Letter to Fallen Matthew, 

I publicly want to acknowledge and show appreciation for your rigorous academic engagement, theoretical and practical alternative vision of creating more equitable and inclusive societies especially for racialized students. Racialized students have experienced the brunt of inequitable, interlocking systems of domination in institutions, whether public and private social spaces or formal institutions such laws, regulations, policies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic context.

Your book chapter, “Nobodies to Everybody: Pervasive Misappropriation and Marginalized Students” in the edited book, ‘The Academic Well Being of Racialized Students” by Professor Benita Bunjun (Image below), remains one of the most intriguing and uncensored accounts of Canadian higher education institutions. This book chapter highlights the manifestations of white supremacist, ableist, classist, heteropatriarchal and settler colonial politics in the Ivory Tower. Your critical scholarship has disrupted the terrain of international education being a neutral process of knowledge production.

Your book chapter has re-defined international education as a political instrument of ideological warfare in support of the project of Empire state building in Canada.

You have shown that Canada actively engages in performative semantics through constructing national mythologies of justice, humanitarian good will, morality, and social justice. These national mythologies are often constructed to compare Canada to the US on matters of race and race relations and other crucial thematic concerns.

There is also this semi-visible or invisible disavowal of the role the white settler-colonial, nation state. The mechanics of white settler-colonialism erases the fact that Canadian nationhood is predicated on resource theft, violent dispossession, genocide, dehumanizing torture, sexual and reproductive violence, chattel slavery of African peoples and exploitation of labour of racialized bodies. 

You have aptly demonstrated that resource theft and violence is not only physical. Theft and violence also extends to the epistemological and ontological/existential dimensions of neo-coloniality where the ideas, reflections, thoughts processes and methodologies of racialized students are stolen and misappropriated. The alternative ontologies and epistemological frameworks of racialized students are also deliberately misrepresented to satisfy the insatiable appetite of a commodified education system. The commodified education system is built on displacing the others for the privileged elite to maintain positions of authority and the neo-liberal, capitalist logics of profit making. The privileged elite, often white, upper-middle class, heterosexual and able-bodied define the parameters of knowledge legitimization and knowledge de-legitimization.

Through our discussions on various online platforms, I sense your anguish, your resentment, your disappointment, your frustration, your apathy, and even your anger with a system that glorifies empty statements of apologies or acknowledgement of our presence while participating in maintaining institutions that demean us, invisibilizes or (hyper)visibilizes our presence through symbolic representations and metaphors of death. Similar to Sunera Thobani (2007), your book chapter has unveiled that Canadian multi-culturalism masked the continuity of white entitlement, exaltation, and privileges within the nation-state. The institution of international education and the politics of multi-culturalism silences our ancestral knowledges and the horrific past that dictates our present and future, assigns us a category of sub-person or non-Human, displaces us, amasses vast wealth and resources through expropriation and environmental degradation then brands itself as development. The institution of international education and the politics of multiculturalism insufficiently explicates the myriad ways how marginalized racialized students are blamed for social crises. 

Racialized students remain susceptible to homelessness, evictions, deprived access to public, social services, the right to a dignified life and standards of living. Punitive policies and practices of settler-colonial state also polices and surveils our movements, what we say, how we say and what we do, where when, why and how. It is no surprise that the current trajectory is one that depletes our physical, mental, affective, and intellectual energies whereby we are expected to suffer to prove ourselves as worthy in exchange for trinkets of recognition with limited social and economic mobility. You have been fervent that we should not have to suffer to prove ourselves worthy as co- creators of knowledge. You have shown that the containment zone, in which Professor Sunera Thobani speaks of, does not begin with contemporary predicament of Eurocentric pedagogy of displacement. The pedagogy of displacement further marginalizes students by omitting histories and current conjectures of war, material deprivation and underdevelopment connected to imperial relations or encounters. The contemporary predicament of the pedagogy of displacement begins from the womb to the plantation and beyond, as Saidiya Hartmann (2007) has theorized in her text “To Lose Your Mother”.  

I know words of encouragement and support are not enough to console you.

This is because there are many times words of encouragement have not been combined with sustained commitment and actions that lead to broader transnational and societal transformations to unsettle injustices and violence against racialized students. However, I want to affirm and reassure you that YOU and your scholarly contributions are valuable. You have a community that appreciates you. Many of our greatest ancestors who are scholars, practitioners, educators, and community activists that came before us, their works have delegitimized, shunned, trampled on, reputed as non-empirical and did not even receive the accolades they truly deserved. Rather, those who came before us and are still with us focused on doing something far much more valuable than what institutions will ever give them or did not give to them, rather.

I know that the present predicament of what is happening to us individually and collectively and what is happening around the world is far from comforting and the issues are becoming even more inter-connected, concerning, and pervasive. Nonetheless, I want you to remember the major role that your work contributes to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, decolonial, abolitionist visions and advocacy for revolutionizing international education. I am glad to have met you on my journey in Canada (2018-2022) and to have known you and talked with you and even share space in a community of like minds (ongoing).

With love and solidarity,

Tina

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Acknowledgements

Special acknowledgements to the Racialized Students’ Academic Network (RSAN) and Prof Benita Bunjun for their transformative scholarship and praxis in Canadian academia.

Tina Renier is an Afro-Jamaican scholar-activist. She is also a Research Fellow for the Sustainable Leadership and Positive Peace Research Fellowship Programme, a UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab expert and a regular contributor to Global Research. She received a Master of Arts in International Development Studies from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Sources

Matthews, F. (2021). Nobodies to Everybody: Pervasive Appropriation and Marginalized Students in eds. Bunjun, B. (2021). Academic Well Being of Racialized Students. Fernwood Publishing. pp. 55-62.

Hartman, S. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farar, Straus, and Giroux Publishers.

Thobani, Sunera. (2007). Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and in the Nation. Toronto University Press.

Featured image is from the author

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