Too Asian: Racism, Privilege, and Post-Secondary Education ed. by Jeet Heer, Michael C.K. Ma, Davina Bhandar and R.J. Gilmour (review)

In “On Being White and Other Lies,” James Baldwin wrote that “race” only “exists as a social construction within a network of force relations: America became white – the people who, they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white – because of … denying the Black presence. … No community … can be established on so genocidal a lie.” (James Baldwin, Essence, 1984) Baldwin’s remarks highlight that “race” as a category operates within a “network of force relations” even if his reference point in 1984 was not directed towards higher education. Universities, however, also exist within a network of force relations and the category of “race,” as an empire story. This excellent book describes the complex force fields of racialization in higher education in compelling ways. The authors argue that racism within post-secondary education is all too often a silent marker of symbolic violence maintained through obscure orientations towards achievement and meritocratic practice. In so doing, they have been highly successful in identifying the forms of symbolic violence that are exercised through categories of race such as its own language forms which mask higher education’s elitist character. Pierre Boudieu’s argument was that elitist institutions often fail to examine themselves as they reproduce the very conditions of their imperial histories and therefore create “self-interested visions of the social world into the appearance of equity” (Homo Academicus, [Stanford: Stanford University Press], 1989, 1). The editors of this collection have gathered together an outstanding group of scholars to confront the politics of “othering” and “stranger danger” in higher education. They have done so in response to a Maclean’s 2010 article which argued that students of apparently “Asian” descent were over-represented in Canadian universities and were threatening privileged “white students” who were seeking to avoid competition and culture clashes with “Asian” students.

Each chapter takes a different line of analysis to address the problems of using broad categories of race or identity to undermine those for whom struggles against racism have been an inter-generational project of symbolic resistance to racism. Each also addresses the ways in which Canada, often touted as the most egalitarian countries in the “Western World,” is mired in forms of imperialism which often goes unseen, and therefore, have effectively identified the ways in which the university is suffering from what Paul Ricouer has termed an “amnesia of the now” in that educational actors and associated institutions often bury historical “truths” about racial hierarchies.

I have summarized briefly the arguments made by the authors whilst also identifying the ways in which we might tackle the conceptual challenges associated with what Richard Kearney refers to as the “sacrificial stranger”’ who must survive in a state of exile whilst also seeking to participate as a legitimate citizen in higher education. Accepting that our grasp upon the past may be distorted either by remembering too much or by forgetting too much, I am suggesting that the article published in Maclean’s and which spawned the political and intellectual responses represented in this book, must be seen to belong to Ricoeur’s category; that is, a forgetfulness about the very histories of the university as a story of empire.

What does it mean when the media showcase young people as “too Asian” whilst simultaneously being compared to “white private school preppies”? Or are those identified as “Too Asian” to be the objects of another moral panic which seeks to figure human beings as a falsified, homogenous collection of identities rather than a challenge to the conventions of institutions carrying traces of their own colonial past?

Jeet Heer’s introduction provides a compelling argument about the problematic terms used on university campuses such as “diversity” and multiculturalism. It points to both historical and emerging anxieties about apparent “strangers” to university campuses and challenges the idea that Canada represents a “post-racial success story.” In...