Unaffirmative Actions: Lessons on Refusal, Racism, and Youth Research

We are all girls of colour attending an independent secondary school in downtown Toronto, where we learn from a majority white teaching and guidance staff, despite having a racially diverse student and city population. We used our school as an example of what we view as a widespread problem, both in our personal experiences in Toronto and as researched throughout Canada and the United States: a lack of racial diversity in secondary school faculty. Using youth participatory action research methodologies, we set out to investigate the source of this problem at our school, but instead encountered refusal and evasion by school administration and teachers of colour. They appeared to use various defense tactics to avoid acknowledging racism in our society. We categorized the ways staff refused and evaded our study into three groups: dismissiveness, rationalization, and sugarcoating. Our study became an example of the difficulties of youth research and of trying to subvert constructs like the teacher-student hierarchy.