Reconsidering the Underground Railroad: Slavery and Racialization in the Making of the Canadian State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Underground Railroad is commonly understood as a defining moment in the ideology of the Canadian state regarding the legacy of racism and anti-racism. This paper attempts to recast the narrative of the Underground Railroad through the lens of an anti-imperialist, anti-racist political economy, departing from the view of Canada’s anti-racist rescue of fugitive slaves from racist America. The Underground Railroad was in fact the product primarily of the struggle for self-emancipation of American black slaves. The central place of these actors as agents of their own freedom struggle needs to be recognized and restored, taken as a theoretical and historical starting point in explaining the pre-history of Confederation. The British North American colonies served as a safe space for fugitive slaves as a result of realpolitik; racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were endemic to the early origins of the Canadian state. This analysis is placed in the context of current and historical discussions of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".