Racism plays a disappearing act: discourses of denial in one anti-discrimination campaign in higher education

ABSTRACT

This article responds to a university’s anti-discrimination campaign, ostensibly launched to combat racism. Taking up poststructural principles and anchored in anti-racism literature, we employ a discourse analysis to examine the truth productions about racism circulated by the campaign, and the subject positions to which they give rise. We analyse the consequences and possibilities for anti-racist action in the light of our argument that the campaign produced the university as an always already anti-racist space, becoming a means to an end to meaningful action. Through themes of belonging, denial, innocence, colour-blindness, and erasure, we demonstrate that the messaging of the campaign aligns with national narratives about Canadian society as free of racial inequity. We bring readers to consider how an anti-discrimination campaign effectively delegitimised the need for anti-racist action, imploring future initiatives to guard against re-inscribing the very forms of inequality they purport to disrupt.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racism campaign
• belonging
• discourse analysis
• higher education
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

Kathy Hogarth, Barbara McNeil, Florence Luhanga, Latoya Reid, Uwakwe Kalu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The term ‘racialised’ is employed in this paper to refer to individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC), and we also use the term BIPOC. While not a homogenous group, BIPOC – albeit always in differential and shifting ways – have been racialised; that is, systems of white dominance have attempted to categorise and define who they are (Gonzalez-Sobrino and Goss 2019; Ladson-Billings 1998; St Denis 2010). While we recognise white people are also racialised in that white is a socially constructed category, our usage of the term implies to be racialised is to be othered, and we follow scholars who emphasise the unequal power relations involved in racialising processes (e.g., Ladson-Billings 1998; Razack 1998). The term person of colour is used to acknowledge the work of scholars that recognise experiences of racialised people in Canada without referring to Indigenous People, who are considered distinct societies under the Canadian Constitution (Canadian Race Relation Foundation, n.d.).

2. Saskatchewan, Canada is situated on lands that are composed of territories covered in 5 major historical numbered treaties: Treaty 4 (1874), Treaty 5 (1875–76), Treaty 6 (1876), Treaty 8 (1899–1900), and Treaty 10 (1906–07) and, to a lesser extent, Treaty 2 (1871) and Treaty 7 (1877), as well as the traditional Homeland of the Métis Nation (Government of Saskatchewan 2019).

3. When using the terms diversity and inclusion, we refer to the diversity initiatives in Canadian or US universities commonly deployed to ostensibly increase racial diversity on campus. We note these have largely served to increase the diversity amongst white people on campuses, rather than increase presence of non-white students and/or enhance their retention. Thus diversity and inclusion initiatives often mask or avoid addressing race and racism (Henry and Tator 2009; Iverson 2012; Moreno et al. 2006).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430-2018-01135].