challenging the biased perceptions of “others”: a critical

Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices Vol 4:1 2010

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Challenging the biased perceptions of “others”: A critical discourse analysis approach to global citizenship education

Dan Cui University of Alberta

Nobody who has an interest in modern society, and certainly nobody who has an interest in relationships of power in modern society, can afford to ignore language.

-Norman Fairclough, Language and Power

The significance of language in the production, maintenance and change of social relations of power, particularly through the ideological workings of media discourse to construct stereotyped assumptions, manufacture consent, legitimate dominance and naturalize inequality have long been recognized and well theorized (Fairclough, 1989; Ferguson, 1998; Hall, 1997; Henry & Tator, 2002; Van Dijk, 1997). Nevertheless, how to apply this part of scholarship to global citizenship education has yet to be fully developed. This paper argues that to educate students in Canadian post-secondary institutions to become global citizens requires cultivating their critical thinking skills, challenging their biased perceptions of “others”, developing critical consciousness of dominance embedded in language, beliefs, value systems, media, traditional citizenship education and their everyday life. A critical discourse analysis will provide students and teachers with such a tool to achieve this goal. This paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate a historical media discourse about Chinese immigrants exemplified in a cartoon, “The Heathen Chinee in British Columbia”, published in the Canadian Illustrated News on April 26, 1879. This cartoon has been chosen because its production, distribution and consumption occurred at a crucial period of Chinese group identity formation in Canada during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The analysis of the cartoon discourse aims to explore how “the unassimilable Chinese” as a type of group identity is intertextually and discursively constituted; and how the ideological and political dimensions of this media discourse are closely related to the systemic racism against Chinese immigrants during that period of time. More importantly, this chapter strives to illustrate and reveal that the ideological assumptions about Chinese immigrants hidden behind this media discourse do not disappear with the historical past; rather, they are well sustained and continued into the current Canadian society in varying revised forms, and therefore still pervasively affect peoples’ common sense thinking about the Chinese in their everyday life. This link between the past and the present suggests a critical discourse analysis approach to anti-racism education should be an indispensable component of global citizenship education.

Theoretical Framework: Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is associated with such researchers as Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995, 2003), Teun A. Van Dijk (1997) and Ruth Wodak (2001). Despite their diverse theoretical and philosophical orientations, all of them are concerned with analyzing how social and political inequalities as well as power relations are embedded and maintained in discourse, produced, reproduced and


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transformed through it within specific social structures (Wooffitt, 2005). In contrast to the social-cognitive model of Van Dijk and the discourse-historic model of Wodak (Richardson, 2007), Fairclough draws on sociolinguistic-oriented discourse analysis and social theories on discourse to develop a three-dimensional theoretical framework of CDA to study the interrelationship between discourse and wider social structures. The first dimension, discourse as text, has as its aim the study of the textual features of discourses, that is “How is the text designed, why it is designed in this way, and how else could it have been designed?”(Fairclough, 1995, p. 202) Through examining the choices of the linguistic forms of texts, it aims at revealing the function of such textual features in producing or resisting the systems of ideology and power hierarchy. The second dimension, discourse as discursive practice, examines the process of its production, distribution and consumption. It specifically focuses on the concept of intertextuality which “is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contradict, ironically echo, and so forth” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 84). As Fairclough (1992) argues, in terms of production, an intertextual perspective emphasizes the historicity of texts, that is, “texts historically transforming the past – existing conventions and prior texts – into the present” (p. 85). Concerning distribution, an intertextual view explores the shift of one discourse type to another; for example, political speech is often transformed into news reports. As far as consumption is concerned, intertextuality stresses that it is not just the text that shapes interpretation; rather, readers bring other texts to the interpretation process. The third dimension, discourse as social practice, concerns the text’s socio-cultural practices in relation to its context, and the social identities and social relations that it affects within that context. Particularly it draws on the concepts of ideology, power and hegemony to illustrate the function and consequences of discourse in (re)producing or transforming unequal power relations.

Discourse and Society

For Fairclough (1992), the three dimensions of discourses respectively correspond to three analytical traditions: linguistics tradition with close textual and linguistic analysis; the macrosociological tradition with an emphasis on social structures; and the interpretivist or microsociological tradition that stresses individual action and agency. A synthesis of these three dimensions is characteristic of Fairclough’s CDA approach and he aims at addressing the weakness in each domain. Meanwhile, such theorization locates his CDA in the current sociological debate on structure and agency (Giddens, 1984). By arguing that discourse engages in a dialectical relationship with situations, institutions and social structures, that is, it is shaped by society and goes on to shape it, he takes a constructivist position which emphasizes that social reality is constructed by discourse. However, his ontological perspective tends to be more realistic than idealistic. As he holds,

We need to distinguish ‘construction’ from ‘construe’, which social constructivists do not: we may textually construe (represent, imagine, etc) the social world in particular ways, but whether our representations or construals have the effect of changing its construction depends upon various contextual factors – including the way social reality already is, who is construing it, and so forth (Fairclough, 2003, p. 8-9).

This moderate version of constructivism is also manifested in his critique of Foucault´s (2003) overstatement of the constitutive effects of discourse:


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While I accept that both ‘objects’ and social subjects are shaped by discursive practices, I would wish to insist that these practices are constrained by the fact that they inevitably take place within a constituted, material reality, with preconstituted ‘objects’ and preconstituted social subjects (Fairclough, 1992, p. 60).

The emphasis on the dialectical relationship between discourse and society, structure and agency provides two important insights in the following empirical analysis. First, examining the impact of discursive practices of discourse in terms of constructing social identities and social relations requires looking at its interaction with preconstituted reality. Second, subjects are not completely constituted and controlled by discourses; on the contrary, there are possibilities for them to act as agents and to engage in resistance and social change. This perspective which highlights the agency of subjects is manifested not only in his reservations about Foucault’s theory of subject, but also in his critique of the Althusserian account of the ideological constitution of subjects, which I will elaborate in the next section.

Ideology and Hegemony

Is all discourse ideological? Can we read off ideologies from text? Is ideology located at structure or event? Is ideology located in the meanings of the text or forms of text? All these questions are central to understanding Fairclough’s conceptualization of ideology. In contrast to Althusser’s (1971) view that ideology is an inseparable part of society itself, Fairclough (1992) argues that not all discourses are ideological. The discursive practices are ideologically invested in so far as they reproduce or transform relations of domination. In this point, he shares a similar opinion with John. B. Thompson (1990) who maintains that whether symbolic forms or symbolic systems are ideological or not depends on whether they serve to establish and sustain relations of power in specific social contexts. Further, in opposing the rigid dichotomy between meanings and forms of text, Fairclough argues that their intertwined nature may render them both ideologically invested to varying degrees. More importantly, although ideology may reside in both the form and the content of texts, it is impossible to “read off ideologies from texts” because the ideological meanings of texts are open to diverse interpretations by readers. Therefore, the consumption process of discourse is a vital component for the workings of ideology. In addition, he emphasizes that “ideology is located both in the structure (i.e. orders of discourse) which constitutes the outcomes of past events and the conditions for current events, and in events themselves, as they reproduce and transform their conditioning structures” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 89). This theorization on the one hand, highlights that ideology as an event or a process is not the product of free formation, but is constrained by social conventions (orders of discourse); on the other hand, it avoids viewing ideology as a “mere instantiation of structure” which privileges its reproductive role over its potential in incurring transformation. Finally, in terms of the ideological constitution of subjects, as suggested in the above section, Fairclough adopts a dialectical position; subjects are ideologically positioned but they are also capable of acting as agents to critique and, in this sense, oppose and transform ideological practices and structures. This point of view is based on his critique of Althusser’s subject theory which, for Fairclough, overemphasizes the ideological constitution of subjects. Likewise, in doubting the ideal case of Althusserian account of the interpellation of subjects, Fairclough argues that people may be subjected in contradictory ways. This point of contradictory interpellation provides a useful theoretical insight to the following discussion of democratic racism in the current Canadian society (Henry & Tator, 2002).


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For Fairclough, the ideological workings of discourse in maintaining or transforming relations of power are facilitated by another important concept– hegemony, which is seen to be the predominant organizational form of power in contemporary society although it is not the only one. Gramsci (1971) once argued that hegemony is intellectual and moral leadership used by the dominant groups to maintain their dominance by securing the ‘spontaneous consent’ of subordinate groups and by persuading them that the relationship of domination is natural and inevitable. Drawing on Gramsci, Fairclough (1989, 1992) argues that dominant groups exercise power through constituting alliances, integrating rather than merely dominating subordinate groups, winning their consent through discourse and through the constitution of local orders of discourse. By combining the concept of intertextuality with hegemony, he insightfully points out how hegemony naturalizes unequal power relations and builds them into people’s common sense understanding in the production, distribution, and consumption process of discourse, and consequently interpellating them into subjects and reproducing the existing orders of discourse in such discursive practices. Therefore, he holds that

Discursive practice, the production, distribution, and consumption (including interpretation) of texts, is a facet of hegemonic struggle which contributes in varying degrees to the reproduction or transformation not only of the existing order of discourse (for example, through the ways prior texts and conventions are articulated in text production), but also through that of existing social and power relations (Fairclough, 1992, p. 93).

Historical Discourse on Chinese Immigrants: An Example

As discussed above, the main purpose of critical discourse analysis is to reveal the ideological and hegemonic workings of discourse in legitimating and naturalizing the unequal power relations, raising people’s consciousness to challenge their own stereotyped understanding of others and consequently to make social changes through critical analysis. In this section, by way of example, I will use Fairclough’s CDA to analyze a cartoon discourse, “The Heathen Chinee in British Columbia” published in the Canadian Illustrated News on April 26, 1879:

Amor de Cosmo: The love of the world or the lover of mankind. Heathen Chinee: Why you sendee me offee? Amor de Cosmo: Because you can’t and won’t assimilate with us. Heathen Chinee: What is datee? Amor de Cosmo: You won’t drink whisky, and talk politics and vote like us.

By exploring the ideological and political dimensions of this media discourse about early Chinese immigrants in Canada, I aim to reveal how examination of the past can help us to understand how the text reproduced the relations of domination, constructed the group identity of Chinese immigrants as unassimilable and undesirable, and consequently justified their exclusion based on cultural differences, through both the meanings and forms of texts and through the process of discourse production, distribution and consumption. Two themes are identified within this discourse through analysis of its textual features, discursive practice and social practice.

Constructing the Group Identity of Chinese Immigrant as “unassimilable” Oriental

Contrary to the traditional linguistics and semiotics which emphasize the arbitrary nature of sign, Fairclough (1992) argues that there are social reasons and motivated


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basis for combining particular signifiers with particular signified. In this media discourse, the Chinese immigrant was signified as “heathen Chinee”, which is “a popular sobriquet for a Chinaman, derived from Bret Harte’s poem of Truthful James” (1871) (Clapin, n.d.).

Which I wish to remark -- And my language is plain -- That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar: Which the same I would rise to explain. Ah Sin was his name; And I shall not deny In regard to the same What that name might imply; But his smile it was pensive and childlike, As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

… From an intertextual perspective, to signify Chinese immigrant as heathen Chinee indicates what Fairclough argues, that in the process of discourse production, the text absorbs and is built out of other texts from the past, and transforms from one discourse genre (poetry) into another (cartoon discourse) in its distribution. More importantly, in the process of consumption, readers may bring all the connotations embedded within the past text (Chinese immigrant as an immoral deceiver in Harte’s poem) into the interpretations of current one (Heathen Chinee in the British Columbia). In fact, with the sensational popularity of this poem, Bret Harte became “the most popular literary figure in America in 1870” (The Heathe Chinee, n.d., ¶ 3) and “heathen Chinee” soon became the nickname for the Chinese immigrants at that time. In this sense, what is reproduced here is the racialized group identity of Chinese immigrants as uncivilized, heathen Oriental through the lens of Eurocentric distinction between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, Christian and heathen and master and slave (Anderson, 1991). Such naming or signifying is also exemplified when Said (1978) argues that Orientalism should be examined as discourse. Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter, or a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient, rather, it is a unifying set of values based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient’ and “the Occident”. Such distinction was constructed by the Europeans politically, militarily, ideologically, and imaginatively to maintain the unequal power relations with the non-Europeans during the post Enlightenment period. It is a power struggle with “power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values) and power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do)…” (Said, 1978, p. 12). In this media discourse, such relations of domination in terms of the European cultural and moral power was reproduced and maintained by constructing Chinese immigrants as possessing certain devaluated and deficit cultural characteristics, incapable of doing what Canadians do: “You won’t drink whisky, and talk politics and vote like us”. The Chinese immigrant in the cartoon discourse was never given the chance to speak about himself; his way of living was judged by the Canadian politician Amor de Cosmo, who tells his readers in what way he was “typically Oriental”, therefore as unassimilable. As Said (1978) noted, “The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered common place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being – made Oriental” (p. 6). In this example, drinking whisky, talking politics and voting was hegemonically constructed as the Canadian cultural norm, superior to other cultures. Consequently, Chinese


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immigrants were orientalized within such discourse construction and an inferior and unassimilable group identity imposed due to their failure to conform to this alleged Canadian living style.

Political and Economic Interests in the Name of Cultural Difference

The cultural deviations of Chinese immigrants from that of Canadians were highlighted in this media discourse and used as an excuse to justify their exclusion. A further exploration of the institutional and social material reality from which such discourse is constructed reveals that there are economic and political causes for producing this cartoon discourse, as well as structural factors which constrain Chinese immigrants from assuming this alleged Canadian style of living. This cartoon which appeared in Canadian Illustrated News, a very successful weekly journal published in Montreal by George Desbarats from 1869 to 1883, was actually a “copy” intertextually reproduced from British Colonist, a major Victoria newspaper started in 1858 and owned by Amor de Cosmo. As Li (1998) notes, during the 1860s, the initial period of Chinese presence in British Columbia, both the British Colonist and the Victoria Gazette, two major newspapers in Victoria, depicted the Chinese as useful members of frontier society. European settlers on Vancouver Island did not view the Chinese as a direct threat to their interests. However, anti-Chinese sentiments and movements began to grow when the local or national economy deteriorated and Chinese immigrants were viewed as competitors to the white working class for limited jobs. Politically, they became scapegoats and were constructed as a national problem by politicians to deflect attention from economic depression, appease uprising labour movements and attract constituencies in the West. By examining the early Chinese history in the United States, Pfzelzer (2008) noted that “…members of congress realized that they could deflect attention away from the collapse of the economy –the destitution and despair across the nation – if they talked about the Chinese” (p. 144). In the context of the anti-Chinese sentiments and movements in British Columbia during the 1870s, the Victoria newspapers began to increasingly focus on the crimes committed by Chinese, and intertextually constructed them as a race inferior to Europeans (Li, 1998). Amor de Cosmo, the owner of British Colonist, claimed that his newspaper was “the true index of public opinion”. His anti-Chinese political stance not only won him the public support and beat its rival Victorial Gazette, but also positioned him to move from being a successful newspaper owner to a popular politician. He became premier of British Columbia from 1872 to 1874 and served as representative of Victoria in the House of Commons from 1871to 1882 (Saunders, 2005). This media discourse was also produced in a critical historical moment—the year of 1879, when Noah Shakespear, a Victoria City Council member who formed the Anti-Chinese Association, submitted a petition along with 1,500 B. C. workers to request excluding Chinese workers from building the Canadian Pacific Railway and levying a tax on them. This petition was then presented by Amor de Cosmo to the Dominion House of Commons (ibid.). In this point, there is no doubt that the production of this media discourse served the political purposes of Amor de Cosmo to distribute his anti-Chinese political stance, build hegemonic alliances with white working class, win public support and justify the exclusion request. However, we need to avoid viewing the production of this discourse as an individual racist action, or an individual event; rather it reveals the systemic racism embedded in the social structure. It is not an isolated event, or an arbitrary and accidental product of free construction out of Amor de Cosmo’s personal dislikes of Chinese, but a continuous reproduction of past racist discourse against Orientals in combination with the emerging political and economic needs of excluding them in that particular historical context. In other words, the


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discourse is engaged in a dialectical relationship with the specific social reality which shapes it and which it in turn reshapes. During the economic downturn of British Columbia in the 1870s, the parliament of British Columbia passed legislative bills in 1875 to disenfranchise the Chinese. Likewise, in 1876 employers were prohibited from hiring Chinese in government projects. Most Chinese immigrants “were engaged in menial work for which employers had difficulty finding white laborers” but were paid much less than their white counterparts (Li, 1998, p.18). For example, “by 1883, a Chinese miner [in British Columbia] would get $ 1.25 a day as compared to $2 to $3.75 for a white worker” (Bun, 1991, p.16). However, such structural constraints which deprived Chinese of their political right to vote, talk politics and a decent income which would enable them to afford middle-class living standards (such as drinking whisky) were absent from the media discourse. The real causes were obscured by the rhetoric of cultural difference and the victims were blamed for their own exclusion. This ideological construction was complemented by the design of textual forms, for example, the agent of the action of exclusion in the media discourse was You not We. “You can’t and won’t assimilate with us” (instead of saying “We don’t allow you to assimilate with us; We exclude you because you compete with us for jobs”). Li (1998) cogently points out that in the nineteenth century, rather than traditional Chinese culture, it was institutional racism which resulted in the social alienation and poor living conditions of the Chinese and that prohibited their assimilation into Canadian society. Richardson (2007) also elaborates how victims were blamed for their own subjugated positions:

Mainstream newspaper naturalize class inequality by individualizing social dysfunction and blaming the victims of the hierarchical structures of capitalism for their own alienation…inequality is naturalized by making the material conditions of working class invisible and by belittling and making as hypervisible the ‘socially unacceptable’ characteristics of (certain) members of the working class (p.142).

In this sense, what is hidden from this media discourse is not just a relation of domination which subjugates the Chinese to an inferior social position and social identity, but also a relation of exploitation which deprives them of equal pay in the name of cultural inferiority. In fact, during the 1870s, thousands of Chinese workers were employed as cheap labourers (half the pay of white Canadian workers) on the West Coast to build Canadian Pacific Railway (Fleras & Elliott, 2007; Li, 1998). However, when the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885, the Canadian government immediately first imposed a Head Tax of $50 on the Chinese to limit their entry into Canada, then increased it to $500 in 1903, and finally completely banned their entry in 1923 with the pass of the Chinese Exclusion Act. What surveyor General Pearse said in the 1885 Royal Commission report on Chinese immigrants typically represents how the exploitation of racialized others for capitalist expansion and ensuing exclusion of them to safeguard white privilege and economic interests while salving guilty consciences was justified and naturalized in the cultural discourse:

We want here, a white man’s community, with civilized habits and religious aspirations, and not a community of ‘Heathen Chinee’ who can never assimilate with us or do ought to elevate us, and who can be of no possible value to a state in any capacity other than that of drawers of water and hewers of wood (as cited by Anderson, 1991, p. 54).

Contemporary Discourses about Chinese Immigrants: Old Wine into New Bottles


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For some Canadians, the racist discourse discussed above is part of the past and has no relevance to a contemporary liberal democratic multicultural society where explicit racist language and attitudes towards immigrants are not officially sanctioned. However, researchers continuously reveal that this enlightened image of Canada is far from the truth. “Racism is so naturalized in history and society that it constantly finds new and complex forms of expression by making itself more invisible” (Fleras & Elliott, 2007, p. 54). Take the example of the Chinese immigrants: today they are not called “heathen Chinee” but more often referred to as the “visible minority”. Li (2003) sharply points out how the term “visible minority” which replaces a racially charged term such as “colored people” or “non-white” is conveniently used by pollsters, politicians and media to discuss “the social worthiness of ‘race’ and ‘non-whites’ without running the risk of being branded ‘racist’ (p. 173). In asking whether the Canadians think there are too many, too few, or the right amount of visible minorities, the pollsters and interest groups funding the survey can legitimately give Canadians a public forum to assess the colored composition of the population merely based on superficial features, such as the color of the skin. In this way, racist discourse is camouflaged by being presented “as a democratic choice of citizens regarding how many ‘diverse’ elements in Canadian society they are prepared to ‘tolerate’”, rather than being viewed as “a social problem that has to be addressed” (Li, 2003, p. 173). Further, the underlying assumption behind the survey question is the continued viewing of Chinese-Canadians as foreigners and not genuine full-fledged Canadians. Too many of them would threaten white national identity and Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition at the surface level, and political and economic privilege at the deeper level. Li (1998) also notes that when the Chinese middle class grew, the stereotypes which depicted them as undesirable foreigners in the historical past were revived. When rich Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong moved into upper or middle-class white Canadian neighborhoods in the 1980s, some local Canadians who never imagined their community would have “Orientals” viewed this move as “an unacceptable invasion” (Makio, 1997). Their non-European house designs were disparaged as “Monster houses”, a threat to Anglo-Saxon cultural values. Likewise, it has been well documented that the credentials of Chinese professional immigrants were devalued or not recognized in the Canadian labour market, another indication of the historical continuity of racism. “…the ideal professional practitioner in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was an Anglo-Saxon, White, middle or upper class, Protestant male, and those who did not fit into this category often faced many explicit and implicit barriers” (Adams, 2007, p. 15). Guo and Andersson’s (2006) comparative study of credential recognition processes in Canada and Sweden reveals that both countries tend to epistemologically view difference as a deficit and ontologically commit to positivism and liberal universalism on measuring foreign credentials. Once again, current Chinese immigrant professionals who encountered institutional and systemic barriers to access the Canadian labour market were unemployed or underemployed and suffered from earning disparities compared with white Canadians. Their credentials are alleged as not conforming to Canadian standards, thereby easily justifying the dominance and exploitation imposed on them. In addition to the derogatory discourse which constructed their culture as inferior to the Canadian lifestyle, their professional skills as not conforming to Canadian standards and their identity as not being genuinely Canadian, their presence in Canada was further viewed as a threat to national security. Hier & Greenberg (2002) describe how the arrival of Chinese refugees (referred to as boat people by the media) in Canada’s west coast in 1999 was first ‘problematized’ by the news discourse as illegal aliens, then magnified and fabricated into a health crisis related to infectious disease (AIDS and tuberculosis) and invasion of potential criminals. Ironically, in the whole process of this event, a dog in the boat received more humanistic concerns than the immigrants themselves:


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Indeed, when it was revealed, on the arrival of second boat, that a dog named Breeze had made the sixty-day journey, the Victoria SPCA was inundated with calls from prospective owners voicing their concerns for Breeze’s well-being. Meanwhile, the people on board the ship were handcuffed, fingerprinted, and processed for detention (Hier & Greenberg, 2002, p. 151).

The examples noted above reveal many social problems embedded in Canadian society. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a full discussion of them. Here, I only highlight two points which are relevant to our discussion of critical discourse analysis. One is the contradictory interpellation of subjects within discourse. The other is the hegemonic articulation of racism by means of culture rhetoric. First, as mentioned in preceding sections of this paper, contrary to Althusserian account of ideology in the linear interpellation of subjects, Fairclough (1992) argues that people may be subjected in contradictory ways by the ideological workings of discourse. This corresponds to what Henry, Tator, Mattis and Rees (2000) argue, that the role and function of racist ideology in Canada today should be conceptualized as “democratic racism”, “an ideology that permits and sustains people’s ability to maintain two apparently conflicting sets of values” (p. 15), that is, the liberal democratic values of fairness, justice and equality versus the stereotyped and biased perception of people of color and the discrimination against them. The Canadian attitude towards the boat people and their preference of the dog over the people is such a case in point. In a similar vein, Fleras and Elliott (2007) also cogently point out “the inescapable paradox” Canadians confront in the twenty-first century:

On the one hand, Canadians, at the cognitive level, have rejected notions of biological inferiority, while internalizing a commitment to tolerance, justice, and equality. On the other hand, they also continue to rely on racially based prejudice at subconscious levels, while institutions are known to discriminate against minorities because of rules that when equally applied have the seemingly unintended effect of excluding or exploiting (p. 55).

Second, democratic racism is manifested in the replacement of race discourse with that of culture. A comparison of the historical and contemporary media discourse about Chinese immigrants reveals a similar racist message masked in the discourse of national culture and identity. According to this discourse, it is the culture of Chinese that is problematic not their race. “Dominant sectors are not defined as racially superior but as culturally normal and preferred over those cultural differences that pose a threat to a secular and liberal society” (Fleras & Elliot, 2007, p. 59). By essentializing the culture difference between groups, the essence of the Canadian culture and national identity is constructed as a single, unified, irreducible and unchanging thing, based on authentic white, superior and Eurocentric cultural traditions whereas the cultural patterns of Chinese are vilified as inferior, deficit and undesirable, therefore they should be marginalized outside of the ‘imagined community’ of Canada. In addressing the question, what makes anti-racist pedagogy in teacher education difficult, St. Denis and Schick (2003) identified one of the three popular ideological assumptions that white-identified preservice teachers held towards non-white people, as being that “race doesn’t matter but culture does”.

We have noticed how reluctant students are to talk about race and racial identities; they would prefer instead to talk about cultural difference… The statement ‘The problem is that their values and beliefs are so different from


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ours’ suggests that the others’ cultural values and beliefs –what constitutes difference – is the problem. Their culture, however it is conceived – as dysfunctional, inadequate, or too much – is what contributes to and explains their inequality (St. Denis & Schick, 2003, p. 62-63).

The student who made this statement was not born with this racist idea towards others; he or she may not even be aware of the racist assumption in this statement. But why, Abdi and Shultz (2008) ask, “is racism still a part and parcel of people’s lives?” (p. 27). “Why, despite their 140-year history in Canada and their upward mobility in recent years, Chinese-Canadians are frequently seen as foreigners, not genuine Canadians…” (Li, 1998, p. 142). Racism is not just individuals’ negative attitudes or actions towards others, but is deeply embedded in Canadian history and institutional structures. It is ideology, hegemony and power relations that have been institutionalized to maintain the privilege of dominant groups by means of exploitation and exclusion at the expense of others (Abdi & Shultz, 2008; Fleras & Elliot, 2007; James, 2008; Li, 1998, 2003). It is the discursive practice of discourse, located in society’s frames of reference, ideologically and politically (re)producing the unequal social relations and identities. As Henry, Tator, Mattis, and Rees (2000) maintain, “Democratic racism as racist discourse begins in the families that nurture us, the communities that socialize us, the schools and universities that educate us, the media that communicate ideas and images to us, and the popular culture that entertain us” (p. 24).

Conclusion

If racism continues to affect our life chances and circumstances, and our real participation in the economic, political, cultural and social domains of Canadian society as full-fledged citizens, it is clear that we need an educational project which can raise people’s consciousness of various forms of racism in Canadian history and contemporary society and break through the hierarchy of ranking people based on an Us/Them distinction. This project cannot be advanced through traditional citizenship education, given that it “has been bound to the interests of the nation state” with an orientation towards developing a sense of national identity and loyalty (Blades & Richardson, 2006, p. 2; Richardson, 2008). What it requires is “a new system of anti-racist citizenship education that aims to ‘recitizenize’ long ago ‘de-citizenized’ people” (Abdi & Shultz, 2008, p. 29). It should be a global citizenship education which cultivates the long-term vision of inclusion and solidarity based on a common humanity and a global responsibility towards others and for the future of our world community. Discussion of CDA will allow students to understand the unequal power relations that are historically embedded in our language and value systems and discursively reproduced in our current society. In this sense, a critical discourse analysis approach to anti-racism education should become an indispensable component of global citizenship education. I would like to use Fairclough’s inspiring statements to end this paper: “Resistance and change are not only possible but continuously happening. But the effectiveness of resistance and the realization of change depend on people developing a critical consciousness of domination and its modalities, rather than just experiencing them” (1989, p. 137).

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challenging the biased perceptions of “others”: a critical

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