Despite focusing on different races and different time frames, both articles, “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West” by Claudette Knight and “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922-1923” by Timothy J. Stanley share a similar thesis. These articles both focus on how socially constructed racist ideologies and practices were put into operation by schools to subjugate these students in an attempt to enforce white supremacy. Similarly, the thesis of the article “Black Nova Scotian Women’s Experience of Educational Violence in the Early 1900s: A Case of Colour Contusion” focuses on Black Nova Scotian Women’s experiences of being excluded from ‘proper’ education because of white supremacy and their resistance to that exclusion.

All together, these articles shed light on the exclusionary practices of the Canadian education system’s past and how the system was used to perpetuate racism. Recognizing that education would provide personal and political liberty, white educators made it extremely difficult for other races to attain an equal education as their white peers.[1] They enforced this by prohibiting the study of certain courses such as natural and advanced social sciences and advanced mathematics that would provide “the possibility for them to acquire the level and quality of education that was necessary for socio-economic mobility and societal respectability”.[2]  Separate schools were established as a form of segregation for both the colored and the Chinese because it was believed that the these races were a moral and physical threat to white children due to their perceived depravity and disease.[3] The underlying motive of these exclusionary practices was to ensure that other races would remain inferior to the dominating white society so that they would not be in competition for white labour. As a result, this would ensure the occupation of these races in low, socio-economic positions such as servants and cheap labourers.

In conclusion, these three articles contribute to the wider historiography on the topic of race exclusion. Based on the similar experiences that both people of colour and the Chinese people faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we can conclude that other races during these times had similar experiences such as the First Nations peoples and their experiences in the residential schools.

[1] Claudette, Knight. “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West,” in Sara Burke and

Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2012: 227.

[2] Bernice, Moreau, “Black Nova Scotian Women’s Experience of Educational Violence in the Early 1900s: A Case of

Colour Contusion,” Dalhousie Review 77, no. 2 (1997): 187.

[3] Timothy, J. Stanley, “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the

Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922-1923.” In Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition:

                Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 239.