THE BODY, THE STRANGER, AND CORDON MINORITAIRE

Abstract

AbstractCanada is touted as a diverse, tolerant, and multicultural country where the prevailing understanding is that racial injustices emanating from structural oppression are not widespread. Analysing lived experiences of racialized participants who worked in publicly funded places of employment in British Columbia (BC), this qualitative study offers a phenomenological exploration of a particular manifestation of racial discrimination: that of quarantine-like containment of mobility at work. Examining undue restrictions and mobility limitations imposed on participants, this article will use three metaphors—stranger for racialized individuals, body for workplaces, and cordon minoritaire as the process of containing the mobility of strangers within the body—to present and discuss findings on: 1) excessive targeted scrutiny; 2) wrongful seating arrangements; 3) cold and transactional interactions; and, 4) bad faith references. In this regard, cordon minoritaire is presented as a novel analytical framework to illustrate the ways in which racialized workers were cordoned off, with their professional freedoms and career mobilities restricted, in order to quarantine White ecosystems of employment. Consequently, cordon minoritaire machinations created perniciously unequal conditions that fundamentally and unjustly constrained participants into working under discriminatory conditions—depravities that are at odds with whimsical notions of Canada as tolerant, multicultural, and morally superior to its neighbour south of the border.