ABSTRACT
In this 2011 essay, Awad Ibrahim explores personal experiences with racialization and racialized ‘psychic violence’ through ethnographic research with African Parisian French-speaking youth in a Canadian, Franco-Ontarian school. Theoretically, Ibrahim draws upon Jacques Derrida’s discussion of language ownership to indicate how the students are racialized so as to be continually treated as deficient and effectively silenced as others by their white, Franco-Ontarian teachers. As Ibrahim notes, while Parisian French is normally a marker of high social capital in Ontario, the African Parisian French-speaking students are treated with incredulity and exaggerated astonishment by their teachers. Thus, the teachers’ ignorance regarding Francophone Africa and their prejudiced treatment of the African youth are normalized, while the students’ desires and interests, and their tools of expression and social power, are effectively muted. Here, Ibrahim notes that while teachers may have positive intentions, their minute, trivial day-to-day interactions with the students are ‘hard-to-pin-down’ as negative, yet ‘psychically painful’ for the students, as their testimonies demonstrate. Furthermore, the teachers harm the students educationally by tracking them into low-level classes and into physical education and sports activities despite the students’ expressed interest in broader visions of academic success. This essay is exceptional for its intersecting issues of race, racialization, and language, as well as for its vivid writing which juxtaposes images of the African students’ lived experiences in Ontario, Canada with theories on postcolonialism and the politics of language.
