here & now
Racism is I ns t i t ut i o na l i s e d, a n d We a re t h e In s t i tution The following was written and read by Simone Delaney, to the School of Architecture at an all-school meeting entitled, “Against Racism” held on June 9th, 2020.
“As one of the few Black students at Waterloo Architecture, there are many things I would like to say after 4 years at this school. I refuse to believe that as a collective, members of the faculty and the undergraduate/graduate student body have been unaware of the barriers to diversity that exist at this school. Anyone who walks the hallways of our satellite campus would know that something is off. In the initial email sent to students during the resurgence of the BLM movement, the school described itself as a beacon of evidence-based truth thanks to the amazing work of Robert Jan. To be clear, when saying this it is in no way my intention to diminish the pain of the atrocities that took place in Europe during this time period in any way. These were obviously horrible atrocities. I am just wondering why exactly these are the only horrible atrocities we choose to speak of. Why do we count the bodies of some events, but choose to bury the death toll of others? How many of us are counting the bodies of the congolese in the face of Belgian imperialism, or the Beothuk - who were completely eradicated in Newfoundland? We need to discuss the severity of the horrific imperialist and colonialist exploits throughout Afro-Eurasia, and tie them back to the interrelated genocidal colonialist exploits that took place on Turtle Island + throughout the Americas. Most educators describing these histories would 07
not even qualify these events as genocidal. However, at Waterloo Architecture it is worse, because its coveted cultural history program barely touches on any of it at all. Faculty members who are educated on these issues, but choose not to teach them, are not simply being complicit, because that is not strong enough wording. You are overtly participating in the institutionalized burial of minority voices, which, particularly in a North American context, should center around both Indigenous and Black stories. We cannot be describing ourselves as a beacon of evidence-based truth in the face of injustice if we cannot even talk about the injustices that took place on the land we live with. This is the same land so many of us will go on to design with. Racism is institutionalized, and we are the institution. There is an overwhelming lack of diversity in regards to Waterloo Architecture’s faculty members. To a large degree the curriculum reflects those who are teaching it. Every student at this school knows that the vast majority of faculty members are white cis men. It is no wonder that our curriculum is insidiously eurocentric, despite most students coming from non-European backgrounds. How is it that the 2B cultural history course covers the period of enlightenment, romanticism, and events up to the 19th century, yet somehow does not cover the colonization of the Americas, triangular trade, Indigenous genocide, or the trans-atlantic slave trade? We simply must do better. When we speak about Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution, I want to also learn about the Haitian Revolution, and how despite being violently exempt from the humanist principles
