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 segregation. Their resistance was unexpected and runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded. In Timothy Stanley combines Chinese sources and perspectives with an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike and construct an alternative reading of racism in British Columbia. His work demonstrates that education was an arena in which white supremacy confronted Chinese nationalist schooling and where parents and students contested racism by constructing a new category – Chinese Canadian – to define their identity.