Imagining the Antiracist State: Representations of racism in Canadian history textbooks

Abstract

This paper examines how knowledge about racism has been represented in high school Canadian history textbooks authorized by the Province of Ontario during the 1960s and after the year 2000. I argue that even though historical racisms have increasingly made their way into Canadian history textbooks as valid and important topics of study, the idea of racism continues to be understood largely within a prejudice/discrimination framework that reduces racism to irrational and individualized problems of thought, behaviour, and assumption. Moreover, through multiple techniques of containment, racism is imagined to exist within temporal and spatial locations, events, or incidents that are represented as either foreign to Canada or aberrations within Canada. The combined effect is to depict the space of Canada as one largely antithetical to racism.

A version of this paper was presented to the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Studies in Education in Halifax (Canada) on May 31, 2003. Thank you to Tim Stanley, Gada Mahrouse, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. There is no national educational ministry in Canada. Each province controls its own educational system, including curricular development and the sanctioning of learning resources.

2. In 1972, Ontario's Department of Education was changed to Ministry of Education.

3. These textbooks include: Decisive Decades: A history of the twentieth century for Canadians (Hodgetts, 1960); The Twentieth Century (Lambert, 1960); The winds of change: A history of Canada and Canadians in the twentieth century (Peart & Schaffter, 1961); The modern era (Ricker, Saywell, & Rose, 1960); Three Nations: Canada—Great Britain—The United States of America in the twentieth century (Nicholson et al., 1962).

4. These textbooks include: Canada, a nation unfolding (Newman, 2000); Canadian history: 1900–2000 (Hundey, Magarrey & Pettit, 2000); Canada: Our century, our story (Fielding & Evans, 2000); Spotlight canada (Cruxton & Wilson, 2000); Canada: Face of a nation (Bolotta et al., 2000); Canada: Continuity and change (Bogle et al., 2000); Making history: The story of Canada in the twentieth century (Bain et al., 2000).