Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the role of education and educators in the detention of Tamil refugee children who arrived on Canadian shores aboard the MV Sun Sea in August 2010. Through an analysis of the ongoing marking of Tamil youth – even children – as always already ‘terrorists,’ I attempt to draw attention to education as a key site of racial management in the political landscape of counter-terrorism. I examine how the racialization of Tamils, especially Tamil refugees, youth and children functions in education, public images and discourses linking ‘Tamilness’ to ‘terror’ and evicting Tamils from the notion of belonging to the ‘public.’ I argue that the case of the MV Sun Sea demonstrates that the targeting, detention, and monitoring of Tamil youth and children in the white settler state is integral to the project of white settler colonialism and its reliance upon education for racial management. The role of educators in the illegal detention of Tamil children is representative of the increasing significance accorded to education in ‘counter-terrorism,’ indicating the necessity of anti-racist intervention. I argue that the possibility of an anti-racism response is first grounded in the anti-colonial commitments of anti-racism educators.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not directly engage with the question of whether or not people of colour are settlers as Lawrence and Dua (2005), Sharma and Wright (2008), Dei and Simmons (2010), and others have done. However, I am informed by these various positions and particularly the ways I have observed them taken up in the academy. In my experiences the debate between people of colour on the settler issue serves the white supremacist and colonial project of ‘divide-and-rule’ and is also disgustingly consumed as a spectacle for the white settler scholar, securing rather than displacing the white settler’s position as ‘impartial’ arbiter within the colonial academy. Thus I seek alternate pathways to furthering anti-colonial resistance than denying the positions of my fellow racialized scholars while noting this is a forced negotiation imposed upon me by the white settler scholar. I have no desire to support or participate in this process on the terms of the white settler, rather than on the terms of Indigenous peoples and people of colour. I refuse to risk being read as aiding the white settler’s ‘race to innocence’ or worse, the white settler’s notion of their intellectual, moral, and scholarly superiority to my racialized sisters and brothers based on their acceptance or rejection of settler identity. In no way do I seek to be read as denying or refuting the claims of Indigenous peoples, leaders, scholars, activists, and warriors who identify all peoples, but predominantly white people, who are not Indigenous to Turtle Island as settlers. Instead I will merely assert, it is not the concern or business of white settler scholars whether or not racialized scholars and peoples understand themselves as settlers or not. I write towards a day beyond the collapse of this white settler state and its colonial academies where I am held accountable to the peoples Indigenous to this land, rather than the white settlers who colonized and continue to colonize them. I fearfully hope the negotiation I have undertaken does not act against the realization of such liberation.
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Philipupillai, G.G. (2014). ‘You Make Our Lives Better’: Education and the Detention of Tamil Refugee Children. In: Dei, G.J.S., McDermott, M. (eds) Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7627-2_8
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