AP/HREQ 3680 6.00
Contemporary Issues of Racism in Canada
This course uses a critical human rights approach to explore contemporary issues of racism in Canada, including #BlackLivesMatter, hate crimes, and systemic barriers for racialized peoples, including LGBTQ2+ minorities.
It analyses racial discrimination in Canadian colonial history through state and institutional policies and practices as well as cases of legal and social resistance to racism. It examines the causes of, impact of, and ways to overcome, the stigma that plays a major role in inequality, prejudice, and discrimination with the focus on understanding the pernicious effects of being part of any kind of stigmatized social identity. It explores the construction and effects of race-making in the Canadian society, with a specific focus on how the Canadian nation-state constructs and manages diverse groups of Indigenous people, Black people, and people of colour in similar and different ways. It examines how forces of racialized and colonizing power operate to construct group identities in Canada, and how resistant forms of power are enacted against racial and colonial inequities. Contemporary institutions will be studied both as sites of employment as well as for service delivery within the context of a globalized, neo-liberal economy. Different forms of racism will be discussed, including forms where the language of ‘race’ has been replaced by other languages, such as ‘culture,’ religion and migration/citizenship status. The course will be taught using an ‘intersectional’ approach, that is by examining how racism is intertwined with other forms of discrimination and exploitation, such as class, sexism, disability, colonialism, nationalism and neo-liberalism.
Course credit exclusions: AP/MIST 3680 6.00 (prior to Winter 2019)
Prerequisites: 24 credits