Race and the Politics of Ignorance in Quebec

Quebec is often understood to have a distinct identity — a language, culture, and history of survivance that distinguishes the province from the broader Canadian national narrative. However, this obscures Quebec’s underlying racial dynamics and embedded forms of white ignorance.

The scholars in this book demonstrate how racism, and willful ignorance of it, are produced and maintained through social, political, and institutional processes inseparable from Quebec's history as a settler colonial society. The denial of racism in Quebec, this book argues, is bound up with the denial of its colonial origins.

From across the social sciences, contributors reframe Quebec as not an exception but a continuance of the settler colonial logic that birthed the Canadian state. Chapters show how forms of ignorance and racial violence — anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples — are co-constitutive of Quebec's nation-building project, shaping social representations, education systems, national narratives, public policies, and legal frameworks.