Abstract
Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University by rosalind hampton unpacks how upper education’s institutional structures, practices, and discourses reproduce white settler colonialism, racialized capitalism, and interlocking systems of oppression. Using an anti-colonial,critical race feminist lens, this ethnographic study centers on the experiences of 21 Black scholars who study and taught at McGill University, an Anglophone academic institution in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The author interweaves experiential narratives that span half a century, along with institutional texts and historical accounts from colonial times to the present, to offer a compelling case study of racialization and racism, and anti-racist, anti-colonial resistance in higher education.
McGill University was established in 1821 on the land white settlers recognized as the property of James McGill, a prominent Scottish merchant. James McGill, who desired to contribute to the formal educational systems of Lower Canada (now named Quebec), bequeathed his estate for the university’s founding. However, the author provides an anti-colonial counter-narrative. McGill University was built on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation and has been funded by magnates whose wealth stemmed from the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover, at the founding of Canadian higher education, Black people were excluded from participating. In offering a critical histography of McGill’s foundations, followed by Black students’ and educators’ experiential narratives, the author illustrates that the white settler colonialism in which the university was founded permeates its contemporary culture.
Three themes resonated with this reviewer: (1) the “haunting” of colonial histories in contemporary times, (2) constructions of Blackness and anti-Blackness, and (3) enacting Black radical traditions of anti-racist, anti-colonial resistance. In the first theme, the author exemplifies McGill’s memorialization of its past reinforces white settler colonial ideologies. The author uses Avery F. Gordons’ concept of “haunting” (p. 70) to illustrate how Black students and educators experience these memorials. Interviewees spoke of their discomfort and expressed their rage when encountering the statue of James McGill, a former slave owner, or commemorations to families whose ancestral wealth was tied to plantation economies. This theme points to how memorials reproduce colonial relations, a timely analysis considering the global reckoning around colonial monuments that laud racist histories.
In exploring constructions of Blackness as they intersect with gender, race, nationhood, and class, the author explores “being Black” as both colonial and anti-colonial construction work. For instance, they contrast the experiences of Black Canadian, Caribbean, and African students and how growing up in nations where one’s race is continuously (Black Canadian) or rarely identified (Caribbean and African) can shape one’s sense of identity and belonging. The author contemplates the contentious constructions of “Black Canadian identity” (p. 113) and articulations of anti-Blackness in higher education. This critical contemplation considers how Canadian constructions of anti-Blackness alter students’ experiences of higher education, particularly when navigating deficit ideologies that presume Black people are at the academic “bottom” when they enter or “exceptional” when they succeed.
The author’s exploration of “anti-colonial construction work” (p. 121) offers the possibilities and tensions of working toward anti-colonial, anti-racist change within contemporary neoliberal universities. The examples of anti-colonial work presented—mentorship among Black students and faculty, forging alliances with anti-racist colleagues, fighting for Afrocentric studies, and building Afrocentric scholarship—illustrate what the author calls “Black radical traditions.” In offering case examples where Black educators and students engaged in anti-colonial construction work, the author provides possibilities of resistance using Black activist traditions that foster collective consciousness and anti-colonial, anti-racist praxis.
As a Black social worker who has studied in “elite” Canadian institutions, this book reminded me of my haunting when I navigated institutions where colonial histories are amply represented but Black ones were relatively absent. I remembered the disjunctures I experienced in achieving success at white supremacist institutions, where my presence, particularly as a doctoral student, was both “exceptional” and exclusionary. This book serves as a case study of the Canadian academe: Eurocentric education reigns with limited integration of Afrocentric, Indigenous, or transnational viewpoints; predominantly white faculties are not representative of general student population; and neoliberal constructions of merit leave many students behind. Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University reminds us that the address of anti-Black racism within Canadian higher education requires a dismantling of its white settler colonial legacies. Only then will decolonial transformation stand a chance.
