Race, Racism and the Quebec Student Movement

Race, Racism and the Quebec Student Movement

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Published on Sunday, 08 July 2012 17:16

By rosalind hampton

Action guided by anti-racist and anti-colonial analysis is essential to imagining and building liberating alternatives to our current social order. The experience of the inspiring movement ignited by Quebec students this year confirms this belief, as questions about its diversity and about incidents of racism have increasingly emerged.

Anthony Morgan’s March 2012 “La grève et les minorités” (“The strike and minority groups”) was one of the first articles published about issues of race in the movement. Morgan challenged the movement discourse of accessibility, highlighting how education has always been a site of struggle for Indigenous and Black learners in Quebec. The article appeared the week after a group of about five white people at the massive March 22 demonstration in Montreal chose to paint their faces black and pull an enormous papier-mâché head of Quebec Premier Jean Charest throughout downtown Montreal. The racism embedded in this “blackface”performance gave some observers the confirmation they needed to dismiss the movement as essentially “white” and racist, composed of privileged white kids concerned only about themselves.

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