3. Defending Blackface: Performing the “Progressive,” Postracialist Canadian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
3 Defending Blackface: Performing the "Progressive," Postracialist CanadianThis chapter further examines mainstream blackface discourses, this time based on the study data from print and electronic articles reporting on Canadian blackface incidents in mainstream media outlets, relevant campus newspapers, and letters to the editor since 2005.It pays particular attention to the sometimes thoughtful, occasionally openly racist, and usually unguarded reader comments associated with online articles.The chapter is based on themes generated from the data about the various ways that blackface is justified in the articles and especially the reader comments.Here, I am interested in learning more about the discursive juxtaposition of these defences of blackface with hegemonic understandings of what it means to be Canadian, and in particular the claim to Canadian progressiveness -all of which typically attend public debates about blackface in Canada.I use the term "progressive" here to refer to the claim to Canadian racial egalitarianism that is actually quite a conservative discursive position because of its relationship to Canadian postracialism, which will be discussed further below.I also use the term "subjectivity" (rather than, say, "identity") to indicate the ongoing constructed, always unfinished, nature of subject positionsthe ways in which social subjects continually struggle to establish and re-establish themselves as particular kinds of persons.In the chapter, then, I demonstrate that the presumption of Canadian racial egalitarianism frames debates about blackface in Canada, but that it is largely mobilized in defence of blackface rather than in opposition to it.I argue that blackface and the logics undergirding its An earlier version of this chapter appears in Howard, P.S.S. (2018).On the back of Blackness: Contemporary Canadian blackface and the consumptive production of post-racialist, white Canadian subjects.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".