found it difficult to mask their disdain, knowing that if they had to

participate in such “racially rigged game[s]” (Ausdale and Feagin 2001:210), they were

not planning to do it with a smile nor were they concerned about making white people

feel good and comfortable, no matter how much they suffered for it in the end.

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For Latifa, learning to do something other than “lash out,” as she did frequently in high

school, continues to be a struggle: “I kind of had this feeling of like why am I here? If

there’s so much against me, then what’s the point? Honestly, if it hadn’t been for my

mom, I don’t know what would have happened,” Latifa reflects of her time in schools.

Battling her teachers, including one who “maintained that negro was still an accepted

term,” she knows that “nothing good” can come out of “yelling about it to the teacher in

the middle of class,” and yet, she “really just didn’t know what to do with it yet,” the

explosive anger and the racism. She recalls how incredibly important her mother’s

advice is to her:

the way to get back at them is not to (pause), not do anything with yourself. Just get your degree. You have to grin and bear it until you get into a position where you can make a change and then as I (pause) got older, when I was 14, grade 9, grade 10 (pause), the closer I got to university, the closer I got to (pause), to getting out of that school, the more I understood what she was saying and the more I took that on for myself.

Critical to her being able to really take in her mother’s advice is the knowledge that

Latifa’s mother validates her feelings of anger and injustice towards the racism that she

endures. But racism is not just something to bear, Latifa has to grin through it, not be so

hostile and angry. Learning to deal with “authority figures” in schools who wielded

considerable power over her life was, and continues to be, a process for Latifa. Having a

sense of a future that offers the possibility of not having to endure racism in the same way

and getting closer to getting out of that school propel Latifa to really take in her mother’s

advice. There is in the advice that Latifa and others receive, a postponement of influence

in relation to racism, a waiting to grow up and get out of high school. She also mentions

a very good friend in high school who often intervenes to “calm me down” during classes

when she wants to call out teachers for their racist ideas, attitudes and practices. “We’re

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getting our report cards soon, you need to calm down, you need to just calm down,” he

would counsel her. Slowly, very slowly she learns how to deal with the system, “how to

speak my mind without being completely belligerent about it.” The risks of calling out

racism in schools were constantly being calibrated against the kinds of punishment that

teachers and other school officials could mete out, the proximity to report cards being

distributed or end of year marks being tabulated, but learning to be strategic about such

things was only through hard lessons, if at all. It seems a lot to expect.

But her hold on a future is tenuous at best, for despite Latifa’s mom’s encouragement to

grin and bear it, her observations of the racism that her mother continues to endure in the

workplace make it hard for her to have faith that things will change and that she will be in

a position to change them. She questions her ability to grow-up and to out grow racism.

My mother is one of the most passionate people I ever, like I’ve known, like I’ve ever seen and she would come home just completely tired and exhausted and (pause) didn’t want to talk about anything and it was sooo hard for me to see that light in her go out and (long pause) and it’s like she’s constantly had to prove herself, like to prove that she could be a VP [vice principal], because even with her degrees and everything like that, like I have a right to be here and it’s like, I don’t know. I kinda feel like well is that what’s waiting for me in my work force, you know? Especially, especially if, well I don’t know if I’m gonna be a lawyer anymore. I might want to be a professor but I wanted to be, for the longest time, I wanted to be a lawyer.

As discussed in the previous chapter on racial literacies, Latifa’s mother’s racial harm

also becomes part of the landscape of her education in racism. I remember some of the

pauses in the interviews and as I read these words again, I hear the long silence as Latifa

notices the burden of racism carried by her mother. Silences of searching for words,

confused rememberings, fighting back tears, wording things too hard and painful to face.

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Recalling how damaging racism was to their aspirations for the future, Latifa wonders,

would the system of racial proofs be endless? Is this what waits for her? This was one

of the many moments that I came up against the limits of transcribed words on the page.

Things were lost in this process. Meaning was not communicated only with words

(Oikawa 2012:86).

Investigating how resistance and conformity work in the lives of young women in

schools, Rebecca Raby argues that girls’ resistance is often overlooked or invisible

because girls, middle class girls in particular, learn to respond more quietly to oppression

in schools. As a result, they are less likely to be harshly disciplined by school officials

(2006:147). Citing Paul Willis’ iconic study on working class boys, Raby argues that

boys, on the other hand, learn to resist out loud and are more likely to fight, vandalize and

skip school. Girls who were more likely to call out their teachers directly, were working

class girls (Raby, citing Ohrn 2006:147). Dawn Currie and Deidre Kelly similarly

contend that because middle class girls are socialized into being “good girls,” they learn

to manage and respond to conflict within proscribed notions of femininity (2006). Raby

acknowledges that class, race and other markers are relevant in considering dynamics of

resistance and conformity between teachers and students (2006:148) and Currie and Kelly

consider the interface of gender and class in considering how gendered hierarchies are

reproduced and contested in schools (2006:170). Reflecting on their experiences in

schools, the participants here suggest that gendered racism works as an important

backdrop against which girls and young women of colour are both being read and sorting

out responses to racially hostile environments. Some students, like Latifa, learn early on

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and are taught explicitly that in order to secure their academic futures, they need to

absorb a lot of the racism that comes at them because of the risks of ‘calling it out.’

Others feel silenced and unable to respond and a few learn, often with the backing of

parents, to ‘throw it back.’ But for many of the young women of colour, being seen as a

“good girl” against dominant markers of white, middle class femininity is not readily

available. Race marks them in much more tenuous ways in relation to competence,

intelligence, promise and goodness and materializes them much more readily for

punishment and regulation, especially when they refuse to be quiet.

For the most part, given the weight of racism, the focus rested on managing their

comportment so that in addition to the problem of speaking racism, of drawing attention

to it, the women are left with the problem of having to appear as though nothing is

happening or having to prove that it is. Like Latifa, others talked about this tension, the

pull between naming and calling out racist behaviour and practices but also the desire to

fit in, to not make waves, rock the boat or intensify the effects of racism. So often

throughout the narratives, students brought to life and struggled against the demands to

be subjects who were entrepreneurial (Davies and Bansel 2007; Apple 2005; Davies

2003; du Gay 1996) enough to manage their way out of or through racism successfully.

Examining the operations and effects of neoliberal reconfigurations of schools, Bronwyn

Davies and Peter Bansel trace the centrality of entrepreneurship, and of institutional life

directed for its production under neoliberal forms of governance (2007:248). Such a

revamping turns all forms of life and the provision of social goods, including education,

into commodities, to be bought, sold and earned (Davies and Bansel 2007:254; Brown

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2005). Focusing on the category of entrepreneur, Paul du Gay also highlights its utility

in organizational contexts such as schools and government departments. For du Gay, this

utility entails assuming the role as an “‘entrepreneur of the self’” (Gordon cited in du Gay

1996:156), no matter the conditions of life with which one must contend. By articulating

all relationships as economic ones, du Gay argues that there are no limits on the market

and commercial considerations become the guiding principles for the provision of public

goods (1996:158-159). There is a premium placed on acquiring and demonstrating

“‘enterprising’ capacities and dispositions” (du Gay 1996:158).

Within this frame, racism is only ever an indictment of the inability of individual people

to rise above, it is offered up as evidence of those who are failed racial subjects, rather

than sufficiently enterprising ones. Structural inequities and histories recede and

individuals are charged with their own successes and failures. Put simply, inequalities

are privatized, as are bad feelings about it. Latifa and others are caught between being

entrepreneurs of their pain, learning to domesticate and make productive the emotional

hardships that racism creates, and raging against demands to be civil, measured and

productive in the face of deeply humiliating and injurious racist practices. These ongoing

tensions were mapped onto deeply ambivalent attitudes about schooling and for some

racialized students, it was hard to maintain a belief that investments in institutional forms

of learning would lead to a good or even better life or promising future.

While thinking about racism was described as crazy-making for some, turning towards it

was also a way of making sense and finding answers, puzzling together conditions of life

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and relations of power that were everywhere but with no name, few ways to think in

relation to them or respond. Reflecting on her observations about watching racialized

people trying to fit in at high school, Isabel appreciates the desire to make life easier but

wonders about the high cost of such practices. She concludes that for her, “conformity is

not the answer cause it just blinds you, you know to greater issues cause there is an issue

and if you just comply and do nothing about it or not even address it, it’s just like, you’re

letting it happen, right.” While Isabel appreciates the difficulties in confronting racism,

she is also critical about the complicities involved in turning away from it. She explains

how unbearable her high school years were, she cried daily and skipped school regularly

as a way to manage the racism she routinely encountered, both in direct ways from other

students and teachers and in the curricular content of what she was and was not being

taught.

It was not until she reached university that Isabel was able to gain some distance from

and insight into what she had endured. She describes how empowering it was, through

courses that centred learning about racism, sexism and oppression, to find the words to

describe racism and to understand its effects in her life. Once this analysis becomes

available to her, Isabel begins to talk about racism relentlessly. When a racialized friend

tells her that worrying about racism is not worth the effort and will simply make her “go

crazy,” Isabel explains that being able to name racism as a form of social organization

rather than as something arbitrary and personal or something that doesn’t exist at all, was

essential to ameliorating her mental health. In Isabel’s case, we also see how affectively

powerful it is for her to find an analysis for her pain and to connect it up with racism.

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Recalling the insights from the previous chapter on affective instruction, Isabel learns to

feel differently, to feel better about her life and learning. Like Angela Davis, she learns

to cry less and to believe more that the thing that hurts her has a name and it can be

changed. As Audre Lorde explains, the “well-stocked arsenal of anger” that women have

in response to oppression, can be enormously useful. It can also be enormously

destructive. Lorde continues, it is when this anger is “focused with precision,” that it can

become a force for change (1984:127). Reflecting on their power, Megan Boler also

argues that “emotional rules” reflect and have the potential to secure or subvert

“particular hierarchies of gender, race, and class” (1999:xxi). They can encourage us,

through “learned emotional expressions and silences” to maintain relations of power or to

get angry in ways that enable collective forms of analysis and engagement to emerge

(Boler 1999:xxi). Boler reads emotion in complex ways, as sites of oppression and

resistance, as forces that are both socially constituted and often overlooked in schooling,

public and scholarly life. For Isabel, proximity to race finally becomes something other

than harm and damage; she gets angry in a way that, to return to Lorde (1984), Love

(2007) and Boler (1999), makes her want to fight back but this knowledge about racism

and its affective power is hard to come by and is often in short supply. One thing was

almost uniformly recounted in the interviews: with the exception of a few exceptional

teachers, high schools and earlier schooling experiences were not places where racial

literacies were explored or learned. They were almost entirely evacuated.

In turning towards collective identities and processes, there is a turn away from racial

neoliberalism’s insistence on atomised individuals owning the conditions of life and

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distributions of harm. “We’re not crazy after all, right, so yeah, now we say, yeah, it is, it

is racism,” Isabel offers in the interview, reflecting on the importance of knowledge about

racism, “it’s just not only me imagining things in my head.” Isabel finally “realize[s] that

words could tell” (Lorde 1984:85). Like other participants, she describes coming to name

racism as an opening to understanding relations of power, as an explanatory lens to make

sense of experiences that had simply been bad, demeaning or awful. It was something

they could name, study and interrupt; they didn’t only have to learn to live better with its

pain.

Usha Unlike Neelam, Usha attended high school with an almost all white student population

and she also provides an interesting window into how racism is organized and responses

to it are developed. Recall that we met Usha in the previous chapter where she talks

about not having the language to articulate that something is wrong, a something that she

knows in her body but for her, the words with which to describe the racial conditions of

her life are missing. In the absence of this vocabulary, Usha does go to extreme lengths

to manage the anxiety she experiences in an overwhelmingly white high school. While

she may not have the language, her actions are revealing for what she knows about

navigating racist structures and the schooling system in which she finds herself. Usha

details surveying the school and classifying the students in groups, the jocks, the rich

Jewish students, an assortment of middle class students, some trying unsuccessfully to

pass as wealthy, and the “white macho” students. They were all white and then there

were a very small handful of racialized students. Usha sets out to figure out “how am I

gonna make this place bearable? how am I gonna make my life bearable here” and so she

describes an elaborate performance which she creates to bear the racism and whiteness.

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Whiteness is not simply a question of difference but also, as Usha quickly observes, a

hierarchy of smart and not, better and less than. While most of the students at Usha’s

high school went on to university, the very small population that did not, was mostly

comprised of the racialized students, who either dropped out of high school or didn’t

continue to higher education. In her scan of the school, Usha understands that to succeed,

she cannot be lumped in with these students who were not “deemed bright.” These

“were not the students that were given, I think, the attention and the tools that they

needed to succeed. They were the students that loitered. They were the students that,

you know, smoked weed at the side of the building. Those were the problem coloured

students and I didn’t wanna be in that category.” Usha describes the work she did to

distinguish herself from this group, to ensure that the label of problem student was never

associated with her. Interestingly, these very students were Usha’s friends outside of

school, they would “sometimes hang out on weekends, we would get together,” she

recalls but inside schools, she was unwilling to associate with them for fear of being

tarnished by the “problem coloured student” category.

Distance was not sufficient, though, because the label of problem, with its associations of

being “troubled in some way, you know, poor, backward, unintelligent, there would be

some notions of crime in there, right,” were not so easily discarded or set aside. Usha

works quite hard and quite deliberately to prove to her teachers that she’s worth the time

and energy, that the investment in her will not be wasted. She understands the limitations

of being “racialized outwardly,” that is coming up against ideas and hierarchies into

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which she and other racialized students are placed but Usha is also faced with the urgency

to survive, to manage what she describes as the relentless anxiety, unease and not

belonging that she experiences at school. “I tried to pass,” she remembers, “in terms of

how involved I got and I tried to pass in terms of the ways that I wanted teachers to

perceive me. I think I wanted them, in some ways, to think of me as that bright Indian

girl and I went about doing so to pass.” When I ask Usha to describe more this idea of

performing, she breaks down her efforts to pass, “to be the best in everything. I was a

keener in high school (laugh),” she confesses. When I mention to her that she says this

with such disdain (more laughter), Usha reflects on the labour of performing:

I would always try and meet with my teachers and talk about my assignments. I would always stay back at the end of class you know to to ask questions about things that I was unclear about and I think that in my, you know, being proactive I was also (pause) performing cause I wanted them to think okay you know this student is really invested and so maybe I, as an instructor, I’m just gonna like look past the fact that this is a racialized student and I’m going to think about this student based on her merit right cause she deserves to be here. I think that it was all the ways in which I, I reached out to the teachers and I, you know, made appointments with my guidance counsellor and I, you know, and I applied for scholarships and I sought reference letters and I, I tried to be involved in you know student orientations and parent teachers interviews and I (pause) was always just really extra in school.

Working against ideas that they walked into in schools and classrooms, students

understood racialized hierarchies of intelligence that they were up against and many

described their ongoing efforts to counteract and work against them, to create different

meanings of who they might be but the work to do this was constant and it extended into

higher education. The system of proofs, it seems, has no end and students describe the

anxiety of always having to put on their “A game,” the very small or non-existent

margins of error granted to them, to fail or to have an off day – mistakes that could have

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devastating effects, landing them back quickly into “problem coloured student” territory.

Implicit in such fears and labour looms the question of the future and the qualitatively

different futures that the women of colour work for and against. For Usha, the work to

demonstrate her commitment with the hopes that it would be met by an investment in her

from her teachers is about creating another category for herself, somewhere between the

“problem coloured students” and the promise of white students. She knows that there are

limits to her performance that she describes as trying to find and fit “this category of

middle ground” but being “extra” provides her with some “extra” space in her

relationships with schools and teachers, something beyond being seen as a racialized

student.

For Usha, being racialized in the school was also about being read as classed, as poor. It

was about not having the “means to fit in” with an assortment of luxury clothes and

accessories that might allow her to be more like the students with whom she attended

school in a very affluent part of the city. Trying to find a middle ground in this respect

was not about trying to pass for someone with money, something she was unable to do,

but it was about being “more ambiguous in terms of what I wore and like how I presented

myself.” Much like her interactions with teachers and school officials, Usha details at

length the management and policing of her body:

I always just tried to stay on that middle ground, I always put my hair back uhm, my clothes were always very neat, I was always wore like maybe like a white collared shirt, black pants, running shoes, black jeans, blue jeans, running shoes. It was always just very neat uhm (pause). Yeah, I think that’s the best way that I can maybe describe it, just being neat. You know grooming my nails, cutting my nails, painting them with clear nail polish uhm (pause) uh (long pause) and (pause) you know maybe going, going to the washroom like between periods,

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checking my hair, making sure that it was all pulled back correctly that nothing was out (pause - laugh) Seems like a lot of work you did all the time. Right, right yeah I was always checking myself like I was always policing myself to make sure that I that I fit this category of middle ground, as someone who was neither this or that, right and in trying to be someone, (pause) in trying to be neutral I thought that that would prevent, that would make it so that I wasn’t put into these categories but I was like I was just fooling myself (laugh) you know? Like throughout all of it, throughout all of, for all you know (pause) having done all of that work, it was just completely in vain because I think in the back of my head I knew that it, I was still being put in these categories that I didn’t want to be put in (pause) but I still did it (laugh) like thinking back, I still did it, I still (pause) was very, very meticulous (pause) in how I performed, in my performance. How did you learn how to do all that? I don’t know (laugh), I don’t know…I, I think it was just something that I, after I entered this school when I saw what it was like and I surveyed the school and I thought okay (pause) these are certain, these are certain things that I need to do and I think it just kind of grew and just kind of snowballed in terms of the, like the strategies that I took to strike a middle ground.

A short while after, Usha looks at me and remarks, “the way you’re wearing your hair

right now, I could never wear my hair like that (pause) at that time. It would, it would

have to be very neat, very neat and tight and in a bun.” At the time and now still, Usha’s

comment reminds me of my own proximity and distance from these and other forms of

racial management.

Usha, perhaps more than any other participant in this study, spells out the meticulous

labour and self-management required to live race, class and gender even when the words

or analysis to describe it are missing or are made absent. The preciseness and attention to

detail with which she manages her body to in turn manage the categories in which she is

placed, the grooming of her hair and nails, the neatness of her clothes, the care and

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thought she puts into her interactions with teachers, all of these careful calibrations are

about managing expectations and standards of excellence. Usha learns to manage racism

by managing widely circulating ideas and institutional practices about who racialized

people are, where they should be and their capabilities and potential.

As much as she can, Usha exempts herself from the distress of having to be at school,

whether going home for lunch so that she could avoid the “uneasiness” and “anxiety” of

lunchtime in the cafeteria. “I couldn’t really like face going into the cafeteria,” she recalls

and having to choose between her racialized and white friends, “it was the white students

that I would have had to sit with,” and so instead of making this daily decision, Usha goes

home. She also provides us with some insight into the ways in which friendship and peer

groups become part of the management of racism. Instead of the often asked question,

“why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria” (Tatum 2003), Usha feels

compelled to be the singular racialized student sitting with the white students. Proximity

to and distance from other racialized students is part of the working out of racial

meanings, of working to make sure that these meanings and consequences do not attach

themselves to Usha. She works hard to achieve this distance and for Usha, the force of

having to sit with the white students, is one that she simply can’t bear, it “was almost

painful.” In the eleventh grade, Usha recalls making scheduling decisions to ensure that

her spare class is either the first class of the morning or the last class of the day so that

she can either arrive at school late or return home early, reducing the time that she needs

to be at school. Of her scheduling, Usha says, “it was strategic even though I couldn’t

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really verbalize the uneasiness and the anxiety that I felt, I planned it. Even though I

couldn’t really say it (pause), I was still very aware of it.”

To be good, neat and smart, to be “extra,” in Usha’s words or simply to disappear and

leave school, was about trying to manage her environment but it was also about trying to

make a future possible that might otherwise not be but Usha knows that she has to keep

performing, that managing these categories means that she must meticulously manage

herself. In the end, Usha seems exasperated in the interview when she tells me that she

knows it’s not working, that she “was still being put in these categories” no matter how

hard she worked to get out, to “strike a middle ground.” She still feels “pigeon holed

into what they expect from a racialized person.” Usha comes up against the knowledge

that she cannot simply conjure up other racial categories and place herself within them –

that they exist as something outside of her, beyond her control, that they have histories

and legacies with which she must contend.

My daughter is enthralled with magic tricks of late, a gift for her birthday from a dear

friend, and she practices them and brings them over to my desk while I write about racial

legacies and inheritances. I find the coming together of these things in the same moments

to be disconcerting. They force me to look up and to stretch so far and so quickly along

affective registers. I wonder about the magic and the violence together and the desire so

strong to make these harms disappear, to vanish them. Usha can’t vanish them but in

some ways, her performance does work to convince her teachers to invest in her, “they

were genuinely interested in my succeeding (pause), I think.” It does work to place a

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distance between her and other racialized students but Usha knows that she can’t stop

working. The labour to manage the racism is constant and the space that it creates is

provisional, it’s based on her performance being carried out over and over again and

being recognized as something, as convincing.

While in university, Usha runs into a high school teacher of hers at a coffee shop, one of

the teachers that she really liked and appreciated her thoughtful and nuanced handling of

history. But this interaction opens up so much unease for Usha and like Neelam’s story

before, I want to pay some attention to it:

I haven’t cared to go back [to high school] like I know some students will go to university and they’ll go back and visit their high school teachers. I don’t care for that shit like I don’t wanna go back. Like I had really good teachers, I ran into one of them like on the street when she was at Starbuck’s and I was at Starbuck’s. She was really surprised to see me and I really liked her as well as a teacher. I thought that she was one of the teachers that accommodated me in some way (pause) like we talked for maybe 5 minutes and that was it, that was the end of it (pause). I don’t wanna revisit those moments in high school, I really, I don’t, I don’t care to (pause). At the time I just I was just like, I’m just here to get my coffee, man (laughter), let’s not, let’s not reflect, let’s not have, let’s not have these, like these moments where you know (pause – sigh). Let’s not tell, let’s not tell ourselves these stories. I don’t wanna tell you any stories. I don’t know if you wanna tell me any stories but I’m just here to get my coffee and you asked me what I’m doing in university and I just told you what I’m doing and I asked you how you’re doing and it’s great that you’re doing well and that’s it (laugh). What are the stories? Yeah, you know like taking on that kind of a role here [extracurricular involvement at the high school] and (pause – sigh) like uhm (long pause) like certain projects that I did in school. I don’t know like I, like even the good, like I really don’t wanna talk about, like I mean it’s usually always the good that people wanna reflect on but I don’t even wanna talk about it like I don’t wanna talk about that (laughter). Why not?

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Uhm (pause) because I just think about all of the negativity that encompassed that experience for me that kind of just overshadowed those things and I really didn’t even come to think about it as like as certain strategies that I employed and so when we’re talking about it today like now that I think about all these strategies that I had to employ, the good being some of those strategies (pause), it’s like well were those things really good (pause) cause now I kinda go why did you, why did you [do certain extracurricular roles at the school] (laugh) like what was your motivation behind it and again I think that was also a strategy for how I could pass (pause) but how I wasn’t passing, you know (pause) yeah. Yeah, so even the good now like I’m just thinking about some of the good things (laughter), I don’t know now, you know I’m just like (pause) oh (pause) right and I don’t know and I don’t know.

Being “Good” to Get Out From Under Racism Like Neelam before her and Dhanya who follows in the next section, we see Usha’s

endless efforts to manage the bad feelings that racism engenders. Even though she can’t

name it as racism, she responds to its nameless anxiety and discomfort through an

extraordinary amount of labour and self-regulation. And following the feelings and

responses yield incredible insights into racial rules and organization at her school.

People get stuck in racism in different kinds of ways and try to get out of it in different

ways. The legacies it leaves, the labour it requires and the orientation it fashions towards

whiteness, are all important insights that Usha offers.

When Usha recounted the encounter with her high school teacher, there was a distress

that was almost palpable, that the encounter had occurred at all and in her desperation to

contain it. Like Neelam, there is a desire to look away from this time in her life, to not

reflect or tell and trade stories about high school. Unlike Neelam and most of the other

participants in this project, Usha remembers her teachers as being “really good.” Her

teacher may have been surprised that she did not want to tell or hear any stories. Usha

was not a troublemaker, she did not get suspended, lash out at her teachers or cut class.

Her success may, in fact, be used against Neelam or the other students of colour at her

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school who mostly dropped out of high school, heralded as evidence of racism’s end and

the triumph of individual hard work and motivation for those who choose it.

For Usha too, resonant with other participants’ reflections, the tensions between racial

identification with other students of colour on weekends and racial distancing on

weekdays, gives us insight into the curtailment of collective politics, association or

support in trying to carve out a space that is more hospitable and less hostile, closer to

university and further from high school dropout. In her ethnographic work with Indian

American youth, Sunaina Marr Maira also found that young people’s public lives in

schools during weekdays were quite bifurcated from their weekend lives which offered

up all sorts of engagements with Indian and South Asian activities and associations. In

this way, “weekday or public life was experienced as non-Indian, coded as ‘American’”

in contrast to life on weekends (2002:102-103). It was also the case, in some of my

interviews, that cultural or racial associations were lived temporally in similar ways.

Race is too closely associated with failure for Usha and many others and the racism that

creates such practices makes it difficult to imagine it to be anything else. This is another

dimension and consequence of racial harm. While it is and can be delivered by

individual teachers and students, it is also about the organization of institutional life and

knowledge in more diffuse and opaque terms. It is important to remember the work that

Usha has to do to have the experience of having “really good teachers.” It is not simply

a right or entitlement in her educational experience. She works in quite deliberate ways

to make them good to her. In Usha’s case, even the good become an occasion for looking

away as she wonders, “were those things really good?”

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Coming up against her strategy of navigating racism at an almost exclusively white

school by being good is something that is hard for Usha to remember and to think of in

these terms. It is also one of those moments where the interview provides the occasion

for these reflections and connections to be made as Usha reflects aloud on her

motivations for doing certain things, “and I don’t know and I don’t know” she trails off.

To look back on all of the work she felt compelled to do but also to understand that she

was never entirely successful in passing, is something that Usha wants to put away. It

looks different than Neelam’s disengagement from school, Usha’s “extra” and yet they

are not all that different from each other. Being good is still a strategy derived from trying

to lessen the effects of racial meanings and classifications in her educational life and so

being good becomes something else, it becomes a way to get by, to manage and get some

space or distance from racial containment. “I kind of saved myself too, right” Usha

reflects towards the end of the interview of the ways in which she policed herself in high

school. She certainly tried.

Usha describes our conversation and the opportunity to look at and think explicitly about

how race and racism appear in her life and her responses and observations of it as “a little

bit cathartic (pause). I’ve never really talked about this kind of stuff before,” she reflects

but it is also “uneasy” and “unnerving,” as in “not knowing” what and how to think of all

of these things at once. “I don’t think they can really even be neatly sorted,” she responds

when I ask her what it’s been like to talk about these experiences with me. She describes

it as taking things out of a suitcase but one thing leads to another, it’s difficult to just take

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out a singular item. Her way of describing this is so compelling and as I think back now

on our interview, I see me and Usha surrounded by an enormous suitcase, her clothes

scattered everywhere, one shirt leading to another and on and on it goes, the stories and

incidents of her life that she shared with me but also the ones she did not, still in the

suitcase.

Although Usha articulates how profoundly her educational experiences have shaped her

orientation towards knowledge and schooling, self and other, she is also clear that she

makes a choice to ignore it, “I choose to put it in a recess somewhere in my mind but

putting something like that in a recess is not really putting it in a recess cause you know

where to retrieve it, right (laugh). You know where to retrieve those thoughts that you

want to forget but that you won’t forget.” And so we return to this tension of

remembering and forgetting or of the impossibility of forgetting, even when trying to

achieve some distance from a past made uncomfortable and difficult. And yet, Neelam,

Usha and others try to forget and want to forget, sometimes desperately. This desire also

makes it difficult to imagine the racism of the past as something that might be useful for

something other than forgetting or working hard to try. Like most things, such as her

efforts to pass, Usha can’t fool herself, she knows where to retrieve the memories and to

know where they are, is to remember them, even if distantly or occasionally when a

teacher from high school appears at Starbucks and might just want to trade stories about

the good. End the conversation and try not to look back but racism doesn’t stay put, it

doesn’t stay contained to the past. It has a way of appearing and reappearing and it’s

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hard to contain to the recesses of the mind. Sometimes it slips out or refuses to be

contained but most of the time, it just doesn’t stop.

Reflecting back on the steady unease with which racism appeared in her life but also the

potential isolation of calling attention to these racialized dynamics, Nimat also thinks

back on her life in primarily white schools. It was “already isolating but it would have

been that much more isolating, I think, to actually make choices to address that

discomfort and unease.” Like Nimat and Latifa’s friends mentioned earlier, other

participants also describe letting go as necessary to managing the racism, not dwelling on

it, moving on, putting it away. Nimat describes her way of surviving as a study in

whiteness, giving her insights into understanding “how white people behave and think.”

Even in the absence of a language to name the racism that shaped her life, she develops a

proficiency in learning to manage it. Other women also speak about some version or

variation of navigating racism by making “white people feel comfortable,” to quote

Nimat and in some instances, it does indeed serve them well. Learning how to do this is

a skill of survival, of keen observation of the social relations of power that shaped Nimat

and other participants’ worlds and the institutions within it, of knowing who’s in charge,

who is making the rules and what can be at stake in breaking them.

The narratives analyzed here also point again to how unable the women, often as girls,

feel in interrupting the painful feelings and practices that racism produced in their lives

and educational experiences. When racism is made so difficult to pin down and name,

but is so affectively powerful, when success and failure are so individualized, when

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histories and systems are so evacuated, people are left, unsurprisingly, searching for

solutions to structural problems in incredibly individualized ways. In this way, we are

offered powerful examples of how the “self is made into a terrain of political action”

(Cruikshank 1999:6) or adapting from Barbara Cruikshank’s insights on how strategies of

government and citizenship are shaped, constrained and encouraged in relation to

poverty, we see that the problem of racism is recast “into a set of possible actions”

(1999:40). Often these actions are about how racism’s targets need to better manage and

respond to racism rather than how racism needs to be confronted and changed. In her

work, Soo Ah Kwon examines how racialized youth activists are produced in ways that

both speak back to power but are also constrained by it. Similar to Cruikshank, she

illuminates how the structural dislocations experienced by youth are often represented

back to them as opportunities for self-empowerment (Kwon 2013:48). While not all

youth embrace such individualizing practices, Kwon draws our attention to how such

efforts eclipse the social and material conditions out of which they are encouraged to

improve themselves. My analysis also reveals how powerfully this devolvement works in

the lives of women of colour, to make them feel responsible to improve or live the racial

conditions of their lives. There seems to be little else to turn to.

But it is also the case that the women, as young girls, do many things with and to

oppression and navigate schools in less than straightforward ways. Despite the focus on

underachievement and exclusion that often characterizes educational research on black

students, Heidi Safia Mirza (2006) attempts to account for the seemingly paradoxical

attachments that British born women of African Caribbean descent demonstrate to

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education in Britain. Rather than reading their “gendered aspirations” through a lens of

self-improvement, she reads them as a “radical site of resistance and refutation” (Mirza

2006: 137). Mirza points out that their struggles for an education are a way to respond to

the deeply racist expectations of schooling with which they contend and she situates them

as forms of “social transformation” (2006:153). Mirza’s findings are insightful for

retooling the equating of educational desire or success with self-improvement but also for

situating neoliberalism and responses to it in specific racial and gendered contexts.

Wondering if and how education is always a form of containment or might be something

more transformative, Mirza cites her earlier work with working class Caribbean women

in Britain to understand the “educational urgency” that shapes and encourages their

orientation to schooling, despite the odds that they face (2006: 144). Rather than reading

their efforts to be educated as an investment in a meritocratic system that only advances

their individual ambitions, Mirza insists that we pay attention to how these students

harness everything that they can to achieve in a system not meant for their achievement

(2009:16-17). Reading these efforts as collective ones, Mirza places them within the

context of an educational movement that reflects a resistance to domination, even though

they may not result in a larger movement for social change (Mirza 2009:13).

For some students school was not just a place to gather credentials, there was also a deep

desire to learn about anti-colonial struggles, social justice movements, histories gone

missing, more representative literary and cultural forms of life - quite simply, less

dominant knowledges. Importantly, these horizons were nearly evacuated until

university. High school was a place with much narrower constraints, mostly to be

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endured. Following Mirza, I am reluctant to do away with the desires and strategies for

success in schooling that were articulated alongside much more individualized and

privatized readings of racial harm and desires to escape it. It would be easy to read

Usha’s negotiations of racism as only conformist. Usha works to become the only kind

of racial minority that gives her the future she wants, a model one. An alternative reading

of Usha not only offers observations of the racelessness she attempts to perform, it

emphasizes the structural conditions against which such practices are engaged and what

they accomplish. Usha’s inability to name racism and her efforts to quietly work around

it is not an indictment of her. It is an effect of racism. Visions of collective life and

transformation that Mirza articulates were often in short supply and in a certain sense,

while Usha may be academically successful, her schooling experience is also incredibly

costly and harmful in other ways.

In her ethnographic work on regimes of punishment that disproportionately affect African

American boys in public schools, Ann Arnett Ferguson explains the extent to which

social interactions between adults and children are governed through “manners and

politeness,” forms of dressing and bodily comportment that together shape how students

are disciplined as a precondition for learning to take place (2001:40-41; also see Youdell

2003). Illuminating the “more concealed” (Ferguson 2001:40) functions of schools,

Ferguson, reminiscent of Phillip Corrigan, forcefully reminds us that schooling does not

only or primarily “teach subjects, it makes subjectivities” (1990:156). So successfully

were such connections obscured, Corrigan continues, that it was not until the 1960s that

sociological examinations of the “‘hidden curriculum’” (1988:8) rearticulated these

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proximities. Excavating the racial and gendered rules of school and the making of black

masculinities, Ferguson explains that often, girls’ behaviours are more consistent with

expectations of appropriate comportment in schools. While most of the boys in her study

had learned to be loud and oppositional in making trouble, “bad boys,” African American

girls were expected to “damage their own life chances, rather than making trouble for

others” (Ferguson 2001:40-42).71

At the outset of her study, Ferguson identified a group of black students who do well in

school as the Schoolboys in contradistinction to the Troublemakers who are regularly

suspended or in trouble for breaking the school rules and often identified as academically

weak. Initially, Ferguson viewed these students as fundamentally dissimilar to each

other. However, as she continued her ethnographic work, she came to realize the “grave

mistake” of her earlier thinking (2001:10). Instead, Ferguson’s revised analysis reflected

                                                                                                               71 Ferguson importantly draws attention to regimes of punishment that shape the experience of black boys in schools. More recently, there has been some debate about how the attention to black boys, both in the context of schools but also police violence and incarceration, particularly in the US context, has been at the expense of attention to similar experiences for black girls and women. For example, President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) program, aims at improving the lives of young black men (through mentorship, job opportunities etc.) with considerable resources behind it as well as data collection to monitor outcomes and track best practices. Reflecting on the exclusion of black and other racialized women and girls from such efforts, in an op-ed in the New York times, Kimberle Chrenshaw opines: “Yet, like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores. Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.” There was a letter and petition signed by many prominent black and racialized scholars, activist and thinkers, urging the inclusion of black and racialized girls and women in the MBK initiatives. Crenshaw and a team of researchers released a report in February 2015 entitled Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected to make clear the crisis in the lives of many black girls and women. For background on MBK, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/my-brothers-keeper. For Crenshaw’s op-ed in the NY times, see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/Kimberl-Williams-Crenshaw-My-Brothers-Keeper-Ignores-Young-Black-Women.html?_r=0 (accessed March 5, 2015). For the letters and petitions in response to MBK, see http://www.aapf.org/recent/2014/06/woc-letter-mbk and http://www.aapf.org/recent/2014/05/an-open-letter-to-president-obama. For a link to the report conducted by Crenshaw et al, see http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/54d23be0e4b0bb6a8002fb97/1423064032396/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf (accessed March 5, 2015).

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the ways in which “Schoolboys were always on the brink of being redefined into the

Troublemaker category by the school” (2001:10).72 Usha and others understand all too

well the contingencies of these racialized categories and the provisional protections they

offer but the categories are also productive. They encourage Usha to work hard, stay in

line and be heavily invested in school success so that she can distinguish herself from the

pot-smoking troublemakers at her school. The dropouts and the success stories produce

and police each other in ways that the narratives encourage attentiveness to but more than

that, they are both costly. The costs of success are sometimes less visible and more

difficult to discern but in this instance, success is also very much part of racial logics and

its effects. One of the major dilemmas of this project, of displaying the pain and

struggles of people of colour, is one with which I continue to wrestle. It is accompanied

by another concern and that is that the women of colour here, all university students, will

be recuperated into neoliberal frames of success and rising above. In short, I worry that

their lives will be narrated as “good lesson[s] to learn” (Cacho 2011:37). There is no

resolution to these dilemmas. I notice them and draw attention to other lessons that can

instruct us in both the costs of institutional learning and the students made missing.

In their ethnographic work in schools, Terah Venzant Chambers and Lance McCready

elaborate on the “‘making space’ strategies” in which African-American students engage

in response to their marginalization (2011:1352). Strategies, such as cultivating peer

                                                                                                               72 I am not making the argument that racelessness inevitably secures academic success or better academic outcomes for students. Instead, through the narratives, I show how racism and the racial climate of schools generate a range of responses on the part of the students, including “resistance and accommodation” (Youdell 2003:5) with varying outcomes and meanings. For a range of perspectives on this discussion see also Dei 2010; Harris and Marsh 2010; Youdell 2003; Solorzano and Delgado-Bernal 2001; Gillborn 1990; Fordham and Ogbu 1986.

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relationships and supports, can sometimes foster a sense of belonging and community but

place students in conflict with school officials. Other ways of making space, such as

Usha’s and Nimat’s, lend themselves more easily to academic engagement and school

success but often at the cost of such supports (Venzant Chambers and McCready

2011:1356; Venzant 2011:9-10).73 These strategies do not map cleanly onto individuals

as students engage in divergent practices depending on the context; sometimes they entail

congregating with other racialized students at specific places in the schools, such as

stairwells and in other cases, they require a high level of engagement in school clubs and

activities (Venzant Chambers and McCready 2011). Venzant Chambers et al., coin the

concept of “racial opportunity cost” as a way to articulate what high performing

racialized students often give up in order to secure academic success and the distance

between racialized peers and community required to achieve this level of success (cited in

Venzant Chambers 2011:4-6). Usha and Nimat above and Dhanya in the following

section elaborate what it means to live with these losses as they reflect on their desperate

efforts to distance themselves from racial assignations that limit, contain and hurt. Like

Venzant and McCready, they insistently draw our attention to hostile institutional

practices that create the need for space making strategies.

                                                                                                               73 For some studies that include or look specifically at the experiences of racialized, academically successful students see Truong and Museus 2012; Rollock, Gillborn, Vincent and Ball 2011; Dei 2010; Smith, Allen and Danley 2007; Smith, Yosso and Solorzano 2007; Kibria 2002; Feagin and Sikes 1994. See also the edited collection by Gilmour, Bhandar, Heer and Ma (2012) for a response to concerns about too many “Asian” students at the University of Toronto in a 2010 Maclean’s magazine article. Within this collection, Adele Perry argues that preoccupations with racial others who are either too upwardly mobile and successful, such as Asians in this case, compared to those who are not sufficiently mobile, such as Indigenous peoples, reflect how “both are positioned outside the nation and its special institutions, and both are perceived as a danger to a polity presumed to be and always to have been white” (2012:65). The racial panics and entitlements, of which this article is more broadly reflective, alert us, as does Perry, to the productiveness of racism’s inconsistencies.

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Usha and others learn the proper rules of etiquette governing relations between students

and adults and while Usha may be an exemplary model, many others also describe feeling

governed by social norms that make expressions of anger, rage and injustice very difficult

and risky. I also suggest that we read being “good” as a gendered strategy on which

some women of colour rely. While it is true that the narratives do not uniformly express

being “good” as a practice or even an aspiration, Usha’s careful comportment, efforts to

curry favour with her teachers and more quiet ways of absenting herself from racial

anxiety and discomfort, were also part of learning not only to be good, but to be a “good

girl.” Often, she and others learn to appear agreeable in very disagreeable contexts. And

while the women did not consistently turn their desperation against themselves, it was

also the case that losing their words and voices, crying, cutting class and working hard

were often described as strategies of learning to survive or manage schools. I hope to

make such quiet, often gendered, desperation in the lives of girls and women of colour

count more in educational studies.

Usha also instructs us in how laborious and provisional the category of “model minority”

is to inhabit. As Roland Sintos Coloma argues, it is generally Asians in Canada who are

thought to have overcome racism in education and employment and integrated into the

“neo-liberal multicultural mosaic” (2013:580). Providing a reading of the “use and

ubiquity” (2013:584) of Asians in exploitive nation building projects but also the

“explicit anti-Asian hostilities and regulations” (2013:585) that they routinely

encountered historically and today, Coloma traces how Asians are welcomed and

desirable, expelled and threatening, depending on the needs of the nation (Coloma

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2013:588). The model minority is a highly mutable, even “disposable” category,

depending on the requirements of white supremacy (Gillborn 2008:147). Gordon Pon

(2000) and more recently Rob Ho (2014) also argue that the model minority Asian in

Canada masks heterogeneous groups within and across the category ‘Asian,’ many of

whom continue to experience structural inequalities and racism that require attention and

intervention. However, the category is not only true or false, it is productive. Like most

categories, it is relational. It only makes sense as a comparison. As Gillborn (2008)

points out, when drawing attention to the racism experienced by Black students in the

British educational system, the response is often to focus on the supposedly universal

success of Indian and Chinese students. By implication, we are to assume that if some

(Indian, Chinese and Japanese, for example) racialized students are achieving, the fault of

the non-achieving students (Black and Indigenous, for example) lies with themselves and

often their families and cultures (2008:152). Racism evaporates. In addition to

homogeneizing vastly different groups of people with distinct histories of migration and

life in Canada, this story masks the deep inequalities that members within so called model

minority groups experience. Being favoured by white supremacy, Usha teaches us, is a

dubious distinction. Usha can’t just arrive as the “bright Indian girl.” She has to work

relentlessly for it and it costs her. The problem is that it also costs other people. In

Chapter 6 and the conclusion to this dissertation, I think more on this problem.

Dhanya Dhanya too reflects on the labour of managing racism in mostly white schools. She

details at length efforts to appear whiter, to anglicize her name, to eat sandwiches for

lunch and to distance herself from other racialized people and the linguistic and cultural

practices of her family and home life. She describes the deep sense of shame and

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embarrassment with which she contends even today, “I feel like I’m struggling constantly

with like (sigh) yes, this is who I am with like oh, please don’t look at me. I don’t know.

It’s weird.” She explains that she is still “tying to figure out” the source of her

embarrassment. Much like Usha’s efforts to strike a middle ground, Dhanya deploys

various strategies, “trying to make sure that I fit in in an average kind of unnoticed way.”

These women understand the force of racism, its gaze and meanings, and they try to undo

it or at the very least, mitigate its effects. They understand both the hypervisibility and

invisibility to which they are subjected. Racism is not theoretically or materially

consistent – it materializes them as troublemakers to be disciplined and regulated or as

simply unnoticed, as the situation demands. Dhanya also talks about not having the

money to have “all the newest coolest things” and her efforts to “fit and make myself

look nice without actually giving away what’s really going on beneath the surface.”

Neatness and trading on smartness are also her fallbacks. To make friends, she helps the

white girls with their math homework, providing answers to tough questions, all the while

knowing that “they’re just using me, right” but not knowing how else to make life

manageable and like Usha, trying “so desperately” to sort it out, “how can I navigate this

kind of thing? I don’t know.”

Dhanya also distances herself from other racialized and “brown people,” “I’d be like, oh,

I’m not, I’m not like that, you know.” To be a different kind of brown person, the one

who eats sandwiches and hangs out with the white girls, is Dhanya’s way of navigating.

She is unequivocal in her sense of anger and regret, for all that she has given up by

seeking these forms of protection, “I feel like I’ve wasted so many years (thumping her

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hands on the table) trying to be this person that I’m not.” She reflects more specifically

on all of the knowledge that she has not acquired about her Tamil culture and language,

all of the years spent hating herself, being quiet and small and fighting with her mom for

sandwiches and to not attend Tamil language classes on the weekend. The weight of

these losses is woven into the distance between her, her mother and her maternal

grandmother during these years, not knowing that her “grandmother has something

important to say” until she’s sick in the hospital, unable to talk and then gone. Thinking

about her mother’s reluctance to talk about familial histories of colonial displacement and

migration, Dhanya reels from the realization that the “one person that I, like, could have

talked to, I didn’t ask her those questions, you know. Only after [my grandmother]

passed away did I realize, oh my god, I should have asked her these things.” Not being

able to see or appreciate her mother’s struggles to “instill some sort of appreciation for

myself,” how hard she worked to support her children through school, Dhanya sobs

through the interview. “Why did I fight with her about those stupid things…why

didn’t I understand these things?” Of course, at the time, these things were not stupid at

all, they consumed Dhanya’s efforts to understand and act on the racial logics and

feelings of her world.

Like Usha and Dhanya, Nimat too engages in distancing practices. For her, the racism

that she experienced meant that she didn’t “stay engaged” with being Muslim for too

long. She is grateful when en route to the mosque, the car is parked in the garage and her

mother, who is wearing a sari, doesn’t need to exit the house and walk onto the driveway.

She is hidden from view. In what Nimat describes as “simple stuff” like that or in

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Neelam checking which corridor children were playing in when she was wearing a lengha

or punjabi suit and bindi so that she could escape her building unnoticed from an alternate

route or checking from her balcony to decide which side of the car she could sit on

unobserved, such “strange behaviour,” to use Neelam’s words or practices of avoidance

were part of the racial fabric of everyday life. Nimat recalls her “most profound

memories” of racial discomfort as being tied to knowledge production about Muslims in

the high school curriculum so that in world issues or history courses, “when Islam was

and Muslims were sort of talked about and you know, and that whole conversation of

like, well those are Muslims and you’re Muslim but you’re not like those Muslims and I

would happily accept the distinction. You know, I’d never challenge it. I built a whole

identity around, I think, separation from a group.” The label Islam, Edward Said noted,

many decades ago, “ends up becoming a form of attack” (1981:xv): the religion is

reduced to a “handful of rules, stereotypes, and generalizations” and its followers turned

into violent and primitive people (Said 1981:xvi). Nimat can’t be on the wrong side of

these divides. Reminiscent of Usha, she describes and contrasts the primarily white

world that she navigates as her “weekday world,” and her weekend world, her Muslim

world, “the worlds just didn’t mix generally,” she recalls.

Like the regrets that other participants articulated, Nimat too talks about the great “sense

of loss” she feels and anger too, about not “staying with the complexity of Islam” because

of the risks of becoming the wrong sort of Muslim. Not having “found a place of

belonging” within Islam, Nimat traces this estrangement back to the racism that she tries

to get around and averting the risks of engaging with Islam. Part of being able to survive

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in a white world was to “dismiss” the other. She also describes a more generalized kind

of “relief,” particularly in her younger years, when other people were made along racial

lines. I kind of, yeah, I took comfort in that like, (relieved sigh) it wasn’t me (laugh).”

Sketching out the contemporary ‘war on terror’ with its global reach and Canadian

surveillance and policing regimes, Sherene Razack points to the resurgence of a much

older Orientalism (2008:5). It is important to note that Nimat is reflecting on a childhood

prior to 9/11. The spectre of Islam with which she is so careful not to associate, calls up

the “outlines of figures so old” (Morrison 1992:xxii) and enduring in Western knowledge

systems and politics. Anti-Muslim racism is not a new phenomenon, intensifying but not

new and Nimat is anxious to claim her place as a good Muslim. For Dhanya, Nimat and

others, the cost of being isolated from their histories, languages, religious and cultural

practices and the familial and communal relationships often embedded in them, are hard

to calculate and important to notice.

It is not only Dhanya who seeks some protection from the racially, classed and gendered

hierarchies of school life but she also feels compelled to extend this protection to her

family. Much like Neelam’s story about the story, Dhanya recounts a pivotal parent

teacher interview in grade 6 that alters her already difficult relationship to teachers and

schooling. When I ask her to explain the specific interaction that seems to occupy such a

central place in her schooling life, she recalls the parent-teacher interview as follows:

I think the way that, instead of talking with my parents about me, it was talking at my parents that I was noticing like just (pause) how they explained how I was doing was in a very pretentious, almost uhm like I’m better than you kinda way, you know. It’s like my mom does not need to, to be talked to that way, right and because like they’d, I remember this, that teacher would ask, so like do you like read to her before she goes to bed or something like that and my mom was like,

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no, you know she like reads on her own and then her kind of looking at us and thinking like, oh like what’s wrong with your family or like whatever it is, right and just like (pause) like I didn’t have that luxury of my mom reading to bed cause she had to work overnight, you know and so it’s like the way that a lot of those discussions were framed in those meetings was like, oh my god, you know and I don’t, I didn’t want my mom to experience what I had experienced.

Wanting to protect her mother from “their judgments,” from the seemingly innocuous and

class laden assumptions about being able to read to your child at night, Dhanya starts to

explain away the need for her parents to attend parent teacher interviews at all. She

insists that her parents don’t need to attend, “oh no, it’s fine, it’s fine, you don’t have to

go, you don’t have to go, right cause I’m always afraid for them cause you want to

protect them.” Other times, Dhanya would simply lie and say that there were no

interviews or that the teacher didn’t want to talk to her and her parents. There was

almost a desperation to ensure that her parents, her mother in particular, would not have

to endure experiences similar to those of Dhanya and she shields her mother from future

interaction with school officials.

It is not just the women in the study who attend schools, school is embedded in familial

experiences and state mandated obligations. The parent teacher interview and Neelam’s

story about the story are but two examples of the many ways that both racialized students

and their families are navigating interactions with these state institutions. There are many

more examples, including of how children tried to shield their parents from having to

endure the racism and humiliation that they themselves felt or instances when children

would return home and silently endure racism’s effects so as not to burden parents who

were already juggling the many demands and hardships of their own racially inflected

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landscapes. Racism imposes its own burdens, of wanting to protect their parents from

their already heavily burdened lives and of shifting boundaries of obligation to protect

from children to their parents.

When I ask Dhanya to reflect more on her own discomfort at witnessing the parent

teacher interaction, the meanings she makes of it and what it is specifically that she’s

trying to protect her parents from, Dhanya reflects on sitting through this interview and

feeling:

that built up (pause) rage almost but you don’t know what it is like when you’re in grade 6 you don’t think this is what they’re trying to do to me and that’s what it is, you just think, I’m not good enough, right. I’m not or my family’s not good enough because we don’t read to each other at night and we don’t sit down and have family dinners or whatever it is. It’s like my family is under observation by these like white people and we’re not good enough so like oh my god, you know, and you kind of like shudder within yourself and like and you’d feel sooooo (pause) silenced or like forced to be silent and then you know, and I remember like me and my mom would just kind of go quiet during these interviews with the teachers and just kinda not say anything and then they’d be like, so what do you think about that then. And then I feel like my mom would like try and justify herself but then I’d kind of sit there and be like, why, why are you, why do you have to say that like why do you have to tell them about what’s going on in our lives for them to understand, you know and then kind of getting mad at her after we’d go home, I’d be like why did you say that, mom blah blah blah and then I don’t know, it’s just, it’s messed up.

Again, Dhanya returns to not knowing or being able to name the racial, classed and

gendered assumptions at work in what is required and expected of families and mothers,

in particular, nightly family dinners with bedtime stories. In place of not knowing are

feelings of not being good enough, of being judged and measured against middle class

white standards, the feeling of being under observation by these “white people.” Having

to work nightshifts is an interruption of these middle class fantasies of reading your child

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a night time story, not to mention the possibility that a parent can’t read or can’t read

English or that books aren’t readily available at home. Reading and family meals are

mistaken for care, caring for your child and her education and their absence is taken to

mean neglect or not knowing any better. Dhanya expresses her rage at this forced

silencing and then the demand to speak in the interviews, “so what do you think about

that,” the teacher would ask her mother and Dhanya’s rage would double as her mother

would feel the need to explain or account for their lives to school officials.

Dhanya switches schools frequently, from all white to mostly racialized spaces and back

again and in this way, provides a window into how forms of racial regulation, anxiety and

management shift. Thinking about the move from white to non-white spaces, Dhanya

laughs and says, “they don’t wanna see preppy girl from Markham” and so she sets out,

“get back into the groove of things, like trying to figure out how to navigate back into this

world.” Here among brown and black working class students, codes of racial belonging

include being “bad ass,” “gangster” and not caring about school work. For Dhanya, part

of looking like a gangster persona is about looking tough “so no one can like, you know,

mess with you, like you have to dress a particular way to make sure that you fit in, that

you’re protected. If you wanna be with a particular group, you have to dress a certain

way.” When people would mention that she had come from Markham as a way to situate

or describe her, Dhanya would respond by “constantly trying to like, no, I’m cool

(laughter), to prove yourself, right but it’s not like I – I never did anything like bad or

gangster but I was just trying to change, say like the way I talked or the way that I acted

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or like oh yeah, I don’t care like whatever that assignment.” Here, Dhanya’s name is no

longer anglicized and she doesn’t see refuge in white social circles.

Monica also describes how she has to recalibrate belonging in schools with different

racial populations. In schools with primary white students, Monica, like Dhanya,

survives what she describes as “difficult” and “horrible” years by working hard to have

people like her, exchanging school work, which by this time, she has grown quite adept at

doing, for acceptance. “I just wanted to be accepted and it sucked and it sucked so much

because I was like, I shouldn’t feel like this, you know what I mean,” she despairs in the

interview. She also tells people that she’s mixed race, Portuguese and Goan as a way to

distance herself from being too Indian, embracing a more recognizably European

background. Her name, both first and last, not normally associated with Punjabi Sikhs,

makes this a believable cover story, not to mention her ambiguous appearance and ability

to pass as something other than Indian. “I don’t wanna be around those people anymore,”

Monica offers to explain why she doesn’t continue onto the primarily white high school

in her neighbourhood where most of the students with whom she had attended school

since kindergarten would be present. “I just wanted to be around more Indian kids, I

guess. I think that was it,” she recalls. Finding a way to gain some distance from the

racial conflicts that had plagued her schooling and social experiences, Monica chooses to

go to a school some distance from her home. Here, she changes her first name yet again,

not back to her given name but to a more explicitly Sikh name. It’s all “so messed up”

she laughingly tells me about shuttling back and forth between names, places of birth and

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the labour of belonging, “my family makes fun of me to this day about it, they rip on

me.”

It is only when the idea of university looms on the horizon, that Dhanya starts to think

about her future and the pretence of not caring about her academic work begins to shift,

of secretly reading books at home so that her gangster persona would not be

compromised. She describes this as a “turning point” where her social circle and group

of friends shrinks considerably and she embraces the idea that “it’s okay to be who I am

and it’s okay to be brown and to be educated or want to learn.” Reflecting on how

“ignorant” the world is, Monica too redoubles her efforts to focus on her education, it’s

her biggest asset. Relationships may be transient and unreliable and despite the hardships

in her life, both at home and from peers, and perhaps partly because of them, Monica

studies and studies. She reflects on her father’s tendency to have more drunken episodes

during critical exam periods in high school. “I will still study,” she recalls, “even if I

have to leave the house, even if I have to sit in my car and just read out of my book. I’ll

study because I know that my law degree and my undergrad degree are what’s gonna be

there ten years from now. Those are not going to get up in the morning and just leave me

(laugh – pause), that’s my asset.” Feeling the ‘heat’ from patriarchy and white

supremacy, schooling offers Monica the opportunity to achieve something that she can

have more control over, that she hopes will go the distance when the people in her life

don’t. Like other women of colour whose lives are made precarious at the nexus of

multiple disempowering structures, Monica aspires to security that she attaches to a

desire to achieve academic and eventually professional success. In her case, these

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“gendered aspirations” (Mirza 2006) are less about communal forms of advancement and

more about enough economic autonomy to make life possible.

Between a mother who doesn’t give up on Dhanya and a few white teachers in her senior

years of high school “who actually gave a shit about like whatever I did,” and

encouraged her to pursue higher education, this opens up university as a possibility for

Dhanya. These few teachers stand in contradistinction to Dhanya’s otherwise difficult

and strained encounters with teachers who “used to kind of like pick on me or like just

completely ignore me or favour certain students, like white students.” Having just started

graduate school and being one of the very few people to go on to university from her peer

group at all, Dhanya expresses an incredible amount of difficulty in encountering some of

the students from her former high school: “I feel like okay, I need to hide. I’m like oh,

I’m just gonna look the other way cause I don’t want them to see me now.” When I

probe more to try to understand what it is that Dhanya doesn’t want them to see, what it is

she looks away from, she responds that a “lot of them fell when they should’ve had that

support in place so like I, I felt like I only did this good because I had my mom pushing

me and like riding my ass about it (laughter) kind of thing, you know and I really really

appreciate that…but then for a lot of people there wasn’t that chance or like that support

system in place that say maybe I had, right and so now when I see them, I’m kind of like,

I feel like a preppy little kid who goes to school and has everything made.” The

exchanges with her previous classmates consist of questions that Dhanya already knows

the answers to but are difficult to hear nonetheless, that most of them are “working at

whatever job” and already have kids themselves. “It’s messed up,” Dhanya reflects, “I

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could’ve gone that route but I didn’t.” There is little that divides her from the outcomes

of her classmates, a mother who refuses to give up on her and an interest taken by some

of her teachers. The differential consequences for their futures are difficult for Dhanya to

face, the distance between falling and having “everything made,” the distance between

precarious employment, young women with children and the hope of a different future

that appears to have everything made, but as Dhanya hastens to add, “on the surface.”

Aaliyah too reflects on the students who are not there with her in university or ones who

did not complete high school. She recounts the story of a friend, “we were more like

acquaintances,” she clarifies, with whom she attended high school. Aaliyah describes

her as someone who was “always getting into trouble, getting suspended” and she recalls

a conversation they had where this friend expressed her sense of alienation and

disengagement from what she was being taught. Looking back, Aaliyah recognizes how

profound her friend’s insights were and what it might mean to take seriously the source of

her frustration and anger, “I wonder what it would have been like for her, if she sort of

(pause), was in a space that was more (pause)” and she can’t find the words to capture

what it is she is trying to say. The unnamed acquaintance drops out of high school and

maybe being in a space “that was more” is the perfect way to end the sentence and the

thought.

Refusals to Learn The narratives, including Dhanya’s are full of refusals to learn or an apparent

disinvestment in institutional forms of learning, “it’s okay to be brown and to be educated

or want to learn,” Dhanya recalls. Learning and being students of colour are often

articulated as distinct positions that are incompatible with each other or in some cases, the

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women talk about deliberately taking on an attitude towards learning that suggests a

distancing from or opposition to academic achievement. As was evident in Neelam’s

case as well, such institutional disinvestments were part of sorting out and responding to

specific incidents of racism and the larger racial structuring of schools and students. In

her efforts to look at how African-American studies, queer theory and black feminisms

might more productively engage each other and centre vulnerable black voices that are

most often discarded, Cathy J. Cohen (2004) compels a return to resistance through

deviant practices. Working from the lives of people on the fringes of dominant society

and often marginalized in academic scholarship, Cohen turns to single Black mothers,

Black people who are incarcerated or who engage in unlawful activities and GLBTQ

members of black communities, among others (2004:33). Rather than pathologizing

these people and the practices in which they sometimes engage, Cohen pauses to consider

how so-called deviants act against normalized visions of family, desire and success in

order to “secure small levels of autonomy in their lives” (2004:30). While not discarding

the politics of respectability to which those excluded understandably aspire, Cohen

argues that deviance not only challenges existing norms and visions of a good life, it

creates different frameworks through which to judge such practices.

In their efforts to investigate black underachievement in schools, Signithia Fordham and

John Ogbu (1986) argue that while the role of schools and society are important factors,

so too are the attitudes that black students take on in relation to other black students.

More specifically, they centre the ways that academic achievement and pro-school

attitudes and behaviours are cast as “‘acting white’” (1986:186) or betraying “black

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loyalty and identity” (1986:185). They historicize such practices in collective

experiences of slavery, colonialism, dislocation and racial oppression.74 Thinking back

on their earlier ethnographic work, Signithia Fordham points out that her efforts to

understand the “burden of acting white” that black students laboured under is often taken

up in the education literature as “acting white” (2014:99 emphasis in original). For

Fordham, these are not the same things. She elaborates that associations of academic

success with whiteness puts black students at risk if they stand away from their black

peers. In deeply alienating and hostile school contexts, there is a lot to risk by

differentiating oneself in this way (Fordham 2014:98). Often taken up by researchers

trying to “quantify the impacts of acting white” Fordham argues that they miss the

messiness of such practices and the costs that are not easily quantifiable (Fordham

2014:101, emphasis in original). They miss the burden.

In her ethnographic work in UK schools, Deborah Youdell investigates the micro-

processes through which African-Caribbean students are constituted as “undesirable

learners” and their responses to the institutional racism that they encounter (2003:5).

While not all students reject what Youdell refers to as a “pro-school, positively oriented

learner identity” (2003:17), for some investing in such an identity comes at a high cost as                                                                                                                74 See also Ogbu 2004 for the ways in which Fordham and Ogbu’s work has been taken up outside of this crucial historical context and its ongoing legacies. As Ferguson comments, the contributions of Fordham and Ogbu have been very important in investigating the complex relationship between institutional racism, racial identification and school success. However, she argues that the “conclusions drawn are considerably weakened by a misplaced emphasis. There is overemphasis on the role of peers as the principle force holding students back…It downplays the hegemonic power of the institution that operates through normalizing practices to push certain students to the margins and produce the condition in many of active ‘not-learning’” (2001:203-204). My work with students, both through this research and various teaching and advocacy work, confirms to me Ferguson’s perspective and the need to attend to the weight of institutional structures in overdetermining the opportunities and outcomes for marginalized students and also giving rise to forms of resistance that can lead to student disengagement. See also Mirza on this issue and her emphasis on the structural issues that shape educational experiences and outcomes rather than a focus on subcultures of resistance in explaining the persistence of inequalities in education (2009:16).

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it distances them from their peers with no guarantees that their pro-school identities will

pay off. Maintaining both pro-school practices alongside “high status Black subcultural

identity” is simply not possible as these identities are incommensurable (Youdell

2003:17). Youdell, like Fordham, emphasizes the context of racism that creates these

responses from students but also points out the bind which black students are forced to

negotiate: if they want some sort of reprieve or protection from racially hostile school

contexts, they are offered this through black subcultural identities which in turn makes

them targets for discipline from school officials (2003:17). As the title of her article

makes clear, Youdell refers to this as “identity traps or how black students fail” (2003).

In other words, they turn race up, rather than down as the school demands (Ferguson

2001:216). Like Cohen, Fordham and Youdell appreciate the importance of these

subcultural identities, perhaps even deviant ones, in Cohen’s formulation, as a space and

set of relationships that offer up “often basic human goals such as pleasure, desire,

recognition and respect” (Cohen 2004:30; Youdell 2003:17), denied to these students in

their daily interface with schools.75

Reflecting back on their own tightly constrained choices, Dhanya, Neelam, Latifa and

others sometimes take on oppositional practices in relation to school. In interviews, the

spaces between staying quiet, screaming back, crying, forging distinctions between good

and bad students, working harder, refusing to work or going for a smoke, were quite

small. They oscillate between pro and anti-school attitudes or ambivalent feelings about

                                                                                                               75 See also Nikki Jones for a related and relevant exploration of how some African-American inner city girls identify as “girl fighters” rather than striving to be “good girls” as a strategy to secure protection and “decency in ways that are not obvious to most outsiders” (2010:13). For Jones, paying attention to these often dismissed or misunderstood practices can contribute to “our understanding of how the contemporary circumstances of life in distressed inner-city neighbourhoods” are lived (2010:13).

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schools and schooling but these orientations might be more accurately understood as

“pro-education and anti-school” (Fuller cited in Youdell 2003:4). The distinction is

important because it nuances the more bifurcated pro and anti school perspectives (see

Mirza 2009) and suggests a commitment to and passion for knowledge and learning that

still maintains a distance from and in some cases, hostility to institutional schooling, that

was often reflected in the interviews. Many participants talked about their love of

learning in very moving ways and read and studied, often not consistently and not in

ways that were always reflected in their academic achievement. As a result, some were

left with very inconsistent or patchy academic records that mirrored their inability to

physically be in schools or classrooms for prolonged periods or sustain an effort when

they did. Cutting classes, engaging in behaviours that are likely to marginalize them

from academic success and the favour of teachers and school administrators, seems on its

surface, like a bad way to deal with racial injustice but there are different codes of

behaviour and belonging for those students on the edges of institutional life in schools.

The recognition that these students seek is from each other and they cohere, sometimes

quite deliberately, in their refusals to be schooled. They offer us important insights into

an education in racism. Rather than casting them away as dead end choices, centralizing

them has the potential to illuminate the racial conditions in which they are made and the

aspirations they contain. The promise of some degree of respect, seeking safety with

other racialized peers, finding “an out” or way to get back at humiliating teachers or

simply refusing to care about a place in which one is made to feel so small and incapable

are all compelling and entirely reasonable responses and they are affectively productive.

Here the pain and anger are not managed quietly; they are often thrown back at teachers

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and school officials in loud, noticeable and disruptive ways. This offers students some

measure of response and relief to the constraints of school life in which they are so often

made to feel angry, sad, humiliated and frustrated and are unable to secure for themselves

justice or accountability. In short, they are refusals of the way that their lives, capacities

and futures, and sometimes those of their families, are summed up in schools.

In her analysis of factors leading to students being pushed out, rather than dropping out of

schools,76 Eve Tuck, drawing on the work of Taiaiake Alfred, argues that many students

engage in practices of “dangerous dignity,” that is, they seek “self-preservation and self-

determination” in the face of deeply humiliating and unjust school contexts (Tuck

2011:817). For Tuck, practices of securing dignity, often at the cost of school completion

or other dominant markers of success, “interrupt the teleological inclinations of resistance

theories” (2011:817). There is no neat or clear line from oppression to empowerment,

she argues and the outcomes of cultivating “dangerous dignity are important in ways that

we cannot anticipate” (Tuck 2011:826). In investigating punishment as a central site in

which “educational structures clash with the resistance strategies of individual students,”

Ferguson similarly argues that landing in trouble is precisely how young black boys are

able to recuperate a “sense of self as competent and worthy under extremely discouraging

work conditions” (2001:22). Sometimes trouble making is precisely how one survives

the racial rules of schools.

                                                                                                               76 See also Dei, Mazzuca, McIsaac and Zine (1997) for a critical ethnography which reconceptualizes student drop-out to push out, thus drawing attention to the racist and structural factors which lead to disengagement of black students from schools.

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Refusing to be “good” can also be read as a refusal to improve or manage oneself in

accordance with neoliberal configurations of success and achievement. These unruly

comportments and their consequences look more like the stuff of neoliberalisms failed

subjects, the deliberate “fuck you” or the slow and more gradual drift away from school,

with more days skipped than attended. In taking up more pro-school practices, students

often experience a loss of peer protections and proximities. In Dhanya’s case, her circle

of friends becomes quite small and for Usha, there can be no associating with peers who

might threaten the legibility she works to gain as a capable student. Success and trouble,

refusals of and accordance with school rules are reconfigured as strategies of survival and

engagement with the racial landscapes of life in schools and the women’s experiences are

populated with reflections of their own experiences as well as those of their peers, the

ones who often drifted away or were rarely to be found on the university campuses in

which they eventually arrived.

Conclusion Drawing on the work of Mica Pollock, Paul Warmington argues that “there are instances

in which we need to reinstate racial analysis, to talk about race more; there may also be

instances in which we need to talk about race less. The key intellectual (and pedagogic)

challenge though, is to talk about race more skillfully” (2009:283). Building on the

scholarship of critical race scholars, I contend that talking about race more skillfully in

schools requires a range of theoretical resources that speak to the complexity and

embeddedness of racism in educational life. The stories of Neelam, Usha and Dhanya

tell both of the accumulation of racism in mundane ways as well as through more

defining moments. By taking their experiences seriously, we can apprehend how larger

scales of racial domination structure the everydayness of racism (Smith, Allen and

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Danley 2007; Soloranzo 1998; Essed 1991). In attending to the many ways in which

racism appeared and was felt but also evacuated, I have tried to lay out the capacious

ways in which racism’s meanings and effects are lived but also efforts made to contain

and erase it. Looking for racist intent and derogatory words as a way to calibrate

racism’s severity is a losing proposition for those who live most intimately with its harm

and devastation. By insisting on this as the primary way to measure racism, is to return to

Hesse’s insights about the far-reaching effects of the “originary foreclosure” (2011:172)

of racism’s possible meanings. It is through this foreclosure that racism is potently

reproduced while being rendered unspeakable. Racial neoliberalisms appear so

unassuming and its hierarchies are so unapologetically instantiated. As Ann Laura Stoler

demonstrates in her historical work, the “making of race” (1995:207) occurs in ways that

appear not to be racialized at all. Competence, potential, intelligence and reason, among

many others, are thoroughly infused with racial meanings without explicitly referencing

race. Racism is sneaky business. We see these classifications and distinctions come to

life over and over again in the narratives in this chapter. In the lives of the women

recounted here, we can trace the many ways that racial hierarchies get articulated and

shored up and we get some snapshots into how its targets are called into, making meaning

of and responding to its practices.

It is important to notice how turns to whiteness are sometimes sought in order to secure

safety or protection from racism’s harms. This chapter details the consequences and

costs of both embracing and repudiating that which hurts us but I centralize how racism

creates the constraints and conditions to which racialized students are responding. I

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follow racism’s temporal spills beyond the moments that it is experienced, insisting that it

is not only episodic but far more enduring; it shapes orientations to school and learning,

self and other and aspirations for futures. What feels possible to racialized students living

with the daily and cumulative effects of racism, the detachment from or in some cases,

keen investments in institutional forms of learning and success, the futures on offer, those

refused and others yet to be imagined, are all important and telling spaces from which to

investigate racism’s organization and effects.

Through the participants we observe that not only are minority subjects subject to racism,

racism endeavours to set the terms and conditions for our engagement and responses to it.

The women are, for example, forced to make racism recuperable into frames of

rationality, argument, proof and individual improvement but as the narratives continue to

illustrate, the vocabularies and analytics with which to describe and organize against

racism are so often missing from educational and public life. Racism leaves them

scrambling, silent, screaming and seething but rarely does it leave them searching for

collective interventions. How is such knowledge made missing and how are such ways

of feeling secured? Drawing on the insights of critical race scholars as well as scholars

thinking about neoliberal configurations of governance, we observe that structures are

profoundly felt and lived but responsibility for them is often devolved to individuals. We

are instructed, often through the most enterprising and self-reliant among us, how to

manage ourselves in order to live more successfully with racism. If racism is even

thought to exist or is minimally acknowledged, we get stuck in it only if we can not

muster up enough good entrepreneurial spirit to get out from under it. Elided are the

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intensification of forms of surveillance, punishment and dispossession with which racial

subjects are increasingly met. Not surprisingly, racism’s primary beneficiaries go missing

in such accounts. This is an old story, with contours that shift, no doubt, but an old story

nonetheless. In this chapter, we see how the story continues to be productive and we also

see how it is called out and refused as Neelam, Usha and Dhanya, among others, labour

in complex ways to respond to and make sense of racial structures and feelings which

confront them daily in schools.

“The things that matter in school settings are things that one can ‘count’ and ‘measure,’”

reflect Greg Dimitriadis et al, drawing from the insights of Michael Apple’s formulation

of audit culture (Dimitriadis, Cole and Costello 2009:377). My earlier insistence on

thinking about how to account for racism has also made me aware that there are few ways

in which the costs of racism in the educational experiences of these women, though

profound, are meaningfully reflected. Though some were officially disciplined by their

schools and had non-linear educational trajectories, they all went on, often at enormous

cost, financial and otherwise, to university. In many cases, they would be considered

success stories and some were very ‘good’ students. Such measurements are “ill-

equipped to confront that which is incommensurable and unquantifiable” (Cheng

2001:175) yet so prominent in these narratives, namely the “meaning of hurt and its

impact” (Cheng 2001:3). It’s hard to account for what racism has cost them in these

ways of adding up harm and as Philomena Essed insists, to appreciate the cumulative

effects of such encounters (2004:125), particularly for young women of colour, whose

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selective success, is used to eclipse the profound ways that racism continues to matter a

great deal in shaping their educational lives and experiences.

The women’s successes have been hard fought and constantly require work - they are not

secure. Perhaps most importantly, the labour to manage white supremacy, so

painstakingly recounted, is difficult to calculate and it seems never to end. One of the

primary goals of this chapter is to insist that this figure into how we count. White

supremacy is exhausting and the women are often depleted from trying to sort it out.

Maybe that is partly how racial neoliberalisms are lived, through simply being exhausted

or by having to live with the accumulation of racism’s devastations, humiliations and

differential opportunities but rarely being able to name it such. And we see how people

sometimes get stuck in the pain, get “caught, trapped [and] silenced by the sadness and

sorrow” (hooks 1995:5) of it all. Taking seriously turns away from race, reluctant

recognitions of it and refusals to engage are incredibly pressing challenges in anti-racist

organizing and pedagogies and are also instructive in revealing how racial neoliberalisms

are lived, both as material conditions and the tensions and contradictions in making sense

of life and feelings in schools.

To return to Aaliyah with whom I opened this chapter, racism, coded as “dumb,”

threatens to stick to her so that a future including higher education seems far out of reach.

But the lesson Aaliyah learns and learns well is that she must work hard and work she

does. Even when her mother suffers from depression and needs to be hospitalized,

Aaliayah who attributes this breakdown to the cumulative stress in her mother’s life,

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writes her applications for university from her mother’s hospital bedside as she tries to

navigate a medical institution that dehumanizes her mother. She can’t fail because like so

many of the women in this study, she understands the precariousness that shapes her life

and she hopes that credentials might offer her some protection and distance from the

insecurity that shaped her mother’s life and her childhood, memories of sparse cupboards

and depleting food supplies. And despite it all, Aaliyah still finds in learning and

knowledge, profound ideas, that move and motivate her. In her reflections on her

mother’s pain, Sara Ahmed argues that despite the limits to knowing her mother’s pain,

by witnessing this pain, she was able to “grant her pain the status of an event, a

happening in the world, rather than just the ‘something’ she felt” (2004:29-30). It has

been my intent to return to the participants in this study, such as Aaliyah, and the many

others whose experiences are resonant with those described here, this harm as something

in the world, shaped by the racial legacies into which they are called and with which they

are forced to contend.

I do remain concerned about how this chapter might be taken up at a time when teachers,

public spaces and institutions are under attack (Dehli 2008:55). As Pollock argues,

“critiques of schooling seem to land most heavily on educators” (2004:17). While this

chapter points to the need to account for and interrupt the pervasive and unremarkable

forms of racial harm in the schooling system, it does so within the context of a

strengthened, not dismantled, public education system. However, I refuse to romanticize

my defense of the “public.” The larger historical sweep of liberalism which I outline in

Chapter 1, alerts us to the always and already “sharp limits” (Duggan 2003:36) of

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democratic life and public institutions. The public that I am interested in defending is

one which has yet to be created. However strategically we might mobilize an idea about

the public to push back against its encroachment, our efforts require attention to these

exclusions.

 

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Chapter 5: Shiny Bodies  While previous chapters focused primarily on early racial memories, families and

institutional spaces of schools as the sites in which racial literacies are cultivated and

contained, this chapter turns to social relationships. I consider how relationships within

and between racialized communities shift and complicate racial understandings. As the

stories and experiences recounted in this chapter illustrate, it was sometimes difficult to

singularly extract racial harm and responses to it. This is another effect of attending to

complexity in the lives of women of colour. Systems are felt and lived simultaneously.

As queer of colour, indigenous and critical race feminist scholars (Puar 2010; Eng 2010;

Smith 2006; Gopinath 2005; Alexander 2005; Ferguson 2005) have long insisted, these

complexities of life are not detours or distractions from the task of understanding racial

formation but the way to a more nuanced and deepened analysis of its articulations and

unevenness. Insisting on the ongoing relevance and centrality of feminist and queer

perspectives, particularly to critical race studies in education, this chapter continues to

explore how the women themselves make meaning of their conditions of life and the

complexities of acquiring racial literacies.

In many ways, this chapter recalls and takes seriously interlocking forms of power and

oppression (Jiwani 2006; Smith 2005; Razack 1998; Hill Collins 1986) and centralizes

the importance of gender and sexuality to racial formation. More specifically, I offer up

ways to amplify perspectives on the lives and experiences of queer women of colour in

ways that I hope will expand the space within critical race studies to take up anti-racist

feminist and queer perspectives and analytics in more sustained ways and also make

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space within queer studies to more thoughtfully engage with the lives of queer women of

colour. As I have done in previous chapters, I also consider the responses that brutalizing

systems generate - a complex interplay between the pursuit of survival, sometimes

respectability, with the accompanying concessions and trade offs that people are

constantly calibrating and struggles to fight against the systems. Consistent with the

narrative driven focus of much of this dissertation, it is through an elaborated

attentiveness to the lives of the women in this study, that these complications are

explored.

Structurally, this chapter is organized into three main sections. First, I consider how

Neelam, Dianah and Nur expand and queer this research in important ways but also

illuminate how and why queer women of colour can so easily go missing, particularly in

high schools. I also consider their sometimes quiet ways of being queer that require

nuanced readings of queer desire alongside the pressures and vulnerabilities that racism

and heteropatriarchy create in their lives. The protections that they seek, in family,

religion, spirituality and different forms of learning, are also instructive in how queer

women of colour are making their lives in and against the many violences with which

they contend. In the second section, I consider how centrally women’s experiences of

and in their bodies matter to how racism is lived and deciphered. Opening with

reflections of white supremacy, I explore the meanings ascribed to women’s bodies as an

index not of their individual feelings and orientations to their bodies, but as insights into

racial and heteropatriarchal forms and effects of power. Finally, I end the chapter with a

section on relationships between racialized communities and more specifically, the

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openings provided by several participants to think about complicities in anti-black

racism. While most of this dissertation is organized around a group that I variously

reference as people or women of colour, the racial groups in which people are placed and

the specificities of their racial experiences matter a great deal. At different points,

participants wondered on these differences and how they have come to matter. I follow

participants as they reflect on these racial rankings and their efforts to render meanings

from the forms of power that circulate within and between racialized communities.

In this chapter, I combine the reflections of women as they remembered them in their

younger years and also their retrospective analysis of these events. In a couple of

instances, I introduce examples from university but the locus of analysis remains on

earlier schooling experiences, primarily high schools. The first section on Queer

Horizons is a response to the unexpected and quiet disclosures that a small but significant

number of the women made in interviews, often towards the end, about their sexuality. I

focus on Neelam, Dianah and Nur because they all offer valuable, related and also

distinctive insights on queer life, the near impossibility of reaching it and the openings

that it affords. Sometimes, such as in the section on Shiny Bodies, this chapter presents

more generalized themes across participant experiences. In the section on anti-black

complicities, on the other hand, I take more anomalous ideas that a few women expressed

to think in more depth about their importance for racial politics and formation. While this

chapter circles around various social relationships, it does so selectively. I sacrifice

breadth in this chapter to think about stories and moments with “staying power.”

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Quiet Queers: Reflections on Queer Horizons

Neelam Neelam talks at length about the entanglement of various kinds of loyalties and forms of

regulation in her high school. Dominated by students of colour who are divided along

racial and cultural lines, she describes the ways in which the spaces in the school

correspond to these distinctions so that specific stairwells and areas of the cafeteria, for

example, are for the Pakistani, Somali, Vietnamese, north Indian or Sri Lankan students.

“You had to make yourself fit in racially, you had to choose the right racial group to hang

with,” Neelam recalls, “when it came down to who you ate lunch with and who you hung

out with after school, it was kind of decided for you.” She does try to make friends with

what she calls a “mismatched” or “misfit” group, “you have your odd rocker here and

there, you have your stoner, you have your like odd person,” but it was a collection of

oddity that disbanded, most of the students either dropping out or becoming “full time

stoners.”

When I ask Neelam about her group, she refers to it as the “brown crew.” The conditions

of belonging within this group included speaking in Tamil, wearing clothes and make-up

in particular ways, watching Bollywood films, having friends from the brown crew and

dating boys from this group as well and adjusting to their lives and interests. Living with

issues of violence at home from an alcoholic father, Neelam observes and speaks out

against issues within the community, that all was not well, but other people did not

respond well to her speaking out or not conforming to cultural expectations. “I didn’t

want to do my eyeliner the same way, I didn’t like the movies because I saw something

wrong with them. I spoke out against things, I didn’t want to date a Tamil boy, I didn’t

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want to speak in the language all the time. I always had a different sense of style. I went

through a phase when I was in high school where my clothes were a bit (laugh), out there

a little bit more. I wasn’t very conservative and that was hard. I felt I faced a lot of

judgment,” Neelam states. “I wanted different things.”

When I ask Neelam about the pressure to fit in, she talks at length about making

compromises in order to make her school life, already so governed by racial animosity

and hierarchies with teachers, livable, with her peers:

like just being quiet like in terms of trying to change my dressing style, trying to be more pious, trying to be more feminine (laugh), trying to be more delicate. Trying to be more, you know, wearing my hair straight than wearing it curly so I don’t look wild (pause) yeah just things like that, little things like that (pause). You know trying to date guys within the group (pause), trying to (pause) not act on my impulses, trying not to create relationships with people who were not of my race or gender (laugh), trying to fight all of that (pause) yeah so changing myself, changing myself to the point where I hated myself.

Here we see the extent to which gender regimes of respectability and desirability to

appropriate male partners, shape orientations to body and beauty. In her work on how

style comes to matter to girls in school, Shauna Pomerantz notes that while clothing and

dress are always navigated within financial and cultural conditions, style is also about

how girls are positioned within and making meaning of various social categories

(2006:185, 177). Neelam finds herself constrained between demands to be modest and

pious, to “tone down” her clothing, make-up and overall appearance, not to mention the

racial associations that were favoured and those frowned upon, and the desire to embrace

a style that was more expressive and relationships that were not governed by demands of

“cultural identity, preservation and morality” (Jiwani 2006:71). The effort feels

intolerable.

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Neelam also recalls, with a great deal of sadness and regret, her own eventual complicity

in homophobia. She mentions a gay friend from outside the “brown crew” with whom

she had attended middle school and the kind of violence that he endures at school, “he got

things thrown at him a lot, he was shoved around a lot. It was so unfair, it was just hard

to see him in that pain.” She talks about being in peer groups with such decidedly hateful

attitudes towards gays and lesbians and despite some initial attempts to advocate for her

friend or to speak up on his behalf, Neelam eventually says nothing. For the times when

she does attend school, her silence enables her to “have a group when I’m here, yeah.

You just stay quiet on this stuff and (pause) you make it through, I guess.” She recalls

how her friend would rush by her and the brown crew, quickly acknowledging Neelam,

while the crew would make homophobic comments. All the while Neelam would sit

silently with them. “I didn’t say a single thing, I didn’t say anything at all,” she recalls.

Despite the pressure she feels to join in, she is unable to do so but in her mind, the

distinction between these two positions, the explicit homophobia and the silence, is

negligible, “you know being silent isn’t any better.”

Reflecting on all of these “pressures to be, you know, hateful,” Neelam shares a more

generalized pressure to isolate people who were odd or different in a range of ways,

including their sexuality. But her silence affords her some protection or acceptance from

within her peer group but it is a price that she deeply regrets, compromising on the values

and people who were important to her. In retrospect, she wishes that she had been able to

endure the isolation, rejection and fear but it is a lot to expect and Neelam is instructed in

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the costs of not living up to expectations of gender appropriateness and racial loyalties.

She is told by the girls in her peer group that by dressing in clothes that were deemed to

be less modest, “I was asking for something” and in more explicit ways, she is subject to

physical intimidation and called a “whore.” She details the sexual and social regulation

of women through discourses of “whore” and “slut” and the ways in which such gendered

double standards don’t at all apply to young men at her school. Refusing to give up her

friends or associations from outside of the “brown crew,” in particular with a black male

friend, results in accusations of being a “n----- fucker.” “It was a lot of girls doing it to

one another,” Neelam explains of the enforcement of these boundaries and behaviours.

In her scholarship on South Asian girls, Amita Handa argues that the social control of

girls and expressions of proper femininity not only affect girls and families reputations,

but is also a measure of their ethnic allegiance (2003:111). In some cases, mating and

eventually marrying are also family preoccupations. In Monica’s case, for example, her

mother polices and enforces patriarchy through the need to secure suitable dating and

marriage partners for her children or to ensure that her daughter’s associations with male

friends do not dishonour the family name (Mirza 2009:89). As Sunaina Marr Maira

points out, in her ethnographic work with Indian youth in New York, preserving the

family name is also about class and material aspirations and marriage partners for other

siblings in the family as well (2002:160). The future is not only an individual ambition

but in the case of some participants, embedded in familial aspirations, through

heteropatriarchal arrangements. Here we can discern the gendered regulation and

surveillance to which these women are subjected, the ways in which there are efforts to

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stabilize the meaning of culture and tradition in markedly singular and conservative ways.

Neelam is instructed in the high cost of disloyalty and it is enforced through anti-black

racism. She finds it all shocking and disappointing, the lack of “I don’t know, maybe

sisterhood” alongside the more generalized lack of solidarity that she witnesses and

experiences between marginalized people and groups. Towards the end of this chapter, I

turn to think more specifically about how the jockeying for more favourable positions

within white supremacy fuels anti-black racism.

Living in what Neelam describes as “state oppressed living,” densely populated areas

with precarious employment, social assistance, poor housing and over policing, she is

perplexed by the connections that are not made across experiences of oppression. She

describes, for example, the police brutality that connects up the “black” and “brown”

male crews:

you were still subject to the same – everything that was still happening in the community like you were still subject to. All the males who were still subject to police brutality like they, you still got beat up by the cops if you were out here at 11 o’clock at night and you talked back to them, they’re still gonna beat the shit out of you and you’re still not gonna say anything about it cause nothing’s gonna be done, just like the black guys down the street (laugh), same thing is gonna happen to them and you guys both watch this happen to each other but you guys can’t get along.

Given the forms of violence with which racialized, working class communities are forced

to contend, Neelam is baffled by the ways in which hatred and conformity to that hatred

within communities is encouraged and enforced. For her, these forms of violence are not

unrelated to “pushing a gay kid into a locker” and her own experiences of oppression,

create the conditions for her to connect up these violences, the potential for some

solidarities and analysis to emerge across white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia and

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class and state violences. While these violences are not the same, they are all important

and Neelam describes them as piled up on top of each other and at times,

indistinguishable in her daily life, one from the other.

Neelam too imagines life like this continuing on endlessly, feeling “stuck here forever”

and wondering “like is this how adults live, is this adult life” but it is from her mother,

whom she describes as progressive, open, accepting and loving that another vision of life

is nurtured and slowly emerges. In addition to being incredibly supportive and open to

her friendships with gay peers, it is Neelam’s mother who encourages her to think about

life in ways that it takes her some time to even appreciate or entirely understand. Neelam

tells the story of her mom coming home one day towards the end of high school and

excitedly telling Neelam that Air Canada was hiring stewardesses and this was a great

opportunity for Neelam, “it’s a good job. It would get you out of here,” her mother

counsels. Neelam laughingly responds, “I’m like, I’m too short (laughter), like I couldn’t

reach people’s baggage (laughter), like can you imagine me in high heels trying to get

people’s bags?” Neelam and I laughed for a long while in the interview when she shared

this story. For me, it was the exemplary desire for the good life, literally mobile and high

up in the air but Neelam can’t imagine it, she’s too short for the dream.

It is only when her home and school life become unbearable and Neelam moves out of

her family home and transfers to a new school, that the meaning of her mother’s

dreaming for her becomes clearer and comes closer. It is a dream, it turns out, not only

about the good life but also of different horizons. It is a mother’s effort to imagine a

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future for her child. Neelam’s relationship with her mother, like so many other

relationships between mothers and daughters, was recounted with love and gratitude. She

dreams for her child dreams that Neelam is not yet able to understand or embrace and she

holds onto the story, recounted in Chapter 4, that Neelam still can’t read and can barely

bring herself to look at. Neelam’s mother, like other parents, caregivers or loved ones,

often held onto difficult things and dreamed futures that provided the women with other

ways of knowing and feeling who they were and who they might become outside of all of

the ways they were schooled otherwise.

In her new school, also racially diverse, Neelam describes the population as working

class, “paycheck to paycheck living” rather than “state oppressed.” For her, this

translates into a space where issues of poverty were not as acute, where conversations

were not structured around housing subsidies, for example, and where the police were not

a regular part of school life. The school environment was quite different than what

Neelam had previously experienced and she describes not feeling “that same tightness in

my chest” as she walked by groups of students, not entirely segregated along racial and

cultural lines but also in her interactions with teachers. Neelam comments on the

presence of racialized teachers who took equity issues seriously, who organized young

girls clubs as a space for young women to come together to discuss issues of concern,

other teachers did work on queer issues. Homophobia was discussed and explicitly

addressed as were the challenges facing youth of colour, “race and social class and things

like that, things that I didn’t really consider that deeply before, I was able to consider

more,” Neelam recollects. She joins this new school in grade 11 and this is her first

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encounter with issues that so profoundly shape her life, “in my other school, nobody

talked or thought about those issues.” The experience of “having people actually caring

about your education,” means that slowly, Neelam starts attending classes more regularly

and from “always hating teachers up until that moment,” Neelam decides herself to

become one. There is one teacher in particular, a black male teacher who takes a

leadership role in equity programming at the school, who helps Neelam to appreciate that

oppression does not continue on endlessly, “change is a possibility.” The combined

effort of teachers to make schooling relevant and based in principles of social justice

affects an enormous change in Neelam’s life, orientation to school, learning and sense of

future:

I felt like okay so there is a world where you can (laugh) be you know, like a politically socially progressive person and actually make a life for yourself. He and some other teachers, some of the stuff that they were doing, it made me realize that (pause) okay there’s life beyond this (laughter) and I felt, I felt very optimistic. I felt like okay I can, I can move forward and you know and I started to. At that point, I started to envision a different life for myself. I was able to dream at that point (hm) of bigger things for myself, where I can move myself forward and it was a really good feeling, it was really good. Being there I was able to, I was able to do better for myself like in what I wanted for myself, yeah.

Going from the feeling and prospect of being stuck in social relations and spaces, Neelam

starts to feel a certain kind of momentum, narrated in affective and temporal terms –

aspirations of a future, movement forward and the possibility of a life with social

relations of another kind. The future here is not the upwardly mobile good life that she

aspires to but a life characterized by different social relations, the possibility of

progressive community providing an alternative horizon for the future, a reworking of the

good life and aspirations of and to whiteness. Understanding that oppression might not

be an individualized burden to forever bear but a set of ideas and practices that she could

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reflect upon, organize against and interrupt with others, Neelam is profoundly moved.

But as we observe in some pivotal moments in Neelam’s life, including in the final

chapter, these beautiful but uncertain desires are joined quickly by other ones. Without

careful nurturing, racism and oppression become a place only where one gets stuck, not a

place from which to create other futures, meanings and directions.

Despite all of the ways that she is reassured by her experience in this new school, the

lessons learned in her previous schools are quite sedimented. As a result, building trust

with teachers and having confidence that her relationship to schooling could be different

comes and goes. It is still difficult for Neelam to be in schools. She also works quite

deliberately to distance herself from being read as brown, she dries her hair straight, tries

to achieve a more slender rather than curvaceous body, wears make-up and clothing to

“garner the attention away from my racial background.” Thinking back on this time,

Neelam says, “if I actually put the time in to find the right make-up, do my hair right and

dress according to what was in at that time (pause) I felt it was, the transition was a little

easier. I think people accepted me a little better.” By trying to present herself as more

“racially ambiguous,” Neelam hopes that she will be welcomed at the new school with

more ease, able to move in and out of social circles more easily. However, racially

ambiguous turns out to be closer to white. Neelam discloses that she seeks to emulate the

styles of white women in film and popular culture, rather than those of women of colour.

I return later in this chapter to think in more sustained ways about these whitening

practices in which Neelam and many others engaged.

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Writing about Neelam’s life, particularly her distancing from brown, reminded me of a

memory from my own childhood. I remember visiting my cousin and his family,

including his three young children. I can’t remember the specifics but I do recall vividly

hearing one of his children running out a room where we were playing, exclaiming, “I’m

not brown, I’m beigy.” I don’t know exactly how old he was but based on how I see him

in my memory, he couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. I remember

looking down at my own hands and being perplexed. I also remember hearing laughter.

What am I, I recall thinking. I wonder now about what he was trying to purchase through

his claim to beigy, not brown. What was its promise or appeal and what meanings had

already been made for him about his brownness? Why was there so much laughter? I

wonder now if he remembers that time and I wonder, too, if in his life staking a claim to

beige has remained an aspiration that affords him some safety and comfort, similar to

what Neelam works to secure in her own life.

At her new school too, Neelam develops close friendships with gay peers and notices that

while the homophobia they experience may not be quite so physically violent, there is

still the pressure to be straight, to date women even when it was clear that those

relationships would not work out. “He still felt that he needed to, you know, prove

himself,” Neelam recalls of one such friend and his efforts to date women. At this point,

Neelam had moved back home because her father had been diagnosed with terminal

cancer and when she wants to have a New Year’s Eve party and invite her friend who is

gay, her father refuses to let him in the house, despite the objections of Neelam and her

mother. As she reflects on this incident, Neelam says:

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I didn’t like to see other people go through it and you know even for myself (pause), for me like treatment of bodies is (pause), it was, it was something for me that (pause) I don’t know I just felt like for myself (long pause - crying) I don’t know I just felt like I couldn’t (long pause - crying) I don’t know. I lost my words, lost my words, yeah (laugh).

Shortly after, Neelam discloses that she herself “wouldn’t mind having a relationship

with a woman” but that at her old school, she “couldn’t have those feelings.” Given the

level of violence she endured at this school, the idea of disclosing her sexuality is thought

and felt to be impossible, “I never would have said that,” “I would have never admitted it

out loud,” she emphatically states. The difficulty of watching her friends endure so much

violence, Neelam is instructed to stay quiet, stay straight and be loyal. For Neelam and

others, the “coordinates of the female figure remain inevitably fixed as wife, mother, and

daughter,” thus rendering “queer female” impossible (Gopinath 2005:191). Yet these

seeming inevitabilities are dislodged. In a new school with supportive teachers, more

students who were visibly out as gay and for the first time, young women who were also

out as lesbians, explicit anti-homophobia messages and supports in place, Neelam feels

an increased safety, and while the acknowledgement is not spoken aloud to others, she is

able to acknowledge her queer desires, to herself. There is more space to love.

Neelam’s crying at the sadness and regret at the kinds of pain she observed, in which she

participated and endured, all come together, making it hard for her to remember and to

word the feelings, “I lost my words, I lost my words,” I can still hear her quiet voice

trailing off and as I rummaged around in my bag for tissues, she wiped away the tears

from her face with her fingers. I wonder now as I sit at my desk and read the transcript

and write these words, what it might have meant for Neelam to hear that her gay friend

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was unwelcome in her home, the weight of knowing that she too must be silent or

possibly give up her home and the smallest hold on a barely tolerable life. The conditions

of belonging so clearly articulated and enforced, what it means to know that however

complex and punctuated with violences their home lives might be, the prospect of being

cast away so unequivocally, of having no home at all, give other more nuanced meaning

to Neelam’s own silence and complicity in homophobia.

I return again to Neelam’s mother’s dreams for her child. Her mother’s wanting her to

get a good education and “get out of here,” leaves Neelam confused, “where does she

want me to go (laughter)? Does she want me to be homeless?” Neelam wonders. There

is no other than here, what Neelam knows in her daily life and there is no ability to

imagine a future otherwise or elsewhere. It is when Neelam is at her new school and the

potential for learning to be meaningful, relevant and connected to her daily life is

presented as a possibility, that Neelam starts to imagine some place else, a future where

oppression does not endlessly repeat itself. The prospect of doing meaningful work and

being part of something to intervene in oppression, being able to live a life struggling,

however imperfectly with principles of social justice, all enable Neelam to turn towards

the future and for the first time, learning and higher education as real possibilities for her

life.

Here discourses of self-improvement and personal responsibility for the conditions of life

are displaced by a turn to collective interventions and commitments. And the shift in

institutional contexts affects a shift in how Neelam feels. Feeling better is not simply a

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decontextualized choice that students can make outside of the influence of institutional

contexts that too often produce schools as hard places that engender bad feelings.

Instead, social change does not arrive through a focus on students interior lives and

“adjustments to the self” (Halberstam 2005:224) but through attention to the structural

conditions of life in schools. Teachers caring and teaching about social justice and social

change correspondingly produces a school environment where Neelam feels better,

breathes a little easier and feels a bit less tense as she walks through the halls. She does

not just have to learn to manage the pain and effects of racism, heteropatriarchy and

poverty better or more masterfully. Coupled with her mother’s insistence that Neelam’s

life not be defined through what she does and who she is in relation to a male partner,

Neelam has the following to say:

it was the first time I was able to really hear my mom’s words and really understood what she meant. It was my first time, really understanding how she was dreaming for me like she was. She wanted me to do things where (pause) my life wasn’t defined by a male partner or it wasn’t defined by what I did in that relationship, it wasn’t just about that. Where, you know, I understood what she was saying to me about (pause) being bigger than that and being bigger than what all this is and (pause) so it was the first time that I was able to (pause) dream for myself in a way that I felt like my mom was doing it for me so I was able to see what she had. At that moment like I, at that time in my life, I was able to (pause) really understand what she meant by that so I was happy that I could, I could think about these things for myself and think about a life where I could independently support myself and have a career and experience life that’s not here (laugh).

Much like Dhanya’s encounters with friends left behind, Neelam describes young women

getting married at eighteen or nineteen to their high school boyfriends, working at home

raising children and finding precarious employment outside the home in poorly paid jobs.

Her mother’s ambitions for her along with the support and encouragement of teachers,

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open up horizons of experience and possibility that speak back to the combined

conditions of structural violence in Neelam’s life.

Lance McCready points out that social justice oriented efforts in relation to schooling

have been remarkably intransigent in reflecting meaningfully on race, sexuality and

gender together (2013:520). As a result, he argues that educational studies have been

woefully inadequate in addressing the marginalization of queers of colour. Queer of

colour interventions, even where they occur, are often consigned to informal learning

spaces, leaving unaltered dominant school practices and curricular content (McCready

2013:519). Notwithstanding the work of Kevin Kumashiro (2001), Lance McCready and

others, Ed Brockenbrough similarly argues that queer of colour interventions remain

marginal in educational studies (2013:429). While I did not set out to make this

intervention, I have tried to respond to and amplify the unexpected disclosures, such as

Neelam’s, that often, very quietly, found their ways into the interviews. The kind of

expansive queer politics and issues that we observe from the lives of the women here, as

well as the place of race in queer, feminist politics is something that deserves our

attention, both for the kinds of theoretical work they are asking us to do in more robustly

engaging these logics simultaneously, but also for the development of politics and

institutional responses that can more fully reflect the complexities of their lives and

struggles.

In an environment where feminist, anti-racist and queer commitments are addressed

together, Neelam’s reflections on school life show us the promise of expansive horizons

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of social justice. Collectively, these interventions create the conditions to open up more

expansive dreams, relationships, aspirations and ways of feeling. As queer of colour

scholars have argued, queer has an analytic potential beyond the study of sexuality and

queer subjects (Munoz 2007; Coloma 2006; Eng et al 2005; Ferguson 2005; Gopinath;

Cohen 2004). It challenges many normalizations, including aspirations to the good life

and posits other forms of life, learning and community that are less about racialized

people gaining entry into neoliberal multiculturalisms or queer liberalisms and more

about working to forge and foster alternate desires. In her research on deviance and

resistance, Cathy Cohen asks how researchers might “leverage the process people use to

choose deviance” and I would add respectability or survival, to “choose political

resistance as well” (2004:30). Neelam gives us some insight into the institutional

conditions in schools and in her life that encourage such important political openings but

these horizons are nearly evacuated in the public educational systems which students

describe. The school that Neelam attends and only for a short time towards the end of

high school, is the only school described by any of the participants as concertedly

addressing issues of equity and social justice. Knowledge about social justice, the

organization of power and how students’ lives and emotional worlds are fashioned within

these histories and structures are mostly missing. When they appear, we are given some

insight into their influence, namely that oppression should not be better managed, it can

and should be changed.

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Dianah For Dianah, having gone to school with primarily white student populations, all of the

harm and the affective labour to manage racism meant that she longed to be in primarily

black educational spaces, where there might be some relief from constantly having to

explain and defend, an end to having to work so hard to fit in when more people who

looked like her were around. “There was just so much involved in being one of the only

black students at that school,” Dianah recalls about her high school years at an all girls

school. Dianah decides at age five that she is going to attend an all women’s liberal arts

college in the United States with a substantial black population. When I ask her about the

genesis of this plan hatched at such a young age, Dianah tells me about seeing a picture

of a dance troupe full of black ballerinas, many from this particular college. “Well I’ve

never seen more than one black ballerina and that black ballerina is usually me so I’m

going there,” she recalls thinking and telling her mother. Dianah recalls that by the end

of high school, “there was no doubt, that I absolutely needed and I wanted and I

knew that I needed and wanted to be around students who looked like me.” Hoping that

“students who look like her” might ease the obligation to explain her life, food, hair and

more generally, diminish the labour required to manage the racism in her life, Dianah

applies to and secures admission to this black American college. “I never saw myself

anywhere but [name of American college].”

Dianah hopes that life in a black majority space might be a “little bit better than what I

had experienced,” but it’s hard for the reality of something to live up to decades of

dreaming and close up, there are cracks in the belonging to which Dianah assumed she

would be welcomed. She does acknowledge that there were certainly positive elements

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of being in a space with a majority of black women but most of her reflections about her

college experience are dominated by divisive politics of gender, nation, colour, class and

sexuality. American blackness, she learns, has its own configurations and logics and

trying to find her footing in this unexpected place and compounded by the distance of

being a “nation away” from home, Dianah describes feeling both shocked and

disheartened, by her own naiveté and the issues with which she is confronted. This

includes frequent comments from other black women about her dark complexion, for

example, or the ways in which her short, natural hair might result in her being mistaken

for a lesbian. “There was supposed to be this great experience,” Dianah explains of

trying to come to terms with life at college. Dating and mating were the discourses

around which notions of beauty and desirability pivot. Dianah shares the following

comment made towards her from one of her peers: “You’re not gonna find anyone who

wants to date a tall, dark skinned girl. Like if you’re tall, you’ve gotta be light skinned

and really thin or if you’re dark, you’ve gotta be really thin with straight hair but you’re

not gonna find guys who are gonna wanna date somebody who’s taller than them and

two, someone who has natural hair.” In these carefully elaborated grids of desirability,

having dark skin, natural hair and a less than super thin body are presented as

predicaments to finding a suitable male match.

In response to this unexpected “barrage of (pause) issues with who I was as a young

black woman,” Dianah describes feeling a tenuous hold on her femininity. She starts to

seek validation in black men, dating frequently, “I did my fair share of dating and I use

the word dating very, very loosely,” she explains. After December break, she finds

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herself back at the college where the combined stress of being away from home, the

financial cost of attending the college as well as the difficult dynamics at school make her

feel incredibly overwhelmed. Dianah finds herself sobbing quietly in a bathroom stall:

I just sat on a stall and I sobbed. Now it’s tough to do this when you don’t know what’s going on, right, like why am I so sad, like it’s not just home sick but like what’s going on? I remember like sitting in the stall, sobbing, taking some deep breaths, knowing that I couldn’t be in the bathroom forever so it’s time to go back (laugh), right. Trying to still, even in my sobbing, not be too loud because it’s a communal bathroom, somebody’s having a shower, somebody’s brushing their teeth. I was still trying to be silent.

“That’s not how college was supposed to be,” Dianah tells me. It was one thing to deal

with comments coming from primarily white peers and spaces but Dianah is devastated

when “people who are supposed to be like me” are the source of these forms of

regulation, judgment and hierarchy. As Yasmin Jiwani notes, the lives of girls and young

women of colour are “border[ed] both from within and outside communities of colour”

(2006:71), and as we see in Dianah’s life, she is left contending with multiple violences

and exclusions simultaneously. Normalizations of beautiful and desirable as raced,

gendered and heterosexual constrain her life. After several years and partly because of

her experiences, Dianah drops out of the college but stays on in the States where she finds

paid employment due to a relationship in which she has become involved, he “found me

to be beautiful in spite of all the things that apparently I wasn’t supposed to be, all the

ways in which I wasn’t supposed to be considered beautiful,” she recalls of her partner.

Absorbing the loss of forms of black belonging into which she hoped to arrive, Dianah

begins a long process of sorting through the confusion and trying to figure out how to

create and find alternate forms of community that might sustain her. For her and many

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others in the study, sexuality and more precisely, compulsory heterosexuality comes to

occupy a prominent place in their lives and orientations to body and beauty through high

school and into university. Here, the focus of life becomes about landing the right male

partner and their bodies are oriented to do different kinds of work in relation to this

project but here too whiteness lingers. Standards of beauty and desirability are clearly

refracted through markers of white, or as close to it as possible, beauty and femininity –

straight hair, thin bodies and fair skin. Dianah’s admission to college is not the start of

her socialization into this heterosexual world but certain dimensions of it are intensified,

partly because of her age and her distance from home. Reflecting on her earlier

schooling years in primarily white spaces, Dianah recalls that “perhaps because of my

race,” she was not “sort of in the running to be somebody’s girlfriend. I wasn’t a female

that would be considered.” While Dianah comments on how much girls’ lives were

shaped through their desirability to male partners, her high school years are not

characterized by the “often (hetero)sexually violent social worlds of schools” (Ringrose

and Renold 2012:472). Instead, being a young black woman placed her outside

heterosexual dating practices in mostly white spaces. She was not someone who was

desired.

At college, she too comes up against the ways in which desirable male attention is

conferred or withheld through the combined markers of skin colour, size, hair texture and

length. In addition to regulating the status of beauty, to have short, natural hair on

campus is an indication of being a lesbian and Dianah describes the stress of going to a

hairdresser who cuts the back of her hair very short, “I was very upset,” she recalls

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“because it made me even- it made me look even more butch at the time.” We see how

women’s relationships, to each other and their bodies, are mediated through

heterosexuality and the men whom they are encouraged to mate and marry. Like Nur

and others who learn to cover up any physical proximity to queer, Dianah also tries to

distance herself from the vulnerabilities of being marked as anything other than straight.

As was the case with Neelam, we observe again the centrality of women’s bodies, how

they provide such a flashpoint for gender and sexual regulation, for the ideological and

physical reproduction of subjects and citizens that they are impelled to birth and properly

socialize (Abu-Laban 2008; Alexander 2005; Yuval-Davis 1997; Anthias & Yuval-Davis

1992:28). Consequently, their dress, appearance and sexual practices come to take on

significance as they reflect investments in heteropatriarchy (Smith 2006; Alexander

2005:23) into which the women’s sexual desires and familial futures are expected to

align. Such investments circulate in such a way that hairstyles and their calling up of

lesbian identities, for example, becomes part of the decision making to wear hair in

particular styles, rather than others. It is another example of distancing practices,

distancing from an aesthetic that might mistakenly result in the mark of a lesbian and its

accompanying inability to end up with the right man. However, these forms of regulation

also work in other ways, to encourage cooperation or compliance with heterosexism and

homophobia, to align one’s own sexuality with heterosexuality and to align one’s

orientation to gays and lesbians, in particular, with disapproving or hateful ones, as we

see outlined earlier in this chapter. Dianah was another example of a participant who

disclosed very quietly that while she had never “been given an opportunity to be with a

female” romantically, “I can’t say that I’m not interested.” She does not elaborate or

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name this desire as queer but simply as an openness. In looking for same sex desire to

announce itself as queer or lesbian, women like Dianah, Neelam and others can easily go

missing, eliding important interventions that can enrich and destabilize the presumed

straightness of critical race scholarship and the whiteness of queer research. In all cases,

queer women of colour slip through the cracks in these narrow ways of looking for queer.

Dianah’s experience also speaks to the specific ways that the sexuality of black women is

contained and bordered. What Dionne Brand describes as “pulling the Black female

body into line” (1994:48) has a violent history. Tracing the colonial meanings projected

onto black women’s bodies, Evelynn Hammonds explains that both during and after

slavery, black women have been rendered hypersexual as a way to justify their rape,

lynching and abuse by whites (1994:132). In response to the “always already colonized

black female body” (Hammonds 1994:132), Hammonds details the silence about black

women’s sexuality that was deployed and encouraged by middle-class blacks as a way to

reposition black women as respectable. This often resulted in black middle class women

“policing the behavior of poor and working-class women and any who deviated from a

Victorian norm” (Hammonds 1994:133). Hammonds, drawing on the work of Evelyn

Brooks Higginbotham, details how the sexual morality of black women became part of an

overall strategy of attempting to secure respect and opportunity for black Americans

(1994:133). Reflecting on the “silencing of sexuality” in black communities, Cassandra

Lord explains the costs of these historical legacies that black women continue to contend

with today (2005:378). This denial of black women’s sexuality, she elaborates, takes on

more complex dimensions for black lesbians. “This denial,” Lord continues “has forced

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some of us to remain in hiding, not only from our families but also from ourselves”

(2005:379). Instead of a romanticized black embrace, Dianah finds herself living the

legacies of these still very real politics that govern the lives and sexual expressions of

black women. As Barbara Smith explains, because black women so desperately lack

power in so many aspects of their lives, giving up even the limited claims or protections

that heterosexuality affords is very risky (1982:171). Dianah feels the risks.

“I don’t like to be boxed” Dianah explains. Throughout the interview, she elaborates all

of the ways that racism boxes her and contains her life in particular ways. She tries to

create more space for herself but racism relentlessly shrinks the space available to her. In

response to the racist hostilities, aggressions and discomfort that she and others endured

in primarily white educational spaces, they seek out schools and spaces with more

racially diverse populations. Wanting to see more of themselves reflected in their peers

and friends, they hoped for the safety that racial and cultural sameness or likeness might

confer. Learning here the difficult lessons of other conditions of belonging that they had

not anticipated nor were they prepared to endure, they have to recalibrate how to manage.

Dianah explains that white supremacy coupled with heteronormative expectations of how

life should be lived, of what it means to be a black woman, together crowd her life. Her

“critique of black homophobia,” patriarchy and “white racism” cannot be disarticulated

from each other (Walcott 2007:235). What are the options available, what kind of life

can be made of the conditions available, what kind of stories can be told of the difficulties

with which the women are presented? When the long awaited for relief doesn’t arrive,

there is confusion, sadness and muffled sobbing in a bathroom stall, there is the choice to

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travel between racial and social worlds, carefully demarcated. Like Neelam’s hopes for a

future in which feminist, antiracist and queer communities might displace the oppressive

constraints of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, the women long for and work to

create other spaces. They actively refuse the fossilized versions of culture, tradition and

family on offer. Jasbir Puar coins the term “bargaining with racism” (1996:132)77 in her

work with second-generation Sikh women in Britain, to reference the identity formation

of these women as oppositionally active; that is, they are neither wholly aligned with

South Asian or white society. Puar argues that these women are able to critically

evaluate their own cultural contexts while also being able to apprehend and navigate

structures of whiteness (1996:131-132). While this was certainly true for certain women

at certain times in this study, the labour of such work was also incredibly isolating and

exhausting. It was also the case that the complexity of oppression and the kinds of

analysis most readily available to them, did not necessarily or cleanly align with such

critical appraisals.

Nimat explains that her own analysis of gender remains quite fragmented from her

analysis of racism because she “instinctively” knew that openly discussing sexism and

patriarchy would simply give white people more “ammunition” to use against racialized,

Muslim worlds. This results in “a lot of silence and protecting and not naming” in order

not to fuel the racism. Nimat reflects Inderpal Grewal’s observation that patriarchy is

increasingly outsourced (2014:165) to racialized communities and homophobia along

corresponding lines. Women of colour and aboriginal feminists have long drawn

                                                                                                               77 Puar adapts the phrase, bargaining with racism from the work of Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy” (1988).

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attention to the ways in which necessary conversations about and organizing against

violence against women have increased discourses pathologizing racialized men and

communities. They have also drawn our attention to how such violence is used to

intensify policing and prison regimes that are themselves steeped in racial and class

violence (Sudbury 2006; Smith 2005; Razack 2004; Davis 1998). There exists too an

abundant scholarship on the colonial logics of what Gayatri Spivak has famously referred

to as “white men saving brown women from brown men” (1993:93) that are easily

resuscitated into imperial justifications for war, invasion and occupation. Some of the

women seemed quite cognizant of this larger context which overdetermined both how

they could speak about the violences that animate their lives as well as how they

themselves narrate that violence. It was difficult to dislodge the racism that shaped

readings of patriarchy in racialized communities as though it was of an exceptional kind.

“My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it,” writes

Toni Morrison (1993:xi). Dianah’s life shows us the illusiveness of an idealized vision of

community but it also alerts us to the conditions of racial harm that produce this

vulnerability in the first place. Women who grew up in predominately white spaces

expressed desires and hopes similar to Dianah’s – to be in a place where more people

looked like them so that the force of racism might be diminished. In predominately black

places, Dianah learns and instructs us in the centrality but also ineffectiveness of

racialized spaces without anti-racist politics. Being in black majority spaces did not

translate into a place with the kinds of inclusive politics to which Dianah aspired. It was

not enough. Other participants learned this lesson earlier, in high schools that were

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populated by racialized people but still characterized by an overwhelming institutional

whiteness. Dianah’s experience underscores the need to cultivate, not assume anti-racist

politics within racialized communities and like Neelam’s narrative, it also speaks to the

need for anti-racist commitments to be explicitly queer and feminist. Dianah was another

quiet queer. She did not pronounce her queerness loudly or explicitly but she felt and

lived it more discreetly, as an openness to loving women.

Nur Being schooled in elite, white arts spaces as a working class, brown, queer kid, Nur too

eventually leaves home and drops out of school, quite shortly after she discloses her

sexual orientation to her family. Not finding school to be relevant both in terms of the

content of what she was learning and her “nothing interactions” with teachers, Nur works

in minimum wage jobs and tries to support herself. When I ask her more about these

interactions with teachers, she recalls an educational trajectory marked by teachers who

either explicitly singled her out and treated her poorly but more often than not, what she

experienced was a disengagement or overlooking, “it was just more nothing.” She

describes observing the difference between these nothing interactions and other

encounters where teachers seemed engaged, encouraging, supportive and invested in

students learning and success. “It’s those things, like the lack of those things,” that Nur

remembers the most, the feeling that her learning and presence were insignificant or

invisible. She is asked to leave the first school that she attends because her artistic

performance is deemed to not meet the required standards and her transfer to another arts

school is short lived. “My life was not okay,” Nur sums up of this time in her life.

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Similar to Neelam and some of the other women in this study, Nur also struggles to

manage how her body and presence are read in different spaces. Trying to look like “an

acceptable straight girl” or working to manage aspects of her “queer identity,” “brown

identity” or the “fact that I didn’t come from money,” are part of this complex mix of

getting by, fitting in or staying safe. “Finally, finally, I’m not that disheveled (laugh)

queer girl who you could pinpoint from a mile away,” Nur explains, “and now I can

disguise myself in any way that I want but that is something that you need to be able

to do in this, in this world. You have to, it’s too much,” she explains of having to

navigate so many systems of domination simultaneously. Nur describes this as a

performance and at the core of it, it means learning to be “shiny.” She describes learning

to be shiny as grooming her “crazy fucking curly afghan hair” to be more manageable,

looking “kept” and “clean,” learning to pluck her eyebrows, using olive oil to condition

her hair properly and dressing more acceptably. The goal of these efforts:

it’s about being taken seriously, it’s about having one less thing to worry about when I interact with people. It’s about fitting in, it’s about looking a certain way so that you can be accepted as like a legitimate person or (laugh) it’s just like, it’s being at like a certain level of what is expected in this society, that kind of visual status quo. It means being shiny. It just means people take me more seriously when I already know they’re judging me for many other reasons so it’s just one less thing to worry about.

Learning to be shiny means that in some family, community or social spaces, Nur can

worry less about being seen as identifiably queer, she can be taken more seriously as

someone who has something to say and contribute in her life and depending on the

context, she can try to make her working class roots and sexuality less noticeable

markers. Shiny was a way to describe a life not so governed by the heavy anxieties of

oppression. But Nur is also incredibly mindful that while she “may have found a way to

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look shinier in certain situations, other people haven’t.” Money, even a modest amount,

time and the willingness and ability to conform or adapt to certain visible markers of

legitimacy, what Nur so insightfully references as the “visual status quo,” are

prerequisites of learning to be shiny. Coming up against so many hierarchies of judgment

and categories of distinction, Nur looks for a way to worry less and to have her ideas and

presence register as legitimate and she does this partly by learning to polish her body, to

make her presence more palatable. And it works to take the edge off of worries

weighted in history.

I find Nur’s insightful and endearing description of dominance and her abilities to

navigate them as ones that have deep resonance in the lives of other racialized women in

this study. The ability to illuminate oneself, to be recognized as being competent,

capable and just downright shiny, has stuck as an example of the kinds of insight and

knowledges these women bring to theorizing and managing the organization of power.

Nur, like many others, understands what she is up against and remarkably, just because

she has, Nur also appreciates that not everyone can figure out how to shine. She

remembers well “not being shiny enough.” Her access to luminosity does not simply

vanish oppression and its effects, Nur is very clear on this point but it does help her to

navigate certain social spaces and circumstances with more ease but the worry and weight

of oppression is relentless. And like Neelam earlier, we see the extent to which racism

and oppression are experienced as real and lived through feelings of, in and about bodies,

hierarchically ordered.

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Disclosing her sexuality in various spaces is one such example of calibrating ease more

deliberately. Identifying as queer, Muslim and Afghan, Nur, who is Canadian born,

explains how despite not growing up in a family that was particularly observant in

religious terms, she is unable to disentangle or separate out the religious and cultural

influences that have so deeply shaped her life and politics. When I ask her to talk more

about these influences, she replies, “the way that you think about family or the way that

you think about (sigh), there’s just, I just feel like everytime I think about anything that

has ever come out of my father’s mouth like about life or about how, you know, you deal

with struggle or how you have hope for the future or how you judge people or don’t judge

people, those things are very very Islamic and those things are very Afghan,” she replies.

She also understands her distance from religion to be partly because of the fact that her

Afghan father married a white, European, non-Muslim woman, Nur’s mother. For Nur,

this is also part of the explanation for gaps in her cultural education that a mother would

often be responsible for passing on to her child, both because her mother wasn’t Afghan

and because her parents, described as “big hippes,” did not generally prioritize such an

education. When I ask her if she discusses sexuality with her family, her response is “yes

and no.” Despite describing her parents as very “open minded,” their discomfort with a

queer child persists and her parents ask her to be discrete when it comes to extended

family. Nur’s response is that while she doesn’t “pussyfoot” with her immediate family,

she doesn’t feel that she has “anything to prove so it’s fine. It just is what it is.” Judged

in different spaces for not being white enough or brown enough, not being gay enough or

Muslim enough, Nur has abandoned trying to live up to discrepant systems of proof, “not

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being comfortable anywhere, I have to make space for myself everywhere I go,” Nur

explains of her life and politics.

I want to dwell, for a moment, on Nur’s decision to be discrete about her sexuality in

extended family spaces. She describes this discreteness as an act of love for her family

and insists that we read homophobia alongside the effects of war, racism, imperialism and

displacement simultaneously, they are not disarticulated struggles or oppressions. In

excavating some of the assumptions in coming out stories, Gayatri Gopinath elaborates

that a commitment to visibility in very specific and public ways as well as a focus on the

individual gay or lesbian subject presupposes “Euroamerican social and historical

formations” (2003:272) that may or may not be commensurate with South Asian and I

would add, other contexts and experiences.78 When it comes to family, Indigenous and

women of colour scholars have importantly pointed out that the ability to form families,

not find some sort of autonomy or liberation from them, are critical given the historical

conditions that have differentially destroyed or mitigated against their family formations.

Family was not something Nur wanted to stand outside of nor could she risk losing given

wider processes of violence that she had endured with her family. For her, coming out is

both a “yes” and “no” proposition. Most often experiences such as those of Nur or

Neelam are cast as an unwillingness to confront a father and family’s homophobia or

being complicit in it, not being “out” enough or, to return to Gopinath, refusing the

“linear narrative of sexual development that ends with a fully realized ‘gay’ subject”

(2005:173, see also El-Tayeb 2012; Schulman 2012; Kumashiro 2001). For Nur, coming

                                                                                                               78 Some of these insights are drawn from an earlier article I wrote (see Charania 2005) on the complexities of storytelling in anti-homophobia education.

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out of the closet, staying in or reorienting discussions of the closet entirely are based on

contingencies that she constantly calibrates.79 Looking more specifically at the refusal of

queer Muslims to be “properly” (Perez 2005:177) queer in contemporary Europe, Fatima

El-Tayeb and others explore how some Muslim queers refuse to be the subjects of

“western humanitarianism” that need saving from the rampant homophobia of their

cultures and communities (El Tayeb 2012:86; Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem 2008). She

is agentic in a way that defies Western understandings of queer life and identity. Nur’s

narrative tells instead the story of multiple vectors of power operating in her life, the

effects of imperialism and war, family dispersal and death, the bombing of her family

home in Afghanistan, and insists that we not distill or impose queer recognition or

politics of a familiar or particular kind. She refuses to tell a story where “spectacularized

homophobia” (Alexander 2005:296), extracted from other relations of power, can be used

to further police and pathologize Muslim families and communities in the name of sexual

or gender liberation (Razack 2008:20). Nur understands well the larger geo-political

context in which such stories are desired and the purposes to which they are put.

It is a complicated enterprise to claim Islam as a central dimension of one’s queer life and

politics, as Nur does, but I am interested in what such a proposition might offer and the

importance of religion in queer life, activism and knowledge production. I draw on some

important women of colour feminist openings to help me think about the shape that such

a proposition might take. M. Jacqui Alexander, for example, insists on the importance of

                                                                                                               79 See El Tayeb 2012; Rahman 2010; Abraham 2009; Yip 2009; Yip 2008 for various ethnographic explorations of Muslim queers in Europe, North America and Australia as well as the specific and global geopolitical contexts in which Muslims are increasingly hypervisible. On the latter, Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem 2008; Massad 2007 and Puar 2005 are also particularly instructive.

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the sacred and spiritual, particularly in feminist theorizing and activism (2005:287-332).

In theorizing the sacred, Alexander is not only referencing religious practices and

affiliations but her scholarship that focuses African spiritual work is useful to my

thinking. Alexander argues that with an insistence on secularism, feminists overlook the

relevance and centrality of religion to the lives and experiences of most people,

particularly women and working class people. This overlooking is also a judging – of the

sacred as traditional, irrational, premodern, supersition or believers as falsely conscious.

These markers also make it difficult to think of religion as a primary category of meaning

making and communal life. In my interview with Erica, when I asked her what she did

with all of the forms of violence that had so profoundly structured her life, she responded

that she talked to God and God talked to her: “ I believe in God. I think he’s always

talked to me, always. When I was a little girl I swear I used to hear him in the trees, I

used to be by my bedroom window.” Raised Catholic but disillusioned by the

hypocrisies of organized religion, Erica finds in her relationship with God, a space of

relief from domination. It is from this place that she derives her strength and it is to this

place that she attributes her ability to survive. I found myself at a loss for words when

Erica shared this in the interview. Nothing in the academic reading I had done had

prepared me to think seriously or at all about how religion and spirituality might feature

in this project. What place is there for conversations with God in our collective

understanding of anti-racist politics?

In her study of an urban women’s mosque movement, part of a larger Islamic revival in

Cairo, like Alexander, Saba Mahmood (2005) argues that the role of religion in feminist

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theorizing has been largely understudied. She critiques feminist modes of agency,

underwritten by liberal notions of autonomy, freedom and resistance, as being inadequate

in analysing feminist movements, such as the one she studied. Mahmood importantly

asks about the place of women’s movements that on the one hand remake spaces such as

the mosque as a site of women’s worship and learning, enhancing their role in religious

and social life, while also relying on notions of piety and virtue which have historically

resulted in women’s subordination. Mahmood’s project is less about condemning or

redeeming the involvement of women in Islamic revival and more about understanding

what makes it a powerful and meaningful practice to the women involved. Reminiscent

of Gopinath cited earlier, Mahmood theorizes against a “simple binary of

resistance/subordination,” insisting that we question if the “category of resistance

impose[s] a teleology of progressive politics…a teleology that makes it hard for us to see

and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the

narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms” (2005:9). I find this useful as many

of my participants confound such clear or consistent categorical distinctions and while

Mahmood does not abandon a search for critical politics, she does importantly want to

foreclose a reading of feminist politics that already knows its political and analytic

categories in advance and with a kind of certainty. 80

                                                                                                               80 Perhaps more tangentially but also very illuminating is Andrea Smith’s work in Native Americans and the Christian Right (2008). In bringing together religion and politics, Smith asks us to rethink ideas of political and religious life that do not fit cleanly into either progressive or conservative. She also challenges social movements who have dismissed or overlooked conservative Christian spaces as potential sites of social justice organizing or coalition building. By studying conservative religious movements, Smith argues that we can better understand what affiliation in such spaces does for people, in order to counter these effects or provide alternatives. I find Smith’s ideas very compelling and provocative for rethinking often anti-intellectual and dismissive attitude towards people of faith, including Muslims.

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Mahmood and Alexander have challenged me profoundly to investigate my own

conceptual apparatus for understanding anti-racist, feminist and queer struggles and the

inheritance of the secular as foundational to these traditions. Having gone into what

Jacqui Alexander calls the “spiritual closet” (2005:15) that is compartmentalizing the

importance of sacred practices, Nur and some of my other participants insist that I come

out, to look at how deeply meaningful religious practices, diversely defined, are folded

into their lives. To attend to the ways in which Muslim queers, women in particular,

are rearticulating their relationship to Islam and at the same time expanding, rereading or

recovering more expansive Islamic traditions is to take seriously how they are shaped by

and are also reshaping religious and cultural practices (Kugle 2010; Sensoy and

Stonebanks 2009; Wadud 2008; Husain 2006; Khan 2002). In centering the experiences

of queer Muslim women, such as Nur, questions that already seem settled – about what

Islam is, who queers are, what constitutes gender and sexual justice and the role of

religion in political life – are opened up and push back against the stabilization and

secularization of queer politics in productive ways. To read family and religion as only

constraining is to miss how they are also contested, reworked and life-sustaining

resources in Nur’s life and the lives of other racialized queer women. As I emphasized in

Chapter 3, families were not only important spaces in which women of colour were able

to learn about racism, they were one of the only places of refuge from it.

“You can’t tell people what they want for themselves,” Nur says of the complex process

through which political struggles are defined and made. For Nur, Neelam and Dianah

who also discloses her openness at having a relationship with women, and other

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racialized queer or questioning women, single issue approaches to sexuality or race are

not likely to address the complex nature of experiences with which they contend. It was

the case that the racial harm they encountered in their lives made many of the women

unwilling to imagine or disclose their queer desires within their birth families (Kumashiro

2001) and interestingly, even in the interviews, such disclosures were often made

tentatively or opaquely and towards the end of interviews. It was the case that of all the

participants, it was only Nur and one other participant who identified clearly and loudly

as queer, at least in the interview. Perhaps not knowing the proper place of queer in a

research project that purported to understand how racism is deciphered, lived and

responded to or not knowing how I might respond to such disclosures, queer was often

only quietly hinted at and rarely did it articulate itself in the language of lesbian or even

queer. It seems that people of colour are adept at calibrating risks of different kinds.

The risk of losing family supports that enabled them to survive in racially hostile worlds

was simply unthinkable. While it is the case that for some of the queers in this study, the

more familiar horizons of gay marriage and legal protections or “queer liberalism”81 (Eng

2010:203) shaped the limits of their politics, others turned towards more expansive queer

horizons. Drawing on the work of Lisa Duggan, Chandan Reddy and other queer

scholars, David Eng persuasively argues for the need to bring together progressive social

movements often bifurcated as either queer or critical race. Such a cleavage, he suggests,

belies other less told histories of organizing and theorizing (2010:33).                                                                                                                81 Chandan Reddy provides an important cautionary tale of how in the U.S. context, hate crimes legislation against racial, sexual and gender minorities, known as the Sheppard-Byrd act (2009) widely supported by various social justice agencies, was attached to the National Defense Authorization Act in 2009, passing the largest military budget in American history. (In 2010, $680 billion was given to the department of defence). These entanglements of militarism with certain kinds of state minority protections that he outlines, is yet another reminder about how our struggles for equality can be tethered to disturbing projects and unexpected alignments, the disjunctures between our political desires and demands and the “freedom with violence” as Reddy’s title so evocatively captures, which is returned to us.

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If Neelam, Dianah, Nur and others are going to live the promise of “It Gets Better,”82 it is

not in the “recoding of queer life and lifestyle as the freedom to travel, tour and consume

safely” (Eng et al 2005:10) or as Martin Manalansan puts it gay freedom “means to wear

Prada” (2005:143). Instead, as queers of colour insist, the narrowing of gay politics and

identity in this way is so disconnected from the lives and material struggles of most

queers of colour (Puar 2010; Smith 2010; Gopinath 2005). As Jasbir Puar importantly

points out, many of the videos in the It Gets Better Campaign are from white-university

educated gay men. It doesn’t get better so evenly for all queers, particularly queer

women of colour and as the women in this study repeatedly point out, so few of their

peers survived the conditions of high school. Trying to imagine how it might get better

for more queers of colour requires strengthened interdisciplinary conversations,

commitments and crossings between critical race, feminist and queer scholars in

education.

On Shiny Bodies In their own ways, Neelam, Dianah and Nur illuminate how centrally women’s bodies are

involved in feeling, living and making sense of racism and heteropatriarchy. As many of

the narratives throughout this dissertation reveal, the body is the site on which many

relations of power are simultaneously inscribed, contested and worked out. In the section

that follows, I explore the prevalent longings for whiteness that were deeply imprinted on

many of the women’s reflections about their lives and relationships to their bodies. In the

                                                                                                               82 It Gets Better was a campaign, initially led by Dan Savage in response to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and other young gay men. For background on this campaign (which has since been turned into a project) and critical responses to it, see http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/16/wake-it-gets-better-campaign and https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/school-daze/.

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afterword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison discusses her interest, relevant to my own, in

thinking about how “racial self loathing” (1994:210) is learned and produced by

recounting an incident of a black girl who, at the start of elementary school, wishes for

blue eyes. Morrison describes the sympathy she feigns for this child, as a child herself

hearing “the desecration she proposed” (1994:209) but really, it is anger that she feels;

anger not only for this child’s desire to have “very blue eyes in very black skin” but also

for the harm that this vision of beauty holds for Morrison’s own concept of beauty

(1994:211). For twenty years, Morrison continues to reflect on how one learns such self-

hatred, what are its mechanisms, how does it work? In short, how are these pedagogies

of “racial self-contempt” (1994:211) transmitted and inhabited? The Bluest Eye is her

decades long reflection on this question and it pivots on Pecola Breedlove’s desire for

blue eyes. Morrison insists that we contextualize Pecola’s desire through the “gaze that

condemned her” (1994:210). She describes the work to write the narrative in such a way

as to move readers away from the “comfort of pitying” Breedlove to being responsible

for her “smashing” (Morrison 1994:211). Focusing on the “social and domestic

aggressions that could cause a child to literally fall apart” (1994:210), Morrison asks us to

see how history and hatred take hold in the desires of a vulnerable child. Rather than

reading the preference for whiteness through the “pop-psychological insight of an

‘inferiority complex’” (Cheng 2001:17), Morrison helps us to situate it in “painfully

installed” (Cheng 2001:17) practices of white domination.83 While the narratives in this

section could easily lend themselves to the more comforting responses that Morrison

outlines, it is to their production and prevalence, that I remain focused.

                                                                                                               83 See Kohli and Solorzano (2012) and Huber, Johnson & Kohli (2006) for contextualizing student of colour experiences of internalized racism through a critical race framework rather than one that centralizes psychological approaches and processes.

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When I started out gathering together these narratives, I too was expecting self-loathing.

But the women’s reflections also signaled something else and something more. What

became clear as I examined these retrospective memories is that the early desire for

whiteness and white femininity was less about “racial self-contempt” (Morrison

1994:211) and more about aspirations for educational success and secure futures. In

other words, efforts to approximate whiteness were strategic. So often denied access to

categories of smart or capable in schools, they locate such promise in the bodies of white

girls and women. The women in this study interpret their own efforts to get closer to

whiteness as emerging from an understanding of the social and institutional worlds they

inhabit and the lessons gleaned from them. They learn early on, through their longings or

through the body altering practices in which they engage to work on and transform

themselves in order to manage racism. I organize these narratives together to enrich an

emphasis on heteropatriarchy, explored previously in this chapter that only partially

explains the constraints that women of colour identify in their lives and experiences of

schooling.

Reflections on their bodies, ideals of beauty and femininity, references to skin creams,

skin lightening and forms of self-regulation to approximate something close to beautiful

were disturbingly pronounced in the lives of the women I interviewed.84 It was at the

level of the body and the skin, that racism left some of its lasting impressions. Surfaces

became a focal point through which information about who and what is beautiful was

                                                                                                               84 For detailed historical analysis of skin lightening, colonial regimes and/or situating the desire for whiteness within global capitalist relations, see Rondilla 2009; Nakano Glenn 2009; Tate 2007; hooks 2005; and Mire 2001.

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collected - observing oneself and others through mirrors, television, story books and

dolls, the looks and judgments of others. The desire for white beauty was everywhere but

the attainment of beauty was not an end in itself but a means to obtaining bits of security,

opportunity and improved treatment that were apparent to the young women, even as

children. Racial privilege and entitlements were visible to them, even as they saw and

understood themselves on the losing side of these rankings. Thinking through processes

of racial embodiment, “race,” Linda Alcoff argues, “helps constitute the necessary

background from which I know myself” (2001:275). Alcoff is useful for foregrounding

the histories from which “meanings are located on the body” (2001:281) and for

appreciating the complex ways that our readings of others and ourselves are mediated

through a system of racial meanings (2001:278). Her hope is that in making visible such

processes of seeing and ascribing meaning and value, we might eventually disrupt and

alter them. It is important to note that the burdens of body and beauty were not equally

shared. While no one escaped its harm, dark skinned black and brown women bore the

brunt of this devastation.

Ayanna, for example, talks at length about living with the desperation of ugliness and her

prolonged efforts to alter her body as “constantly feeling in some bizarre way that I

wasn’t beautiful, that I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t enough.” She explains that her goal in

trying to change her body and its association with blackness was to be more beautiful, to

“somehow blend in a little bit and appear more decent and more normal.” She describes

staring at herself in the mirror and itemizing all of the “things I would change about

myself if I had the power.” Ayanna tries to recruit her mother into what she describes as

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“desperate” attempts to transform her body, from making her nose more slender and her

lips and body smaller. This distancing from blackness also results in Ayanna purchasing

skin-whitening creams. She recounts becoming aware of these products from the time

she was in grade four or five, in Black American magazines for women, such as Ebony.

She wonders if those creams “would actually help me be more pretty” and when she is

older, she recollects saving up her meager allowance money to buy one of those creams

and “being really disappointed that it didn’t work and I spent all (laugh) of my allowance

money on it. I was like what the hell (laugh), I still look the same.” Ayanna talks about

noticing skin shade in popular culture, among friends who are black or mixed race and

wishing for her skin to be a “lighter tone” of black, even that would be “more

acceptable,” even that would mean that she would be treated differently, treated better.

When I ask her if she can trace the origin of these feelings and desires to specific

incidents or instances, Ayanna responds:

I don’t know if there’s something particular or like I can’t pinpoint it, I just remember feeling that. I just remember feeling that and I don’t really know where that came from but just like a generalized feeling - of feeling that I wasn’t worthy and that I wasn’t enough and that I was like the, I honestly thought I was the ugliest thing on the planet and it was just, like it’s really heartbreaking when I think about it now as an adult like that child felt that but yeah.

Ayanna explains that these feelings continued into high school but at this point her

interventions and desperation to “find like a miracle cure to change my situation” ebbed.

“It was still on my mind,” she recalls and she also adds that it still continues to be

something on her mind today, but rather than being “constant,” as when she was a child

and teenager, now it “just pops in” from time to time: “just sort of fighting it but it’s not

a big fight now, it’s sort of a tiny little fight, it’s just like a small little thing” that she is

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able to talk herself through with reminders that she is “pretty attractive. I’m able to tell

myself that now and that my nose is totally in proportion to my face, everything is in

proportion. Nothing is like really large on my face and just like really how to appreciate

my skin colour.” It’s a little less sticky, the racism. It appears and sticks around for a

shorter time but it’s there – still - and it needs to be attended to, it requires labour and

looking at and after, despite having been transformed from a “big” into a “tiny little

fight.” “I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy Black girl who once

longed to be white or anything other than who she was,” writes Audre Lorde (1984:174).

Ayanna teaches us that learning to love herself and to feel good in her body is not a

frivolous pursuit outside of politics.

Aaliyah also grew up in what she describes as a multiracial environment and she

describes a similar struggle with beauty and body. “There was something to my

difference and I knew that, you know, I was darker, that wasn’t good,” Aaliyah recalls.

She talks about her obsession with combing the hair of her Barbie doll: “ I never wanted

it to get like, you know, with Barbie’s after a while, [the hair] gets kind of like fuzzy. I

wanted it to stay like you know, straight and smooth and blonde and silky.” When I ask

her about where she thinks this preoccupation with “straight and smooth and blonde and

silky” came from, Aaliyah reflects on opening a book or watching a television show and

seeing very little of herself reflected back to her. From a very young age, four or so and

heightened by eleven, Aaliyah recalls that she “really, really wanted to change myself,

my nose, my skin colour, my hair, my everything.” Like Ayannah, Aaliyah’s racially

inflected desires haven’t simply vanished. While she describes herself as being in a

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“better place now,” she also insists that “it’s still a process, it’s not like oh my goodness,

everything’s better, you know what I mean?” These women’s desires reflect an

embrace of white femininity – a slender nose, slim body, just right lips, skin and hair –

and are about proximity to dominant standards of white beauty. They learn early on to

see themselves in relation to these markers and the accompanying promise of the good

life that they might contain. An embrace of whiteness is not simply a question of feeling

better but also a pressing urgency to imagine a future in which they might live better.

The women describe the sadness, even heartbreak at looking back on these longings for

whiteness and their recurrences in their lives, diminished but nonetheless, still carrying

some of the force of earlier lessons in race and whiteness. Latifa describes an almost

eerie scene from her childhood, one where she is simply looking at her blue eyed, blonde

haired Barbie, not playing with it. “I said that I wanted blue eyes and [my mother]

freaked out and she said, why would you want blue eyes?” Latifa reflects on the

centrality of her mother’s question in asking her to interrogate her own desires for blue

eyes. “I never actually hated my skin colour,” Latifa shares and when I press her about

how she makes sense of her desire for blue eyes, she expresses her confusion and not

knowing. She continues, though, to reflect on the largely white student population where

a lot of children had blue eyes and thinks aloud about the possibility that while blue eyes

were pretty, more significantly, blue eyes might mean that “I’d be treated like everyone

else (pause) because (pause) like I said that like teachers would always treat me and my

friends differently from the rest of the class.” She continues to talk about noticing

differential treatment between the white and black children so if “another [white] child

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didn’t have their homework that day, then that was fine. If one of us didn’t have our

homework, for instance, if we forgot it or even if it was just in our locker and we had to

leave class to go, we would, we would have to stay in for detention and things like that. I

mean there was the comment, the lawyer comment,” Latifa recalls, of her grade 5 or 6

teacher telling her that her aspiration to be a lawyer “wasn’t a realistic goal for someone

like me.” As she goes from earlier to later years of public school, Latifa eventually

understands the message that professions have a race and she’s dreaming in the wrong

colour. So often, racism resulted in dreams that were hard to hold onto. Proximity to

blue eyes is what Latifa hopes might offset the distribution of detentions, visits to the

principal’s office and perhaps even make her suitable for the profession she desires.

Ayanna too reflects on her desire for whiteness and while she can’t precisely locate its

genesis, she traces it back to a more “generalized feeling- of feeling that I wasn’t worthy

and that I wasn’t enough.” However, when I ask her what she imagines this desire for

lightness and whiteness were about, how it might have shaped her life, she has the

following reflections:

I thought [my life] would be better. How would it be better? I thought that people would treat me decently. I thought people would be more, more likely to engage in a conversation with me. I thought people would think I was trustworthy. I thought people would look up to me. I thought I would, even as a child, I thought it would get me a better job for some bizarre reason. I don’t even know why that entered my consciousness as a child because you know I wasn’t in the workforce, obviously (laugh) but I just envisioned that life would be simpler and it would be better and I don’t know why I envisioned this. I imagined that life would be better and people would treat me differently and my outcomes would be better, different and I would get better grades.

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In desiring whiteness, like Ayanna, it turns out that most of the participants understand

that whiteness translates into better life opportunities and chances, into improved social

interactions and being held in higher esteem, into better employment and grades. As we

saw in the previous chapter, white is the colour that Neelam wished her parents to be so

that the teacher who accuses her of plagiarism can’t get away with it, so that there might

be some accounting required of her accusation. She too wonders if she would have had

“different opportunities” or would have “felt better” about herself and her life had her

skin been lighter. “You know I always felt like I wasn’t good enough because my skin

wasn’t light enough and that always bothered me. You know dark skin is something that

(pause) I’m still really aware of and it’s hard, it’s a really big issue,” Neelam explains. In

short, white is the colour of educational opportunity, mobility and the possibility of a

good life, one shaped by material security and well-being. But it’s also about securing

for oneself an affective disposition – of an orientation to life not burdened by the ways

that racial harm made them feel, a relief from feeling ugly and being someone who can’t

be trusted or relied upon or who is ignored and overlooked. Maybe, Ayanna hopes, she

might be someone who is respected enough to be engaged in conversation and maybe

“life would be simpler” and “better.”

Audre Lorde writes that in order to survive oppression, people who endure its effects

learn to be “watchers,” that is, they learn to observe how oppression is put together and

how it works (1984:114). These women, as very young girls, carefully observe the world

of school and social rules around them and they have important insights into how racism

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operates. Whiteness is apparent to them, as a structure of advantage and racial privilege.

Sara Ahmed, in her reluctance to embrace whiteness studies, references Lorde and the

work of black feminists as being central to a genealogy of whiteness studies. While

appreciating the political work of making whiteness seen and visible, Ahmed is

concerned about the potential of whiteness studies to recentre rather than disrupt

whiteness. She is not alone in these preoccupations (see also Dyer 1997; Weigman 1999;

Thompson 2003; Fine et al 2004; Lipsitz 2006). Acknowledging the important work of

later whiteness studies scholars, such as Ruth Frankenberg and Richard Dyer, in

investigating both representations of whiteness and how whiteness is lived by white

people, Ahmed recuperates earlier black feminist critiques of racial privilege (2004:1).

By centering the work of Lorde and other black feminists, Ahmed reminds us that

whiteness is rarely so surprising to or unnoticed by people of colour. Contrasting the

structured and willful ignorance about racism for most whites (Williams 1997:27) with

the kinds of harm narrated by the women of colour highlights the asymmetrical costs and

burdens of an “education in racism” (Cheng 2001:21). It is important to notice the

knowledge of racism and its absence. But absence turns quickly to denial, evidence of

something that doesn’t exist. Racism isn’t real because people with the authority to grant

it the status of something real refuse to acknowledge it. As Sara Ahmed puts it,

“[w]hiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it” (2007:157). The women in this

study do not learn about their whiteness from academic contexts or courses, they learn

about it as young children in the course of everyday life because of all of the racial

entitlements and privileges that are denied to them. Like Ahmed’s insistence on turning

to black feminist theorists contributions to whiteness and anti-racist scholarship,

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cultivating an attentiveness to the lives of women of colour, such as the women in this

study, contains important insights for the operation and understanding of how racial

logics are gendered and racialized girlhoods are lived.

These women also reveal how the body stands at the nexus of multiple relations of power

which are intertwined and simultaneously lived and extend the concerns with body image

that animate dominant feminist theorizing and politics. They reshape notions of desiring

whiteness as being solely about self-contempt or a lack of self-esteem so that we see that

the arithmetic of racism, its distributions of opportunities are well understood by them as

children. These too are the effects of an education in racism – being contained by racial

meanings, practices, feelings and futures that the women work to escape or with which

they struggle to live. For the women here, the future is the purview of white girls and

women with more power to “twist life into the shapes [they] wanted” (Adichie 2014:

355). They know, in other words, that “whiteness has a cash value” that it facilitates

access to “resources, power and opportunity” (Lipsitz 2006:1). Racism is about these

material and affective distributions of harm and injury. Reflecting back on being the

“darkest out of my groups of friends” and using skin-lightening creams, Dhanya recoils

in horror that this was a practice in which she engaged. Yet she also adds that at that

time, “you don’t think oh, like I’m doing this to hurt myself. You just think I’m doing

this to fit in, right, cause like I want to fit in and I want to be like those like pretty white

girls.”

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To work to approximate white femininity is about getting closer to these opportunities or

to fitting in, to some sense of comfort and belonging, trying to insert oneself into a

structure of privilege that is obvious, apparent and distant to the women racialized as not

white. As children and young girls, few of them would have attributed racial

understandings to these whitening practices and desires but they feel the weight of these

systems. They apprehend this structure in their childhood longings and also in their

desires and worries for a future. Whiteness becomes the colour of this promising future,

of a good grade or better job, some dignity, respect or belonging, a promise that doesn’t

exist at all or in the same way in their non-white worlds and bodies. Lorde understands

that people of colour seek to emulate or adopt oppressive ways in order to carve out some

spaces of protection, however illusory this turns out to be (1984:114). Such desires and

practices are born not only or even primarily of self-contempt or a lack of self-esteem but

of longing for security, success and beauty and there are constant calculations to get

closer to whiteness, as an aesthetic and way of appearing in the world (or way of having

oneself read) but also as a set of practices and performances, things that can be done to

get closer to success and goodness.

This section is populated by women and girls’ efforts and longings to improve themselves

and their bodies in order to find a way out of racism’s effects. These whitening practices

say “more about the keenness of the hurt than a cure” (Cheng 2001:5) but they also

provide important insight into how their hurts move them in particular directions, rather

than others. We can trace, through their narratives, the emergence of racial formations in

which the bodies of women of colour become the targets of what is to be worked on in

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order to work out racism. While the racial conditions of life are incredibly pressing to

them, the racial solutions that they take up are remarkably similar and individualized. It

has been my goal, in this section, to recuperate desires for whiteness from pathologies or

psychologies of women of colour and to render them as coherent and reasoned responses

to being structurally excluded from the educational and life advantages that whiteness

confers. “To want to change your everything,” as Aaliyah so insightfully reflects, is a

not so surprising outcome of white supremacy.

Anti-Black Complicities I return in this section to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s insight that racism and

oppression don’t only generate resistance, they also create “new sites of power” and

solidify existing ones (2001:671). As the previous section illustrated, participants

understood the gradations of colour and associated rankings within racial hierarchies.

Many endeavored to get closer to whiteness and to gain distance from blackness. This

section looks at the openings that a few participants provided to think about how people

of colour are invited into circuits of complicity against black people. I centralize anti-

black racism because several brown participants commented on both its visibility and

severity as well as how they understood themselves situated within racial hierarchies

against black people. While much of this dissertation looks at how racial literacies are

cultivated against a system that materializes women as racialized, this section investigates

racial differences within groups as being an important site from which to consider how

meanings are made of specific racial differences. Sometimes racial others provide

participants with an opportunity to have the “heat” of racism off them (interview with

Ayanna). Reflecting on the complexity of racial politics, Audre Lorde writes, “the

“woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by

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assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell

me that I had better learn from” (1984:127-128). There are places where our struggles

connect and places where they come apart. Theoretically, this section is grounded in

Lorde and Andrea Smith’s insight that racism is not a homogenous system that creates a

monolithic system of racial oppression (2006). Instead, it sets up racialized meanings and

hierarchies relationally which participants struggle to name and understand.

Neelam’s life, like others in this study, speaks to the complex conditions in which racial

literacy emerges, where relations within and between racialized communities are relevant

and pressing in the lives of the women interviewed. In Neelam’s case, while there is a

great deal of clarity about the white, non-white relationships, structured primarily by

contact with teachers, school officials and police officers, the terrain is much murkier

when it comes to relationships between racialized communities - the racial slurs, violence

and hostilities between the black and brown groups, for example – as well as the forms of

regulation she comes up against when it comes to gender and sexuality. Jasbir also

puzzles over the power relations between racialized communities in quite sustained ways

during our interview. She feels caught between the positions that on the one hand, people

of colour can’t be racist because the histories and relationships between communities of

colour in Canada are distinct from white-non-white relationships and on the other hand,

the position that racism is something that can be done to anyone under any condition.

Living in social worlds populated by many racialized people, Jasbir lingers on this

problem of how to think about these animosities between racialized people that occur

with such frequency in her life and work. When a white colleague at work chastises her

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for not keeping a good enough eye on her merchandise at a shoe store in her last retail job

because “those people steal,” and her South Asian colleague goes along, she finds it

disturbing and perplexing that some brown people agree with the assumption that black

customers need to be surveilled more closely in shopping malls because they are more

likely to shoplift. “I don’t know. It is, it is one of those things that I think about. I just

don’t know how to frame it cause I just know so many people who would be like no,

that’s not being racist. It’s just, there’s a different history so it’s something else but what

is it? I don’t know.” While Jasbir wonders about the explanations offered to her, she

demonstrates a great deal of clarity about how racism and whiteness structure Canadian

immigration policies and the foundations of curriculum and learning. On this, there is

little confusion.

In thinking about Neelam and Jasbir’s struggles to word and make sense of these power

relations, I was reminded of some of the human rights and equity work that I did at the

Toronto District School Board. One school in particular stands out, as the entirely white

administrative team called in my colleague and I to address the racism at the school. In

our conversations with school officials and in trying to understand the dynamics and

demographics of the school and neighbourhood, it became clear that racism was deployed

to mean the racial slurs and self-segregation between primarily black and brown middle

school students. This was the first of many such calls and concerns about racism being

about what racialized students are doing to each other in schools. Trying to take

seriously the behaviours and attitudes of these students alongside an almost all white

teaching population and curriculum was like trying to juggle complex understandings of

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power and history, particularly while insisting that whiteness was relevant in the school

conflict and therefore needed to be part of the intervention. It was also an important

lesson to me in the various ways that racism can be deployed, to draw attention to certain

relations of power, those between racialized people, while obfuscating others, whiteness,

systems of knowledge and the normalization of white staff teams and racialized student

populations.

Shani But these relationships between black and brown communities require more attention.

Describing herself as brown and Trini and living in an area with a high population of

black people and people of colour, Shani shares that the experience of “being lesser than”

binds colonized people together. Shortly after, she elaborates that the categories are not

so categorical and continues to break down and connect up men and women of colour

across and within class divides. Even the category women of colour, she tells me can be

further subdivided. “Some people might prefer me over a black woman,” she says.

When I ask her to tell me more, she shifts from looking back on her life as a child and

reflects on the current schooling experiences of her daughter. She describes the

neighbourhood school, populated mostly by racialized, working class people (and still a

mostly white teaching staff) and explains the differentiation that she sees happening in

the experience that she is having compared to that of a black parent and black student in

the same class and grade as her black and brown daughter. The school her daughter

attends is one where all day kindergarten, rather than a half-day program, for 4 year olds

is being piloted and her child is in one of these classes. When Shani goes to pick up her

daughter, she describes warm encounters with a teacher who shares some anecdotes about

her daughter’s day and a generally positive experience. She notices that another mom,

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who is black and Guyanese is getting a “very different reception” when she goes to pick

up her black son. “What’s going on here,” Shani wonders, “why am I getting treated a

little better. Is that because I’m brown and she’s black?” Even trying to account for

personality differences, as people of colour often do when noticing such things, Shani

explains that the Guyanese parent is lovely and much more “level headed” than she is.

But Shani understands that her brown body is more likely to be read as “nice” and so

whether the other parent is more amenable or not, her black body does not afford her

admission to “nice” without a lot of labour. These same distinctions, Shani suspects are

at play in what is happening to the black children, 4 year old black boys in particular, in

all day kindergartens.

Expecting children that young, many of whom come from economically poor homes

where the stress in their lives is often already elevated, to learn in crowded classrooms all

day is simply foolish, Shani tells me. Instead, there are a lot of kids “freaking out,”

“melting down” and being punished. The full day program as it is being rolled out, Shani

says, is only creating more stressful classroom environments for young children from

earlier ages. Rather than a place to encourage literacy and learning in their younger years

what Shani notices is that black boys are learning, from age 4 that “you’re a bad kid, you

can’t do school.” For parents, including herself who have access to daycare subsidies,

Shani explains that she has the option to pull her daughter out of the full day program and

she does because she sees that being in school all day is “stressing out” her daughter.

Other parents who do not have subsidies and cannot afford or arrange other daycare

options have no choice but to leave their 4 year olds in crowded classrooms.

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Other parents have started talking to Shani about their concerns and whether they lack the

language skills or cultural capital to advocate for their children (recall Neelam and others

from Chapter 4), “they feel insecure” in going to talk to school officials. The parents

have collectively started to think about how to respond to what they see happening to

their children but until then, Shani tells me that she is “straight up” with her child and the

other children. “Listen to me, nobody cares about you…if you don’t smarten up, these

teachers aren’t gonna care. It sounds a little harsh but I am (laugh). It’s just what you

have to do.” Reflecting on learning to survive racism, Audre Lorde writes that all

children should “be able to play at living for a little while.” For kids of colour, black

children in particular, “a piece of the price we paid for learning survival was our

childhood. We were never allowed to be children” (1984:171). At 4, as their interaction

with state schools grows from a half day to a full one, parents wonder how to keep their

children safe. How to keep the 4-year-old black child from turning into a hypervisible,

menacing boy that the school needs to discipline? Keeping them out of state schools or

prolonging their entry seems like the best way, but the best way is not affordable for most

parents.

In their scholarship, George Dei et al (1997) detail the very long tradition of black parent

and community organizing in the Ontario public school system in response to the

disproportionately high number of black students who are disengaged from or drop-out of

school. Acknowledging the problems of educational achievement for racialized youth in

general, they argue that specific attention must also be paid to black students because of

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the heightened risks they experience as black youth in Canadian schools (1997:28).85

Drawing together insights from ethnographic work with teachers, parents, advocates and

students who had dropped out or were at risk for doing so, Dei et al turn away from the

usual panoply of reasons for black underachievement - dysfunctional families, missing

fathers, cultures that don’t value schooling and difficult children among them. In its

place, they paint a disturbing picture of white knowledge, white teachers and pervasive

racist attitudes about the ability, intelligence and futures of black youth. Re-routing our

tendency to look for problems on the bodies of black youth, Dei et al train us instead to

see how systemic factors converge in classrooms and everyday encounters to make

schools dehumanizing spaces for black youth. They do not drop out. They are pushed

(1997:243). Shani’s observations turn us to the origins of some of these processes.

Lorde explains how difficult it can be “to stand still and to listen to another woman’s

voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one which I myself have contributed”

(1984:128). Shani describes watching the mother of a black boy with her “back up

against the wall,” already lamenting, “not my child.” Shani knows that while her

daughter is not safe in this system, what is happening to this parent and her child is not

the same thing. She doesn’t look away from the difference, nor does she happily accept

her place on the winning side of these racial distinctions. The differences that Shani

notices and the questions that she starts to ask contain within them the potential to notice

the specificities of anti-black racism and also how race, class and gender together create

the “menacing” and the “model” in relation to one another. As Shani’s daughter and her

                                                                                                               85 Also see Adjei and Agyepong 2010; James 2009 and Dei 1996 for elaboration of the academic and community responses to anti-black racism and the schooling experiences of black youth.

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classmates grow, what will their futures be in state schools? What place is Shani being

offered as the brown model minority mother? What work do we need to do to attend to

the futures of black boys and girls in state schooling?

Nimat Nimat too struggles with an education in racism that opens up onto so many complex

relationships and her more recent observations of how racism creates a system in which

people of colour are “played” off each other, is one which she also finds disturbing and

unable to shake. She notices, for example, that her hard work to advance equity in her

workplace, while not without costs and risks, is eventually rewarded, “I was benefitting,

right, like I was getting promoted. My work was getting recognized. I was respected so

when I spoke and named issues, by that point, people did listen. I could have hard

conversations with people and I could push around issues, all kinds of equity issues.”

However, Nimat also starts to observe that not all of her racialized colleagues are equally

rewarded or taken seriously. In fact, many of them are dismissed. Her observations are

not about random rankings and racial hierarchies but about how she is positioned in

relation to black women, in particular. Nimat observes how the work of black women is

critiqued through supposedly neutral markers, such as performance reviews and their

work is found to be wanting but much like the application of discipline in schools, Nimat

has seen the inconsistencies in measuring workplace output. Growing up in middle class

white environments, Nimat is aware that she is able to make white people feel

comfortable and she worries that it is this skill and capital that is being rewarded, even as

she witnesses the harsh consequences for co-workers not equipped with or willing to use

these skills. Moving from understanding how racism has cast its difficult consequences

in her own life, Nimat is increasingly concerned about how in having her around,

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organizations and people are “able to manage their own racism,” they are able to use

Nimat’s presence as evidence of their anti-racist efforts and commitments:

One of the things that I’m interested in right now is how do we not, how do people of colour not participate in, whether again actively, passively, in the marginalization of other people of colour so how do we not become agents in a racist system, so agents of that racism, you know or conduits to it? I’m trying to understand that and it’s my new learning now or my new process that I need to go through and cry about and figure out how not to be that agent, even though I thought that I had positioned myself in a way of, as not that, you know or tried not to be that.

As she talks, Nimat cries and when I ask her about the tears, she describes how “yucky”

these recent realizations have been to her. “I feel like I need to have a strategy, I feel like

I need to learn how to navigate this,” she explains.

Certain relations of power are more visible in our lives. The people who love and hurt us,

for example, our friends and neighbours, our teachers and siblings, our places of worship

and work. Others are more difficult to spot unless we are given the tools to see them, to

make them visible. They are like Toni Morrison’s fish bowl, it is easy to overlook but it

is the thing that structures and contains the life of the fish (1993:17). In his book The

Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad illuminates some of the structures that encourage

South Asian immigrants in the United States to adopt and reproduce anti-black racism.

Finding ourselves “forced to live” race (Prashad 2000:ix), Prashad explains the ways in

which South Asians are offered a place higher up than blacks in U.S. racial formation and

that such a position can be quite promising “to a migrant in search of some

accommodation in a racist polity” (2000:xi). As he explains, the seemingly natural

success of South Asians, always articulated in contradistinction to the inability of

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working class black Americans to achieve for themselves some material success, is the

result of immigration policies through which highly educated Indians, most with

advanced degrees, immigrated to the US (2000:4). In Canada, the introduction of the

1971 Multiculturalism Policy with its move away from race to education and occupation

as selection criteria also created a pathway for highly educated professionals to enter

Canada (Coloma 2013:580). Nimat’s parents were part of this group. Prashad and

Coloma on whom I draw in the Canadian context, aim to denaturalize and trace state

practices which have created favourable immigration outcomes for certain immigrants.

But to return to Prashad, he also wants South Asian communities to take seriously the

ways in which our model minority status is “hitched” to troubling racial projects

(2000:9). Tracing circuits of imperial and domestic racism, immigration and global

capitalism, Prashad illuminates the webs of power and historical conditions which

produce South Asians and the conditions of their lives and settlement in the United States

in particular ways. Despite the incentives to participate in the reproduction of racist and

capitalist hierarchies, Prashad too excavates lesser known or certainly lesser mobilized

histories of “social and political justice” (2000:127), such as those that bring together

anti-colonial and black liberation struggles. These are also inheritances of history.

Prashad, like Himani Bannerji (2000:48-49), also attends to how racism creates the

conditions for engagements away from public institutions and civil society and a “retreat

into the home” (2000:104), with narratives of tradition and history that fossilize culture

and community, and regulate women, sexuality and family in concerning and

conservative ways.

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I interject Prashad here for a number of reasons. He insists on the unevenness of white

supremacy and an analysis of it in conjunction with capitalism, patriarchy, history,

migration and imperial aspirations, in this case through a look at the complicities of South

Asians in anti-black racism. As Andrea Smith reminds us, racism does not only generate

conditions of oppression that are shared, it also invites us to be “complicit in the

victimization of others” (2006:69). More specifically, she explains that the anti-

blackness embedded in white supremacy offers people of colour who are not black the

opportunity to not be at the “bottom of the racial hierarchy” (Smith 2006:67). Insisting

on the need to take black racial formation seriously, Jared Sexton expounds that while

“black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation…it does relate

to the totality” (2010:48). By obscuring this, he warns us, what we lose is a full

understanding of the reality of black struggle and suffering (2010:48). Nimat starts to

sniff out some of these hierarchical logics. Whether she will work to develop an anti-

racist politics that not only works for her but that also insists on the centrality of

addressing anti-black racism is not yet evident at the interview’s end but Nimat is

significant in inviting us to reflect on these questions. As Avtar Brah insists, all

invocations of a “we” conceal differentiations that matter a great deal (1996:184). Like

Smith, she flags the power differentials across marginalized groups that are constructed in

relation to one another. These lateral relationships she argues, need to be accounted for

“with reference to the main dominant group” (Brah 1996:189). The necessity and the

complication of understanding relational circuits of power is that they are made harder to

see when we feel so firmly contained and constrained in our own. While this dissertation

foregrounds the relationships between white and non-white communities and its

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consequences, in Chapter 6 and the conclusion, I return to reflect more on these lateral

relationships in anti-racist politics and research.

The voices that I have centred in this section are the voices of different brown women –

Neelam, Jasbir, Nimat and Shani – and their reflections on anti-black racism and how to

think about our differential rankings within racial hierarchies. What I don’t have are the

voices of black women reflecting on this process. In my interview with Grace, I asked

her about her observations of racism and its differences. How, for example, might she, a

black woman, and I, a brown woman, experience racism differently? Grace had the

following response, “(sigh) I mean racism is racism really (laugh), right? An assault is an

assault no matter if you’re East Indian, if you’re black, you know (laugh), so that’s what I

feel.” The black women in this study did not share with me the ways that brown and

other women of colour may have betrayed them. I can only speculate on why this might

be the case. So few of these women had any public spaces in which to discuss racism.

As many expressed in the interview, the conversation that they had with me was often the

longest continuous conversation that they had about racism and its effects in their lives.

While some of the participants may have felt or assumed a sense of racial solidarity with

me, others may have been more reluctant to disturb the category “woman of colour” with

me in the room.86

                                                                                                               86 It is also important to point out, that in most cases, I didn’t ask questions that might elicit these kinds of responses. Jared Sexton (2010) argues that the term people of colour institutionalizes a colour blindness within it that “misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy” (2010:48). Starting points have a lot to do with where we end up. By making my starting point for analysis “people of colour” and then “women of colour,” the question that I am left to consider is how I have shaped these findings not only to present back on women of colour but to produce them as a category. I circle back to this in the conclusion where I also reflect on new or different starting points in future work.

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The feminist lessons of wishing for a global sisterhood instead of struggling for a

feminist solidarity in which patriarchy is unevenly lived, amplified and offset, are

important cautionary reminders for critical race struggles that also invested in stories of

sameness. Smith urges us to work towards a resistance and accountability that do not

“inadvertently keep the system in place for us all” (2006:69). The dilemma that some of

the women in the study are faced with is that which Prashad and Smith, in their own

ways, ask us to pause and consider, the uses to which brown and other racialized

communities are put in the consolidation of racism against blacks. It is a growing and

distressing awareness with which Nimat is faced and her family migration does indeed fit

the pattern of the professional class that Prashad references, though in a Canadian

context. The participants also help us to appreciate that the configurations of power

resulting from racism are many and the ways in which we are encouraged to fight for a

place in a “racist land” are disturbing (Prashad 2000:128). In Nimat’s case, she also

opens up a set of questions about how different racial differences are regulated, even

invited in, under certain conditions - people of colour who are palatable, even a few who

speak the language of anti-racism but not too many, not certain ones and certainly not at

once within the same place.

As Goldberg cautions, the incorporation of difference, not its expulsion is also a defining

feature and practice of racial governance (1993:188). Of course whether the model

minority is true or not or as Prashad demonstrates, how it is a deliberate creation of

professional, middle class migration at a specific historical moment, it is productive. It

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disciplines us all in a variety of ways. It has come to regulate and be used as a weapon

not only against working class blacks, but also against more recently arrived immigrants

or those whose histories of arrival are not from urban centres, with recognized degrees

but agricultural workers, refugees, working class people or well educated professionals

who can not work in their professions due to lack of accreditation and recognition of their

schooling and work experiences. For the women of colour whose family migration

patterns fit within this latter group, their inability to live up to the model minority of a

moneyed middle class is also relentless, “their lives are not available inside the

stereotype” (Prashad 2012:95). Tracing the continuities and contingencies of racial

formations in Canada at various critical junctures of nation building, Jenny Burman also

argues that “‘Brown’ in Canada is a strategic discourse that is mobilized in different ways

at different moments in time; it shapeshifts to identity ‘model minorities’ as well as

suspect residents” (2010:201). As the women in this study make clear, model minority

discourses do not do away with the racist hostilities and structural forms of regulation and

surveillance that they endure. The gap is large between the promise of the category and

how it is inhabited.

My work attempts to capture a range of engagements with racism but it is not an effort to

rescue people of colour from the real and material ways that we sometimes take

advantage of small spaces within otherwise oppressive systems to get some relief.

Keeping in mind Andrea Smith’s cautions about the “separate and distinct, but still

interrelated logics” of white supremacy (2006:67), Alexander helpfully adds, “both

complicity and vigilance are learned in this complicated process of figuring out who we

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are and who we wish to become” (2005:272). It has been important to me to maintain

clarity around the differential impacts of and invitations into whiteness. It is these

differentiations and specificities that I attempt to centre, while not losing sight of the

racial hierarchies into which they are folded. At the same time, I reject claims of

compensatory violence and argue that whiteness is a project that requires a great deal of

violence on the part of all of us who are invited into it on highly specific terms (Razack

2004:115). Focusing on the complicity of people of colour can obfuscate this much more

prevalent racial violence, the most powerful of which is embedded in and managed by

state practices (Hage 2000:69). In focusing only on individual narratives, we can easily

overlook the structuring violence and beneficiaries of white supremacy, often beyond the

narrative but foundational to it. It has been a challenge to theorize and write in such a

way that our “bargain[s] with racism” (Puar 1996:132) not be focused on to the exclusion

of what enables them and what they accomplish in relation to racial hierarchies. I am

very mindful of the need to write against dominant tendencies that frame racism as

individual conflict or difference without power (Goldberg 2002:180; Farley 1997:475),

something that equally implicates us all. I suggest a more careful and nuanced analysis

of racialized people’s lives that does not confirm or collude with such prevalent and

dominant interpretations but puts forward the position that while we may all be

implicated by race and its operation, we are no means equally implicated or impacted. In

short, I run the risk that white supremacy becomes incidental or accidental in our lives

and social structures.

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A very small number of women in this study reference racism only in individual acts of

discrimination in which we can all equally participate. Evacuated in such analyses are

the centrality of histories of oppression and their enduring legacies. Education to combat

stereotypes, openness and more contact with each other become the benign prescriptions

to remedy the institutionalization of racial harm and injury. But thinking about racism

simply as a form of individual ignorance or problem of misinformation doesn’t stop the

harsh and disproportionate forms of discipline to which racialized students are subject in

schools, the police violence in their communities, the concentration of racialized peoples

in poor housing and low paying, precarious employment or their increasing entrance into

Canada as temporary migrant workers with severely circumscribed rights. Like

Prashad’s model minorities as simply being the outcome of hard working and industrious

immigrants, these distributions of privilege and opportunity also become naturalized or

we are simply taught not to notice. Without being taught these histories, without

becoming literate in their complex and multivalent legacies, it is not at all surprising that

for some people, it is the racial slur, joke or shove that are the only remaining vestiges of

racism. And while there was no shortage of physical violence and intimidation recounted

in the interviews, it was still on this basis alone that for some, racism registered as a

concern.

Conclusion While much of this dissertation engages centrally with the dispossession and isolation

through which white supremacy is felt and lived, this chapter explores the “painful fault

lines of homophobia, culture and class within different communities of belonging”

(Alexander 2005:279). I have tried to understand the complex lives, desires and betrayals

that the women of colour shared in this chapter. They instruct us on what it means to

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search and struggle for forms of belonging and community that are hard to come by. We

are able to apprehend again some of the tensions and contradictions of racial literacy

under pressure from neoliberal forms of understanding oppression and its remedies. So

often, participants were caught between feelings and experiences that materialize

oppression in their daily lives and “post” and “neo” horizons that evacuate collective

histories, interventions and possibilities. Racism and oppression continue to collectivize

punishment but demand individualized responses to it.

I was, however, struck by more expansive ways to create forms of life and ways of being

not governed so heavily by the logics of individualism. In discarded corners of life,

religion and spirituality, learning and love, exceed perhaps both neoliberal (Duggan

2003:87) and progressive visions of life. Reflecting on the pain of colonial violence and

displacement, M. Jacqui Alexander remarks on the extent to which anti-colonial and

other progressive movements have not adequately understood the desire for belonging,

nor have we “made ample political room for it” (2005:281). I have tried to make some

room for these pressing concerns that are perhaps not seen to be properly political - of

love, friendship, acceptance and the search for communities of belonging. But these

desires were accompanied by the grief of not finding belonging for which the women had

so desperately longed and so I also tried to preserve space for sobbing, regret, and

wondering out loud about some of the compromises, trade offs, conditions and

complicities of being in and outside various communities.

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As Jasbir and other women in this study make clear, they are searching for a language to

think about different registers of power and their consequences simultaneously. For

racialized people living, working and going to school in places where much of their direct

relationships and engagements are with other racialized people and state structures appear

more opaque or difficult to decipher or where the state works to present itself as a

relatively benign adjudicator of rights, it is understandable that sorting through these

relations of power is a major concern and curiosity. Neelam’s observations of police

violence against racialized youth or the participation of racialized youth in homophobic

violence serve as important reminders that oppression does not necessarily translate into

solidarity or social justice alliances, it can just as easily generate or solidify racial and

other animosities. Drawing on the work of Philomena Essed, Frantz Fanon and Albert

Memmi, France Winndance Twine argues that “racial subordination does not

mechanistically generate a critical stance vis-à-vis racism any more than colonialism

created anticolonial subjectivities” (2000:15). Progressive politics and alignments are an

outcome of struggles and investments in community, not generated solely on the basis of

experience or identities. These participants also remind us that there is no place outside

of racial histories and hierarchies. Like Prashad, they ask us to find ourselves in racially

marked terrains and places and to think carefully and analytically about the distinctions

that racism sometimes affords. It is not an absolutely oppressive system; it is constantly

made and remade, amplified and modified in relation to other systems of structural

oppression. But the contestation over what racism is, does or can mean, the gap

between stereotypes and enduring violent histories speaks to much larger investments in

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keeping intact systems of racial privilege and entitlement, making it more difficult for

them to be spoken and heard, engaged and interrupted in meaningful ways.

We also see the ongoing relevance of interlocking analyses of oppression that bring

together queer of colour theorizing, critical race and feminist analytics. As women of

colour feminisms long ago illuminated, working from people’s lives and struggles

requires an “analytical agility” (Alexander 2005:10) that is oblivious to disciplinary

constraints or requirements. The oppressions together create the stuff of life and our

meaning making apparatus. There is a kid being shoved into a locker, trying not to be

that kid or trying to secretly survive as that kid and feeling like no place will ever be okay

for your brown or black body. There is no concern here for where critical race ends and

queer begins. This presented its own set of challenges in terms of the many unexpected

directions in which the women who participated in this research insisted that I go.

However, it certainly enriched my own understanding of processes of racial formation

and its articulations and also opened up onto many discomforting yet pressing challenges

in writing this work. Most significantly, I have been reminded that in trying to distill

racism and racial literacies, I run the risk of flattening out feminist and queer

complexities to which I remain committed. Gopinath discusses the “dangers of

privileging antiracism as a singular political project” (2005:46) and I take her caution

seriously. This chapter has been an effort to write what the women know and live in their

lives, that no project committed to racial justice or the cultivation of racial literacies can

be effective without taking seriously the complex and interlocking power relations that

animate their lives.

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Finally, an interlocking analysis does more than help us to precisely analyze the workings

of power. It reminds us that there can be no racial justice without gender and sexual

liberation. By maintaining a focus on political horizons that are more expansive but also

at times, more strategically narrow, we can glean important lessons from across a range

of social justice movements. It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that marginalized

others are unequivocally denied access to corridors of power. But “incorporation,”

Roderick A. Ferguson argues “has always been a reason for meditation, scrutiny and

awareness” (2012:40). We are variously invited into white supremacy, heteropatriarchy

and other forms of domination and we are right to cultivate vigilance towards such

invitations even while we long for some of the entitlements and protections they purport

to offer.

 

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Chapter 6: Living the Nation  In keeping with the larger preoccupation of this dissertation, this chapter investigates how

racial literacies are forged within a specifically Canadian national context. An “education

in racism” (Cheng 2001:19), it turned out, was also an education in place, in Canada. On

the question of national identity, for most participants, experiences of racial exclusion

were part of the equation of sorting through, provisionally embracing, critiquing or

rejecting national identity as part of their own understandings of themselves and their

place within the nation. In the interviews, reflections about race quickly slid to nation

and back again and in a few cases, also between multiple national formations and more

localized city spaces.87 Like encounters with racism, national identity was made, revised

and undone in everyday life and shaped relationally through such encounters. While

most participants were suspicious and critical about a national project that excluded them

in so many ways, it would be an oversimplification to link their analysis with a clear

politics of repudiating the nation. Canadian national mythologies were also productive in

displacing an analysis of racism and calling people of colour into more palatable

multicultural politics. Writing from an American context, Inderpal Grewal argues that

state multiculturalism produces subjects who both identify with and struggle against the

                                                                                                               87 Participants understand and live the distinctions between formal citizenship rights conferred by the state and their national identity or sense of belonging, configured through what they learn about Canada, their everyday interactions and how they are perceived. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan provide a clear and useful definition: “A state can be seen as the political and bureaucratic institutions, practices, and policies that govern a given territory and population. A nation implies a community of people who are believed to be or believe themselves to be similar or connected by a common identity” (2006:151). Cynthia Enloe adds that people who consider themselves as part of a nation believe that “they have been shaped by a common past and are destined to share a common future” (2006:222). In Benedict Anderson’s often-cited definition, a nation is an “imagined political community” (1983:6). Throughout the chapter, I explore the interface of participants’ lives with the nation and put these encounters in conversation with scholars who investigate questions of race and nation. What becomes clear is that having access to formal citizenship rights does not ensure that the rights can be equally accessed or that national belonging follows.

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nation’s “affirmations of white supremacy” (2005:200). As was the case in earlier

chapters, here too nationalist exclusions and provisional inclusions are productive of

different orientations to race, nation and in the second section of this chapter, white

settler colonialism. Quite often the desire for security and belonging was firmly tethered

to national identity.

In the first part of this chapter, I explore reflections about citizenship and national

belonging through the narratives of Salimah, Neelam, Dhanya and Usha. I provide small

vignettes of each of them followed by a discussion of the salient issues that their

narratives bring up, individually and collectively. Drawing primarily on feminist critical

race scholarship about race and nation (Thobani 2007; Jiwani 2006; Razack 2002;

Ahmed 2000; Bannerji 2000; Essed 1991), I explore the conditions that make it

increasingly difficult for racialized people to access a robust and public vocabulary to

articulate their experiences of racial injury and the social organization of racism. Canada

is a place where people of colour are forcefully persuaded to forget racism. It is not

intelligible as a contemporary Canadian phenomenon and when racism is admitted, it is

done so narrowly, as carefully contained historical footnotes to the nation. Like all

things, participants engage differently with multicultural Canada. For some, the

“racialized structure of citizenship” (Razack 2002:5) is incredibly clear and their

strategies of national affiliation or distance are shaped in response to racial exclusions.

Despite the formal citizenship to which they could all lay claim, their right to belong is

endlessly in question and often under attack.

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The second part of this chapter hinges on a question and absence. Here I nuance

participants’ discussions of nation through an analysis of the relationships of people of

colour to settler colonial practices in Canada.88 I continue building on the important

insights of feminist critical race and Native feminist scholars (Simpson and Smith 2014;

Tuck and Yang 2012; Amadahy and Lawrence 2010; Lawrence and Dua 2005) in relation

to both the absence of and openings provided by Ayanna and Nur to think about these

historical and contemporary legacies. When I asked participants explicitly about their

relationship to Canada, experiences and analyses of the nation, it was precisely the

erasure of white settler colonialism that, while not surprising, was certainly telling. I pay

attention to these gaps and inquire about what they might reveal about the storying of the

nation and the schooling of people of colour within this national landscape. The question

of how to take up something that is so often missing or barely there has been a challenge

but I am persuaded by the need to investigate the “primacy of settler colonialism as a

logic that structures the world for everyone” (Simpson and Smith 2014:13), however

unacknowledged. At times I undertake lengthy engagements with the issue of land and

settlement, both historically and in contemporary Canada, and its place within critical

race frameworks that appear to be disarticulated from participants’ narratives. In doing

so, I argue that the effacing of settler colonial violence in the recountings of most of the

women of colour be thought of not only as individual complicities but collectively and

                                                                                                               88 By white settler colonialism, I mean a society that is “established by Europeans on non-European soil. Its origins like in the dispossession and near extermination of Indigenous populations by the conquering Europeans” (Razack 2002:1; also see Cannon and Sunseri 2011). In order to establish and maintain settler societies, settlers and their descendants “must remain politically dominant over natives” (Weitzer 1990:25). Multiple strategies through which occupation of land by white Europeans and European domination was secured, some of which continue today, include: open warfare, chemical and germ warfare, trade dependency, forced removal from land, legal administration, displacement through adoption and residential schools, sexual violence, and the regulation of Indigenous identities (Lawrence 2004:6; also see Smith 2005; Churchill 2004; Lawrence 2002; Mawani 2002; Razack 2002; Weitzer 1990).

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indeed nationally in terms of how colonial violence works to disappear itself or is placed

in the past, as an historical event to some within the national landscape. Disappearing is

precisely how settler colonial violence works.

But there are not only absences and gaps; though they are few, there are also productive

and circumspect openings. I pry these open and use them to think about multiple

historical and contemporary displacements, migrations and entanglements together. To

“thread our way through the complexities of power relations” is no simple task, as

Sherene Razack reminds us (1998:22). I turn to Razack’s (2002) analysis of white settler

colonialism in Canada and her elaboration of white settler mythologies as important

anchors in this chapter. They help me to maintain a clear focus on the differential ways

that Aboriginal peoples89 and people of colour are written in and out of the national

project in order to secure white claims to the land and entitlements of citizenship (2002:1-

5). In taking up the work of Elizabeth Povinelli, Sneja Gunew compellingly argues that

multicultural states fail both Indigenous and multicultural subjects (2004: 44). However,

the specific ways that these failures are lived, as well as efforts that are made to mitigate

their uneven effects, require much attention. In making claims to the nation, I consider

the varied involvement of racialized people in ongoing white settler colonial projects.                                                                                                                89 I use the terms Native, Indigenous, First Peoples or Aboriginal to collectively reference the original people of North America and their descendants. I use the term “Indian” only to describe government legislation or governance bodies as defined by the Indian Act. This act refers to a body of laws that govern and regulate Indigenous life and peoples in Canada, including the classification of status Indians, Metis and Inuit peoples (Lawrence 2004:25-26). By tracing the governance of Indigenous identities and resistance and opposition to these practices, Bonita Lawrence points out what is at stake in being counted as “Indian” or not is about access to territory and the fracturing of families and communities through legislative means. Despite the constructed nature of “Indian” status, its importance as a legal category and the varied and contested meanings that it has come to have for both status and non-status “Indians,” it has also shaped conditions for resistance to ongoing colonial encroachment (Lawrence 2004:230). For more on the complexity of terminology and its colonial dimensions and legacies, also see Cannon and Sunseri 2011 and Alfred 1999.

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This chapter refocuses the question of racial literacy to ask about the limits of our

literacies and what gets bracketed off when we fail to see across multiple oppressions or

to ask more uncomfortable questions about our own entanglements in and distancing

from struggles which are seen not to be “our” own. By paying attention to the ways in

which racial literacies are formed within a white settler project, as well as the reshaping

of white settler relations in the context of racialized populations, this chapter amplifies

perspectives for thinking about potential solidarities between Indigenous and racialized

groups as well as the uneven terrain of racial hierarchies and colonial consolidation,

which racialized populations are invited to reproduce.90 More specifically, the analysis

offered here complicates and expands the critical race scholarship on which I draw so

extensively throughout this dissertation in ways that I hope will be productively

unsettling.

National Belongings and Evictions

Salimah When I ask Salimah about how racism appeared in her life, she explains that it is through

her experience as a practicing Muslim that racism has been most pronounced. As the

interview continues, it becomes clearer that Salimah limits her analysis of racism to her

experiences of wearing the headscarf, a decision she recounts making in grade ten, at a

high school with a primarily white student population. When I ask her about what

wearing the headscarf means to her, she describes it as a cultural practice and when I ask

                                                                                                               90 My use of the term Indigenous, separated out from racialized people is not meant to suggest that Indigenous peoples are not deeply affected by racist practices. Rather it is to maintain clarity on the differential impacts of white settler colonialism and racism on Aboriginal peoples and people of colour. The former are members of sovereign nations. As I discuss in the second half of this chapter, to discuss Indigenous peoples without attention to these distinctions is to obfuscate the white settler colonial project.

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her to say more, she simply reiterates that it is more cultural than religious but provides

no further elaboration.

Prior to wearing the headscarf, Salimah describes a white school environment, to which

she had learned to “adjust.” After wearing the headscarf, she describes an increasingly

hostile and isolating environment at school which includes being excluded from a peer

group to which she formerly belonged, no longer being invited to parties or to “hang out,”

being excluded from social conversations and being subjected to relentless questions

about why she is wearing the headscarf and its meanings, not to mention an endless

barrage of “rude” comments. She reflects that the headscarf functions to make her an

object of fear, danger and difference – “I’m like an alien to them.” The hostility becomes

so debilitating that Salimah decides to transfer to what she describes as a more

multicultural school where she is able to find a place within a peer group with similar

cultural and religious backgrounds. With other Pakistani and Muslim students, Salimah

is able to gain more social acceptance. Salimah locates the responsibility to manage the

racism she experiences with herself, reflecting that if she was more extroverted, she could

have “adjusted” to everyone around her and remained in the school to “fight it”, instead

of transferring. As she puts it, because of the way people responded to her when wearing

the headscarf, “I myself felt like an outsider so I felt like other people saw me like that as

well.” She hesitates in using the word white in interviews and when I ask her if it is

awkward to use the term she finds that, yes it is, “I keep referring to them (white people)

like that. I feel like that, okay, this is me, this is you, like we’re all people. I know I

shouldn’t be doing that (laugh).”

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The interview is clearly stressful for Salimah and like many of the other interviews, I

sense from the shifts in her voice, hesitations and eyes welling up with tears, the

difficulty of returning to this time in her life. When I ask her about this, she discloses

that this is the first time that she has discussed these experiences with anyone outside of

her family and despite the difficulty of doing so, she thinks it’s important that these

experiences be noticed, documented and researched. At the same time, Salimah insists

that for her personally, it’s necessary to move on from remembering these incidents.

Reflecting on both the process of being interviewed and her need to move on, Salimah

states: “it’s kind of like, it’s emotionally hard. Like at one point, I just want to, kind of

like, you know, break down and cry but like, I’m over it. It’s taken time but I’ve put it

back so I don’t want to think about it over and over again. I’m just gonna talk to you and

then it’s gonna be back where it was before. You have to start fresh and you have to

build yourself again so I guess that’s what I’m trying to do.” Salimah speaks with a great

deal of courage about living daily with the effects of being “broken” by the racism she

experienced, becoming quiet and withdrawn and having to rebuild her self-esteem and

confidence. While she does wear the headscarf for the first couple of months of her first

year at university, she continues to feel anxiety “that maybe I’m gonna go through that

again so I just stopped wearing it.” The remnants of her earlier experiences result in her

decision not to wear the headscarf during most of her university years because of her fear

that she might confront similar forms of racism. The earlier meaning she makes of her

experience also results in her not publicly discussing racism or her encounters with it,

emphasizing once more the urgency to move on. It’s important, she argues, to “put that

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stuff away behind you and try to move on. You tend to hold onto good memories. You

don’t want to hold onto stuff that’s hurt you, you know cause it’s been so tormenting for

yourself.”

Towards the end of the interview, I ask Salimah about her university and she describes it

as very racially diverse in terms of the student population but she also adds that most of

the professors are white. When I ask her how she understands this racial discrepancy

between the students and faculty, she reflects that whites are “the native descendants of

here so we still have that little part of us that’s like okay they’re above us because they’re

Canadian, they’re fully Canadian.” I probe further to ask her if she and I could be fully

Canadian, even if we wanted to be and she responds, “I don’t know if we can be fully

Canadian. If we try, we can try, but I don’t know if they can see.” Elaborating on what it

would mean to try to be more or fully Canadian, Salimah provides the following

explication:

I guess try doing what you want, for example, I want to do law. Pursuing your dreams and trying to get up there where it’s like, you know, all those people are. I guess you can do that and I guess most people do step off like they’re you know okay we’re done university it’s not like you know we can be the CEOs of this company you know cause they’re not going to give us preference anyways so I guess that’s where they stop. And I feel like we should push and we should try to get there and a lot of people have. I’m not saying they haven’t but a lot of people like uh from different minorities that have been successful so I guess it’s just the fact of putting yourself up there. I guess you just have to be really, really strong and stand up for who you are cause obviously you can’t change yourself so, yeah. It takes a lot of courage and confidence to do that and I admire people who can actually, you know, stand up for themselves like that.

One of Salimah’s parting thoughts in the interview is that over time, she herself is

working to be such a person.

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Neelam Neelam describes not feeling connected to a homeland due to civil war and a sense of

displacement as a minority in her birth country, Sri Lanka. Sensing that she can’t belong

there, she reflects on what it means to come to Canada:

and then you come here and you try to look for inclusion but you know, you’re still, you still feel indebted to this country cause you feel like, I still feel like you know they let you in here and you know it’s about assimilation and it’s about (pause) you know but yet you still don’t feel completely at home here because no one says to you oh, you know you’re Canadian, like they still ask you where are you from (hm)? So it’s yeah I’ve always felt, you know (pause) uhm yeah I’ve always felt like, as a refugee or as a displaced person, you uhm (pause) yeah I’ve always felt like it’s no, no sense of belonging, I guess, yeah.91

When I ask Neelam about whether she thinks of herself as Canadian, she responds that

she does now but also traces an earlier time when she categorically refused identifying as

Canadian. She recalls being in middle school and along with five other kids, she went on

an “anthem strike” where they declared themselves not Canadian and as a result of this

declaration, they argued that they shouldn’t be required to sing the national anthem.

Neelam recalls ‘growing out of this’ in high school when she wondered to herself, “well

what other anthem are you gonna sing?” She elaborates that it has taken a long time for

her to “feel Canadian” but then she hesitates and rephrases, “I don’t know what it is to

feel Canadian” but to accept herself as Canadian and to identify as a “proud Canadian.”

When I ask her to give words to the process of coming to this place, she traces it to her

later university years and powerfully articulates:

you know it had a lot to do with anger, letting go of the feeling of difference, letting go, letting go of, you know (pause), letting go of the past that may have conditioned me and kind of understanding that not everything is you against (pause) the world. It was a lot of anger that I had to let go, I had to stop being, cause I was a very angry person. I had to let go of being very angry and I had to

                                                                                                               91 As a reminder, bolded words from the interview transcript reflect words or phrases that were distinctively emphasized by participants.

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stop othering myself like I had to stop feeling so different, like and understand that I’m in a place where if I choose to want to belong there are, there are people who are willing to accept me and allow me to belong in whichever way I want to belong.

When I probe the reasons for her anger, Neelam responds that they aren’t entirely clear to

her but she does know that she was “very angry, very angry” and “very negative.” She

elaborates needing to let go of the feeling that life was always harder for her and “easier

for the white girl (laugh)” and understand that “it’s harder for everybody and it’s not just

me.” As she elaborates:

I really needed to stop doing that, I needed to stop feeling like everything is about race because I, there was a point in my life where I felt everything is about race and sometimes I still do and I have to, I catch myself doing it and it’s like okay stop (laugh). Cause if I do that to myself and maybe it is about race for everybody else but if I continue to do that to myself I feel like I’ll, I’ll just stay stuck in that, in that place and I didn’t like the place I was stuck in uhm so it felt good to work hard at getting out of that so I still find myself working with it, like I still you know find myself aware of my dark skin or aware of, you know, my non-whiteness.

Dhanya Dhanya also rejects thinking of herself as Canadian and when I ask her why, she puts it

quite bluntly, “I feel like Canadians are white people, like, as simple as that.” She also

recounts her own ambivalences around whether she wants to or even can be seen to be

Canadian and connects up her affective displacement with larger national exclusions,

including the backlash against the arrival of Tamil asylum seekers in 2010 near Victoria,

British Columbia. The political response to the refugee arrival included security and

terrorist discourses intermingled with more popular responses of “bogus” refugee

claimants attempting to take advantage of Canadian generosity.92 When I ask her to

                                                                                                               92For background, see the following. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/848212--tamil-asylum-seekers-spark-canadian-vitriol-anger;

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elaborate on her own entry into and responses to these larger events in relation to her own

struggles with national identity, Dhanya has the following response:

The whole asylum seekers issue has completely reaffirmed me not being Canadian or made to feel that I’m not Canadian. I don’t feel like I belong here, I don’t really know where I belong. I’ll read a lot of those comments on the newspaper posts and they’ll constantly be saying, oh these immigrants, they’re all gonna use our system like it still bothers me, you know and it still makes me feel like these people don’t think that I belong here, you know or my people don’t belong here and its like this complete erasure of the history of this place. Like let’s not forget that a hundred years ago, there were Sikh men who were trying to come and so just feeling like I’m an outsider, like I don’t belong, right, cause people are surprised that I speak the way that I speak. You know when, like let’s say I’m calling the Internet company, wondering what’s going on, cause when my Internet wasn’t working a while ago and so like he was struggling with pronouncing my name and then I corrected him and it’s like, oooohhhhhh (in surprised voice) and I was like what, you know and he’s just like, oh I’m just surprised because you sound uhm like you’ve been here for a long time and I was like, what does that have to do with my Internet, you know? And like just those like little tidbits of people being surprised or people assuming that I speak a certain way or would act a certain way, like it, it kind of makes me think, okay so you don’t think I belong or I don’t belong.

When I press her on what it means to not belong, Dhanya opens up her own ambivalence

about both the pull of wanting “to feel like we belong to something of that sort” but also

questioning and reflecting “do I wanna belong to this, I don’t know like in the sense of

like this Canadian nation thing like I don’t know if I wanna belong to that or on what

terms I wanna belong to that or (pause), I don’t know.” She also reflects on the spaces of

belonging that are offered up, the “I wanna get to know you in a multicultural kind of

way” that is a “nod to diversity,” through cultural forms of difference such as “ethnic

food” or a “pretty sari.” Dhanya elaborates that this multicultural way of belonging has

clear limits: “They only want to know you when ‘you’re not causing me trouble,’ like

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/07/canada-tamil-refugees-racism-debate; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/29/canada-accused-tamil-asylum-prisoners; http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=2167

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especially and I was thinking about that after the Tamil protests, like they only wanna

know us when we’re not out demanding certain things, rights.”

Usha Finally, there is Usha who, much like Neelam in her earlier years, categorically refuses

Canadian as a way to understand herself. She elaborates that while she benefits from a

Canadian passport and associated privileges, she is not Canadian and has “never”

identified as Canadian. From her perspective, to be Canadian is associated with “being

white and being privileged,” things to which she doesn’t relate. She also observes that

Canadian is not the answer sought when people ask her where she is from, “they weren’t

looking for that either right. They don’t want you to say you’re Canadian. I’m from

Canada (laugh), they’re looking for something else and I wasn’t looking to say that I was

from Canada or that I was Canadian.” Usha juxtaposes her own navigations with that of

her younger brother, who is thirteen. It is incredibly unsettling to Usha is that her

younger brother seems to wholeheartedly embrace a Canadian identity by adopting

certain culturally white practices (Hage 2000). She describes how strange it is that “some

racialized people have been co-opted into thinking that they’re also white cause they live

in a white culture and (pause) they in some ways have like certain racist ideals about

other people that are also coloured.” When I ask her what she means, she explains that

she overheard her brother having a conversation with his best friend who is black, most

of his friends are racialized, about a student who just arrived at their school from Africa

(country not specified), through demeaning deployments of race and culture. She

reprimands her brother but gathers that this is not the first such conversation that has

taken place and she worries that it won’t be the last. Usha reflects at some length on her

brother’s complicity in harming other racialized children, in this case, a child newly

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arrived to Canada. Her worry takes her back to her own experience of arrival as a young

child and she wonders, “wow like maybe that’s how they thought of me, maybe I was

that new kid,” a child from Guyana with a “very thick accent” and not yet having

“figured out how to speak Canadian (laugh).”

Usha describes her brother as “her project” and wants to provide him with the resources

to grow up in a culture “that isn’t the definition of him,” and for that, she turns to history,

“he needs to understand his history, he needs to understand the history of a place that he

kind of calls his home and his own and he needs to understand the history of a place that

he almost doesn’t consider as his, which is, you know, his Guyanese roots.” When I

press her as to what she hopes that history will provide, she articulates an almost

desperate desire for her brother to think critically about how he currently feels, about his

embrace of a white Canadian identity, which she struggles to understand, nor does she

find entirely believable in a national context where “you’re racialized from without”, and

his rejection of a connection to Guyana and his racialized identity. Interestingly, she also

brings it back to herself and speaks to the need to have something of a “hybrid” existence

and perhaps for her alongside her brother to create some form of a hybrid space “between

being a Canadian and being someone who’s racialized,” something other than their own

categorical rejections and embraces which she sees as problematic. Towards the end of

the interview, Usha wonders aloud about such a possibility, “I don’t know what that

looks like but I can only say that I hope that it’s some place that can exist.”

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Continuing a theme developed throughout this dissertation, I take up the divergent and

unpredictable responses that women of colour develop as a result of their experiences

with and understandings of nation, racial injury and oppression. They provide

compelling insights into their own struggles with belonging in the nation and articulate

various trajectories of staking a claim, refusing a place or claiming multiple national and

cultural affiliations as ways to write themselves into or find a place to stand outside the

nation or between nations. Despite these navigations, their education in racism certainly

allows them to articulate an analysis of whiteness, racial entitlement and racialized

conditions of inclusion and citizenship.

Forget Racism Both Salimah and Neelam speak to the need to forget, to put racial injury and oppression

somewhere, most often behind in order to move forward. While this is a theme

elaborated in earlier chapters, it is worth restating that managing racism comes to have a

temporal dimension to it, that is to move forward in time and into the future and to secure

a place within the nation, remembering racism must be left behind, put somewhere,

contained. Salimah describes feeling broken and tormented by the racism she endures

but she turns her pain towards horizons of corporate and economic success, perhaps not

too far removed from the upwardly mobile, highly educated multicultural elites of Jodi

Melamed’s concern (2011:45). Salimah alerts us to the pain and disavowal of racism that

can be folded into racialized peoples’ aspirations for success. Whether or not Salimah

makes it, she and others are kept “in place” by the “constantly deferred promise” that one

day, they might (Bannerji 2000:9). In this articulation, it is not the conditions that give

rise to racism that are seen to require intervention, rather it is the affective aftermaths of

dealing with racism that people of colour are expected to manage, through perseverance,

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letting go of anger, getting oneself unstuck from the past and negativity, catching oneself

noticing race and insisting on letting go of it, being more resilient, altering one’s

personality and pushing hard to create opportunities despite the barriers. Reflecting on

her own childhood, Mona Oikawa speaks to how the nation impels people of colour to

align their personal memories with national ones (2012:xi). In order to perpetuate the

mythology of Canada as a benevolent and peaceful country, Oikawa argues that racial

and national violence “must be forgotten” (2012:xiiii). Neelam and Salimah struggle to

find a place in the nation, with its associated material and affective privileges, a place to

belong, access to jobs, opportunities and a secure future. Calling attention to racism

publicly or dwelling on it too much privately puts all of this in jeopardy.

Sherene Razack (2004) alerts us to the hyper-visibility and regulation of Muslim

women’s bodies in a post 9/11 context. She elaborates the figures of imperilled Muslim

women, dangerous Muslim men and civilized Europeans that populate the landscape of

the ‘War on Terror,’ giving rise to and intensifying military, security and surveillance

regimes across the globe (2004:129). Jasmin Zine explores how this larger geo-political

backdrop and the figure of the ‘Muslim terrorist’ have come to play an important role in

the everyday lives and collective experiences of Muslim communities (2006:247).

Directly relevant to my purposes, Zine looks at practices of veiling among Muslim girls

in Canadian Islamic schools and the “gendered Islamophobia” that they routinely

encounter (2006:240). Similar to Salimah, some of the girls in Zine’s research detail the

Orientalist assumptions with which the veil marks them, singling them out for oppression

and harassment. Hers is not an individual or isolated experience. Salimah feels the

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“heat” from these circulating figures and stops wearing her headscarf because she is

unable to endure or even imagine that the racist hostilities from high school might start

again, following her into university.

Jenny Burman also draws attention to the post 9/11 context in Canada in which ‘brown’

has come to have hypervisible meanings, sliding between “excitingly multicultural” and

“threatening” (2010: 205-206), highlighting the contingency and mutability of racial

categories and meanings. Drawing on Robert Fisk, Burman draws attention to the newly

minted category of “Canadian-born,” used to reference the fact that while Muslims may

be born in Canada, this is no assurance of their allegiance to or right to belong to the

nation (Fisk in Burman 2005: 201; also see Razack 2008). In her ethnographic work with

South Asian Muslim youth in the United States after 9/11, Sunaina Marr Maira

importantly points out the complex and often subtle ways in which young people engage

with questions of power and resistance (2009:213). She argues that because of increased

regulation and censorship of political speech and dissent, Muslims who are experiencing

heightened forms of vulnerability, regulation and state incursion may be less likely to

articulate political responses to the state in organized, direct or public ways (2009:213-

215). Inderpal Grewal similarly argues that the aftermath of 9/11 intensified practices

whereby people who might be read as Muslim, took up the flag or other visible symbols

of national allegiance as forms of protection against renewed racial assaults as well as

ways to ensure their national futures (2005:212-214). Under constant scrutiny and

surveillance, women like Salimah who remove the headscarf and refuse to publicly

engage racism and oppression can appear to be and to take up practices as good Muslims

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(Mamdani 2004) and good neoliberal multicultural subjects. She can’t change herself,

her skin, she remarks in the interview and like so many others, she never learns that

racism is a force that has and can be changed. Instead, she removes her headscarf, works

hard and refuses to talk about racism publicly. Practices of resistance are circumscribed

by contemporary power relations as well as the careful calculations that people such as

Salimah often make or are forced to make about the risks of speaking out. Even then, the

protections they seek are far from guaranteed. As Grewal notes, “there are many who

cannot afford to hate” the nation (2005: 220). The racial constraints to which Salimah

and others respond require attention.

Neelam alludes to the tense pull of never-ending gratitude to Canada for “letting you in,”

as well as her affective transition, leaving behind her anger, alienation and refusal to sing

the anthem in the infamous anthem strike that she embarks on with other classmates.

Eventually, she embraces the anthem and a proud Canadian identity. Seeing herself as

Canadian requires leaving behind an analysis of racism and it is a trade that makes

Neelam’s life feel somehow easier to live, unencumbered by race. Neelam also reminds

us of the practices that cultivate an attachment to nation. It is the daily anthem singing in

schools that results in Neelam’s search for another anthem which she might sing instead.

The option of not singing one at all is simply unimaginable. For those, such as Neelam,

who talked about histories of displacement and placelessness, Canada offered not just a

place where one might feel belonging, but also access to documents, passports, political

rights and a kind of security, for which they longed. Neelam and so many others are

caught up in the constraints and contradictions of citizenship, of living with the material

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and affective legacies of being stateless in a world organized primarily around state

recognition and rights. In exchange for these rights, gratitude is expected. She learns to

make demands of herself, rather than the nation, and in so doing, finds her way to the

“preferred immigrant/conditional Canadian” category that Yasmin Jiwani explicates -

loyal, grateful, hard working and reasonable (2006:xiv). Race still sneaks in but mostly

she works hard to ward it off. There is so little space to attend to the structural and

historical conditions of racism, civil wars and colonial displacements. Instead, it is in and

on the individual bodies and emotional landscapes of people of colour that the remedies

of racist harm are sought. It is, of course, important, perhaps even critically important for

people who are experiencing racial injustice to feel better and living with bad feelings

that the women of colour speak about and to, is indeed a space requiring relief (Ahmed

2010:216). While this is certainly an engagement with racial injustice, it is also in some

ways, a turning away from it, a forgetting or overlooking in order to secure some

temporary relief. It is also a strategy that leaves unaltered relational forms of national

belonging and unbelonging that are made and remade in everyday encounters.

In her work with Black women from the United States and the Netherlands, Philomena

Essed (1991) importantly discusses the ways in which national discourses around race

and racism impact the knowledge that women themselves come to identify and articulate

about structures of racial domination. Of particular relevance are the ways in which

Dutch frameworks of tolerance, pluralism and the workings of race through cultural

discourses result in Black women themselves being able to describe their experiences of

racism but in ways that often frame “racism as a problem of misinformation” (Essed

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1991:111), relying on and reproducing notions of cultural pluralism (Essed 1991:117). I

am not arguing that national frameworks translate into the emergence or occlusion of

certain forms of racial consciousness/knowledge in ways that are so clean and direct. I

am also mindful of David Goldberg’s qualification that the state is central, though never

entirely or absolutely successful, in producing and policing feelings, habits, and meanings

while also limiting the circulation of alternative commitments and social and political

priorities (2002:152). However, it was also the case that for Neelam and others, tensions

were recounted between the demands to perform and embrace multiculturalism, diversity

or racelessness and participants own lived experiences of racism. Oikawa describes

living “disjunctive moments” in which her knowledge of the internment of Japanese

Canadians meets with its forgetting (2012:xii). For Neelam, there is less force and

knowledge to withstand the forgetting.

In describing racism in her life, Salimah struggles to name the white people from whom

she encounters it. She explains that she should not be talking about people as white

because this is precisely what white people do through their racism, place her and others

in racial categories. Salimah was not alone in refusing to talk in racial terms or categories

but there was no differentiation between using such categories to enact racism and using

them to describe and respond to it. Any kind of race talk was equivocated with racism.

This made it difficult to think about racism in social, collective terms, let alone to talk

about it as anything other than individual animosities with no history and little force.

National articulations did not determine the direction and contours of racial literacy, but it

certainly shaped them in profound ways. More specifically, racial formations,

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understandings and responses were constrained by multicultural logics. Racism was not

intelligible as a Canadian story or as an experience of contemporary Canada.93

Am I Canadian? In relaying her analysis of why the professors at her university are overwhelmingly white,

Salimah understands this to be relatable to their status as “full Canadians,” “natives” of

the country. As much as racialized people can try to stake a claim to full citizenship, she

astutely points out, it is a claim that requires recognition, it requires “them” to see. Here

Salimah references the ways that whites get positioned as the normative Canadian subject

and also the subject that gets to adjudicate the claims of non-whites. As Ghassan Hage

observes in his work on multiculturalism and white nationalism in Australia, not anyone

can assert the right to belong to the nation, it is a right that must be recognized by others.

He adds that forms of recognition that are offered or withheld enable us to discern the

“governmental belonging” of some. By this he means that some are empowered to place

others in national spaces (2000:55) and there are those who escape this struggle, they are

seen to be white or national without the burden of proof (Hage 2000:61). In other words,

they are, or appear “born to rule the nation” (Hage 2000:67). Himani Bannerji points out

that Canada imagines itself as a white nation and it is white European colonizers who

assert for themselves the right to determine the “degree to which multicultural others

should be tolerated or accommodated” (2000:42). Diverse, multicultural others are called                                                                                                                93 When remembering their childhoods, participants recounted life in various parts of Toronto but also in cities throughout Canada. However, at the time of interviews, they were all attending universities in the Greater Toronto Area. Drawing on the work of Boudreau, Keil and Young, Minelle Mahtani (2014) provides an important context for thinking about Toronto as a neoliberal city. Given its racial and cultural diversity, the “diversity storyline” of Toronto was foregrounded in the 1990s and “sold as a major competitive international advantage around the world. Under this veneer lay a city divided by ongoing and increasing demographic racial rifts and socio-economic inequalities” (Mahtani 2014:133). Mahtani draws attention to how these larger economic and social shifts provide an important discursive context against which people make meaning of national and urban discourses of diversity and multiculturalism. Toronto as a specific geographical site from which discourses of diversity and multiculturalism are formed and shaped is another layer of analysis for future work.

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into existence against the “national we” (Bannerji 2000:42). Those presumed to belong

to the nation and its outsiders are relationally and racially marked.

As Oikawa observes, it is not only racial subordination that is reproduced through such

hierarchies, so too is white domination (2012:8). Reflecting on the spectacularly

depressing failure of multiculturalism in Canadian universities, Rinaldo Walcott points

out that despite the remarkable demographic shifts in urban Canadian cities, like the one

that Salimah notices in her own university experience, “our faculties and their interests

remain permanently and characteristically white – there is no other way to name it”

(2009:22). For Salimah, race and entitlement slide into each other with multiculturalism

firmly entrenching the primary rights of white Canadians. She understands that the

distinctions between white nationals and racialized others also result in material

entitlements, to employment as professors, for example and as Salimah elaborates, in

other leadership positions and opportunities to which she also aspires. Rather than

considering citizenship rights as something categorical, either you have them or you

don’t, Salimah and others experience citizenship as more variable and contingent. She

grasps the ways that whiteness operates in a racialized national hierarchy to secure

entitlements. Salimah interweaves her analysis of racially ordered hierarchies and

opportunities with the ways in which racialized people place whites “above us.” Rarely

referencing white or racialized except through “them,” “they,” and “fully Canadian” and

“we” and “us,” presumably aligning her and I with racialized markers, for Salimah,

whites become Indigenous to the nation, while the rest of “us” are impelled to work hard,

be “strong, really really strong,” courageous and pursue our dreams. In this recounting,

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white Canadians are made Indigenous, Indigenous peoples are made missing and

racialized people are set up as perpetually arriving. This is accompanied by a history,

taught and told, of national mythologies that give it not only a legitimacy and weight of

truth but also set up distinctions of national entitlement and colonial disappearance.

Salimah has made for her and in turn makes a story in which white “settler dominance is

assumed to be normal and inevitable” (Perry 2002:19). As Razack explains, central to

white settler mythologies is the installment of European settlers as the original citizens

alongside the “disavowal of conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of the

labour of peoples of colour” (2002:2). She goes on to argue that in North America, the

national narrative of peaceful settlement, not colonization, continues to be the dominant

one. Not surprisingly, it is the narrative of peaceful settlement that, with some variation,

was reproduced by most participants in my study.

Dhanya similarly struggles to understand the way that nation seems to provide a powerful

horizon for belonging that she longs for but with which she also quarrels. Her reflections

on forms and conditions of belonging centre on current responses to Tamil asylum

seekers which reproduce racialized people as perpetual immigrants, as “always arriving”

(Mootoo cited in Gunew 2004:93) and as criminals. Once again, it is white Canadians

who are authorized to adjudicate the claims of racialized people, to accept them as

legitimate or to cast them as off as ‘freeloaders,’ taking advantage of the generosity of

hard working, tax paying Canadians. Dhanya connects up this contemporary example

with a longer history of white nation building and selective immigration policies which

have consistently marginalized racialized people. Her analysis of the current political

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context leads to a recounting of her exchange with an Internet technician when she calls

her provider for customer support. He is surprised when someone with a name ‘like hers’

speaks English as well as she does. Whether in the astonished responses of people who

do not expect people of colour to be fluent in English or to have been in Canada for long,

people of colour are frequently thought to be from elsewhere. The comment that the

Internet repair guy makes to Dhanya is one small but significant example of the

instantiation of white settler mythologies, the erasure of bodies of colour in this national

story and the explanations that the “national we” often demand and extract from

racialized people.

People folded a range of everyday encounters into stories of the nation so that making of

the nation, for many of the participants, consisted of formal structures of citizenship,

rights and discourses but belonging was also made and unmade in the street, on the phone

with the Internet technician, in schools and in the comments section of news articles.

They come to “experience themselves as national” or situate themselves outside or

against the national in the course of everyday life (Berlant 1997:10). Their analysis

reveals how deeply felt and intimate wrestling with the nation is, at the level of the body

and “being” (Ahmed 2000:98; Hage 2000:45).

“Good” Multicultural Subjects In the routines and travels of everyday life, racial and national hierarchies came to life

and often became indistinguishable from each other, revealing the long-standing ways

that citizenship and racial exclusion are intertwined (Thobani 2007; Jiwani 2006;

Goldberg 2002; Razack 2002; Bannerji 2000). Dhanya, like many of the participants in

this study, highlights that being recognized as Canadian and feeling a sense of national

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belonging are not guarantees of birth right or having spent the majority of one’s life here.

Dhanya also provides important insights into provisional forms of national belonging so

that racialized others are not entirely excluded (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995:21).

Ethnic food carts and attire might be tolerated, welcomed or even celebrated but political

demands and rights quickly take us into “trouble maker” territory. Indeed official forms

of multiculturalism require and incorporate certain dimensions of racial difference but as

M. NourbeSe Philip observes, “multiculturalism, as we know it, has no answers for the

problems of racism, or white supremacy” (1992:185). In an Australian context, Sara

Ahmed (2000) suggests that multiculturalism is a way that the nation imagines itself in

relation to difference. It is not, she argues, incompatible with including those who are

seen to be strange or unassimilable; rather, multiculturalism requires selective practices

of inclusion along with targeted expulsions (Ahmed 2000:95,97; see also Mackey 2002).

Difference is variably tolerated, required, sought after, even celebrated but in ways that

erase history, mask relations of power and the processes through which racial

differentiation and hierarchies are secured (Ahmed 2000:103). Bannerji centres the ways

that official state multiculturalism constantly reworks political demands, of Aboriginal

sovereignty, and racial and economic justice, into cultural demands and diversity claims

(2000:9, 45). Consistent with these scholars, Melamed adds that neoliberal multicultural

formations and practices do not unequivocally repudiate multicultural others but their

uneven incorporation makes the racial landscape much murkier. Melamed is attentive to

the shifting and uneven terrains of racial formations and in assessing “neoliberalism’s

capacity to deploy multiculturalism” (Melamed 2011:138) she observes that the

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intensification of global capital can create “new racial subjects” that further distinctions

between “newly privileged and stigmatized collectivities” (2011:146).

In Usha’s case, as in the case of other women in the study, her categorical refusal of

Canadian but also her troubling of her own position, as well as that of her brother, speaks

to the conditions of racism that racialized people are navigating in a variety of ways.

Usha worries that unless offered other ways to locate himself historically and socially,

and to belong, her brother might find comfort in and even embrace ways of being

national that she finds disturbing and harmful, to himself and others. Her brother’s

cruelty reminds her of the cruelty that she herself might have encountered as a young

child newly arrived from Guyana. Her concerns are resonant with Melamed’s caution

that new racial subjects can be used over and against vulnerable communities enduring

renewed racial assaults (Melamed 2006:18); they become the yardsticks against which

racial others are measured and found wanting. Dhanya incisively unmasks this reworking

and the conditions of belonging that are offered up. Ultimately, belonging is relationally

constituted, it is variously withheld, denied, scrutinized or extended with conditions and

nods to diversity that only go so far. Dhanya’s questioning of not knowing if, how and

whether she can or wants to belong to something like Canada hangs partly unanswered,

like Usha’s aspirations for her and her brother.

Regardless of how participants navigated the nation, finding their ways in and out in

contingent and continual, rather than absolute and stable ways, they all understood that

they did so in relation to whiteness. Some worked the distance between their lives and

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national mythologies about Canadian kindness and tolerance by disavowing racism or

taking up neoliberal forms of management. For others, the gap between professed ideals

of cultural diversity and acceptance, variously articulated, and the realities of racist

incidents and structures resulted in an alienation from and disidentification with the

nation. Others in the study made stronger claims to the category nation as a way to insist

on their presence and the presence of racialized communities and this is repeated again

forcefully in the narrative of Ayanna in the following section. For a very few, it was

simply a way to describe their birth place or a place in which they have grown up, the

only place that they have known and it was unencumbered by other considerations.

Notably, all of the women in this chapter thus far, despite the diversity of their political

formations, backgrounds, places of origin and biographies would generally be seen to

belong to the category Asian in Canada, with its associated model minority status. Some

of them, such as Dhanya and Usha, with their refusals to be grateful, might be evicted

from this category but Neelam, Salimah and Usha’s brother, they might fit. What my

analysis of their lives endeavors to show is that this fit is never easy, it cannot be assumed

and it is always provisional. In his effort to “produce a sharper analytical grammar of

race,” specifically in relation to Asians-Canadians in white dominated multicultural

Canada, Roland Sintos Coloma explains that Asian-Canadians, a highly differentiated

group, may make stronger claims to the nation in order to assert their citizenship rights

(2013:594). However, he insists that they do so in response to the “violence inflicted on

them” in terms of the everyday racism that they experience as well as state organized and

directed violence (2013:594). While attentive to how such claims can be used against

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other racialized groups with more tenuous relationships to the state, Coloma pushes us to

think about the vulnerabilities that give rise to such claims. He does so without giving up

on strategies that refuse the advancement of some racialized groups at the expense of

others (2013:595).94 Like Coloma, I am mindful of the uneven invitations that are

extended to racialized others both within and across racial groups. But it turns out that

inclusion also punishes and disciplines, both those provisionally included and others who

refuse to put race away. I agree with Coloma that we need sharper insights into how

discursive categories, such as the model minority, are lived and embodied and how the

state deploys them.95 It has been one of my goals to think carefully about how constraints

and categories appear and are worked out in people’s lives. It highlights the difficult

trade-offs that people of colour are constantly calibrating, individually and collectively, in

order to make life possible in difficult conditions and it also alerts us to the things that

they desire.

“Other” Places For participants like Shanice, her love for and deep connection with Jamaican cultural

practices meant her insistence that she is a “Canadian born Jamaican.” In the interview,

she recounts that whenever she is asked where she is from, “you will always hear me say

something about Jamaica.” So while there is the force of alienation, there is also the

sense of connection across places which modulate women’s sense of belonging within

and across multiple national spaces. Shanice describes the relief that she feels when she

                                                                                                               94 See Julia Sudbury for a relevant analysis about “competing minorities, competing models” in the British context, specifically between African Caribbean and Asian communities (1998:152-156). 95 Sintos (2013) provides a reworking of model minority discourses from an historical perspective that traces the divergent ways that ‘Asians’ have been provisionally included and excluded from Canada. Also see Oikawa (2012) for a nuanced reading of the power relations the undergird representations of Japanese Canadian women, in particular, as silent and passive about the effects of the Internment. Stereotypes of Asians as “diligent, docile and self-sufficient” (Sintos 2013:594) are usefully deployed by the state but do not ask us to consider accountability for these representations (Oikawa 2012:77).

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visits Jamaica, “it just feels like the weight of the world is lifted off your shoulders.” But

like many others, Shanice also reflects on her idealized relationship to a place where she

is only ever a “tourist.” She knows that her attachment to Jamaica is romantic, perhaps

even unreliable because for her, it is not a place where she struggles with everyday life.

It often provides her with a break from that life.

Many others also described the relief of returning to their birthplaces or to places where

they had ancestral connections. Even where some of those returns were not physical,

they sought refuge in stories and memories that other places afforded. Dianah recounts

how her parents cultivated her sense of attachment and connection to Jamaica through

stories. Shopping in West Indian food stores, Dianah relates how her dad would stop

while looking at a can of coconut water and tell her stories about how he would climb a

tree to get a coconut, even though this was so far removed from her own experience: “he

would make sure that he told that story or he would come with certain types of- I think a

june plum and certain types of mangos and say this is the difference between this and this

is the difference between that.” Looking back, Dianah understands that these stories

provided her with more than the ability to name various fruits, it was “just like this

repetition of this, this is who you are, this is where you’re coming from.” Her parents,

she recalls, were “always always teaching” her things but it never felt “like a lesson.”

Dionne Brand describes the recovery of history for people of Caribbean descent living in

Canada as “redemptive and restorative” (1994:80). Referring back to Chapter 3, these

lessons were offered up so that young people could develop an appreciation for ways of

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living that might protect them when they encountered racial hostilities and the erasure

and denigration of black and non-European people and histories.

Never having had the opportunity to go to Sri Lanka, Dhanya longs to see where her

family is from and the place that has formed so much of her life. : “I want to know how

like my grandparents used to live or like how our area looks like per se or what our

temple looks like.” Wanting to know her cousins and the family left behind and even to

be geographically closer to the memories of people unable to find a place of safety who

had died in the civil war, Dhanya describes wanting a “sense of connection with

something” that eludes her in Canada. She recalls listening to family and community

members talk about details of lives left behind, “you know just certain things like, you

know having like mango trees or like whatever it is just those common like everyday

experiences or like even just tidbits that I do get from my mom about how she grew up

like, I wanna feel that like I wanna experience that.” Even though she knows that her

relationship to Sri Lanka is different than that of her mom’s or other family members, she

wants to go to a place that makes her feel like something other than “an outsider.”

Reflecting on the place of Guyana in her life and her hope for what it might provide to

her brother, Usha explains that it has the potential to provide a lens through which to

think critically about Canadian history and forms of identity on offer. So many of the

women searched so often to find themselves in the nation, in schools, in classrooms and

books. In histories and struggles gone missing, they longed to see something of

themselves reflected back in ways not so deeply lodged in racial hierarchies. Usha

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suspects that there are other histories in which she and her brother might be something

other than what they are made to be in a Canadian landscape. In short, Guyana becomes

mobilized as another way of feeling and knowing themselves. Her thinking about

Guyana and Canada are offered as a resource and a hope. In thinking about how to bring

them closer together, Usha and her brother might do something differently with lessons

of history, nation, race, migration and belonging. At the very least, Guyana might

displace a focus on Canada as fixing their identities, as offering them the only horizon for

belonging and knowledge that they can find. These ways of living are characterized by

what Rinaldo Walcott describes as “cross-border, outernational sharing and

identification” (2007:234). In other words, there are those who remake their belonging in

Canada across multiple national sites and affiliations (Lord 2015:34).96

In a few anomalous examples, participants described deep connections with cities or

particular neighbourhoods as providing a sense of home and belonging rather than a

larger sense of national affiliation. A few participants described a corner of a city or a

handful of streets as providing them with a sense of comfort or hominess. Latifa

contrasts the memories of a mostly hostile white elementary school alongside her

grandmother’s neighbourhood. In close proximity to one another, filling her with both

dread and belonging respectively, Latifa describes walking through memories of “patty

stores and jerk shops and the hair dressers,” what she describes as the good memories.

When I ask her what specifically made her feel that she belonged, she replied, “I do not

                                                                                                               96 See Trotz for an interruption to binary ideas of home and away and a reformulation of “transnational practices that connect people not just with the place they left but also across sites of migration” (2011:59).

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have a strong connection with Jamaica or Jamaican culture really. I mean I know certain

things, I eat the food and things like that, I listen to the music, my grandmother, I mean

that’s really where most of it comes from, she lived around there and I just felt closer to

Jamaica when I was there.” Again she comments on going into hairdressers and

barbershops filled with conversation and familiarity. This was not necessarily about a

geographic return to a place of origin as something fixed and pure but something more

akin to a “homing desire” which Avtar Brah distinguishes from the “desire for a

‘homeland’” (2002:180).97 Combining familial, cultural and multiple national affiliations

and desires, Latifa describes the sounds, conversations and tastes that bring her closer to

Jamaica in a few streets of Toronto, to some place where she might belong. She fashions

such longings from a partial, even romantic sense of community, something that other

participants also echoed. Others described home or feeling a sense of belonging not to

Canada but to Toronto or to a small corner of it. Despite the desire to find such spaces,

Usha is much more circumspect about the necessity of engaging broader structures to

survive. Navigating immigration, taxation, health, education, employment and other

services and obligations mean that insularity is impossible. For her, finding a corner of

the city isn’t so easy or so available as the need to engage what she calls, “the rigors of

the system,” seeps into life in so many ways. But to disavow the nation, as Usha and                                                                                                                97 Brah is attentive to how diasporic affiliations, like national ones, are not exempt from a series of exclusions or homogenizing impulses in the name of creating a common community. As much as they have the potential to critique fixed identities and origins, Brah is also cognizant of the varying power relations, conditions of movement and immobility that mark people who are or who consider themselves diasporic. While some do, she points out that not all diasporas promote a return to a place of origin (2002:180-181). Brah’s focus on movement and “‘staying put’” (2002:181) are taken up in the second half of the chapter. Some interviews barely referenced national spaces outside Canada and others fashioned a sense of place very much in relation to multiple national affiliations. For a few people, relationships with ancestral places were very pronounced, sometimes through travel and other times, through travel and/or the way that places were kept alive through stories and memories in their families. I am aware, as are some participants, of the complex histories and grids of power that mark their connections to other countries or their search for belonging.

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others do, to claim that one is not or does not see or experience oneself as Canadian does

not mean that they are somehow removed from involvement in white settler colonialism,

anymore than white people distancing themselves from whiteness turns them into “former

white people” (Wiegman 1999:143).

On Silences and Colonial Containments In investigating how racial literacies are forged within a Canadian national context, in the

second part of this chapter, I explore how the racial formation of most participants

evacuates settler colonial practices. Canada works hard to disappear settler violence and

invites and schools racialized people to do the same.98 Throughout the dissertation, I

have endeavored to understand and examine the depth and magnitude of racist practices,

effects and dislocations that racialized women live with and to which they respond. I also

draw attention to post-racial, neoliberal multicultural constraints that defer or at times,

displace an analysis of racial and, in this final section, colonial logics. Most of the

women in this study do not have access to or live the lives of elite multicultural subjects;

a few do and others aspire to this vision of the good life. They live with pressing

concerns of employment, educational opportunities, enormous student loans and a

“constantly racializing Canadian political economy” (Bannerji 2000:9, see also Galabuzi

2006) that place them, their families and futures in precarious conditions. It is often to

                                                                                                               98 All of my participants were studying and/or residing in the Greater Toronto Area during interviews. This, in large part, fashioned their orientation to Indigenous peoples and to white settler colonialism. As Bonita Lawrence writes: “because Toronto is located in eastern Canada, where Aboriginal peoples on the whole are far less visible than in western Canada and where the presence of large numbers of people of color ensures that the racialized Other in Toronto is not Aboriginal, urban Native people in Toronto suffer from a certain invisibility.” Lawrence continues that Toronto remains a place where “Native people as a whole are the most invisible” (2004:19). This erasure would not necessarily be the case in other parts of the country where specific interactions between racialized and Indigenous peoples might be productive of other orientations to white settler colonialism.

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mitigate or escape these vulnerabilities that claims of belonging get articulated to and

invested in structures of citizenship within a white settler society.

While committed to excavating settler colonial practices in the Americas, Jodi Byrd is

also mindful of how easily “diasporic migrants, queers, and people of color” are accused

of “participating in and benefiting from indigenous loss of lands, cultures, and lives…as

if they could always consent to or refuse such positions or consequences of history”

(2011:xxxviii-xxxix). Some of us have travelled far from the conditions of our

migrations and for others, life continues to be lived in various migratory and confined

crises and precarities. I take Byrd’s caution seriously in conjunction with Andrea Smith’s

insistence to attend in nuanced and historically specific ways to the logics of white

supremacy. Smith argues that rather than claiming a shared victimization or oppression

through white supremacy, it is also important to attend to how white supremacy organizes

racial hierarchies and complicities within and between racialized and Indigenous

communities in uneven and often contradictory ways (2006:66,67). Mary Louise Fellows

and Sherene Razack similarly caution that to retreat to positions of innocence or

subordination in the face of multiple and overlapping systems of power does not fully

capture the range of ways that we are entangled in and reproduce these very systems

(Smith 2006; Fellows and Razack 1998). Drawing on the insights of Native and critical

race feminists, I try to work through the complexities and complicities of these systems

and participants’ efforts to respond to them, without effacing the exclusions and racial

hierarchies that racialized women routinely encounter. Yet in trying to forge a home,

find security, survive, get ahead or claim a national space, a white settler project

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continues and invites us to continue it. While the data used in this section is fragmentary,

I use the fragments as “opening paths for understanding” (Das 2007:39) how racial

literacies are formed in white settler contexts and how they might be formed otherwise.

Schooled in Settler Colonial Complicities In his book on the residential school system in Canada, John S. Milloy opens with a quote

from an unnamed Mohawk residential school survivor. When asked in 1965 by the

Department of Indian Affairs to write of his memories of residential school, he responds:

“‘If I were to be honest, I must tell of things as they were and really this is not my story

but yours’” (1999: xviii). Milloy explains that in central ways, residential schools were

implemented and managed by non-Aboriginal people and to not write about or engage

them is to contribute to maintaining the story of residential schools as one about

Indigenous peoples, rather than the story of what was done by non-Aboriginal people to

Aboriginal nations.99 As Verna St. Denis articulates in the foreword to Racism,

Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada, a principal contribution of Martin Cannon and

Lina Sunseri’s work is to insist on the centrality of colonialism as a Canadian story, one

often denied or peripheralized, but nonetheless Canadian (2011:vii, xxi). In the case of

my participants, many of whom were born, raised or schooled here for the bulk of their

educational lives, most were silent or uneducated about settler colonialism. How is this

easy forgetfulness secured? What does it accomplish? Far from an indictment of the

limited racial literacy of these participants, I consider the ways in which settler

colonialism works to organize knowledge production, to make its violence unspeakable

                                                                                                               99 Milloy does importantly acknowledge that the work of non-Aboriginal scholars is not to stand in place of that of Aboriginal scholars and communities. Rather, there are distinct stories to be told about the planned and programmatic conceptualization and management of residential schools by non-Aboriginal people as well as their effects on Aboriginal children, families and nations.

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or unknowable and invites us all, including those of us racialized, to do the same.

Colonial complicities are socially constructed and collectively and individually enacted.

There are multiple ways that white settler colonialism appears and disappears in my

discussions with women of colour. By and large, it is absent in the reflections of women

of colour about racism and their relationship to Canada. I think through both the absence

of and the sporadic and uneven ways that settler colonialism does materialize in the

interviews. Using both the data and its absence, I explore the tensions and debates that

animate recent scholarship on Indigenous-settler relations, and with the participants’

narratives, I think through some of the impasses they contain. I also suggest how critical

race and settler colonial analytics might be brought closer together in the stories

participants tell and the national stories told of them.

Reduced to a Paragraph There has been, importantly, some attention paid to the role of residential schools in the

Americas and more specifically, in consolidating a Canadian colonial project (Castellano,

Archibald and DeGagne 2008; Churchill 2004; Miller 1996; Haig-Brown 1988). With

the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada focus on investigating the

experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children and communities in relation to

residential schools, this chapter points to the ways in which public education institutions

are also intimately involved in reproducing white settler dominance through the schooling

of non-Indigenous people (Doxtator 2011; Dion 2009; Tuhiwai Smith 1999).

Increasingly, I began to read the narratives of public schooling as ones that also sought to

consolidate settler projects and populations.

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With very few exceptions, the women of colour in this study referenced either the

absence of analysis about colonialism generally and settler colonialism specifically or

recalled a paragraph which purported to cover residential schools, Japanese internment

and the Chinese head tax, among other often cited episodes in Canadian history. Dhanya

describes “random mentions” of “the head tax or like the building of the railway or like

slavery” but they were only ever “tidbits” and they did not disturb the overall story of

Canadian nation building. For Nabila, history was mostly about heroic Europeans. The

only mention of residential schools was “watered down….to like a very small blurb.”

Ayanna vividly remembers the paragraph, “like Chinese people’s experience [building

the railway] was like a paragraph, like a paragraph (laugh). Aboriginal people’s

experience was maybe half a page.”

While earlier chapters delineated the importance of such a circumscribed analysis for the

racial literacy and analysis that people are able to develop or not develop, here I focus on

the settler colonial dimensions of knowledge production through the entry point of the

paragraph, the blurb, the tidbit or the half page. Throughout the interviews, the repeated

reference to these small bits of text of settler colonial acknowledgement in high school

textbooks, primarily in the history curriculum, that students were able to narrate with a

great degree of regularity, became a source of interest for me. The interviews propelled

me to reflect on the paragraph as a strategy or technology of colonial containment; it

allows settler colonialism to appear but simultaneously fixes its place as marginal and

incidental in national life. In the frequently occurring reference to paragraphs in high

school textbooks, racism and colonialism were transformed from structures to incidents

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(Hesse 2004; Wolfe 1999). This has important consequences in turn for how students are

schooled to develop a limited analysis of racism and settler colonialism as being episodes

in Canadian society, rather than the conditions that enable it to exist. The paragraph was

revealing in that it also reproduced a remarkably standardized account of the nation

across a group of women who had been educated in diverse geographical sites and at

different times in Canada. So while some of the women were able to make often vague

reference to residential schools and the abuse of Aboriginal children, these were often in

the context of more anomalous abuses of power and were also often articulated alongside

incidents about exclusionary immigration policies towards racialized people, thereby

dissolving critical distinctions between Indigenous and settler populations. Injustice was

a vague and undifferentiated story and it was short. The history of the nation was

transmitted in carefully managed ways, it was a place where forgetting was “actively

produced” (Oikawa 2012:xiii). As Susan Dion observes, the consequences of forgetting

are differentiated for different people (2009:5). While forgetting serves the needs of the

Canadian nation, she argues, that for Aboriginal peoples, justice is only possible by

remembering (2009:3).

The paragraph also does the temporal work of relegating injustices or wrongdoings

against Aboriginal peoples to an unfortunate past (Dion 2009:73; see also Coleman

2006). This narrative secures a particular vision of national innocence in the present but

also works to reproduce this innocence into the future where settler colonialism is

ongoing but is perpetually disappeared. The disappearance of Native peoples is not an

issue requiring representational correction, rather, as Andrea Smith argues, it is the

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condition that allows genocide to continue (2010:53). Even in more critical narrations or

analysis, colonial pasts are delineated from multicultural presents, promulgating

distinctions between historical brutality and a reconciled present. Khadija explains that

learning about Canada’s past has complicated her understanding of Canada as a “nice

country.” It turned out to be more “vicious” than she assumed but that viciousness was

contained to the past. “I still think it’s a great country but I think in the past it wasn’t,”

she explains. The relationship between residential schools, genocide and the securing of

Indigenous lands and resources in contemporary Canada is evacuated so that even while

the horrors of residential schools are conjured up, they are contained. Schooling plays no

small part in reproducing the settler colonial story (Tuck and Wayne 2012; Dion 2009;

Willinsky 1998).

Tracing the effects of multiculturalism on the organization of knowledge in the academy,

women and gender studies curricula in particular, D. Alissa Trotz explores how the logic

of inclusion that underwrites multiculturalism, keeps at its core the dominant, normative

subject (2007:3). Other groups of women, always racialized, are “fleetingly visible to

students.” This results in what Trotz describes as a “pedagogy of compartmentalization”

that essentializes difference but provides little analytic ground to theorise connections

(2007:3). While the site is distinct, the problematic that Trotz highlights, particularly in

terms of the relationship between multiculturalism and knowledge production is relevant.

For the most part, teaching and learning about Canada proceeds in precisely the

compartmentalized and racially distinct ways that she elaborates. White Europeans,

Indigenous peoples and racialized populations are thought to be discrete constituencies.

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This is accompanied by a racial logic that firmly sutures white to Canadian, white as

Canadian. “Other” people and histories do appear in textbooks, maybe for longer in the

university, maybe for a week or even a term in area studies or special topics courses but

in high schools, they vanish much more quickly. If you are away for the day and you

turn the page, you could miss the paragraph or the blurb. You could end up being like

some of Isabel’s classmates who arrive in high school asking the obscene but not entirely

surprising question, “what is an Aboriginal person?”

Small Openings In Ayanna’s narrative, there is a small but productive opening to think differently about

the relationship between racialized people and settler colonialism, not as

compartmentalized but entangled. Ayanna’s narrative and Nur’s, introduced towards the

end of this chapter, provide fruitful and nuanced, though admittedly preliminary, ways to

think of processes of settlement and displacement together. They draw our attention to

wider circuits of imperial displacements and particular versions of white Canada that

continue to write out black and racialized presences. Throughout, I integrate an analysis

of the narratives alongside the contemporary scholarly debates and tensions surrounding

racialized settlers and white settler colonialism.

Like many of the women in this study, Ayanna discusses her strategic negotiations with

the question of Canadian identity, for the most part not employing national identity as a

primary way that she thinks about herself but revealing that it becomes more salient

particularly when she feels defensive. She elaborates the ways that Canadian history is

narrated to absent the experiences of black and other racialized people or to make them

appear incidental. When I ask her to explain or provide examples of such defensive

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encounters, she describes her claim to citizenship as a space making practice: “in those

moments sometimes it does become important and I feel like I need to claim space and

say I have the right to be here.” Echoing the women of colour referenced earlier, Ayanna

also discloses that her claim to the category Canadian is insufficient: “being Canadian

born doesn’t suffice, it’s not enough (laughter), they want me to dig deeper and that

deeper is like saying I’m from Jamaica.” She rages against all of the ways that she and

racialized people are placed outside the nation and the demands placed on them to trace

and recount itineraries of arrival, always presumed to be recent (Walcott 2003:18). As

Walcott explains, thinking of black life in Canada “within a logic of immigration” elides

the long presence and contributions of blacks to Canadian life (2009:22). Ayanna keeps

pushing back to make more space for this reality to be acknowledged and told. Resonant

with the experiences of other women, there is a distinction between being Canadian and

being Canadian born, a disjuncture or gap often mediated by racial exclusions. To be

born in and of a place is not necessarily to belong to that place or more importantly, to be

seen to belong to a place.

As Ayanna impassionately explains, “Canadian history and identity and nationalism have

been edited so much, I always feel like I need to tell certain stories so it’s not forgotten.”

In these spaces of defensive telling, Ayanna shares that she often recounts the Canadian

history of slavery and the long presence of blacks in Nova Scotia, despite the fact that this

is not her family history. She describes feeling compelled to do “these weird sort of

things” in response to being written out of the space that is Canada but also the

indignation, “yeah, I’m Canadian, I was born here. I don’t know anywhere else, you

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know, it just sort of blows my mind when people ask questions around that and I, I kind

of fumble and I kind of splutter and I kind of get angry and then I kinda rant and

sometimes I’m calm, depending on the person but I just feel so, like, how dare you

(laugh). I guess that’s how I feel, like, how dare you.” Despite the affective dimensions

of these racialized displacements, Ayanna sees her interventions and historical

recountings as being deeply pedagogical in that they force a confrontation with these

absences and perhaps even a reworking of histories that are “conveniently neglected and

forgotten” or forcibly forgotten by people who “choose to forget.” Like most of the

women of colour in this study, Ayanna describes in great detail her navigations of

whiteness, encounters with racism and oppression, and search for community, insisting

that she has figured out not only how to survive, but how “to do better than survive here

(laugh).”

In the context of a university class on race and racism, Ayanna recounts sitting in a class

when the professor poses the question: “are we settlers or are we citizens in this space,” a

question that she describes as very “triggering” for many of the students in the class who

simply “didn’t know what to do with that question.” When I ask her about her own

engagement with the question, she describes it as being a hard and a new engagement.

On the question of hard, she elaborates her own family history of migration at the time of

Jamaican independence from the British:

the way my grandmother migrated to this country like she was, it was sort of a forced migration cause she migrated at the same time that Jamaica became independent and the British, like, kind of fled back to Britain and they took everything with them and they said adios, you’re on your own (laughter). However in that process, they did create programs where you could become nannies and domestics in Britain and other British colonies like Canada so that

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sort of created like a bridge so that was sort of like my grandma’s exodus. So my grandma came to Canada and she was a domestic for about 5, 6 years before she could become a landed immigrant and then at that point she was able to bring most of her children. She couldn’t bring all of her children cause some of her children, at that point, were over 18.

Ayanna’s mother is one of the children, just under eighteen, who emigrates at this point.

Referencing her own relationship to Canada, Ayanna states that she doesn’t see herself as

a citizen but she doesn’t know quite what it means to be a settler, “I’m not quite sure

what that looks like.” When I press her to say more about the difficulty in bringing

together the conditions of her family’s migration with the question of settler and citizen,

Ayanna again reiterates the difficulty of the question, particularly given its newness and

the fact that no one has “ever” required her to think of this question, nor has she required

it of herself. While she has a general awareness of history and colonization, the question

of land in contemporary Canada is one with which she has never been confronted.

Indigenous Settler Relations There is a growing body of literature that investigates Indigenous settler relations,

including the ways that racialized people in the Americas live with and participate in

conditions of white settler colonialism (King 2013; Walia 2013; Jafri 2012; Patel 2012;

Tuck and Wang 2012; Byrd 2011; Lee 2011; Morgensen 2011; Sharma and Wright 2008;

Thobani 2007; Smith 2006; Lawrence and Dua 2005). There are increasingly productive

tensions and debates that push critical race theorizing to articulate its relationship to land,

to specific racial formations and also point to the limits of anti-racist work and analytics

outside of white settler colonial practices.100 They also help us to think about how

                                                                                                               100 I do remain concerned that these important and necessary insights and interventions can be used by white scholars and activists to discipline the important social justice and academic work being done by the too few scholars of colour in the academy. In some circles, declarations of people of colours’ relationship

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colonial violence organizes knowledge production, interpretative schema for theorizing

experience, our frameworks for articulating social justice claims as well as the

disappearing of settler colonial violence itself. What happens when white settler society

looks much more racially diverse? What are the ways that racialized people settle and

unsettle notions of settler colonialism?

In centering Ayanna’s narrative, I draw attention to how settler colonial violence

continues to be contained in Canadian national narratives in such a way that the question

of settler colonialism appears new. However, in Ayanna’s reflections, I found something

more than what was missing, something to be politically promising. While she is not

entirely sure what to do with this hard and new question of settler colonial history and her

relationship to it, she maintains an ability to stay with this question, an openness. She

doesn’t foreclose the question, it doesn’t trigger her, as she observes it does to other

students, to a place of defensiveness or rejection. Rather, it has the potential to open onto

unfamiliar and challenging knowledge, new forms of connection and complexity that

Ayanna is willing to engage and forge into. In her generous reading of feminist of colour

scholarship, Deborah A. Miranda critiques the absence of Indigenous women and insists

that we enter into a dialogue about what this larger “cultural amnesia” signals (2003:335).

Ayanna demonstrates a willingness to do just that. Listening to her reminded me very

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         to white settler colonialism has become the new litmus test for the validity of the work carried out by academics of colour. Reflecting on these dynamics, Scott Morgenson (2014) calls on white settlers to refuse “the authority we might claim, or have conferred upon us, to appear to lead discussions of decolonization. White settlers do not lead the work of decolonization, in practice or in theory.” Following the work of indigenous, black and people of colour scholars, he insists that white settlers be accountable to the racist and settler colonial logics that structure life in the Americas, not the arbiters of relations between Indigenous and racialized peoples. See http://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/white-settlers-and-indigenous-solidarity-confronting-white-supremacy-answering-decolonial-alliances/ (accessed June 14, 2014).

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much of Cynthia Enloe’s (2004) insistence on cultivating and deploying a feminist

curiosity as an orientation to thinking about power relations. Enloe argues for curiosity

and its lack as political acts, the latter often normalizing and reproducing power

structures because they escape analysis and scrutiny, we are made to overlook them, they

become just the way things are. To get curious and to get curious about our lack of

curiosity, Enloe argues, can have important political effects, can result in questions about

whose interests are served by particular social arrangements. While Enloe’s entry into

curiosity is a specifically feminist one, her insistence that we pursue questions about the

way things are, how power is organized from our homes to the global stage is useful for

thinking about the work to make national subjects uncurious about our own investments

in nation and stories of origin.

In Ayanna’s narrative, she opens herself up to such a curiosity, an engagement that clears

some space to think again on questions that appear to be settled or that don’t appear at all.

How, where and for whom does settler colonialism vanish and appear and what is the

work it does, what does it secure? While I do not know what Ayanna’s “not knowing”

might yield, the forms of knowledge, analysis or politics it could take, I take her

willingness to stay in that place as an invitation to follow her there, to dwell on the

question and to think on answers.

In a white-settler colonial context, Bonita Lawrence and Ena Dua make an important

intervention in anti-racist theorizing and activism, challenging the extent to which anti-

racist and anti-colonial projects have been disarticulated from one another, resulting in

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anti-racist projects that do not take the complicity of people of colour as settlers into

account (2005: 134). They argue that much postcolonial and critical race theory effaces

both ongoing colonization and Indigenous presence and resistance in the Americas in its

orientations towards race and racism (2005:127). One of the consequences of this

“theoretical segregation” (2005:133) is that even when told through a critical lens,

Canadian history is often recast as the story of racism experienced by racialized people

from white settlers in the establishment of a white nation. Alternately in frameworks of

liberal pluralism, Aboriginal claims to sovereignty are assimilated as diversity and

cultural claims (Bannerji 2000). While acknowledging the reality of racism that people

of colour experience within white settler projects, Lawrence and Dua also point to the

contradictory ways that people are colour have historically been situated in and continue

to be complicit with the colonization of Aboriginal peoples. They cite the differential

conditions of migration and displacement that result in the presence of racialized people,

including migrant labourers, those brought as slaves, refugees and people without

documents and argue that despite these differences, people of color are settlers.

Lawrence and Dua insist that our itineraries of arrival, frequently retold, must also detail

the specific removals of Indigenous nations, as well as the ways in which Canadian

citizenship, shared however unequally by people of colour, is harnessed to continue this

dispossession.101 By centering ongoing colonization as foundational to white settler

colonialism, they challenge the “innocence of people of color in projects of settlement                                                                                                                101 For example, Lawrence and Dua point to the proposed Charlottetown Accord constitutional changes which would have resulted in important recognitions for Aboriginal peoples, including recognition of Aboriginal governments, provisions for self-governances in relation to land, culture, language and the environment as well as representation in the Senate. The accord that was negotiated over many years by the Canadian government and Aboriginal leaders was then voted on to determine if it would be ratified. As Lawrence and Dua argue, this put those with citizenship rights in Canada, including people of colour, in a position to adjudicate decisions related to Aboriginal sovereignty, a measure which ultimately failed (2005: 135, 140).

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and colonial relations”(136). They also argue that scholarship is required on the

interactions of people of color and Aboriginal people in settlement practices, both to

rewrite conflict, collaboration and connectedness.

Lawrence and Dua conclude by asking anti-racist activists and scholars to account for

land rights and Indigenous sovereignty in advancing our anti-racist agendas and claims

rather than to pursue inclusion into the nation on grounds that continue to disempower

Aboriginal people and gloss over our own complicities in colonial projects and practices

(Lawrence and Dua 2005:137). They raise the larger point about how the omission of

Aboriginal peoples in settler societies distorts both our understandings of racism as well

as Indigenous struggles for land (2005:128). While I read Lawrence and Dua’s work as

providing important political and theoretical interventions, I also read them as

methodological. That is, they provide an opening to reconsider readings of racism,

imperialism, white settler colonialism and multiple historical entanglements together.

Entangled Histories It is on this question of entangled histories, that I return to Ayanna’s narrative to consider

how we might engage conditions of migration and settler colonialism, such as that of her

family’s. While I have only some skeletal information on Ayanna’s family’s migration,

as Daiva Stasiulis and Abigail Bakan demonstrate, despite the complexity of the English

Caribbean, during the 1960s and 70s, there is increased migration, including that of well

educated professionals and increasingly of Caribbean workers at the time of political

independence. They point out that newly independent governments encouraged

migration in order to manage severe unemployment and also to ensure a supply of foreign

currency through remittances (2005:53). On their arrival in Canada, domestic and other

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workers encountered explicitly racist immigration policies, resulting in precarious and

exploitive working conditions, including mandatory live-in requirements for domestic

labour, not required of domestic workers from European countries (Silvera 1989;

Stasiulis and Bakan 2005:55). Ayanna’s family migration requires that we “interpret the

cacophonies colonialism has left us” (Byrd 2011:xxxix). She interweaves British

colonialism, national independence, global restructuring and gendered and racialized

conditions of arrival and settlement in the context of settler colonialism in Canada and

asks us to attend to these processes in all of their complexity and contradictions.

“People on the move,” as Avtar Brah refers to them (1996:178) draw our attention to

major political and economic shifts associated with patterns of migration. I find some of

Brah’s work very useful, specifically in terms of her focus on the relational positionings,

“the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of

‘staying put’” (1996:209). Brah is also careful to point out that both migration,

settlement and, as Julia Sudbury adds, confinement and containment (2004), be

understood across and within “circuits of power” that she describes as “multi-axial”

(1996:197). Brah argues that we cannot assume trans-historical concepts without

understanding how divisions are accomplished in specific places and times. Recalling

feminist theorizing of interlocking oppressions, she also insists that multi-axial readings

of power allow us to see that people are not fixed in either dominant or subordinate,

majority or minority positions but that these shift along and across different lines and also

operate simultaneously (1996:189). Brah’s work takes seriously that relations of power

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are just that, relations, and her analysis allows for multiple readings along these

differentiated vectors, both within and across communities.

Along similar lines, Julia Sudbury argues that a focus not only on mobility but the forced

immobility and “terrifying confinement” (2004:155) of slavery and in contemporary state

practices of imprisonment, is instructive in extending analyses of diaspora and its

mechanisms. It allows for a historical and contemporary focus on forced and chosen

dispersals, displacements and terms and conditions of confinement. As Sudbury argues, it

is also a call to temper a more celebratory focus on movement and migration with a

corresponding analysis of spaces and conditions of confinement (2004:161) which allows

us to think about the gendered and racialized effects of imprisonment and punishment

regimes on both black and Aboriginal communities as well as conflicts and coalitions

between black and Aboriginal women (2004: 158,161). She also insists that

complicating confinement to attend to reserves and residential schools, for example, is

required in order to consider “entanglements between aboriginal and diasporic

communities” (161) in the Americas. Ayanna’s narrative provides an important opening

to think about how “migrants, settlers and indigenes” are called into a “variegated field of

struggle over rights to belong” (Anderson 2000:385) and Brah, Sudbury and others

instruct us in how we might think about these histories together through both movement

and confinement in different colonial circuits, coming together in white settler Canada.

Sunera Thobani also provides some critical reflections on thinking about the question of

settler and citizen in relation to racialized peoples. Intervening in the literature that

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centralizes the discrimination and injustices experienced by immigrants, Thobani argues

that while there are complex structural conditions that give rise to migration, “the

immigrant is a much more complex and ambiguous figure in settler societies like Canada

than has generally been suggested” (2007:16). By seeking to consolidate their own

citizenship rights and economic conditions, immigrants also become implicated in the

ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples (2007:16). While being seen as white

remains out of reach, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang caution against offers of “subordinate

settler” status (2012:18) that often keep people of colour fighting for full recognition and

citizenship entitlements within settler states. Thobani importantly qualifies that it is

important to take seriously the magnitude of suffering and inequalities experienced by

immigrants while also noticing that these immigrants are not the “authors of, or even

equal partners in, the colonial project” (2007:17). Even while accounting for the “force

relations among these various populations” (Thobani 2007:17), Thobani insists that it is

critical to look at the specific ways that non-Indigenous people participate in ongoing

settler colonialism.

Ayanna’s narrative provides an opportunity to look more specifically at the relationships

and conditions that create both migrations and confinements and the narrations of these

processes as distinct and unrelated. It also opens up relations between black and

Indigenous peoples in contemporary white settler Canada. Zainab Amadahy and Bonita

Lawrence explore these specificities, arguing that discussions of black-Indigenous

relations are often told through competing claims of oppression and marginality.

However, Amadahy and Lawrence importantly acknowledge that this conversation is

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often shaped by the magnitude of devastation that both black and Indigenous peoples

continue to endure (2010:106). Shifting away from the more polarizing question of

whether racialized people should be called settlers and partly in response to the critiques

of Lawrence and Dua’s earlier interventions, 102 Amadahy and Lawrence refocus

attention to the involvement of racialized non-Indigenous people in specific settlement

practices, as well as the pressing question of contemporary relationships that are possible

and necessary between Indigenous and black people. Here Amadahy and Lawrence

provide a much more nuanced reading of black-Indigenous relations (also see King

2013).

For my current purposes, I draw attention to Lawrence and Dua’s reiteration of the

theoretical separation of racism from colonialism in ways that prioritize racism within

critical race frameworks (2010:118), as well as their attentiveness to the conditions of

racism and white settlement that shape black claims to settler status in conditions where

life and death issues were and are pressing (2010:119-120). Referring to black settlement

                                                                                                               102 Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright make two significant critiques of Lawrence and Dua’s analysis. They argue that to suggest that all people of colour are settlers is to insufficiently attend to specific conditions of migration and settlement that are often also part of circuits of colonialism, such as the forcible movement of enslaved Africans, indentured Asians or Third World migrants, many of whom are themselves indigenous (2008:121). They also challenge perspectives of decolonization that continue to rely on ideas of nation and territory as central to the securing of rights and in fact, see such perspectives as being embedded in neo-liberal regimes and the intensification of capitalism through nation states (2008:122,125-126). Looking to failed projects of national liberation, Sharma and Wright argue that through formal decolonization, ruling relations have remained the same while rulers have often shifted to new elites (2008:130). Instead, they suggest that anti-capitalist projects must remain central to anti-racist organizing and our strategies of liberation should not reproduce various forms of nationalisms that they see as embedded in colonial projects of defining freedom and resistance in restrictive and non-liberatory ways (2008:122). All authors agree that the specificities of oppression against indigenous people must be central in struggles against racism and approaches such as those of civil rights do not adequately address colonial relationships. My purpose here is not to weigh in on these very complex relationships or the extent to which we can equate projects of national liberation and independence with Aboriginal sovereignty claims in Canada. Instead, as Sharma and Wright also concede and Lawrence and Dua forcefully argue, I am interested in exploring the extent to which colonialism and racism are not thought of within the same frame and as Sharma and Wright usefully suggest, nor are multiple colonial displacements and legacies.

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as shaped quite often by the need for sheer survival, Amadahy and Lawrence, reminiscent

of Thobani, describe the very “ambiguous” positions that connect black communities to

what is overwhelmingly a white settler colonial project (2010:121). They also contend

that anti-black racism and the place of black people and communities within Indigenous

sovereignty need to be addressed while also insisting on a reorientation to Indigeneity in

the scholarship and organizing of black communities to ensure that Indigenous presence

“fundamentally matter[s]” (2010:122). Citing Comanche activist Paul Smith, Amadahy

and Lawrence importantly point out the centrality of both “‘Indian land and African slave

labor’” (2010:123) to settler colonial projects. While such a focus does not escape the

ways that strategies for survival are often organized along sovereignty lines for

Indigenous peoples, it also allows for a revisiting of histories of alliance as well as roles

that some racialized activists are beginning to articulate in relation to specific Indigenous

sovereignty movements (Amadahy and Lawrence 2010:126,128). 103 Ultimately,

Amadahy and Lawrence call for an analysis and relationship building practices that

connect up the “perpetual state of crisis” in both Indigenous and black communities

(2010:131) and the settler colonial state that remains the primary beneficiary of such

socially produced desperation.

                                                                                                               103 For example, Amadahy and Lawrence point out the work of Palestine House, No One is Illegal and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, comprised mostly of racialized people, in providing resources and logistical support to Kanenhstaton, the Six Nations land reclamation site near Caledonia, Ontario. Indeed it would be fruitful to look at the defunding to certain social justice organizations that received federal funding as well as the increased surveillance and restrictions placed on others organizations in the context of these larger potential solidarities between indigenous and racialized populations. They also suggest, as does Renisa Mawani (2009), that colonial anxieties about the potential alliances and relationships between Indigenous and racialized settlers provide us with a compelling entry point to consider the connections and solidarities, not the sameness, generated by racialized colonial displacements while circumventing the “oppression olympics” (Smith 2006:66) in which people and communities clamor to come out on top.

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Tying together forced migrations and displacements alongside the dispossession of

Indigenous peoples, Amadahy and Lawrence call our attention to more entangled and

uneven histories that collide and collude in complex configurations (2010:131) without

reverting to claims about mythical and pure origins. They also importantly point out that

the colonial relations that racialized non-Indigenous people are called into shape our very

conditions for survival and resistance. Sometimes, there are “helpful concessions” to be

found in these gains and strategies, often through state recognition. Reflecting on their

pervasiveness in public discourses, Bannerji observes that even people who are not

comfortable with the politics and language of diversity and multiculturalism are often

required to “translate our needs and concerns” into this “discursive constellation” in order

to be effective or intelligible (2000:40). Such strategies, while expedient and perhaps

even strategically effective, do not address the “system that requires Native peoples to

disappear in the first place” (Simpson and Smith 2014:11).

Like so many silences, confusions and unanswered questions that punctuated the

interviews, I do not know what ideas and answers will fill Ayanna’s not knowing. But

her not knowing provided an occasion to think about deepening racial literacies across

racial and settler colonial divides in Canada. In her interview, Ayanna discusses the

newness of the question of settler and citizen identity for her and her own struggles to

understand a family history of colonial displacement and arrival in another place of

colonial displacements, a process in which she participates. In her not knowing, she does

not foreclose thinking more and deeply about untidy histories and complex relations of

power. I fill Ayanna’s not knowing with some ways of creating space to trace and

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understand the histories that help us to end up where we are and sometimes keep us there,

in relation to other histories, sometimes made hard to see. Questions left hanging or

unanswered may seem small, even insignificant, but it was in Ayanna’s openness to not

knowing, that I found one of the most potentially promising openings. Not knowing is an

uncertain place; it can be turned into many things, including a space that makes learning

possible.

I end this section with a final narrative, that of Nur, who brings together often disparately

narrated colonial circuits and displacements as a way to rethink connections across and

between spaces, histories and organizing. Recounting her own family’s displacement

from Afghanistan in the context of imperial wars and dispersal and resettlement across

the Americas, Nur discusses her involvement in university-based Palestine solidarity

work as well as her analysis of colonialism and settlement in Canada. Describing herself

as Canadian by birth but one “who doesn’t believe in the state of Canada,” Nur brings

together an analysis of land, settlement and displacement in Afghanistan, Palestine and

Canada, which she often references as Turtle Island.104 Thinking of these processes

simultaneously, Nur reads her efforts to sort out her own family history and experiences

as bringing her to the experiences of lands, communities and displacements of

Palestinians, Indigenous people on Turtle Island and back to Afghanistan. We glimpse

through the small openings that she provides, “land shaped by competing histories of

slavery, colonialism, arrival, and Indigeneity” (Byrd 2011:xxxvi). Nur, like many others

in this study, describes the almost desperate desire to “place” oneself in the world but

                                                                                                               104 Turtle Island is commonly used by Indigenous peoples to reference North America (Cannon and Sunseri 2011:xiii).

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then immediately recognizes that this desire often does not account for those who are

displaced or emplaced in specific ways. She also insists on the need for collective

organizing so that questions of complicity are framed as historically and socially

produced, lived and contested.

Auditing Privilege and Oppression Nur encourages a move away from exclusively individual preoccupations with privilege.

Such proclivities often result in the listing of social locations (i.e. I am a white, straight,

able bodied man; I am a middle class, straight, woman of colour; I am a white, queer,

working class woman; I am a racialized settler etc.), without a corresponding political

project. Often it is unclear what such declarations accomplish. At the same time, I do

not want to underestimate the importance of reflecting on our own locations within

systems of power and the way that they are harnessed to specific entitlements and the

disempowerment of others. However such lists, while they have become standard

practice in some progressive, activist and even academic spaces, can themselves become

empty recitations. Reflecting on such confessional practices, Andrea Smith argues that it

is often the confessions that become the focus of our political work (2013:263). Warning

against turning structural oppression into individual forms of self-improvement, Smith

asks instead how individual and collective transformations might be linked in order to

confront and undo the systems that give rise to privilege in the first place (2013:278). As

Sara Ahmed (2004) argues in a relatable context of whiteness studies, the term “critical”

is often deployed as a marker of transformative politics. She cautions that such a reading

is inattentive to the effects of anti-racist declarations, which can be engaged while

concealing or leaving in tact racist relations of power. Put another way, the terms critical

or anti-racist can be mobilized performatively rather than as transformative political

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practice. So too can lists of privilege, they can make us feel good, unimplicated and

distinguish us from “those” people who are unaware and uncritical (Thompson 2003).

There is no list complete or thorough enough through which we can individually check

ourselves out of racism and white settler colonialism. But the impulse to narrate

ourselves in these ways reveals the long reach of neoliberalism where auditing our

politics and lives to some place comfortable and unimplicated, comes to stand in for

collective forms of life and social organizing.

Taking seriously Andrea Smith’s (2013) call to move away from confessing privilege to

finding alternative ways to relate to each other, my project is not invested in people of

colour coming to take up an identity as racialized settlers. I am much more interested in

the kinds of openings, revised political practices and relationships that attending to white

settler colonialism might provide. Tiffany King works to account for the importance of

both settler colonialism and slavery in the settlement of the Americas. While she rejects

the notion that black people who were enslaved in the Americas can be conceived of or

accurately referred to as Black settlers, she also argues that “blackness does not escape

complicity” (2013:206). For her, rejecting the category of Black settler from a specific

historical location of enslavement does not mean that one cannot seriously engage settler

colonialism and work to confront genocidal practices in settler societies alongside the

desire for Black freedom (2013:223). Hers is a very instructive and politically generative

way of engaging the often dead-end antagonisms created by declarative politics.

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Ayanna and Nur are among the few women of colour in the study who reflect

meaningfully or at all on the interdependence of colonial and white settler histories. Far

from individualizing the silences about colonialism, I situate them within a larger

framework of national complicity while also drawing attention to how racialized people

born here or who have gone through the educational system almost entirely in Canada,

have been, in some unsurprising ways, very well schooled in Canadian national

mythologies, particularly as they relate to settler colonialism. Part of this dissertation has

been an effort to notice and wonder what becomes unremarkable and how. While the

entry point for my work is through racialized individuals, I call attention much more

broadly to the discursive and racialized terrains and interpretive repertoires which offer

up or efface settler colonial histories and relations in the service of nation building, into

which we are all unevenly invited. This section is an opening, to consider how racialized

people are invited to continue a white settler project. While we may not be the primary

beneficiaries of such efforts, we are certainly not outside of them. I draw attention to

how white setter colonial violence continues to be contained in Canadian national

narratives in such a way that the question appears new for many of us who are not

Indigenous. That is also an effect of colonial violence and it speaks to how settler

colonial violence in the Americas organizes specific knowings and forgettings and the

territorial evictions and protections they accompany. As Scott Morgensen argues, “if

settlers ever do learn who they are, they will recognize themselves at the least as those

who are meant to replace” (Morgensen 2011:22, emphasis in original). While this

chapter has pointed to the diverse field of settlers and conditions of migration and

settlement such complexity should not be read as effacing the ways in which Indigeneity

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and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty continue to matter a great deal. However, the

more dichotomous question of whether racialized people are settlers or citizens may help

to further polarize, rather than engage in a more thoughtful way with how we, as

racialized non-Indigenous people, are produced to replace. This chapter points to the

centrality of knowledge production in securing such replacement but through the

narratives of Ayanna and Nur, also allows us to imagine cultivating different habits of

racial literacy.

Conclusion In 1995, Oscar Lathlin, a Cree Member of the provincial opposition in Manitoba, used the

word racist to describe the effects of Manitoba’s provincial policies in relation to

Aboriginal communities. In response, the Speaker of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly

banned the word racist in the House, deeming it to be “‘unparliamentary language’” (Gill

2002:159). Lathlin refused to withdraw his comments and as a result, he was expelled

from the House. In her article about this incident, Sheila Dawn Gill (2002) traces the

ways that law produces racial and colonial violence and refuses to allow it to be spoken

or named as such. The ban on the word racism was extended by the House Speaker to

include any reference to policies, individuals or governments, past or present, in

Manitoba though the word could still be used to reference governments outside of

Manitoba (Gill 2002:164-5). I thought a lot about Gill’s article, about the banning of

“racism” when its proximity posed a problem but its availability to describe policies and

practices outside of the provincial boundaries. Far away racism, racism past the

provincial boundaries could be tolerated and named but how else could Lathlin describe

the reserve on which he lives, whose genealogy can be traced to colonial and racial

technologies of containment and dispossession? How else could he capture not only the

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racism he has experienced “‘practically all of my life’” in schools and workplaces

(Lathlin cited in Gill 2002:165) but also the “imperial-colonial relations” (Gill 2002:167)

that undergird white settler colonialism, made impossible to speak publicly through this

ruling?

In January 2014, Bernard Drainville, Parti Quebecois Minister responsible for

Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship in Quebec, proposed a provincial charter

of values. The charter proposed a ban on public sector workers wearing any religious

symbols, except for small crosses. In the furor that ensued, it was evident to many

observers that Muslim women and their overt articulations of being Muslim, whether by

wearing the hijab, burqa or niqab, were the flashpoint and focus of these efforts. Debates

continued for many months and there were also public hearings in which ignorant and

racist views about Muslims, in particular, but also racialized others, always outsiders to

Quebec, were openly and abundantly expressed. When Martin Laperrière, a citizen who

opposed the charter, was presenting his perspective during the public hearings, he

referenced as racist, an incident where a journalist and TV host who supported the charter

went on air in a burqa. “No, no, no,” Drainville interrupted, “Mr. Laperrière, you cannot

call anyone here, in this space, a racist. I will not accept it.” Drainville insisted that

Laperrière withdraw the word and furthermore declared that no one could be called racist

in that space.105

                                                                                                               105 For background on the charter and this specific incident, see http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/01/15/graeme-hamilton-drainville-bans-racist-at-quebec-values-charter-hearings-the-word-that-is/ (accessed July 2014).

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While much more can be said about these examples, in this context, Lathlin and

Drainville are useful for thinking about the national contest over speaking or containing

racism and colonial violence, of rendering it explicit or making it difficult to think, speak

and interrupt. In these examples, it is not the people and policies that perpetuate racism

that are called out, it is those who try to draw attention to it.106 Doing racism, condoning

it, creating the conditions for it to be expressed and enshrined in government law and

policy is not the problem. Being called to account for it is.

I start the conclusion with these examples to emphasize the national constraints and

conditions that defer or at times displace an analysis of racial and colonial logics as

practices and realities in contemporary Canada. Racism is incommensurate with the kind

of place Canada is and who Canadians are or think themselves to be. It is contained

spatially and temporally, to other places, times and people.107 The discursive authority of

the nation to adjudicate how, where and when racism is understood to take place is

powerfully constraining. As I have done throughout the dissertation, once again, I draw

attention to the conditions under which racism can be thought, spoken or acted on. Most

of the women of colour in this study attest to the stabilization of racial formation outside

of white settler colonial logics and practices. The knowledges available for them to think

                                                                                                               106 See also Eva Mackey for the example of Robert Nault, the federal Minister of Indian Affairs who demanded an apology from Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. In a speech at the UN Conference on Racism in South Africa, Coon Come described Canada as racist in its “‘oppression, marginalization and dispossession of indigenous peoples’” (Coon Come cited in Mackey 2002:xv). “The Minister responded by saying that Canadians have a right to be outraged with such statements because there is ‘no proof of this in the modern time’” (cited in Mackey 2002:xv). Calling out racism ends in a mix of punishments and demands for proof. Racism is relegated to some other place and some other time, a distant past or a distant location. These examples illuminate the difficulties, in some cases impossibility, of naming racism as a national contemporary problem and practice, one that is close by. 107 Paraphrasing Zeus Leonardo, racism is the fart that is always someone else’s (2010:210).

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about colonial violence are circumscribed in ways that predictably echo Canadian

national mythologies and yet, there are moments, reflections and engagements where

other things come into the picture to complicate and unsettle the story. Both the

dominant and more critically oriented reflections about colonial violence speak to the

ways in which national mythologies require a great deal of work and energy to be

reproduced and naturalized. They are after all, powerful, mythical stories of origin and

founding but they are uneven and disorderly and the cracks within them provide

opportunities to think otherwise, to connect up histories and struggles, to bring racism

and white settler colonialism into the same analytic frame and to insist that the effects of

such practices are unevenly configured and lived.

I draw on the critical interventions of Aboriginal and critical race feminist scholars to

emphasize that our organizing and the analytical terrains we mobilize and that mobilize

us, do not require us to proceed along the lines of sameness, shared oppression or

sisterhood. Rather, the social and material conditions of life differentiate us and these

distinctions continue to matter a great deal. This chapter demonstrates that attachments

to forms of racial literacy based on prioritizing our own experiences of racial oppression

and injury, often requires us to bracket off those experiences, histories and questions that

involve us in more uncomfortable ways. In addition to being a methodological problem

of severing histories off from one another, it is also an epistemological problem,

organizing “ways of knowing, in the past and present” (O’Connell 2005:ii). To develop

more robust, relational and reflexive forms of racial literacy, we need to be much more,

better and differently schooled in reading across histories that not only knit together

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white, racialized and Indigenous peoples but in many ways, also call us into and produce

these categories. But in our often desperate and varied efforts to lessen the uneven

conditions of oppression in our lives and to make futures possible, it is difficult to enter

the fraught discussion of our own complicities and historical entanglements. Yet such an

effort may enable us to bring “our own” and “other” struggles alongside each other in

ways that can yield important tensions and insights that we cannot entirely foresee. As

Andrea Smith observes in the organizing work of No One is Illegal, documented by

Harsha Walia, taking settler colonialism seriously within immigrant rights movements,

can help to clarify how the nation-state controls land and regulates movement in ways

that are disempowering for both migrants and Indigenous peoples (2013:xiii).

Native and women of colour feminist scholarship is generative precisely for its ability to

link forms of domination that are often disarticulated from each other. As Audra

Simpson and Andrea Smith remind us, the oppressive conditions that Native peoples face

are linked with those of other marginalized groups (2014:11). Turning “away from the

assimilative lure of the statist politics of recognition” Glenn Coulthard (2007:456) and

other Indigenous scholars look to contemporary Indigenous activism as positing futures

that do not fix Indigenous ways of life in sentimental and timeless ways but as struggles

which make possible different kinds of futures and relationships (Simpson and Smith

2014). However, Tuck and Yang also point out that elements of Indigenous sovereignty

may be incommensurable with the social justice efforts of people of colour in settler

contexts. They remind us, as do other scholars, that anti-racist remedies that seek to

address racial exclusions and hierarchies that need to be addressed can have the

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unintended effect of strengthening settler colonial practices (Nichols 2014; Lawrence and

Dua 2005). While this can be deeply unsettling, Tuck and Yang are clear that the

political project of “decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity”

(2012:35). While struggles for Indigenous sovereignty may well conflict with the desire

for and investment in a more just, fair or inclusive Canada, confronting white settler

colonialism requires us, at the very least, to question our attachment to and investment in

the nation and its normalizing powers.

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Coda I completed revisions to this chapter on Canada Day, 2014. A week or so before, my

daughter completed Grade 1 and at the end of a series of activities about Canada, she

came home and said, “I love Canada.” After a long silence, I asked her why she loved

Canada and what it was she loved. Another long silence followed, this time hers. At the

end of the discussion that followed, Canada had been whittled down to the province and

then the city and then the neighbourhood where she lives and the parks, ice cream shops,

swimming pools and fruit stands she loves to frequent. On July 1, while I was doing

dishes, she spontaneously said to me “I’m curious about why I love Canada.” I replied

that I am also curious and so we strike up another conversation with a different set of

histories, landmarks and feelings. My daughter is being schooled to love the nation and

to imagine it as a finished project, as something that exists, without question or

contestation. I see the work being done to cultivate this affective attachment and to

secure a particular national mythology that tells its own story so selectively and easily, as

my daughter declares her love for it. It takes a lot of work to do and undo Canada, to

make it and to destabilize it. As my child is schooled in Canada and its attendant white

settler colonial story and trying to find her place within it, I try to feel reassured that she

is also being schooled to question her own attachments. Like Usha worrying for her

brother, I too worry about the meanings that will be made and offered to her and I hope

desperately that she will inherit other meanings, ideas, histories and feelings that protect

her and help her to find places to love and ways to belong that are less costly.

 

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Conclusion: From Racial Injury to Anti-Racism  

Memory is a tough place. -Claudia Rankine (2014:64) We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. -Jose Esteban Munoz (2009:1 emphasis in original)

At the start of her book, The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng cautions that despite

her interest in exploring the meaning and impact of racial injury, there are minority

subjects that develop “self-affirming or sustaining” relations to their racial identities

(Cheng 2001:7). This project does not highlight these subjects. Instead, many of the

participants who came to the interviews, came because racism had harmed them in

immeasurable ways and they wanted to explore, understand and pass on some of these

memories and reflections. And they wanted me to do something with them. While racial

injury was not what I set out to explore, it became relevant, even central, in how the

lessons of racism were learned and remembered and the kinds of responses that they

generated. While I was initially reluctant to focus on injury and harm or to recall Eve

Tuck, to report back on women of colour as simply “damaged,” (2009:412) the stories

recounted damage in great detail. It took me a long while to sort out how to pay attention

to the damage. This was a challenge for me as I didn’t set out to engage the affective

repercussions of racism but more than that, I am deeply suspicious of emotions - for how

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they can be used to evade issues of power and responsibility.108 If anything, my

orientation to thinking and teaching, some might even say my orientation to life, reflects

an investment in thinking and doing more than feeling. Writing this project taught me to

temper my dismissal of emotions, to think instead about their production and

productiveness in the lives of women of colour, to pay attention to what feelings do, how

they move people in certain ways and directions. I stopped fighting feelings and started

paying attention to them.

Through analysis of interviews, I mine microsites and memories of early racial

aggression to examine their enduring effects and the varied meanings and practices that

they produce. In the scholarship of women of colour and black feminists (Ahmed 2010;

Davis 2008; Essed 2004; Essed 1991; Williams 1991; Lorde 1984; Lorde 1982), I found

some of the most thoughtful and sophisticated ways of understanding the emotions

generated by racism. Perhaps the first lesson I drew from this work at the onset of this

study was the injunction not to hurry past pain. While it would be a mistake to think of

people as only hurt or damaged, it is also a mistake to rush over or past these places.109

In his work on schools as sites of black suffering, Michael J. Dumas insists that while

racial suffering is an entirely predictable outcome of state schooling in America, we

know much less about how black and racialized subjects understand, articulate and know

their losses (2014:26). It is important, Dumas argues, to get under how mundane their

                                                                                                               108 See Leonardo and Zembylas 2013; DiAngelo 2011; Razack 2007; Srivastava 2006; Boler 1999; Razack and Fellows 1998 for the complexities of engaging with emotion with particular emphasis on how emotions can skirt issues of accountability. 109 As Audre Lorde writes of the effects of white supremacy and patriarchy in the lives of black women, “we are strong and enduring. We are also deeply scarred” (1984:151). Certainly moments of survival and strength, individual and collective, are recounted but the focus remains on the deep scars and their production.

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suffering appears and to attend to its social production. Sara Ahmed also reflects on the

desire to rush over “unhappy stories of racism” (2007:164). Instead, she points out that

institutions are much more eager to solicit stories of good practice and resistance, of

racism overcome. Stories of overcoming racism, Ahmed argues, “can involve a defence

against hearing about racism as an ongoing and unfinished history that we have yet to

describe fully” (2007:165).

Insights on stories of overcoming can also be gleaned from disability studies. In her

analysis of overcoming stories, Tanya Titchkosky explains that disability is posited as

“something that can and should be overcome” (2007:177). She explores the demand and

desire for these stories and their ubiquitous recounting, arguing that they reveal “how our

consciousness of disability is governed” (2007:181). I apply and adapt Titchkosky’s

analysis for thinking about the limits of investigating racism in meaningful ways, outside

of the overcoming story. What I find disturbing and illuminating about Titchkosky’s

insight is that the overcoming story also governs people of colour – it defines the limits of

the stories we can tell and the shape that they should take. The permitted story of racism

that people of colour can recount goes something like this: a terribly racist encounter,

one that is easily identifiable, allowing all other white people to comfortably distance

themselves from the bad racist; recount the incident quickly; pain is okay if not

belaboured; anger can be uncomfortable so if you must judiciously target it at the specific

racist person and express it appropriately (smiling and keeping an even voice can be

helpful here); change gears to resilience and an upbeat attitude and by way of conclusion,

say something comforting and reassuring about the tolerance of Canada and Canadians.

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This sums up the liberal story about racism and the boundaries of its expression. It

consists of singular events and exceptional people and it is intelligible only when

recounted in non-threatening ways by reasonable people of colour.

Marginalized people have long had to sort out how to harness, position and represent

even their oppression and its pain (Morrison 1998). It has been one of the major goals of

this work to refuse the constraints of permitted stories of racism or to orient their telling

to white audiences. Instead, I endeavour to describe more fully the legacies of everyday

racial violence in the lives of women of colour; to insist that we not gloss over them

quickly but that we stay in those stories, feel how they were told, detail how they were

thought, trace their resonances and link them to the systems which give rise to them in the

first place. While it does not sum up the lives of participants, this dissertation does turn

an analytic lens to these unhappy stories.

I began this study imagining that I would be exploring how racial literacies develop

across multiple landscapes, from the school to the university and from the home to

institutional life. Although I gathered data on all of these sites, I was overwhelmed with

reflections on early schooling and on childhood. There is undoubtedly a sequel to the

present study but in this dissertation I have kept the gaze on the landscapes of public

schools and on childhood, as a measure of the importance of these experiences in my

participants’ narratives. It quickly became evident that one could not understand later

experiences and responses without first dwelling on the context in which racial literacy

first develops. Understanding what Dianah comes looking for in her women’s studies

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classrooms and what she wants to learn has much to do with where she has been.

Listening to the joy when Jasbir finally learns, even for a moment, about Sikh culture and

history in a university classroom makes sense more fully once we understand where the

alienation she feels from a Eurocentric curriculum first began. Following Latifa to the

whitest corridors of the arts world where white people are surprised to find a black

woman takes on a different force when we recall her lost dream of becoming a lawyer. It

also teaches us about why her attachment to Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Junot Diaz is

so deeply meaningful. When we know how hard Usha worked for a future and all that

she gave up, hearing her describe university classrooms that reflect Europe, Guyana and

Canada in different ways is profound and moving. Knowing that Neelam still can’t be in

classrooms so easily today makes sense when we know what happened and when we pay

attention to the things that keep happening.

Racial injury is where many of the stories discussed in this work begin but it is not where

they end. This dissertation traces the racial politics that emerge from these experiences of

racism. As I show, there is no readily available language for narrating racism. For many

women in this study, racism was difficult to understand and describe and in their

childhoods and younger years, racism was lived out in isolated and isolating ways.

Participants who grew up in homes where understandings of racism were provided, by

parents and grandparents, enjoyed distinct advantages in this regard. The words and

analysis of family members helped them to place disorienting experiences of racism in

social and historical contexts and it helped them to understand that racism was a system

that had been changed, that could be changed. And it was not only knowledge that was

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inherited but also affective instruction – the girls learned to feel themselves as something

other and more than a racist word or a circulating set of ideas put in motion by white

supremacy. The love of family members fortified them. As Richard Iton argues, if

“politics is, among other things, a contest about what matters and ought to be subject to

consideration and debate” (2008:9), I had to take seriously things like love, the longing to

feel good and the ability to live positively in ways that expanded my understanding of

political life and desire.

Understanding everyday racism, to use Philomena Essed’s (1991) fitting phrase, while it

provided relief, it also generated divergent pulls and discrepant desires. The participants

disrupted my linear readings of political formation and development. Their politics were

stuttering and non-teleological; they did not move from oppressed to empowered (Tuck

2011; Mahmood 2005; Kandiyoti 1988) and often, they confounded easy distinctions

between progressive and conservative. In some cases, women of colour who had a

remarkable fluency in matters of racism turned away from it. Learning about racism was

painful and difficult and not always welcomed.

I wanted to find good anti-racist subjects, girls who grew into women with a strong

analysis of their own racial subordination and who were not defeated by it but instead

were emboldened to fight it. What I ended up with is a much clearer picture of the

conditions that regulate and constrain the development of anti-racist politics. In other

words, the story most available for the women of colour in this study to understand and

tell racism is the permitted one. Social justice turns out not to be an easily available

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horizon. It is in fact a heavily managed project (McRobbie 2009:10). Focusing on the

movement in social movements, Deborah Gould considers what it means to be moved

and by what and in which direction (2009:2-3). My participants encouraged me to think

about how slow, hesitant and laborious their movements and learning can sometimes be,

orienting them not only to social change but also to forms of inaction and stagnation.

Often, their movements are not directed to the conditions that produce oppression.

Instead, women often learned how to better live with and manage racism. I was not the

only one fighting feelings. I explore the primary tension that marked the interviews - of

becoming entrepreneurs of the harm and pain that racism deposits in their lives and

throwing responsibility for racism back to the people and conditions that produce it. This

is not, however, as I have emphasized throughout, to be taken as a story of women’s

failure to develop an anti-racist politics. Instead, it draws attention to the larger

institutional, historical and national conditions that evacuate the ability of many women

of colour to name and analyze the racism that they experience. The problem is not of

overcoming racism, the problem is that racism is organized to keep coming.

Throughout the dissertation, I trace understandings of racism under pressure from

neoliberal interpretations of racial oppression and its attendant remedies. In so doing, I

demonstrate the constraining consequences and regulatory effects of racial neoliberalism.

I pay attention to homes and families, schools and teachers, peers and strangers and

everyday encounters in the national landscape. Together, these places and relationships

cultivate and curtail understandings of racism and encourage people of colour to think,

act and speak in particular ways in relation to racism, rather than others. Principally, this

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dissertation gives an account of racism and its effects and traces the accounts of racism

that it is possible for people of colour to give. Women of colour are often caught

between feelings and experiences that materialize oppression in their daily lives—and

dominant postracial neoliberal horizons that evacuate collective histories, politics and a

public language with which to name racism. In other words, racial injury is privatized.

Attending to women of colour’s everyday lives reveals and challenges the power of

standardized accounts of racism in Canada that spatially and temporally contain racism to

other times, places and people. It is not only that ideas have consequences; increasingly I

came to understand that the ideas women of colour articulated were best understood as

consequences of the landscapes that furnished them. In particular, I trace the force of

Canadian multicultural pedagogies in displacing an analysis of racism and white settler

colonialism and compelling its forgetting. This lesson is learned powerfully in state

schools. While not all participants were domesticated or seduced by multiculturalism,

none escaped its influence (Thobani 2007:165).

Gayatri Gopinath discusses the “dangers of privileging antiracism as a singular political

project” (2005:46) and the women insisted that I take her caution seriously. In particular,

the lives of girls and women of colour in this study instruct us in the inadequacies of anti-

racist politics and literacies that are not also explicitly queer and feminist. Because of the

already heavy burdens of living lives so racially constrained, almost all of the women of

colour in this study who were queer were quietly so. One of the best ways to strengthen

the ability of women and girls of colour to live queer lives is through an increased

commitment to feminist anti-racist politics and organizing. If schools had been less

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racially hostile, young women of colour may have found their ways to queer sooner.

Neelam instructs us powerfully in this possibility.

Anti-racism is slow business. I was slowed down by the stories, in my writing and

thinking. In turn, I wrote to slow readers down. I pause at stories and peer into them, I

don’t disclose all the details about participants when I introduce them. I disperse

information about them throughout the dissertation. They are not in charts or tables that

provide demographic details and overviews. I don’t summarize their lives. Readers may

find themselves flipping back and forth between chapters to stitch together the details of

peoples lives, to find out some bits of information at the end and to reconsider how it

might reshape earlier readings, to wonder about things we don’t know and to think about

those that we do. At the same time, I wrote to bring readers along, to write just at the

edge between frustrating and engaging, demanding and giving. Different readers will

respond and read differently and no doubt, there are pitfalls and things to be gained from

this way of writing life and people. Some readers may find themselves wanting a more

solid empirical picture, something that enables them to pin down the moment that racism

took hold, did its damage and was resisted. One of the contributions that I make is to

show racism’s ephemeral yet enduring effects.

Yet even in these narratives so heavily weighed down in the “here and now,” the “then

and there” of Jose Esteban Munoz’s longing does appear (2009:1 emphasis in original).

There is the bubble of history and family stories that shields Miriam from racism’s

relentlessness; there is a friend who appears only briefly to help Latifa manage her racist

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teacher right before report cards; there is Shanice passing on family knowledge to her

nieces so that their futures are not so constrained by racism; there is Ayanna’s fragile and

profound space of not knowing that might make space for her and for many of us who

don’t know yet; there is Neelam’s mother clearing some space so that her child might

imagine a queer and feminist future; and there is Nimat crying her way to a new set of

questions where she hopes that she is less likely to fuel anti-black racism. These

moments of beauty and struggle are undoubtedly within a landscape of oppression that

“wastes people’s gifts and obstructs their contributions and…forces people to spend their

lives fighting for things that no one should ever have to fight for” (Schulman 2012:149).

Even though some of them barely touch down on the page, it would be a mistake to miss

how life sustaining they are.

The Way Forward For the most part, I conducted interviews asking about experiences of racism in order to

understand how women of colour learn about it, how they arrive at explanations about the

racial conditions of life. What I didn’t ask was a specific set of questions about the

different ways that racism is experienced. I have some, but admittedly few, insights into

how people thought of themselves in relation to other racialized communities. What this

dissertation materializes is racism as a shared experience among women of colour – a

deeply injurious one that requires inordinate amounts of labour to manage and respond to.

It attends to the kind of considerations that women of colour are variously engaged in, the

decisions that they make to inhabit or try to refuse the categories into which they are

pressed, the kinds of safety they were seeking and the daily encounters that they were

trying to manage. I look less at the consequences of these things than at arriving at them.

But the consequences are consequential, not only for the people who take them up but

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also for other racialized people and communities. What does it mean to take up the

invitation to be the model minority, the grateful citizen, the university educated brown or

black person - even where we understand the desire for inclusion, safety or a future that

gives rise to it? Are there people for whom these categories are more easily available or

inhabitable? How does the brown hijab wearing Muslim fare in relation to the black

hijab wearing Muslim and how do they both fare in relation to the Muslim woman who

doesn’t wear the mark of Islam in the same way? How does the brown student that traces

origins back to Bangladesh fare in relation to the brown student with roots in India? How

does the black student whose family is from the Caribbean fare in relation to the black

Nigerian student or the Indo-Caribbean student? Complicated questions that are further

complicated by class, gender and sexuality. This study does not attend to these important

distinctions. As Chapter 5 suggests, the specificity of anti-black racism or, as I raise in

Chapter 6, the nature of racism directed at Indigenous populations in a settler colonial

society, requires further analysis and investigation.

Thinking with and through queer of colour critique in critical race feminist work has been

helpful for more than examining queer desire. It has also enabled me to think more

expansively and critically about how some marginalized people can be domesticated by

the promise of inclusion. Drawing from and extending Lisa Duggan’s work on neo-

liberalism and sexual politics, Jasbir Puar explains that mainstream gays and lesbians are

increasingly incorporated into dominant forms of citizenship. No longer expelling them

entirely, American gays are included against “racial and sexual others” (Puar 2007:39).

Just as queers of colour have rightly pointed out how much the fight for gay and lesbian

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marriage has domesticated a broader non-normative vision of life of which sexual rights

are a small part, queer of colour critique can also be useful for refusing the stabilization

of racial politics in line with neoliberal multicultural absorption and aspirations (Ferguson

2012; Melamed 2011). Applying Puar’s work to think more about the complexities of

Canadian neoliberal multiculturalism, Roland Sintos Coloma argues that Puar’s analytical

insights are useful for reversing the focus on oppressed groups, such as “queers as always

resistant and oppositional” and also for illuminating how the nation-state can include

certain segments of marginalized communities against other constituencies (2013:591).

As much as we need to fight back against exclusionary citizenship practices, we also need

to be wary of the relational and provisional conditions of inclusion.

At this project’s end, I think about the spaces that multicultural Canada offers to some of

us, more easily than to others. Is the multicultural promise for brown and black people

the same? While this dissertation insists that the model minority is not a category which

different brown people can easily assume, it also shows us that with enough work, it is a

provisional category that is available, heavily regulated and surveilled and recounted

through tears, but available still. For the most part, professors and students are not

entirely surprised to find brown students in their classrooms. While the brown students

do not recall the university with a sense of ease, “the bright Indian kid” that Usha aspires

to be has a place in the university.110 There was no equivalent story of the brilliant black

woman that black women could step into. As Rinaldo Walcott puts it, black people in the

                                                                                                               110 However, as Coloma importantly interjects, the category of Asian, the largest minority population in Canada, includes wealthy investor class immigrants alongside live-in caregivers from the Philippines (2013:593-594). This vast diversity and the uneven incorporation of different Asians within the Canadian landscape require much more attention.

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academy are “unimaginable” (2011). The fight of black women took on a different feel

and intensity in the university. This will be the starting point for thinking about the lives

and learning of women of colour in higher education. All of this means that our racial

literacies need to be adept and agile enough to more fully engage sites of racial

differentiation in Canada. Racial others are not uniformly excluded but to notice that, as I

do at the start of this dissertation, does not tell us about who is being invited in, under

what conditions and against which racial groups. This project would have undoubtedly

turned out differently had I started at a different starting point.

Some participants reflect on these complex circuits of power. Ayanna, for example,

wonders what to make of her own and more generally black and people of colour’s

relationship to settler colonial practices. Nimat wonders about shifting her learning –

from thinking about racism as a monolithic force that positions her in relation to whites,

to a more careful consideration of how she is positioned as a brown middle class woman

in relation to white women and against black women. There is no place outside racism

(Leonardo 2010). At the same time, the problem of racism should not be displaced to

people of colour. For too long, whites have constructed racism as always the problem of

other white people (Leonardo and Zembylas 2013:151). These urgently needed and

difficult conversations on the relationships within and between Indigenous and racialized

communities in Canada need to be contextualized within a white settler society and

project that continues. Otherwise, they will be handily recuperated by white people

looking to find yet another “alibi” (Leonardo and Zembylas 2013:151) for a system in

which they are the primary beneficiaries.

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While the effects of racial logics works to contain the lives of women of colour in

particular ways, they are also uneven and contradictory, providing at times, small avenues

of escape, relief or mitigation from its harm. In investigating only our hurt and pain,

what can be obscured is how women and people of colour can also participate in the

racial harm that is visited on other racialized people. If the intransigence of white

feminists to centrally engage racism in their feminist politics has taught us anything, we

should take to heart the lesson that when called to account for our differential power

locations in anti-racist feminist efforts, there are many discomforting entanglements and

complicities that we need to engage.

So much of this dissertation has been about people looking back on their lives. It seems

fitting, for many reasons, to end with Sherene Razack (2013), looking back on her earlier

work with Mary Louise Fellows (1998). Razack recalls her work with Fellows on the

challenges of building feminist solidarity and the tendency of women to “race to

innocence” when called to account for their complicity in subordinating other women.

The problem, Fellows and Razack point out, is not only cognitive; it is the problem of not

feeling “ourselves as simultaneously marginal and complicit in the subordination of

another” (Razack 2013:207; Fellows and Razack 1998:336).111 It is hard to feel

complicit when the conditions of life are so difficult and when our tools to think and feel

racism are so deeply impoverished. As Leonardo Zeus and Michalinos Zembylas argue

                                                                                                               111 Looking at her scholarship on Indigenous deaths and the torture of Muslim men, Razack wonders, in particular, about her suppression of anti-blackness (2013:207). A point to start unraveling this suppression as well as what appears to some of us as urgently in need of asking in our academic work is to consider “how repressions are socially produced” (Razack 2013:207).

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in relation to challenging “white comfort zones” in race analysis, feelings, emotions and

affective attachments need to be held to “standards of social analysis” (2013:161). In

other words, we need to learn to think about our feelings. Increasingly racialized

landscapes in neoliberal multicultural Canada will require sophisticated, robust and

reflexive racial literacies if we want to advance anti-racist projects and that do not only

help some of us to claim equivalent rights and entitlements as white Canadians or as

secondary to white Canadians. In short, what is needed are racial literacies with reach.

Learning to see, connect up and differentiate the multitude of ways that racial harm works

itself out in our lives and in the lives of others can also open up potential solidarities. It

can help us to cultivate a practice of becoming more literate in each other’s struggles

(Alexander 2005:7) and our own. Towards the end of our interview, Dianah mentioned

how hard life in schools has been. Worrying about her future, she hoped that it would

bring some “soft landings.” As desperate as so many of us are for our own futures of soft

landings, as Audre Lorde insistently reminds us, we also need to struggle for a “future

that can include each other” (1984:142). The way forward is together.

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Coda: Times Before It is also not lost on me that at the same time that I’m writing on early racial pedagogies,

my child is starting school and so I walk her to and from school, spending my days

thinking and writing about racism, early memories and articulations of things that can’t

be forgotten or things that have no words. Just prior to the start of school, it was my

daughter’s birthday and she got a card in the mail with a hundred dollar bill enclosed. It

was around the same time that there was a well-publicized discussion in the Canadian

context about the removal of an Asian appearing woman scientist from the hundred-

dollar bill, due to complaints from several focus groups.112 She has now been replaced

by a more white looking woman. I wonder, in my walks to and from school, what my

child will make of what she inherits, the systems in which she will live and which will

live in her, the money that changes her hands, the ideas that animate her mind and their

emotional dispersals in her life. And this wondering has everything to do with my

worries and longings as I read the interviews and sit and think and write my way through

this dissertation daily.

I think, though, there is something more in my interest of these early racial pedagogies

and that is a longing for a time before racial harm and violence, a life before the

disruptions. In turning to early racial memories, there is a part of me that is looking for a

time before racism – even as I unsettle claims that we’ve arrived at a time after it. I

remember myself very vividly before these and many more disruptions, not just as a

memory through stories and the few photos that I have of this time, but as an embodied

                                                                                                               112 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/bank-of-canada-slammed-over-racist-move-to-scrap-asian-image-from-100-bills/article4485307/,http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/08/17/pol-cp-100-dollar-bills-asian-scientist-image.html, accessed October 25, 2012.

408

memory, as an affective sense of being happy, of my feet dangling off a chair, of a child

who smiled easily and much and a time before knowing fear and terror. I know, partly,

that this “time before” existed only because of all the social relations that didn’t quite

make sense to me yet, that I was shielded from, for a brief time, by the love of a mother,

by things that I didn’t quite register or that I’ve simply forgotten. And yet I long to have

that time back. The lives of women and girls, in particular, teach us that the search for a

time before is elusive, that home is a deeply fraught place, often already the time of or the

time after so I’m aware of the need to be suspicious of my own desires for a time without

violence and harm but I’m not willing to let go of the desire, however precarious and

misplaced it might be.

Perhaps my interest in a “time before” also comes from how desperately I’ve tried and

failed to preserve and enlarge this time and space in the life of my own child. I’ve

developed this habit - born of fear and anxiety and wonder as a parent - of watching my

daughter. I watch her for clues to put together how race and gender and so many

normalizations enter her life. I watch for the words it uses, the games it plays, the

pictures it draws, the inclusions and exclusions it fosters and the entitlement it confers. I

watch for the hierarchies it sediments of who is good and smart and what is beautiful, the

meanings ascribed to being and becoming a girl, a racialized girl. I listen and wonder

how the colour black comes to embody danger and fear. “It is the colour of nightmares,”

the 4 year old mixed race child of a friend recently expressed to his horrified, black

mother. And I try desperately to stop it but I know that I can’t so now I settle for trying

to slow it down.

409

Watching my child, I remember an earlier watching. I remember watching my brother

when I was younger, watching also for clues on how he learns to be a boy and later a

man. I recall articulating to myself quite explicitly that I would watch close up, how he

learns all of the stuff of normative masculinity – fixing cars, knowing how stuff is put

together and what to do when it’s broken, the labour expected and associated with boys

and men, with all of its racialized and classed inflections and patterns of relating. But it’s

hard to sort out how seamlessly and routinely it seems to occur and creep up, our ways of

being in the world. We somehow materialize but the instructions vanish. It’s the

instructions that interest me and their resonances in our lives. I want to trace some of

them, give them some space so that we can look at them, walk around them and figure

out how they have come to be so pronounced in our lives, in our efforts to sort through

how and who to be, but also their attempts to vanish, to make us believe that we choose

them. I also have to remind myself not to miss the unexpected, creative and joyous

things that come from watching, the messing around with instructions and all of the ways

that the time before appears or almost appears in my life.

It would be difficult to find a time before if we think of our lives as situated in much

longer historical narratives and struggles into which we already arrive. At its heart, I

suspect that the desire for this time is a longing for a world not framed so heavily by and

through oppression. But longings do not materialize what it is that we long for and so I

return to my participants to be reminded of the importance of struggling for our longings.

They are much less romantic and grand, the struggles, but perhaps this is part of their

beauty, they are often not far from reach.

 

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Appendices

411

Appendix A: Request to Participate in Research Project

• Are you currently pursuing undergraduate studies (in any discipline) at a Canadian University?

• Do you live in or around the Greater Toronto Area? • Do you identify as a person of colour (Black, South Asian, East Asian, African

Canadian, Middle Eastern, Indo-Canadian, non-white, mixed race, racialized)? • Are ideas of race and racism important in your life? • Are you Canadian born or have you spent the majority of your childhood and

education in Canada?

If you answered yes to all of the above questions, I want to talk with you! My name is Gulzar and I am currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto, conducting research on how students of colour at the undergraduate university level experience and think about racism in their lives. I am interested in talking to a wide range of individuals who may or may not be formally involved in activist work. Even if you have never formally participated in any kind of anti-racist or social justice work, I want to talk with you. If you do consider yourself an activist, I also want your valuable insights. Your activism might focus anti-racism but also include a wide range of social justice or equity concerns such as gender equity, anti-homophobia, class justice, anti-globalization work, disability rights, anti-war organizing and Aboriginal sovereignty. Your estimated participation time will be 2 hours. Conversation topics include: the ways racism has affected your life in the university and beyond; your complex responses to racism; how racism relates to other forms of oppression; your own changing ideas about racism. If you are interested or want more information, please contact me immediately at gulzar.charania@utoronto.ca, so we can talk further about your participation in this project. All interviews will be held in the fall of 2010 in the Toronto area. Please forward widely. Thank-you for your interest and support!

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Appendix B: Information Letter for Participants for Interviews and Informed Consent Protocol Title of Project- Tracing the Development of Racial Literacy: In Conversation with Undergraduate University Students of Colour My name is Gulzar R. Charania and I am a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Working under the supervision of Professor Sherene Razack, I am currently conducting research as part of my PhD dissertation on the ways in which people of colour at the undergraduate university level come to an analysis of racism in their lives and act in a variety of ways in response to these conditions. I am interested in interviewing 30 individuals who meet the following criteria:

• You are currently attending a Canadian university at the undergraduate level in any discipline.

• You identify as a person of colour (this category could include but is not limited to Black, South Asian, East Asian, Latino/a, Middle Eastern, Indo-Canadian, African Canadian, non-white, mixed race, racialized etc.).

• You may be involved in various kinds of anti-racist activities but this is absolutely not necessary.

• You are either Canadian born or have spent the majority of your childhood and education in Canada.

If you meet these criteria, I invite you to participate in my research project. Participation will include an interview that will last approximately 120 minutes and will be conducted at a time and place most convenient for you. With your permission, I will audiotape the interview to ensure accuracy. In the interviews, I will ask you to: reflect on your own racial identity and its significance; trace the ways in which ideas of race and racism have become important in your life and have changed; discuss your personal experiences of racism to the extent that they are relevant in the development of your analysis; link racism to a range of social justice issues and concerns; and finally, consider the range of ways you respond to and navigate racism in your life. While individuals will be drawn from across universities, primarily in the greater Toronto area, the purpose of this study is not to evaluate the effectiveness of individuals or individual universities in relation to issues of race and racism. I do recognize that in asking you to reflect on the development of your analysis of racism, some evaluative data may emerge implicitly. However, no individuals or individual organizations will be identified in the work and while participants are drawn from a pool of undergraduate university students, the university is not the exclusive site that I examine in my work. It is one of a range of sites that includes multiple other networks that may be important in your life and political development.

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It is important to acknowledge that discussions of race and racism can generate discomfort, as can revisiting such experiences. While my work does ask you to reflect on how you experience and navigate racism and racial injustice in your life, the focus of my work is to understand the conditions that enable students of colour at the undergraduate university level to develop a critical analysis of race and racism. In my own work for social justice, I have found it enormously useful and productive to discuss experiences of racism and injustice as well as processes of politicization with others. Such encounters can reduce the isolation that often arises from racism and can also provide individuals with the space to reflect on such experiences and connect them to wider social processes. This study will provide valuable insights, reflecting the experiences of undergraduate university students of colour encounters with racism and processes of developing critical responses and practices that will be of interest to educators and scholars working in areas of and related to anti-racism and social justice. Research data will be securely stored in locked, password protected files. After the completion of the thesis, audio files of interviews will be destroyed. However, due to my interest in building on my research interests in this area, I will securely store transcripts of interviews with no identifying information for an indefinite period. This data will continue to be stored in locked, password protected files in either paper or electronic form. I will seek informed consent should I wish to use this data in related research efforts in the future. Apart from myself, my supervisor, Professor Sherene Razack, will have access to the data for supervisory purposes. At any time during the research process, you have the right to withdraw consent, before, during or after your participation or decline to answer specific questions, without any negative repercussions. In the event of your withdrawal, any documentation related to your participation will be destroyed in a way that does not compromise anonymity. I welcome any questions or concerns you have at any stage of this research process. The research I am conducting will provide the basis for my doctoral dissertation that will be housed in the OISE/UT thesis collection in the R.W.B. Jackson Library. If you would like a copy of the report, you can indicate this in the informed consent below. I may also present parts of this work at various conferences, publish it in academic publications and use it in my teaching or social justice work. If you are interested in participating in this research, please contact me by phone or email. If you have any outstanding questions or concerns about your rights as a participant in this study, feel free to contact me or my supervisor Professor S. Razack at sherene.razack@utoronto.ca or 416-978-0017. Alternately, the Office of Research Ethics of the University of Toronto is reachable at ethics.review@utoronto.ca or 416-946-3273.

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I thank-you for taking the time to consider my request and hope that you will agree to participate in this project! Yours sincerely, Gulzar R. Charania gulzar.charania@utoronto.ca 514.277.5485

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Informed Consent Protocol for Interviews:

If you agree to participate in this study, please carefully review the letter of introduction and consent protocol. A copy of these documents will be left with you for your reference. I, ___________________________________________ (please print name), agree to participate in a tape-recorded interview for the project, “Tracing the Development of Racial Literacy: In Conversation with Undergraduate University Students of Colour.” I would like a copy of the thesis to be sent to me electronically at: (please provide email address)________________________________________________ _____________________________ ________________________ (signature) (date) _____________________________ (print name)

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Appendix C: Interview Questionnaire (Introductions, context of study and why I’m doing it, bit about who I am, format of interviews) 1. Tell me a bit about what made you interested in participating in this research?

2. Can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

(various prompts or things to explore include the following) • Rural/urban • Primarily white or very culturally and racially diverse environments • Class – working, middle or upper class – did you work? • Religious upbringing – was it important or present? • Home/family life – siblings, family network etc. • Education • friends

3. How did you identify racially and/or culturally?

• What does this mean to you? • How has it changed over time? • How did others refer to you?

4. Do you identify as Canadian? How do you think race impacts your life (in Canada)?

What does it mean to be a person of colour living in Canada?

5. Some people think of their race and racial identity and experiences in complex ways – ideas of class, sexuality, gender, religion etc. are also be really important. Would you say this is the case for you? Can you tell me more about how other parts of your experiences are important in thinking about race and racism?

6. Did you think about or experience racism when you were growing up? If NO, did you have any moments or experiences that stand out that made you feel uncomfortable or different that you might now think were about racism? • If so, how did you understand what was happening to you? (did you talk about it

as racism or feeling different or being treated unfairly or as a feeling or impression)?

• Did you talk about (or avoid talking about) these experiences at home or school or with friends? Tell me a little about this.

• Are there any specific experiences that stand out?

7. If experiences of race or racism were not important to you growing up, when did they become important?

8. How did you deal with experiences of feeling different? (whether referred to as racism and/or injustice more broadly). How do you deal with them now?

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• Were there things you did to avoid being targeted (things that may be difficult to admit to or that you are not particularly proud of? Places or people you avoidied or did you learn to behave in certain ways?

• What did you or do you do or feel when you experience various forms of racism? • What are things you wish you could do or had done when you encountered

racism? What prevented you from doing those things?

9. Tell me a little bit about your experiences as a person of colour (or however you define yourself) in the university. • How did you decide what to study? Or what are your career goals? Are there any

people in particular who influenced your area of study? • Do you spend a lot of time on campus? • Are you really involved in you college or dorm or extracurricular activities? • What kind of space is the university for you? • Have ideas related to race and racism been important in your university

experience? • Has the university been an important space for your critical engagement of ideas

around racism and social justice? • Are there ways in which you experience or observe racism differently in the

university than in other sites? If so, how? If not, how would you describe the ways you have encountered or observed race and racism in the university?

• Are there different spaces within the university where racism works differently (your dorm/residence, in classes/lab, meeting with faculty, tutorials, at the cafeteria, student clubs, the library, writing exams, getting to and from campus, dealing with administrative matters (student loans, registration), where you are a minority numerically or where people of colour are the majority)

10. Part of my work is exploring how and why people of colour are able to develop an

analysis of racism. Not everyone who experiences racism or injustice develops a critique. Why do you think you were able to develop such an analysis? • Were there specific events that stand out for you or the cumulative effects of your

experiences or observations of others around you? • Formal learning, activism, family, friends etc.

11. Would you say you do something called anti-racism in your life (informally, through

student or other organizations, on your own)? • If so, what does it look like in different times and places? Tell me about these

various aspects of your life or involvement. • What are the things that make anti-racism more or less possible in your life?

12. Has your awareness of race and racism made you more aware of other forms of

injustice that you may or may not experience directly? Or have other forms of injustice made your more aware of racism?

13. How do your family and friends of people close to you think about racism? Does this

influence you? Do you know other people of colour in your life who think racism is

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unimportant? How do you understand this? Why do you think it might be difficult for some people of colour to acknowledge or discuss racism?

14. What do you think the pressing issues or concerns are for people of colour in their

lives (in workplaces, universities, schools etc)? What are they in your life? What do you think needs to happen for some of these issues to be addressed?

15. If you had to give some advice or guidance to other people of colour, based on your

experience, what would you want to pass on or what would you want them to know? Are there things you would want to say to white people? People in leadership positions in the university?

16. Any thoughts on what it would mean for the university to be a place that feels like it

is anti-racist or inclusive or welcoming for you? 17. Is there anything else you would like to discuss that I didn’t ask but that you think it

is important to discuss? 18. What do you want me to keep in mind as I write up the research findings from this

project? What are the ways that you might want to see your participation in this study reflected? What is it important for you to say to other people – not only people of colour but also white people?

19. What was it like to have this conversation with me?

 

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