Dismantling Curricular Statues: Critically Examining Anti-Black Racism in Representations of Ancient Africa in Canadian Textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Canada is portrayed as a benevolent multicultural society, the experiences of many of its racialized peoples point to the ongoing realities of racism. Research demonstrates that schools are central to perpetuating racism, in part through a prioritization of white Eurocentric curricula. But how might ancient history curricula specifically contribute to racism? In this article, we interrogate representations of ancient African societies as presented in three secondary school world history textbooks from Quebec and Manitoba and consider the mechanisms of anti-black racism at work. By using Fairclough’s (2003) approach to critical discourse analysis, we offer insights about how ancient history curricula do little to address the persistence of anti-black racism. Our analysis finds a continued valorisation of white Western civilizations at the expense of ancient African histories and Black peoples more generally. Further, we demonstrate how ancient history textbooks perpetuate specific anti-black discourses such as Black primitivity and an overemphasis on Black labour.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".