"A better place to live": National mythologies, Canadian history textbooks, and the reproduction of white supremacy

Abstract

This thesis examines how high school Canadian history textbooks authorized for use in Ontario from 1945 to the present have represented knowledge about race, racism, and opposition to racism in relation to the nation and national identity. Through a Foucault-informed critical discourse analysis, the thesis documents how racism permeates the taken-for-granted structures of schooling, how the imagined community of Canada is reproduced, and how ideas about the nation, race, racism, and opposition to racism are put into cultural circulation as normalized regimes of truth. My findings can be summarized briefly as follows: (1) Canadian history textbooks continue to circulate the 18th century idea that humanity is divided into sets of biological or naturally occurring races, in spite of it having been recognized for some time that races are social constructions, not facts of nature; (2) Racism has consistently been reduced to irrational, abnormal, extreme, and individualized problems of psychological or moral deficit and represented as either foreign to Canada, isolated incidents within Canada, or part of a distant past and with consequences solely for the racially subjugated; and (3) Opposition to racism has been represented in these textbooks as a state-driven enterprise stressing tolerance of the Other and privileging the idea that racism can be eradicated or stopped wherever it is seen to start. I argue, moreover, that the circulation of this knowledge about race, racism, and opposition to racism helps to prop up particular nationalist mythologies, most notably the myth of Canada as a uniquely tolerant and pluralistic nation-state which has effectively resolved the problem of racism. The effect is to depict Canada as a 'better place to live,' a model for other nations to emulate, and a place with a moral responsibility to uplift apparently inferior places in the world. I conclude by discussing how the institutionalized arrogance necessary to represent Canada as a space of vanquished racism or as a place of antiracist achievement perpetuates mythologies of white settler benevolence as it at once obscures the banal racisms upon which the modern nation-state is built and re-built.