Blackness, Exclusion, and the Law in the History of Canada’s Public Schools, Ontario and Québec, 1850–Present

With an eye towards current practices of anti-Black schooling discrimination, the author theorizes the ways that public schooling violence throughout Canada impacted the lives of Black families and their children for over 100 years, beginning in the early nineteenth century. She points out that a number of scholars have documented the history of schooling violence in Ontario and Nova Scotia. Her dissertation builds upon such scholarship and locates Montreal within this history. She points out that although this dissertation does provide a historical landscape for the history of anti-Black violence within the institution of public schooling, it also proposes a grammar for Canadian anti-Black racism, as well as characterizes a more robust critical race theory within a Canadian historical context than has been previously theorized by legal scholars and historians. Importantly, she also points out that the dissertation uses the backdrop of nineteenth century Black migration to Canada, prompted at its apogee by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, to narrate a more nuanced representation of the Underground Railroad and debunk its reputation as a terminus of safety and freedom for Black refugees. Rather, the author proposes that the history of public schooling discrimination, coinciding with Black migration, best illuminates Canada’s tradition of anti-Black violence historically.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

2017

269p.

en