Struggles for Justice in the Great White North
In the wake of the movement for racial justice and the defense of black lives, it is important to contextualize conflicts involving race, status and power, including around the use of the “n-word,” and to consider how they are framed differently across national contexts with varying historical legacies, immigration regimes, and transnational influences. This panel focuses on the Canadian and Quebec cases against the backdrop of American and European experiences.
This is a Webinar event. Please register here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ApquBONNTZKIpIELlU45CQ
The Sacralization of Racism in the Anglosphere
Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birckbeck, University of London
This paper will draw on John McWhorter’s notion of the ‘religion of antiracism’ and survey data to examine the social construction, in elite institutions, of a discourse of pervasive ‘systemic’ racism. This is out of alignment with measurable phenomena that can be conceptually defined as racism. I argue that today’s cultural left, and to some extent society more broadly, has been shaped by narratives, myths and symbols which stem from periods when the problem was more severe. These narratives are propelling the radicalization of left-wing spaces, and are even affecting the policy flexibility of left-wing parties such as the Democrats or Labour in Britain. In English but not French Canada, this discourse has its greatest power, even constraining the Conservative Party. Younger and university-educated segments of public opinion are increasingly influenced by this central narrative. The outcome of this form of politics will, in my estimation, produce an increase in political polarization.
Plantation U: Labour, race, state and the struggle against command capitalism
Tamari Kitossa, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brock University
The interference of Harvard administrators to deny Dr. Cornel West the justly earned security of tenure mirrors the Black Canadian Studies Association boycott of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences for its anti-Black racism. Each reflects a common theme that the university, in the dénouement of capitalism, is in crisis – ethically, fiscally, morally and politically. In my opinion, the administrative fiat of the academic administrative class, whom Ferdindand Lundberg called ed pols, and the economic insecurity of even the most qualified scholars, signals the necessity to resist the interchangeable authoritarianism of the political class and the corporate capitalist militarized command economy. The redux of the James O’Connor’s The Corporations and the State is a return of repressed questions of labour, property, power and struggle for the state to protect the interests of excluded and exploited communities and workers from the necropolitical neoliberalism. In heated milieu in which we find ourselves, anti-racism, ‘ethnic studies’ and the hiring and tenuring of professors from historically downpressed communities reflects the broader dynamic of what Mao Tse Tung called the ‘primary contradiction’: that of the state against the people.
The Great White North: Race and Reckoning in Canada
Debra Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies, McGill University
What defines the boundaries of Blackness and belonging in Canada? Using the analytical insights of black political thought, I use personal narrative to make the case that there’s something truly unique about Blackness and the persistence of anti-Black racism in Canada, in part because of the lingering, ubiquitous specter of Black America. Tethering territorial and temporal boundaries to our contemporary understandings of race and racism, the presentation seeks to both reconsider and recalibrate ideas of home, belonging, and the meaning of diaspora.
Dimensions of Whiteness: A self-reflexive exploration
Anna Triandafyllidou, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Ryerson University
The pandemic emergency and the Black Lives Matter movement have made particularly evident the multiple dimensions of socio economic, ethnic, religious and racial inequalities that structure our societies in Europe and North America. And yet the request for justice and equity comes at the backdrop of rising populism and white supremacism in both sides of the Atlantic. While many researchers have delved into both the multiple dimensions of discrimination and inequality that racialized minorities and Black people suffer and the multiple – often invisible or intangible – aspects of white privilege, I feel there is a need to further unpack ‘whiteness’ as a racial or ethnic category precisely because it has so far been treated as the ‘default’ category. The very use of terms like brown, shadeism, racialized minorities denote that those who are racialized are non-white, as if white is the ‘natural’ category (even though the majority of the world’s population is not ‘white’). My exploration is self-reflexive as I am white by skin colour but not ‘white’ in the way that this category is used in a North American settler colonial context. Coming also from a migration studies perspective, I am particularly interested in the socio-economic and geopolitical connotations of different degrees of ‘whiteness’, their shifting contextual nature, or the related religious and cultural nuances. This presentation (and future paper) explores the different dimensions of whiteness, its intersectional and contextual nature, and the elasticity of whiteness as a socio-political and ethno-racial category. Ultimately the paper seeks to unpack whiteness in ways that illuminate the complex inequalities that structure advanced capitalist societies today and the ways these play out in different domestic and transnational contexts.
Chair: Elke Winter, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor of Sociology, University of Ottawa
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin/Abrams, 2018/19); Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard 2004), The Orange Order (Oxford, 2007) and one other book. He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography (Oxford 2012) and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004).
Dr. Tamari Kitossa is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brock University. He earned his BA (Hon) and Magisteriate degrees at York University and his Ph.D. at OISE/UT. He is editor and contributor to three books: Appealing Because He is Appalling: Black masculinities, colonialism and erotic racism (University of Alberta Press), Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy: Teaching, learning and researching while Black(University of Toronto Press) and African Canadian Leadership: Continuity, Transition, and Transformation(University of Toronto Press).
Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. Her award-winning book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. She is currently writing an academic book that explores the transnational dynamics of the Black Lives Matter movement and a non-fiction book about race, racism, and resilience across the Canadian/US border.
Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University, Toronto. She was previously based at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy where she held a Robert Schuman Chair on Cultural Pluralism in the EUI’s Global Governance Programme. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. Her recent publications include: Rethinking Migration and Return in Southeastern Europe (with E. Gemi, Routledge, 2021) and two edited volumes: the Routledge Handbook on the Governance of Religious Diversity (2020, co-ed. with T. Magazzini) and Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (2020, with S. Spencer, Springer Open). She recently published two papers that are somehow connected to this one: Nationalism in the 21st Century: Neo-Tribal or Plural? in Nations and Nationalism; and De-centering the Study of Migration Governance: a Radical View in Geopolitics.
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