Rendered In/Visible: Possibilities and Limitations of Building Cross-Racial Solidarity in University Institutional Responses to Racism


Yukiko Tanaka, University of Toronto Scarborough

There has been a proliferation of working groups, committees, surveys, focus groups, and reporting on racism in Canadian universities. Often, these working groups and other initiatives tackle specific forms of racism that target one racial/ethnic/religious category: anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Asian racism. These race-specific working groups address the unique historical and structural oppressions that different groups have faced, thereby avoiding one pitfall of racial politics: lumping together disparate struggles under one “people of colour” or “racialized” experience. However, there are tendencies toward both flattening difference and amplifying difference through these racially-specific working groups that may preclude possibilities for solidarity. First, by assigning each racial category their own working group, these categories become taken for granted as already existing, bounded, cohesive collectives with shared interests that can indeed be expressed through a working group. Drawing from Brubaker’s (2002) work on “ethnicity without groups”, the existence of “groupness” should be taken as an empirical question: is there a collective of any such group that understands themselves as “Asians” or “Muslims” with shared interests and capacity for collective action? Secondly, as theorists of intersectionality point out, race is inextricable from other forms of social differentiation, including gender, sexuality, and ability (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1986). Working groups run the risk of flattening difference within each category. To what extent might the interests of some intersecting identities, such as queers or ethnic minorities within those larger categories, be sidelined in favour of the more powerful members of that category? Third, theorists argue that race is constructed relationally in comparison with a range of “racial” groups (e.g. Mawani 2009), making it impossible to understand the experience of any one racial group without attention to the others it is constructed in relation with. In the Canadian context, it is key to think through how differently racialized groups have been implicated in structures of settler colonialism. What kind of understanding might be foreclosed by refusing to see the links between differently racialized working groups? In this paper, I ask, what gets overlooked when racism in universities is addressed through racially specific working groups? What implications do working groups have for cross-racial solidarity? To address these questions, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of working group reports from the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities. I draw on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s notion of “constellations of coresistance” to theorize potential solidarity between groups working for their own and their allies’ liberation, taking racially-specific working groups as a potential (if not actualized) constellation of coresistance. By thinking through opportunities for cross-racial and intersectional solidarity through institutional working groups, and the limitations for such solidarity-building imposed in the working group framework, I suggest ways forward for building anti-racism in universities that are grounded in decolonial struggle.

This paper will be presented at the following session: