Abstract

This thesis is premised upon the well-established understanding that universities across Canada and North America have been constructed through and are embedded in white supremacy — a historical and colonial system of power which privileges white, Euro-centric knowledges, bodies, and cultural norms and values. Examining the challenges of achieving racial justice in Canadian universities, many scholars have concluded that cultures of whiteness shape the university and pose fundamental barriers to racial justice. This results in a predominately white institutional environment resistant to the inclusion of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) communities. And this not only privileges white, Euro-centric ideologies, epistemologies, pedagogies, and bodies, it dually restricts BIPOC access to and belonging in the university. Using the notion of the ‘culture of whiteness’ as a point of departure, this work examines manifestations of, and resistance to, white supremacy in the Canadian university through a detailed case study centering the contributions of anti-racist student organizers. This thesis offers a close-up examination of how white supremacy is established, reproduced, and resisted in one contemporary urban university setting: Concordia University in Montreal. Drawing from interviews with eleven anti-racist student organizers and supplemented by reflections grounded in auto-ethnography, institutional ethnography, and participant observation, I examine manifestations of white supremacy and the conditions of student anti-racist work in the university. Centrally, on the basis of this research I argue that the responsibility for racial justice is unfairly assigned, and these assignments perpetuate rather than interrupt structural and cultural white supremacy in the Canadian university.