On the back of blackness: contemporary Canadian blackface and the consumptive production of post-racialist, white Canadian subjects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is based on a qualitative research project examining the phenomenon of contemporary Canadian blackface. It addresses the discursive juxtaposition of blackface with the claim to Canadian racial progressiveness that typically attends public debates about blackface. I argue that blackface and the discourses defending it are forms of racial consumption through which ostensibly progressive white subjectivities are secured. I further argue that contemporary Canadian blackface discourse is postracialist in its ability to juxtapose racist expression with claims of racial transcendence, and I identify this postracialism as a long-standing feature of Canadian national narratives that are partially constructed through revisionist understandings of the nation’s relationship to blackness, and against an ostensibly more virile racism in the US. This analysis reminds us of the symbiotic relationship between racial fetishization/fascination as found in contemporary blackface, the foundational white supremacy of the Canadian settler-colonial context, and the always uneven terms upon which blackness is included in Canada. It clarifies what is at stake for Canadians who participate in blackface and in defending it, and helps us to understand the pedagogical import of both blackface and Canadian egalitarianism for perpetuating anti-blackness in Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it