This brief essay addresses recent events involving the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA), in which I have shared the role of president with Dr. OmiSoore Dryden since June 2019. Much of what I write here is informed by ongoing conversations between Dr. Dryden and myself, as well as with other members of the BCSA executive. It is also shaped by my ongoing work with students, comrades, and colleagues committed to Black Studies in Canada and to changing academia.
The BCSA was founded in 2009, at the conclusion of a three-day Black Studies workshop convened by Dr. Afua Cooper at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The primary objectives of the association determined at that time are:
To create an institutional infrastructure of Black Canadian Studies in Canada; to support and facilitate interaction and exchange and networking between scholars, community historians and cultural workers of Black Studies here in Canada and abroad; to provide support for Black Canadian Studies scholars, academics, community historians and culture (and those of Black descent regardless of research interests and foci); and to actively encourage and support subsequent generations of scholars, researchers, community historians and cultural workers.
The BCSA held conferences at the University of Alberta in 2010, at Brock University in 2013, at Dalhousie University in 2015, and at Brandon University in 2017. At the Annual General Meeting in Brandon, the BCSA membership passed a motion for the association to join the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Annual conferences were subsequently held as part of the Federation’s annual Congress: in 2018 at the University of Regina, and in 2019 at UBC, when Dr. Cooper stepped down from her longstanding service as the president of the association.
Amidst the now well-known incident of racial profiling at the 2019 Congress, a new executive team was elected for a special one-year term with a twofold mandate. First, we were to represent the BCSA’s four demands of the Federation, to address the racial profiling of Shelby McPhee and to begin to confront anti-Black racism. Second, we were to assess the state of the association and the potential for its growth. One of the BCSA demands had been that confronting anti-Black racism be incorporated into the theme of the next Congress, which led to the modified 2020 theme of Bridging Divides: Confronting Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism.
Heading towards the 2020 Congress, Dr. Dryden and I engaged in extensive dialogue and negotiations with both the Federation leadership and the Congress 2020 organizing committee at Western University. We planned a dynamic BCSA conference that celebrated the interdisciplinary work of Black scholars and the futures of Black Studies. We did everything we could to ensure that this would take place within the broader context of an accessible and welcoming Congress experience of academic community building, especially for Black students. COVID-19 interrupted these plans, and also interrupted what seemed to have become a generative collaboration with the Federation. Faced with the conditions of pandemic, however, the Federation announced the intention to move the Congress online, rather than postponing the entire Confronting Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism Congress theme. The BCSA would not support this attempt to push ahead with “business as usual” and hold a virtual Congress amidst a surging global pandemic. And as it turned out, neither would the vast majority of our fellow member associations.
The BCSA cancelled our conference last year, and the AGM of the BCSA membership was held online. Elections resulted in another one-year term executive to continue the work we had started with the hopes of meeting in person for a conference in 2021.
Déjà Vu
Approaching a virtual Congress 2021 amidst the ongoing pandemic and cycles of lockdown, the BCSA spent several months considering our options for a conference and the potential of participating in Congress. Our executive consulted the membership at large, and our conference committee—Dr. Alana Butler, Dr. Philip Howard and Dr. Barbara Hamilton-Hinch—approached the Federation leadership to discuss our participation.
The BCSA made two requests of the Federation: that Congress fees be waived for BCSA student-members and community members; and that a formal commitment be made to a Black Studies theme for Congress in the near future. These requests were denied, sending our association and the entire Congress the message that the Federation was seeking to re-settle itself, and calling into question both the will and potential for deep, lasting structural change. In a statement released on February 9th, 2021, the BCSA announced that our association will not participate in Congress 2021, and explained why. We followed this with another statement to further clarify our position.
In response to the announcement of the BCSA’s non-participation in Congress 2021, the Federation’s advisory committee on “Equity Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonization” (EDID) has been invoked, as if to suggest that our position is disrespectful of the work of our colleagues on that committee. We strongly reject this suggestion. The goal of naming anti-Black racism and coloniality within the structures of academia, is not to shame our colleagues (Black or otherwise) who are differently located in this struggle and/or whose beliefs or choices differ from ours. We are identifying institutional practices that we believe contradict and are detrimental to our political aims: institutional practices within which we are also all, to some degree, implicated. The BCSA has never questioned the intentions of the members of the committee on EDID. Indeed, last fall, Dr. Dryden and I accepted an invitation to meet and consult with the chair and vice-chair of that committee. We believe this meeting to have been in good faith, our discussion was characterized by honesty and mutual respect, and we look forward to reading the report that this committee has prepared for Congress 2021.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the common practice at universities of hiring women and racialized persons—Black women in particular—to do so-called “EDI” (equity, diversity, and inclusion) work on behalf of the institution. On the one hand, these workers typically have crucial lived experiences and scholarly expertise related to the forms of oppression and inequity that such committees are meant to address. On the other hand, such positions come with the strong potential of having to defend institutions and institutional processes against racialized and other activist scholars and students demanding change. Do institutions hire EDI workers to dismantle and abolish their colonial-capitalist structures and practices? Or are EDI workers typically hired to manage issues related to equity and diversity in ways that allow the institution to continue its business with minimal interruption?
In their July 30, 2020 media release announcing the creation of the EDID committee to “help the Federation” and “advise the Federation Board,” the Federation leadership identifies “the COVID-19 crisis” as their impetus, rather than acknowledging the role that Black scholars, and the BCSA specifically, have played in challenging academic anti-Blackness and coloniality. The statement expresses the intention to increase access to the Congress that exists, rather than to pursue profound changes to that Congress, and uses the deflective language of “members who have felt marginalized” (emphasis added).
It has been almost a decade since the publication of Sara Ahmed’s brilliant study of diversity workers in the UK and Australia, On Being Included. Ahmed’s findings resonate deeply, especially for those of us trying to do “equity and diversity” work, and apply it throughout the transnational institutional network of academia. They echo in my own recent work examining how McGill University has managed and suppressed generations of Black student campaigns for Black/Africana Studies, through strategic bureaucratic cycles of “consultation” and committee formation. As a Black professor in that study noted, “When it comes to anything to do with racism it’s ‘we’re going to consult.’ And then they pray that you will go away.”
Statements of commitment and institutional committees to address inequity and oppression are often nonperformative—that is, the statement or formation of a committee comes to stand in for the actual work of rooting out oppression and generating change. Ahmed recently summed it up in a post to her Twitter account:
Committees are so important to the institutional mechanics of the nonperformative.
We promise to do x by creating a committee to do x.
Committee is used as evidence x is being done.
Committee becomes (entangled with) x.
Committee does not do x
x becomes not doing x.
The Federation has announced—following the withdrawal of the BCSA from Congress 2021—that Black and Indigenous students are exempt from paying Congress fees this year. We are faced, once again, with apologies and damage control that come after the harm has been done.
For years now, Indigenous scholars have critiqued such “performances of recognition and remorse” amidst what Mushkegowuk (Cree) scholar Michelle Daigle so aptly describes as the spectacle of reconciliation. Hence, the Federation’s rhetoric must be scrutinized, especially when the registration tab on the Congress website continues to state that “All attendees, including organizers, speakers, presenters, panelists and those chairing or attending a session, must pay the Congress fee” (emphasis theirs).
The BCSA—and now several other associations—will be convening conferences and reassessing our priorities at AGMs outside of Congress this year. Many of us will be reconsidering whether to remain members of the Federation, and if, as Dr. Dryden has written, we need a new way of organizing ourselves, one that begins with anticolonial commitments that reckon with the after-life of slavery in Canada.
From Supporting the Other to Solidaire
There is a delicate balance to be struck, in taking cues from and centering the work of BIPOC scholars, while at the same time not burdening those scholars with the responsibility for thinking and acting on everyone’s behalf. Decades of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized and radical scholars—particularly feminists and LGBTQ2S+—have engaged in a prolonged struggle to make and claim space for us and our work within academia in this country. We can and do share accountability to and responsibility for continuing this struggle. Institutional racism and coloniality are issues that impact all of us and inevitably impact our work as scholars. Thus, decolonizing Canadian academia is about more than supporting the BCSA.
The collective process of defining and enacting political positions and strategies for change is difficult, often frustrating, and literally never-ending work. And it is risky. Perhaps most notably, it risks exposing the tensions and conflicts between the positions and politics we claim, research and theorize, and what we are actually willing to do. What are we, as academics, willing to give up in order to decolonize the university? What are we willing to change in order to bring a different university into existence?
Beyond whether or not academics and academic associations participate in Congress this year, overlapping current contexts provide an opportunity for all of us who claim commitments to social justice to think seriously about the kinds of relationships we wish to develop and with whom, the collective work we wish to do, and the kinds of futures we wish to build. Conversations and public statements (including those by the BCSA, of course) will only carry us so far. But they are an important start. Perhaps recent events and the risks that we are taking together are leading us toward not only being in solidarity with one another, but being solidaire.
Unlike the English solidarity, the French word solidarité has an accompanying adjective: solidaire. I found myself to be in solidarity with, but also I was solidaire. We could define ourselves as embodying this spirit, oftentimes physically in a shared collective space, the effect of which tied us in with a greater social construct, a greater sense of history and community, making us feel like a more integral part of the broader narrative. Not only are we shoulder-to-shoulder (in solidarity), we are (solidaire). I came to believe that it is not only the experience of solidarity but also the affirmation of self as solidaire that is key to effecting change (Boushel, p. 179).
Perhaps this moment of tension and questioning is a beginning, through which more of us will become solidaire. Perhaps the multiple deadly, global crises of racial capitalism that we are currently trying to survive will be a portal to elsewhere. Perhaps that elsewhere will be a place where scholars gather in formations that do not mimic the nation state and its politics. Perhaps we will no longer desire a massive national congress (conjuring formality, delegation, and legislation). Perhaps we will desire a smaller anticolonial convergence (conjuring coordinated movement), where thinkers and makers and doers committed to pursuing the radical intellectual work of social change convene and share and co-conspire. It’s really up to us to decide.
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Photo by Chris Kealy
Dr. rosalind hampton works as an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, University of Toronto. She is the current co-president of the Black Canadian Studies Association, and the director of the National Black Graduate Network.
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