Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians

In 1922-23, Chinese students in Victoria, British Columbia, went on strike to protest a school board's attempt to impose racial segregation. Their resistance was unexpected at the time, and it runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion in Canada, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded.

"Contesting White Supremacy" offers an alternative reading of the history of racism in British Columbia, one based on Chinese sources and perspectives. Employing an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike and document its antecedents, 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 in particular 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.

By shifting the focus from discourses about the Chinese to discourses of the Chinese, this compelling narrative of adaptation and agency and racism and rejection offers a truly anti-racist ?alternative to nationalist narratives and paradigms.