Visualizing White Supremacy
in Institutions
Compiled by Ta’Ziyah Jarrett (Affiliate - Critical Race Museology Cluster)
In December of 2021, Amal Alhaag and Syrus Marcus Ware facilitated an online workshop called “Uprooting White Supremacy in the Institution”. In Zoom Breakout Rooms, TTTM members were asked to share an object that for them represents White supremacy in an institution they belonged to.
The goal of this project is to share and archive some of those objects. Between January and February of 2023, nine people were offered the following prompt:
Select an object that you believe represents institutional White supremacy.
When visualizing White supremacy, images of white hoods, burning crosses, and Confederate flags may be what immediately comes to mind. However, as these responses demonstrate, White supremacy often operates in much more subtle ways. Thus, if we hope to one day rid ourselves of White supremacy, we must all look deeper, at both the world around us and within ourselves, so that we may be able to see and bring attention to White supremacy in all of its forms.
Tuition Fees
Mahlet Cuff
Research Assistant - Museum Queeries Cluster
“Tuition makes it hard for people to think beyond what they are [currently] capable of.”
— Mahlet Cuff
Snapshot of Western University 2023-24 Undergraduate Tuition Fees.
It is no secret that (ever rising) tuition fees are one of the biggest barriers to higher education. But it is also evident that for Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (BIPOC), this barrier is all the more difficult to surmount. This was the experience of Mahlet Cuff, who had to take breaks during their undergraduate degree because they were unable to afford the associated costs. As a Black person whose parents did not attend university, the financial burden Cuff faced was only exacerbated by the lack of institutional knowledge (e.g., where to look for scholarships and bursaries) passed on to her. According to Cuff, access to knowledge is vital, and so the fact that higher education is locked behind a paywall is linked to capitalism, which itself is linked to White supremacy.
The link Cuff makes between capitalism and White supremacy is apt. According to researcher Andrea Gibbons, White supremacy refuses “to acknowledge structure and grapple with the exploitative nature of capitalism and the centrality of racial logics in capitalist development that has ensured the longevity of both economic exploitation and racism.”¹ BIPOC and White people alike suffer under capitalism, but insofar as White people overwhelmingly control power and material resources, the economic system cannot be adequately confronted without also contending with White supremacy.
James McGill Statue
Shelley Ruth Butler
Co-Investigator + Coordinating Committee - Critical Race Museology Cluster
Statue of James McGill, 2012. Photo Credit: Michel Dubreuil.
“Many statues are still invisible.”
— Shelley Ruth Butler
From 1996 to 2021, a statue of James McGill, the founder and namesake of McGill University, stood on the university’s downtown campus. The statue commemorated McGill without addressing the fact that he owned Black and Indigenous slaves.² This omission is why Shelley Ruth Butler calls this object a “silent statue,” as its subject’s story was valourized but his connections to settler colonialism and empire were erased. Having taught Canadian Studies at McGill for two decades, Butler regrets not having understood much about its founder when she first started teaching. For her and many others, the statue and the history it embodied were invisible. When students — notably the Black Students’ Network of McGill — brought attention to James McGill’s past and lobbied for his statue’s removal, both the university and the general public were forced to reckon with the ways monuments to White supremacy are often hidden in plain sight.
In response to the calls for the statue’s removal, McGill University adopted a stance of denial and defensiveness, which educator and artist Tema Okun identifies as being a key characteristic of White supremacy culture. Only when the statue was vandalized to the point of needing repair did the university remove it indefinitely. McGill’s insistence that the statue — a visual reminder of the colonial legacy embodied by James McGill — remain on display exemplifies why critical race theorist Francis Lee Ansley describes White supremacy as a system of dominance “daily reenacted”.³
Concordia University Campus Map
jason chalmers
Former Affiliate - National Heritage and Traumatic Memory Cluster
“We live in 4 dimensional space that gets flattened in this rendition that tells us what’s “important” about this place.”
— jason chalmers
Map of Concordia University’s Downtown Campus, as of January 9th, 2023.
Just as McGill’s statue reminded us how the very foundations of an institution (namely, its founder) can be implicated in White supremacy, maps demonstrate how Eurocentric models of space, place, and time influence how we conceive of the world around us. jason chalmers points out that in a time where territorial acknowledgements have become somewhat commonplace, it is interesting that this campus map does not integrate any of the critical perspectives that land acknowledgements are supposedly indicative of; instead, European place-names are inscribed on streets and buildings.
chalmers remarks, “There is a way in which certain cultures conceive of space, and the perspective that is privileged is often a question of White supremacy.” Furthermore, characteristic of White supremacy culture is its ability to present its perspective as being the objective or ‘neutral’ option. This is, in fact, integral to White supremacy’s persistence as it relies on the passive support of the general public, who must participate in “an active form of not-seeing, not-thinking, and not-feeling for those who suffer under it.”⁴
First Year Political Science Materials
Malaika Eyoh
University Syllabi
Anonymous
Former Research Assistant - Critical Race Museology Cluster
Excerpt from a University of Toronto Political Science course syllabus, dated 2021.
Malaika Eyoh
“All knowledge is valuable but the way that material is taught to students is in a way that undervalues and discredits other forms of learning and that is everything from the way stuff is taught in the class to the attitudes created around it in those spaces. The [small] number of students of colour who make it through the program reflects those things.”
Anonymous
“What was taught in social sciences was so canonical and considered neutral without any critical reflection that these things are created by a certain group of people, subjugating [other] epistemologies.”
University course materials are examples of White supremacy culture’s worship of the written word. People and cultures learn and pass on information in a wide variety of ways, but when that information is systematically ignored in favour of whatever is written, we are left with a canon that is presented as neutral but undeniably favours a particular perspective. This was apparent to Malaika Eyoh, who found that the scope of political science courses at the University of Toronto were standard Western European political theory, and did not consider the rest of the world in any meaningful way. Others describe how, in academia in general, there is a tacit agreement that knowledge is not valid unless it draws back to these established theories.
Charles Mills argues that the reason why White supremacy forms the basis of our society’s political system but is not acknowledged as such is because “standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination.”⁵ Moreover, figures such as Bacon, Locke, and Kant are still viewed as canonical, even though their publications include racist justifications for colonialism, slavery, and eugenics.⁶ University syllabi like the one above are the byproduct of the epistemic injustice perpetuated by White supremacy culture.
Concordia University’s Academic Calendar
Erica Lehrer
Principal Investigator + Coordinating Committee - National Heritage and Traumatic Memory Cluster
Excerpt from Concordia University’s 2021-22 Undergraduate Academic Calendar.
“A major piece of White supremacy is Christian supremacy.”
— Erica Lehrer
In the same way that White supremacy upholds certain epistemologies, it also privileges certain values and beliefs. Erica Lehrer notes that most North American universities’ academic calendars still reflect the White Christian roots of these institutions. The temporal pauses that these institutions build around the Christian holidays privilege adherents of the dominant religious culture, catering to their needs for rest, communal celebration, and family connection. Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and others are forced to make awkward or painful choices between professional and personal commitments at their holiday times.
Lehrer points out that objects like the calendar highlight why discussions of “White supremacy” cannot focus exclusively on race, but rather must examine how constellations of dominant views are embedded in institutional practices and structures. These formations require intersectional approaches to understand how harm and exclusion are experienced by different groups and individuals.
University of King’s College Dining Hall
Dorota Glowacka
Collaborator - National Heritage and Traumatic Memory Cluster
University of King’s College Dining Hall, 2021. Photo Credit: Jessica Casey.
“I can somewhat understand how it may be important to uphold these traditions, but to me, the day I stepped into the dining hall in 1995, it was intimidating and actually horrifying to see all these White men staring me down.”
— Dorota Glowacka
Exclusionary practices rooted in tradition are not only faith-based. Dorota Glowacka describes how the English tradition of decorating university dining halls with the portraits of past presidents created an unwelcoming atmosphere for BIPOC and women at the University of King’s College. With the exception of one White woman, all of the presidents were White men. This reminder of the lack of diversity in the university’s leadership was constant, as the room served as a main gathering place for the relatively small institution. Although the hall’s decor was changed in the summer of 2022, the normalization and centering of Whiteness undoubtedly affected BIPOC students, as some of them — who were able to do so — concealed their origins in an attempt to blend in.
Of all the things White supremacy culture attempts to normalize, arguably the most pernicious is the tendency to treat Whiteness as the default. According to White sociologist Robin DiAngelo, “White people are taught from an early age not to see themselves in racial terms, not to draw attention to their race and to behave as if it didn’t matter at all.”⁷ Disrupting White supremacy becomes all the more difficult when ‘neutral’ and ‘White’ are regarded as synonyms (whether knowingly or unknowingly).
Art Gallery Promotional Photograph
Anonymous
Art Gallery Promotional Photo. Photo Credit: Marc Cramer
“It can just be a neverending cycle of normalization of these narratives and hesitation or fear to challenge them because you might lose your job or because you’re just a volunteer, because you’re a white person, because you’re not a white person.”
— Anonymous
For ample examples of Whiteness being the standard against which all else is measured, look no further than art galleries. It has been found that even certain so-called “international collections” reflect 19th century principles that establish “a hierarchy of fine art over craft, and of Western art over that of other cultures …”.⁸ When it comes to addressing these hierarchies, as well as the lack of non-White representation within the artwork itself, educators who worked in these galleries were not provided adequate training or support to do this critical work.
Whether intentional or not, the exclusionary institutional messaging conveyed by art galleries is the result of the lack of diversity at the leadership level. In 2017, a study of Canadian art galleries found that “out of 184 senior positions, 92% were occupied by white people, less than 4% by Indigenous people and just more than 4% by visible minorities.”⁹ Consequently, even when BIPOC and historically marginalized communities are represented in exhibitions or artwork, it will often be through the lens of White culture. By leaving this frame of reference unnamed and its inherent assumptions unaddressed, an atmosphere of hesitation or fear of challenging the status quo is created, affecting museum visitors and personnel alike.
Old News Clipping About the Construction of a Modern Museum in Pakistan
Varda Nisar
Research Assistant - Critical Race Museology Cluster
“While Pakistan is not a country that (any longer) associates itself with White people ruling it, these ideas continue to circulate, and they are not being recognized as part of the problem. The colonial mindset has the idea of who’s the master, who’s on top and who is not.”
— Varda Nisar
The reason why Tema Okun describes White supremacy as being a “culture” is because its scope reaches beyond racial identity. A similar sentiment is expressed by Varda Nisar, who makes the connection between White supremacy and the National Museum of Pakistan. Even though the museum was built during Pakistan’s post-colonial era, its announcement drew on the idea of modernism, which was considered a Western concept. It signified the intent of the new ruling class to fill the void left by colonial powers. Nisar asserts that she does not feel represented by this museum, especially in light of its usage of antiquated dioramas — originally made for entertainment purposes — to depict tribal and semi-tribal communities.
One of the reasons why White supremacy has managed to remain dominant for the past several hundred years is due to its ability to persist in non-White contexts. Whether through imperialism, settler colonialism, or trade, you would be hard-pressed to find a community on this planet that has not been influenced by White supremacy culture.
Footnotes
1 Andrea Gibbons, “The Five Refusals of White Supremacy,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77, no. 3-4 (2018): 733, 10.1111/ajes.12231.
2 Luca Caruso-Moro and Billy Shields, “Statue of university namesake and slave-owner James McGill removed after most-recent bout of vandalism,” CTV News Montreal, July 12, 2021, https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/statue-of-university-namesake-and-slave-owner-james-mcgill-removed-after-most-recent-bout-of-vandalism-1.5504661.
3 Frances Lee Ansley, “Stirring the Ashes: Race Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship,” Cornell Law Review 74, no. 6 (1989): 1024, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol74/iss6/1.
4 Gibbons, “Five Refusals”, 731.
5 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1-2.
6 Gibbons, “Five Refusals”, 740.
7 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility. White it’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Bacon Press Boston, 2018), 7.
8 Kate Taylor, “National Gallery runs into decolonization controversy,” The Globe and Mail, November 28, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-national-gallery-runs-into-decolonization-controversy/.
9 Michael Maranda, “Hard Numbers: A Study on Diversity in Canada’s Galleries,” canadianart, April 5, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/art-leadership-diversity/.
