White Obstructions; Barriers to the Implementation of Black Studies

Abstract

This article interrogates the strategies of white supremacy that functioned as obstacles to the implementation of the Black Studies stream in the Social and Political Thought graduate program at York University. The author reflects on her experience as co-chair of the Graduate Student Association and an Executive Committee student representative the year before the inauguration of the stream, identifying and examining white bureaucratic delay, with its practices of reiterative revision and deliberation, as a tactical obstruction to Black studies. The author demonstrates how these administerial tactics, mutually dependent on anti-Black quotidian violence and the ongoing denial of its quintessence to the organizing logic of the university, also work to rescue academic whiteness from threats to its ascendancy, remaking it as the progressive agent of change in the neoliberal era of equity, diversity and inclusion.