States of Race

Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, Sunera Thobani

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781926662381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

What is a Canadian critical race feminism?

As the contributors to this book note, the interventions of Canadian critical race feminists work to explicitly engage the Canadian state as a white settler society. The collection examines Indigenous peoples within the Canadian settler state and Indigenous women within feminism; the challenges posed by the settler state for women of colour and Indigenous women; and the possibilities and limits of an anti-colonial praxis.Critical race feminism, like critical race theory more broadly, interrogates questions about race and gender through an emancipatory lens, posing fundamental questions about the persistence if not magnification of race and the "colour line" in the twenty-first century. The writers of these articles – whether exploring campus politics around issues of equity, the media's circulation of ideas about a tolerant multicultural and feminist Canada, security practices that confine people of colour to spaces of exception, Indigenous women's navigation of both nationalism and feminism, Western feminist responses to the War on Terror, or the new forms of whiteness that persist in ideas about a post-racial world or in transnational movements for social justice – insist that we must study racialized power in all its gender and class dimensions.The contributors are all members of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity.

Sherene Razack is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, and Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Sunera Thobani is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia. She is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Malinda Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, and author of Beyond the ‘African Tragedy’ Discourses on Development and the Global Economy.

Part One

Race, gender, and class in the Canadian state

1 Race, gender, and the university: Strategies for survival

Patricia Monture

Prologue

AS I TURNED OVE R THE WRITING of this chapter in my mind, I found myself sitting and reflecting on the history of the RACE (Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality/Equity) organization. While reminiscing, I remembered the Race and Gender Teaching and Advocacy Group (RAGTAG) conference that Dr. Sunera Thobani and others had organized at the University of British Columbia in 2001. Chatting before the conference, my friend Dr. Sherene Razack commented that we would be the “grandmothers” at the gathering. I didn’t say much to her then because I just couldn’t imagine that this would be so. When I arrived at the gathering and glanced around the room, I was shocked to see that she was right. I knew that there were no Aboriginal women who I could look to as role models in this country, but I had never noticed before among my feminist colleagues, that I had so few racialized mentors who were teaching at Canadian universities. A review of the literature on racialization and gender in the academy also demonstrates the gap that Dr. Razack had pointed out to me. Before us, I am sure there were other scholars of colour, and perhaps even an Aboriginal person or two. The gap that I am identifying is about the commitment to centre both race and gender in one’s work. As Professors George Dei and Agnes Calliste note:

Our schools, colleges and universities continue to be powerful discursive sites through which race knowledge is produced, organized and regulated. Marginalized bodies are continually silenced and rendered invisible not simply through the failure to take issues of race and social oppression seriously but through the constant negotiation of multiple lived experiences with alternative knowledges.¹

The way race knowledge is organized in Canadian educational systems makes us realize that the right race knowledge is white and white is “normal.” It is scholars who are studying the process of racialization and who are challenging the presumptions about knowledges portrayed as neutral and natural but are really raced (and e-raced). These are the scholars who understand the importance of space and the way that it is racialized and also sexualized.²

Unlike many other conferences I went to, I had prepared a written paper for the RAGTAG meeting, but did not publish it after presenting it. Recently, I thought I should look for the paper to see if it was something I should polish up and publish. Rereading it nearly a decade later, I was struck by the unhappy realization that I could have written it yesterday. Elsewhere, I have written about my own lived experiences of the university and thought that, as an academic “grandmother,” the issue of survival was something that would be meaningful to address. It was difficult to discuss this issue in a written form, as I struggled with the feeling that I was being patronizing, and clearly this is not my intent. The words I shared at UBC in 2001 have formed the basis for this chapter.

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AFTER SEVERAL YEARS OF WORK, the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women released its report, entitled Creating Choices, in 1990.³ As a document on the lives of women who are federally incarcerated, it has been viewed as groundbreaking. Even so, scant attention has been paid to the report itself, which crosses lines of race/culture and gender. More specifically, it has not been understood as a government document in which activists attempted to address the racialization Aboriginal women experience in the criminal justice system. In some aspects of its discussion, the document recognizes decolonization as an important context for understanding the experience of Aboriginal women both before prison and during their sentences. In its presentation, the report creates space for Aboriginal women in a separate chapter, acknowledging the history and context which underlies their imprisonment. It also includes integrated information about Aboriginal women when their needs and concerns surface in particular ways in the broader discussion. This approach, integrated yet equally separate, illustrates an important standard when working in racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces. The degree to which this was actually recognized by the individual Task Force members is not known. But claiming a space for a racialized gender analysis in that report was a struggle. As a member of the working group of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, I wish to capitalize on the energy already expended and the accomplishment that was made.

The mandate of the Task Force was described in chapter 2 by the Aboriginal authors in this way:

Women must have choices. This is as true for Aboriginal women as it is for all women. Historically, the criminal justice system in general and the federal prison system specifically, have clearly failed to provide options for women. The mandate of this Task Force was to review federal policies about sentenced women as women: a task that previously has not been undertaken in the numerous reports completed on the Prison for Women. Previously, women were mere add-ons to a male system of federal incarceration. In the 1980’s, this has been recognized as both unrealistic and paternalistic. Control over women’s futures, over women’s choices, must rest within women’s own experience. Likewise, adding-on Aboriginal women to the review of women serving federal sentences amounts to the same mistake as tacking women onto the tails of a system designed by, for and about men.⁴

It is not the examination of the prison system that I wish to focus on here. What I wish to note is the way in which the preliminary conclusions of the Task Force are equally applicable to the university. Taking the same quote, I changed a few words and added emphasis:

Women must have choices. This is as true for Aboriginal women as it is for all women. Historically, the education system in general and the university specifically, have clearly failed to provide options for women. The mandate of this Task Force was to review educational policies about women as women: a task that previously has not been undertaken in the numerous reports completed on the education system in Canada. Previously, women were mere add-ons to a male system of education.

My point is simple (and intended to shock people into action). More consideration has been given to the experiences of Aboriginal women in the Canadian prison system than to the experiences of Aboriginal women in Canadian universities. This is not to say that the experiences of women in prison should be ignored. After all, it is uncanny how their experiences of exclusion parallel the exclusion of women in broader society. This, in fact, was one of the starting premises of the Task Force.

There is a second reason why the comparison of the prison and the education system in Canada is important. Much of the colonial oppression that Aboriginal people survived is embedded in the institutions Canada has created. Some of those institutions, such as residential schools, were created solely for that purpose. When people wonder why Aboriginal people just can’t let the past be the past, they don’t understand the present-day impacts of institutional oppression, including the continued suppression of our own ways and social systems that we have survived. A few years ago, a student sat in my office and said to me of the university: “This is the same as the residential school, except now we come here willingly.” It is notable, that as the prominence of the residential schools began to decline, the child welfare system began to scoop more and more Aboriginal children. There is also the overrepresentation of Aboriginal persons in the Canadian criminal justice system, first noted in the report of the Canadian Corrections Association in 1967.⁵ From the position of Aboriginal peoples, the difference between these institutions and the damage they have done appears minimal.⁶

It is not clear to me that we can confidently say there has been a recognition that the Canadian education system has been widely acknowledged as “unrealistic and paternalistic,” or as racist and colonial. The experiences of Aboriginal women in institutions of higher education remain largely invisible. If the experiences remain personal and are told only anecdotally among ourselves (when we have the opportunity), then the hope that things will change is built on utter foolishness. It has been suggested to me that speaking about issues of racialization in the academy is risky. Although I have indeed experienced the sharp edge of backlash, I speak to these issues because it is the only way to unmask and destabilize the power held over so many of us. And if I cannot hang on to the hope of transformative change, then I cannot continue to engage the university.

My stories are not meant to diminish the work of many Aboriginal scholars and scholars of colour, for whom I have a great deal of respect. My point is simply (and there is a sensitive irony in the middle of this) that in our institutions of “higher learning,” we have failed to consistently recognize that knowledge is always gendered and raced (although the race is often e-raced). It is not neutral, and there is no single form of it. We have failed to acknowledge this, and the universities have failed to act on it when it has been brought to their attention that their ways are exclusionary, silencing, and perhaps even violent. It is important to continue to work on ways of forcing the universities to acknowledge the gendered, raced, classed, abled, and homophobic spaces in which we work, but that is not my purpose here. Rather, I wish to turn my attention to an analysis of my own experiences, to explore ways in which survival in the university is possible. Granted, I do not believe that survival is a very lofty goal. I do believe that we are entitled to expect much more of institutions of higher learning. But if we cannot survive the university, then the transformation of that space will remain illusive. Not all of the scholars who experience racialized and sexualized violence (and making someone invisible is indeed violence, even though no physical blows are dealt) in that institution will speak about it.

Surviving the university must be understood as a cluster of strategies. These strategies are both individual and collective in nature. Not all of them will work for all individuals. We have to pick and choose our courses of action, depending on who we are and what we do well. Our choices also depend on where our tolerance levels lie. Together, however, we must remember to support each and every person who is engaged in the struggle, even though we may sometimes make different choices. Our safety in the university is tied to the strength of other racializ...