Anti-Racism Statement

Department of History

Supporting the community

In support of the global movement against anti-Black racism initially sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, the Department of History states unequivocally its opposition to racism in all forms. Racism is woven into the fabric of Western societies whose pasts were shaped by slavery and colonialism. Understanding and confronting this history is critical to fighting anti-Black racism in the here and now. Taking additional action, not just expressing solidarity, is required.  

History's role

History as a discipline has a unique role to play. Examining how the past shapes the present, on campus and off, is a critical element of our scholarship and teaching. The current struggle is embedded in the long history of slavery, racism and colonialism that is worldwide, but has particular relevance for Canada and the United States. In the U. S., the colonizers’ choice to build and sustain a society based on slavery profoundly shaped its development to 1865, and then exerted tremendous influence over its post-emancipation history.  There was a close relationship between Euro-Americans’ efforts to assert control over the enslaved and the development of professional policing, and the deployment of that policing after slavery’s end to maintain racial hierarchy. This past directly ties to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, which disproportionately impacts African-American communities. To fully understand why George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and so many other African-Americans have died at the hands of police in the US for basic human behaviors such as sitting in a car (Floyd), sleeping (Taylor), playing (Rice), driving (Bland), and standing outside a store (Garner), we need to know and understand the lasting influence of this history. 

In Canada, the histories of slavery, anti-black racism, and settler colonialism are unique yet interconnected in entrenching structural whiteness and privilege. Too many Canadians dismiss the seriousness of police brutality in Black communities. Historical narratives that insist that, in comparison to the United States, Black Canadians have experienced benign racism inform these misperceptions. The important work of Black scholars and activists has belied histories that argue that slavery was less violent in New France and British North America and that segregation was less destructive to Black communities in Canada. Yet these myths persist. The erasure of Black histories is itself a form of epistemic violence that fuels claims that Canada is not a racist country. The deaths of D’Andre Campbell, Nicholas Gibbs, Abdirahman Abdi, and Albert Johnson at the hands of police in Canada stand as stark examples that these claims are wrong.  At the same time, Indigenous peoples were also enslaved in New France and British North America and have faced many forms of state violence, including the dispossession from their lands and resources and state policies that attempted to destroy Indigenous forms of governance, kinship networks, and spiritual practices. The violent arrest of Allan Adam, Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and his wife Freda Courtoreille are not exceptional; the tragic death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet (an Indigenous-Black woman) and the police shootings of Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi are a few of the known recent examples of the vulnerability of Indigenous peoples in Canadian legal justice systems. Police brutality against Indigenous people coincides with the failure to act on the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada.

We have a common duty as a department to identify and disrupt racist legacies within our professional reach. That reach includes not only fostering awareness of those legacies through our teaching (while being careful not to reconfirm them), but also contributing tangibly to help the University achieve its goal of becoming a truly inclusive, diverse, and equitable institution.    

We must begin by listening and learning. The experiences of Black and Indigenous students and colleagues, in particular, should initially guide us as we make changes. Plans were already in place to strike an equity committee within the Department before Mr. Floyd’s murder, and in light of recent events a priority mandate must be anti-racism. Among its duties, the committee will map out a path to greater diversity within the history faculty, review our curriculum, advocate for the adoption of vigorous anti-racist policies and practices across campus, and put systems in place to make sure that when Black, Indigenous, and other racialized students and colleagues interact with the History Department they receive the fair treatment and due respect that should be accorded to all students and colleagues.