Combating Racism in Multicultural Canada: Theorizing Social Movement Learning from Anti-Racism Protests

• In Event: Protest and Social Change

Proposal

Purpose of the Study

Canada prides itself on being a multicultural society, promising a commitment to multiculturalism premised on the cultural and racial diversity of this immigration country. However, such a liberal policy of multiculturalism evades critical issues of race and racism, suggesting ambivalence toward the social reality of racial hierarchy sustaining white supremacy. The tension between the persistence of systemic racism and the pressing need of racialized communities for racial justice becomes stark, particularly in times of social crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. The many racist incidents catalyzed by or intensified during the pandemic urge us educators and scholar-activists to reflect on how people mobilized protests to combat racism and how we can effectively support individual and collective learning through protests. Thus, this research aims to theorize a form of new social movement learning by exploring learning through protests in three major ongoing anti-racism movements in Canada, namely anti-Asian racism, anti-Black racism, and anti-Indigenous racism. It responds to the conference’s theme on the power of protest by addressing theories, methodologies, pedagogies, and protest.

Theoretical Framework

This research is informed by critical race theory (CRT). With its roots in critical legal studies, early development of CRT established the conceptual foundation of race as the primary construct to understand and analyze disadvantage and injustice in society, focusing on the experience of black Americans in the U.S. (Bell, 1976; Freeman, 1978). Later development has drawn on insights from Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida as well as ethnic and feminist studies (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Contemporary CRT further expands the view of race as a black/white binary to recognize the experience of marginalization and racialization of non-black minorities such as Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos/as (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Meanwhile, influenced by feminist scholarship of gender, CRT is committed to intersectionality and recognizes oppression and racism as experienced intersectionally along lines of race, gender, class, physical ability, and so on (Crenshaw, 1991). From the outset, CRT has been a theory advocating for action to expose and confront white supremacy as liberal approaches of equality-oriented reform are not enough to rupture the fundamental structure of asymmetrical race relations. Instead, CRT centralizes activism such as protests and underscores an anti-racist pedagogy in which narratives of lived experiences of racism are deployed strategically and analyzed in relation to the broader social and political structures to make sense of and challenge racial injustice (Brayboy, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1998, 2005). A CRT-informed approach of anti-racist education calls on educators to integrate multiple centres of knowledge and develop awareness of discursive racialization and power dynamics that restrict equal access to education, healthcare, safety, and resources for livelihood (Dei, 2001; Dixson et al., 2006).

Research Methods and Data Sources

Following CRT, this research adopts the sociomaterial approach of actor-network theory (ANT) (Fenwick et al., 2011; Passoth et al., 2012) to focus on the role of various actors, both human and nonhuman, in the process of coming together in building assemblages for learning in the anti-racism movements based on the discursive texts produced in and surrounding the movements. Specifically, data include discourses for the Stop Asian Hate Movement, Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Idle No More Movement. Data sources include online media coverage and blogs, publicly available social media posts on Facebook and Twitter, YouTube videos, government and community organization reports and documents on their official websites in the last ten years. Data analysis examines the content of discursive materials to reveal what people learned about the movements and what assemblages of learning contributed to such learning.

Research Findings

This research illustrates three themes on how anti-racism protests and social movements inform learning, how knowledge was created and shared through learning assemblages, and the ramifications of learning on wider society. First, learning was race-based and race-centred, focusing on democratic knowledge based primarily on critical race theory. Various discourses shaping the movements, such as “multiculturalism”, “model minority”, and “Yellow Peril”, were vehemently critiqued with a critical race perspective. Reflections connected racist incidents, hate crimes, and police violence with a history of racialization and colonization. Strong emotions from experience or knowledge of racist incidents triggered individuals’ learning about their racial identities in relation to skin colour and ethnic origin. Second, key actors and actants forming assemblages of learning include movement intellectuals, hashtags, NGOs and social movement groups. Movement intellectuals played a pivotal role in mobilizing resources and tools to shape the discourses guiding learning about racism. Hashtags created new public spaces for grassroot activists to voice their political stances on social media (Mundt et al., 2018) and helped to assemble various forces for political action by centralizing learning resources and enacting themselves as a living repertoire to allow learning and the movements to continue and expand (Hall et al., 2012). Learning was mediated by NGOs and social movement groups as they often shaped the sharing, interpretation, retainment and development of knowledge that they deemed as valuable legacy. Third, learning extended to the wider community through an inclusive and community empowerment agenda. The three movements may have started as a race-based social movement, but an open space as protests with their race-inclusive social justice-oriented discourses enabled everyone to join in learning about race and racism through action and reflection.

Conclusion and Scholarly Significance

This research demonstrates how CRT and ANT combined can help disentangle the various micro practices, effects, and relations at play in the emergent dynamic of learning (Latour, 2005) and provide a nuanced analysis of the co-constitutive nature of learning spaces, knowledge practices, and exercise of political capacity in such complex assemblages of networks of human-object interactions as protests in social movements. It suggests that social movement learning can be further supported with strategies such as providing a larger variety of physical materials and objects to stimulate learning, providing physical spaces to spark informal learning through interactions (Hall, 2012), and establishing more permanent spaces for learning about race and anti-racism through artistic, creative, and capacity-building programs.

Authors

• Shibao Guo, Werklund School Of Education

• Ling Lei, University of Calgary