Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T18:27:16.997Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Keeping the Ivory Tower White: Discourses of Racial Domination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Carol Schick
Carol Schick
Affiliation:
University of Regina, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina (Saskatchewan) S4S 0A2,[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Designations of space and place are significant to the history and formation of Canada as a white-identified country. Particular places discussed in this paper are public education and post-secondary schooling, which, as regulators of public spaces, act as indicators of belonging in the production of students' identities. White students in this study need the university for its credentialing function and for its training in ideological processes of their “becoming a teacher.” Their production as legitimate citizens and teachers is authorized by requirements of the institution in which they learn to “manage” cross-cultural relations. Maintaining the status of elite sites requires surveillance of knowledge production with respect to hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Elite social relations also designate which identifications and knowledges will be considered rational and legitimate. In the research on which this paper reports, white-identified pre-service education participants depend on the racial hierarchies of elite educational spaces to secure their own respectability among the white-dominated profession of teaching. It is a respectability which their whiteness both requires and affords.

Résumé

La manière de désigner les espaces et les places est significatif dans l'histoire et la formation du Canada comme pays identifié blanc. Dans cet article, les espaces de l'éducation publique post-secondaire sont analysés comme indicateurs d'appartenance dans la production identitaire des étudiants. Les étudiants blancs de cette recherche ont besoin de la fonction légitimante de l'université tout autant que des processus idéologiques de sa formation pour «devenir des enseignants». Les exigences de l'institution d'apprendre à «gérer» les relations interculturelles les autorisent à devenir des citoyens et des enseignants légitimes. Maintenir le statut de sites d'élites demande de surveiller la production du savoir en termes d'hiérarchies de race, de classe et de genre. Les relations sociales de l'élite désignent également quelles identifications et quelles connaissances seront considérées rationnelles et légitimes. Dans l'enquête qui fonde cet article, des étudiants-enseignants identifiés comme blancs dépendent des hiérarchies raciales d'espaces éducationnels d'élite pour assurer leur propre respectabilité dans la profession d'enseignants à domination blanche. C'est une respectabilité exigée et possible par le fait qu'ils sont blancs.

Type
Law, Race and Space/Droit, espaces et racialisation
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , August 2000 , pp. 70 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Harris, C., “Whiteness As Property” (1993) 106:8 Harvard Law Review, 1707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See Wetherell, M. & Potter, J., Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3 See Razack, S., “Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of the Bourgeois Subject” (1998) 10:2 C.J.W.L. 338.Google Scholar

4 The Subcommittee on Multicultural Teacher Education, Multicultural Teacher Education: A Proposal for a Multicultural Teacher Education Component for the Incorporation into the Program (Saskatoon, Sask: University of Saskatchewan College of Education, 1988) at 5 Google Scholar [hereinafter Multicultural Teacher Education].

5 Ibid. at 9.

6 Ibid. at 13.

7 Ibid. at 9.

8 See Fellows, M.L. & Razack, S., “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations Among Women” (1998) 1:2 Iowa Law Review 335.Google Scholar

9 Author Interview with Research Participant 01 (10 November 1995).

10 Whetherell & Potter, supra note 2 at 189.

11 Author Interview with Research Participant 41 (10 November 1995).

12 Author Interview with Research Participant 79 (15 November 1995).

13 Author Interview with Research Participant 08 (4 November 1995).

14 Keeshig-Tobias, L., “O Canada (bear v)” in Fife, C., ed., The Colour of Resistance: A Contemporary Collection of Writing by Aboriginal Women (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993) 69 at 69–70.Google Scholar

15 Harris, supra note 1.

16 Multicultural Teacher Education, supra note 4 at 10.

17 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c. 11 [hereinafter Charter].

18 Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c. 11 [hereinafter Constitution].

19 GA Res. 217(III), UN GAOR, 3d Sess., Supp. No. 13, UN Doc. A/810 (1948) 71.

20 Multicultural Teacher Education, supra note 4 at 5.

21 Sibley, D., Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995) at 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Supra note 13.

23 See Goldberg, D.T., Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).Google Scholar

24 Found within a range of discourse analyses as described by Wetherell and Potter, supra note 2, subjects' rhetorical strategies include reporting the reactions of classmates, objectifying self and others' reactions, making disclaimers, claiming credentials as a feminist sympathizer, offering evidence of supportive actions, extensive qualification of negative remarks, changing the focus within the interview, making rhetorically self-sufficient statements, offering factual accounts, and many other methods of warranting claims to support their credibility.

25 Supra note 11.

26 Supra note 12.

27 Author Interview with Participant 31 (12 November 1995).

28 Supra note 11.

29 Ibid. [emphasis added].

30 Supra note 12 [emphasis added].

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid. [our emphasis].

33 Hurtado, A., The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) at 149.Google Scholar

34 See Harris, supra note 1.

35 See Pratt, M.L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Supra note 11 [emphasis added].

37 Author Interview with Participant 10 (4 November 1995).

38 Author Interview with Participant 66 (12 November 1995) [emphasis added].

39 Supra note 23.

40 See Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, R., vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).Google Scholar

41 Stoler, A.L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) at 110 [emphasis added].Google Scholar

42 See Morrison, T., Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993).Google Scholar

43 Stoler, supra note 41 at 53.

44 Ibid. at 54.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid. at 69 [emphasis added].

47 See Hesch, R., “Cultural Production and Cultural Reproduction in Aboriginal Preservice Teacher Education” in Erwin, L. & MacLennan, D., eds., Sociology of Education in Canada: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Research and Practice (Toronto: Copp Clark Longman, 1994) 200.Google Scholar

48 Ibid. at 210s.