Student voices on social relations of race in Québec universities

ABSTRACT

This study aims to shed light on the role of the university as a space contributing to (re)production and even to the reification of social relations of race. To do this, we sought the views of 30 students enrolled in first-year undergraduate studies to analyze how institutional racism occurs through microaggression interactions, i.e. subjective or overt racism expressed by individuals or through institutional practices, understood as indirect processes that may have unplanned effects on racialized groups via feelings of inequitable treatment. These students were born to immigrant parents from Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa. This article shows that, despite a denial of systemic racism by the Québec government, our data do reveal unequal social relations of race in the daily lives and practices of academic institutions. Students, through their words, tend to emphasize the existence of a boundary linked to power relations between those they name as Whites and Others. They relate incidents of microaggression, which seem normal or banal for the majority group, often taking the form of humour, which constantly bring them back to their otherness, their social positioning vis-à-vis power relations, which they describe as inferiorizing. They also highlight the perception of these boundaries at the institutional level in the choice of staff hired, in the whitewashed image of the institution in promotional materials, in the predominance of formal and hidden ethnocentric or racist curriculum, and in student life.

KEYWORDS:

• Social relations of race
• racialized university students
• immigrant university students
• (un)equitable university practices
• Quebec

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Indigenous groups have lived in the territory known in today’s western terms as Québec for thousands of years. They formed complex political, economic, cultural, social and educational systems long before their first contact with non-Indigenous visitors to the land, such as the first settlers from France (Oliver 2010). After years of cohabitation with these newcomers, they were colonized through violent and genocidal means. The Canadian government has only recently acknowledged its problematic history officially, and Indigenous groups continue to be confronted with systemic racism and other forms of injustice.

2. They were drawn from a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) entitled Unequal Pathways in Higher Education: The Case of Immigrant-Background Students.

3. For example, we must cite the unapologetic use of blackface by White university student protestors in Québec in 2012 to represent their perceived position of subjugation and servility in relation to rising tuition fees (Howard 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).