Preserving white comfort and safety: the politics of race erasure in academe

ABSTRACT

In this paper four critical scholars/ activists reflect on the complex institutional and public responses to recent white supremacist events on Canadian campuses and the equity discussions they have affected. Specifically, we interrogate practices, which reify and reinsure positions of dominance and human/social hierarchy in four ways. To begin, (1) we interrogate freedom of speech and freedom of expression positions, as well as the reliance on critique of neoliberalism to supplant analyses of racism and colonial logics, to identify their role in preserving white fragility. Next, (2) we provide a local media analysis of academe’s responses to white supremacy on campus to trace the discursive moves that obscure institutional racism. Following these contextual scaffoldings, (3) we explore the ways equity projects within institutions remain projects protecting and preserving whiteness while exploiting the politics of identity. Finally, (4) we carefully reflect on the various modes of inclusion in the academy, which produce racialized scholars(hip) to be complicit in the reproduction of racial thinking, alongside and occluded by institutional narratives of equity and progress. Critical questions are raised regarding the possibilities, complicities and complexities of achieving equity and transformation in the academy, as well as the role of racialized scholars(hip) in this work.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional racism
• white supremacy
• white fragility
• equity
• higher education
• freedom of expression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Not to be confused with concepts like racial neoliberalism which draws attentions toward racism rather than away from it-see: Goldberg (2009).

2 The texts which inform this analysis are from media outlets in Ontario with a focus on the Golden Horseshoe Area. The texts were selected from the FACTIVA data base according to the following search strategy: keywords of white supremacy or alt-right or racism and campus or University; contained responses by academe to white supremacy or racism; and were published in the following time period: August 2014 to September 2017.

3 FACTIVA database search as outlined in the preceding footnote yielded more than 1000 media texts.