Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University

The author notes that the presence and experiences of Black people at elite universities have been largely underrepresented and erased from institutional histories. Her book, based on her 2016 PhD dissertation, engages with a collection of these experiences that span half a century and reflect differences in class, gender, and national identifications among Black scholars. Drawing on anticolonial and critical race theories and using methods of institutional ethnography/political activist ethnography, the author studies how Black people describe and analyze their experiences at Montreal's McGill University, how the university's institutional texts and discourses shape their activities, and how neoliberalism may be altering these relations. Former and current Black students and faculty members describe experiences of racialization mediated by differences of gender, nationalism, culture and class. The author points out that Black people's activities at the university over the past five decades have consistently involved navigating the racialized and racializing environment and working for anticolonial, anti-racist change through community and coalition building, various forms of service work within the university, organizing non-formal teaching and learning, and political activism. The author reveals how the "whiteness" of the university both includes and exceeds the racial identities of students and professors. She argues that it highlights the specific functions of Blackness and of anti-Blackness within society in general and within an institution of higher education in particular, demonstrating how structures and practices of McGill University reproduce interlocking systems of oppression that uphold racial capitalism, reproduce colonial relations, and promote settler nationalism.

Toronto, ON

University of Toronto Press

2020

224p.

en

978-1-4875-2486-9