White fear: analyzing public objection to Toronto’s Africentric school.

In September 2009, the Toronto District School Board opened a publicly funded Africentric alternative school that today serves a population of about 135 students. While the founding of the eponymous school was the result of successful advocacy on the part of African-Canadian communities in the city, it was met with controversy. Readily observed in online comments appearing in national newspapers, objection to the school was far more common than approval. Arguments against the school ranged from the defense of Canada’s official multiculturalism that impels a fantasy of a ‘rainbow’ of children interacting in the city’s classrooms, to crudely racist remarks equating blackness with uneducability. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, objections to the school are seen as expressions of white fear of the self-determining Africentric Other. In this process, white innocence projects fear of its fragmentation onto the educated black body suddenly capable of incisive knowledge and expressive power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]