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As a recent visitor to academe, having written much of late about Canadian universities and so read many scholarly papers, I have seen my share of what I would call, in my white settler, cisgendered way, lightweight fluff.

I have read of the travails of a University of Ottawa law professor suffering the impossible dopiness of white students taking her class on racism and white privilege. (Guilty Displeasures: White Resistance in the Social Justice Classroom by Rakhi Ruparelia, 2015)

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No one, certainly no one like me, can understand her pain: “I interpret the hostility of resistant (even if well-intentioned) white students as racial microaggressions that compromise the psychological well-being and deplete the emotional and physical resources of racialized professors; in short, these interactions can be harmful and exhausting to me as a racialized woman.”

I’ve read “100 Ways to Indigenize and decolonize academic programs and courses,” which includes No. 63, “Deconstruct the construct of racism”; No. 68, Watch out for those worrisome “discourses of multiculturalism” because some Indigenous people “believe that multiculturalism serves as a form of on-going colonialism”; and No. 81, “Participate in the anti-oppressive summer institute.” (Dr. Shauneen Pete of the University of Regina is the scholar here; she’s the executive lead of Indigenization at the school.)