(RAE1a) Race, Ethnicity, and Identity Construction in Canada

In this session, panelists discuss how constructions of race and ethnicity proliferate in the Canadian context in response to multiculturalism politics, ongoing settler colonialism, anti-Black racism and struggles to address other forms of systemic racial and ethnic discrimination. This panel aims to bring awareness to the history and impact of racialization and ethnic categorizing in Canada while also bringing forth solutions for how Canada can be a more equitable nation, a place of belonging for everyone. Tags: Canadian Sociology, Equality and Inequality, Race and Ethnicity

Organizers: Carlo Handy Charles, University of Windsor, Manzah-Kyetoch Yankey, University of Alberta, Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, Concordia University; Chair: Manzah-Kyetoch Yankey, University of Alberta

Presentations

Jessica Bundy, University of Toronto

Black Nova Scotian conceptions of safety

Nova Scotia is home to Canadas oldest and largest multigenerational Black community, with roots tracing back to the late 17th century. African Nova Scotian communities have been perpetually impacted by acts of state violence, silence, and oversight. This impact is apparent in the historical and current social, political, and economic standing of African Nova Scotians, and the continued discriminatory treatment of African Nova Scotians by police and criminal justice system. This paper examines this historic Black Canadian community’s perceptions using interviews, while acknowledging the significance of engaging with an intergenerational Black community in the Canadian context. Focusing on creating a community narrative through centering Black voices in the lens of Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought, the realities of navigating everyday racism and disproportionate police discrimination and violence are examined, and concepts of safety and protection. Further, how this Black Canadian community conceives and sustains safety in the presence and extensive history of discrimination. The pervasive nature of such anti-Black racism in such a historical Black community stresses the importance of additional exploration, understanding, and centering the experiences of Black people in Canada.

Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, Concordia University

Black Masculinities in Canada: Humanizing Black Men and Gender Advocacy

This study presents how Black men in Canada construct their Black male identities outside mainstream stereotypes and lead efforts to empower Black men and boys in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. In North America, Black men have one of the lowest social positions, challenged with high unemployment, high school dropout rates, incarceration, and mortality rates (Alexander 2011; Brown 2011). In efforts to resolve this disparity, Black masculinity is overrepresented as "in crisis" within the Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) (Brown 2011; Johnson 2018). Scholars in the CSMM have investigated how the Black male expression of patriarchy and hypermasculinity contributes to Black communities' low social position and well-being (Connell 1987; Schrock and Schwalbe 2008). Crisis narrative scholars tend to draw from gangster and ghettoized representations of African American men in the mainstream media and local communities as evidence of mass Black male underachievement that requires urgent state intervention. This study illuminates how the central "crisis" in Black masculinity studies is the problem-centred deficit framework and homogenization of the American context, overshadowing Black men's multidimensionality and positive societal contribution across the African diaspora (Toldson and Johns 2016).   The CSMM emerged in the 1960s using feminist methods to advance research into the lived experiences of men beyond being perpetrators of sexism and patriarchy (Brannon 1976; Kimmel and Messner 2013). However, research on Black masculinity continues to be hyper-focused on Black male perpetrators, framed as in the constant quest to attain white male status or as underdeveloped from the over 500-year legacy of systemic racism instilled during the 16^th-century western transatlantic slave trade and 17^th-century scientific racism (Cooper 2007; Curry 2018;  Somerville 1994). As critiqued by Black feminists, gendered racism in western knowledge production is responsible for the social construction of people of African descent as an inferior Black race, the framing of Black male-female relations as in perpetual conflict and Black men as underdeveloped, deviant, and dangerous (Collins 2004, 2006; hooks 2004). It is thus essential to avoid deficit frameworks and elevate humanizing representations of Black men and masculinity to combat anti-Black racism and sexism. Using a Black feminist sociological lens, this study investigates Black men as multidimensional racialized and gendered beings with agency to construct liberating counternarratives and positive societal contributions across the African diaspora (Blume Oeur and Grundy 2022; hooks 2004).   To enliven the CSMM with humanizing representations of Black men from a Canadian context, this study resolves the following questions: 1) How do Black men across the gender and sexuality spectrum in Canada define and redefine Black masculinities? 2) How do Black men engage in efforts to combat gendered racism in Canada? 3) How do Black men work with Black women and other communities to promote change in Canada? Qualitative interviews and photovoice were conducted on (N=20) self-identified Black male community organizers across the gender and sexuality spectrum who strive to advance race and gender justice, including Black men who identify as heterosexual, transgender, homosexual and non-binary. The findings will be disseminated as a written thesis, published in journal articles, accessible as educational resources on a public website and a multimedia presentation that spotlights positive representations of Black men and oppressive systems and ideologies that still need to change to propel Black male security and joy.

Julien Quesne, ESPUM - Université de Montréal

The cognitive routines of whiteness: an overview of the emotional pathways leading to white emotional ankylosis

In this communication, I discuss some of the results stem from my thesis work on the analysis of the cognitive and emotional dimensions of white racism. This research attempted to document the existence and use of cognitive routines specific to the white condition in its relationship to racism in the modern Western context. This research was built on the basis of the following analytical and methodological path: 1) a content analysis of emotional representations on race in the American TV series Dear White People (Netflix, 2017-2021); 2) a decolonial phenomenographic analysis (Marton, 1981) of the results of the content analysis by conducting semi-directed cognitive interviews with eight white, heterosexual, French-speaking men, all defining themselves as politically progressive, and from two different national contexts (Quebec and France). One of the main aims of my research was to lay the foundations for a transdisciplinary postconstructivist approach that can capture the cognitive expressions of whiteness in its emotional and affective relations to the dehumanization of blackness (Ajari, 2022). I will chart the evolution of the theoretical path that enabled me to envision the creation of a postconstructivist approach to emotions epistemologically compatible with decolonial and Afropessimist (Wilderson, 1999) perspectives on race. Through the notion of postconstructivism, I intend - from an Ajarian understanding of blackness (Ajari, 2020) - to grasp emotions through the prism of race from their profound historicity. In other words, to start from colonial violence and dehumanization in order to understand what constitutes both the repertoires of emotion and the affectivity of the white condition in the light of the power it wields over the black condition. From the historical and ontological roots of violence against black populations has been forged what might be called a white affectivity and emotionality, structured around a jouissance centered on black suffering (through its ontological understanding degraded and abjected by whiteness) and white drives for self-preservation (Fanon, 2011; Whitney, 2018). I argue that neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barretts (2017) theory of constructed emotion provides a neurobiological understanding of the consequences of the colonial historicity of emotions in the West for the modern timeframe. Barrett takes a constructivist stance on emotions, based on the predictive brain theory (Barsalou, 1999), which suggests that our actions (of which emotions would be part of) are the object of predictions and not reactions. In the case of emotions, she adds that the latter are purely social and cultural phenomena, necessary for the interpretation of biological phenomena that are far more opaque to our consciousness: affects. In the dual process that leads to the inferiority complex of the Black by the White lies what Fanon calls an "epidermalization" (2011, p. 66) of this inferiority. In other words, the racist white gaze is the product of an affective internalization of black inferiority. This gives rise to a "white affective ankylosis" (p. 163), based on the idea that the black person exists only through his or her skin and through the spectacle of the violence that can be perpetrated on his or her flesh (Hartman, 1997). This idea of the absence of interiority thus presupposes, in racial colonialism, the absence of affective intentionality in the Black person. In this communication, I will discuss the results of my research and the existence of cognitive and emotional routines that illustrate more concretely the moral and political structuring of this white affective ankylosis.

Jennifer Peruniak, University of Toronto

Racial Literacy: An Analysis of How Transracial Adoptees View Their Racial Identity

This research traces how transracial adoptees from diverse racial backgrounds in Canada conceptualize and articulate their sense of racial identity through the life course from early childhood to adulthood. It engages with theorization of the self from a racialized outsider’s perspective to ask: what does it mean to be a racialized person in Canada, and how does this function to socialize someone who occupies an outsider position due to their inherent circumstances of adoption? Transracial adoptees (TRA’s) are a fascinating case study that can speak to many areas within race literature. Primarily, TRA’s expand theorization of how BIPOC people come to understand their own racial identity on a micro everyday level. This paper utilizes 42 semi-structured interviews with transracial adoptees that took place over Zoom lasting between 1-2 hours. Participants were from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds with a mix of domestic and international adoptees. The family unit plays an essential role in how TRA’s understand their own racial identity. This paper contributes research that is in conversation with France Twine’s concept of racial literacy. Twine (2004) coins the concept of racial literacy as one that theorizes parental labour as an anti-racist project, which encompasses their actions toward raising their children with understandings of racism. This paper applies this concept to unpack how transracial adoptees attain racial literacy (or not), and how this affects their internalized perceptions and feelings of themselves as racialized people. Participants in this sample articulate the cyclical nature of how outsider status functions to create and reproduce itself even within marginalized groups, and more broadly, within the Canadian cultural landscape. It highlights the push-pull dynamic central to transracial adoptees understandings of their own sense of racial identity as one occupying an “in-between” status. By theorizing from those on the margin, this research will contribute nuance and complexity to scholarship on the boundaries and constructions of racial identity, and how racial identity is understood by those on the fringe. It unpacks the symbiotic relationship between belonging and identity; it examines how belonging is felt and understood in two major contexts, belonging within the family unit, and belonging within a particular racial group. This paper breaks the data into two major phases of transracial adoptees’ experiences: one is the everyday process of othering they encounter, second is the impact these experiences have over time and how it affects transracial adoptees’ sense of identity. The lack of belonging of this specific group of transracial adoptees shows how difficult acquiring racial literacy is, especially with a white family who does not have shared lived experiences. TRA’s lived experiences show the strength of racial boundaries and categorization, through positioning themselves as not belonging to either white groups or racialized groups. Transracial adoptees exist as outsiders, both on the white side of the colour line, and the racialized side of the colourline. Their lived experiences on the colourline as outsiders illuminates the real world implications of not belonging and its impact on identity and the self. Consequently, the outsiders of these groups function to show the inner workings of how belonging operates within the in-groups, as well as the salient role of external perception (based on phenotype, racial codes, and culture) towards a racialized person. These work to reinforce the significance of race (racial identity) and display how complex the processes of learning about what it means to be a racialized person in Canadian society.

Ritika Tanotra, York University

To Accept or to Reject? Navigating the Complexities of Multiple (Chosen and Given) Identities for Indian South Asians in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA)

With an “alarming surge” of hate crimes against ‘Asians’ since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (Chen and Wu, 2021, p. 6), those perpetrating anti-Asian violence or engaging in racist beliefs regarding Asians may see all as threatening and ‘foreign’ regardless of whether “... the person is from China, of Chinese origin, or simply looks Asian...” (Li and Nicholson Jr., 2021, p. 4). Commonly held stereotypes (such as the ‘model minority’ myth) ignore the diversity within these ethnic and racial groups and can obscure its complexities. As the category of ‘Asian’ gained increasing attention during the pandemic, it raises questions about what this means for other groups (such as Indians, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshi, etc.) within this larger category, and how experiences of hate and racism are experienced by different segments of the overall ‘Asian’-Canadian population. Using semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to examine how state-imposed and chosen identities (such as Asian, Indian, Canadian, etc.) intersect with feelings of national belonging for Indian South Asians in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), who themselves have a long and complex history of experiencing instances of racism and feelings of exclusion. It examines how individuals belonging to this category navigate their (multiple) identities and relationships within these various classifications, and whether they adopt and share or reject a collective, one- group identity (or identities). As said by Pierre Bourdieu, “[N]othing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 132).