Contesting White Supremacy

Download or read book Contesting White Supremacy written by Timothy J. Stanley and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1922-23, Chinese students in Victoria, British Columbia, went on strike to protest a school board’s attempt to impose segregation. Their resistance was unexpected at the time and runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded. Contesting White Supremacy offers an alternative reading of racism in British Columbia. Drawing on Chinese sources and perspectives and an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike, Timothy Stanley demonstrates that by the 1920s migrants from China and their BC-born children actively resisted policy makers’ efforts to organize white supremacy into the very texture of life. The education system served as an arena where white supremacy confronted Chinese nationalist schooling and where parents and students rejected the idea of being either Chinese or Canadian and instead invented a new category – Chinese Canadian – to define their identity.