Racism plays a disappearing act: discourses of denial in one anti-discrimination campaign in higher education

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Abstract

This article responds to a university’s anti-discrimination campaign, ostensibly launched to combat racism. Taking up poststructural principles and anchored in anti-racism literature, we employ a discourse analysis to examine the truth productions about racism circulated by the campaign, and the subject positions to which they give rise. We analyse the consequences and possibilities for anti-racist action in the light of our argument that the campaign produced the university as an always already anti-racist space, becoming a means to an end to meaningful action. Through themes of belonging, denial, innocence, colour-blindness, and erasure, we demonstrate that the messaging of the campaign aligns with national narratives about Canadian society as free of racial inequity. We bring readers to consider how an anti-discrimination campaign effectively delegitimised the need for anti-racist action, imploring future initiatives to guard against re-inscribing the very forms of inequality they purport to disrupt.

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APA

Gebhard, A., Novotna, G., Carter, H., & Oba, F. (2023). Racism plays a disappearing act: discourses of denial in one anti-discrimination campaign in higher education. Whiteness and Education, 8(2), 229–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2022.2072760

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