[icecube]

Dear white people, wake up: Canada is racist

http://theconversation.com/dear-whit...s-racist-83124

Canadians widely believe their country to be a peaceful, multicultural country without racism.

Yet human rights activists and critical race scholars provide evidence that inequity is woven into the fabric of Canadian institutions and normalized in everyday practices.

The absence of racism and racists is one of Canada’s “fable-like” racial stories. In Racism Without Racists, scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva says we tell and retell ourselves the same moral story.

The majority of racism “remains hidden beneath a veneer of normality,” says sociologist David Gillborn, “and it is only the more crude and obvious forms of racism that are seen as problematic by most people.”

Institutions of higher education are especially prone to reproducing inequalities beneath a “facade of meritocracy and colour blindness.”

As a Black feminist and critical researcher of race and education at UBC, it is not uncommon to encounter students and colleagues who deny not only institutional racism in Canada but also the ways in which we are all implicated.

This matrix of domination permeates our universities, schools, communities, religious institutions and even our families. That is, intersecting dimensions such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and religion affect us all but they can be especially powerful in Canadian institutions.