Beyond Good Intentions: Race Regimes, Racialisation, Immigrant Service Non-governmental Organizations (IS-NGOs) and Race-Class Reproductions in Canada

Abstract

Based on research conducted in a Parenting and Literacy Program (PLP) offered by an Immigrant Service-Non Governmental Organisation (IS-NGO) located in Alberta, Canada, a racialisation and race regimes framework is deployed to advance the proposition that IS-NGOs and their approach to programs and service provision encourage race-class inequalities and augment the contemporary race regime of multiculturalism in Canada. This is in/advertently achieved by selectively racializing im/migrants and reproducing class inequities through the adherence to neoliberal prescriptions (best practices) while claiming to settle, support and work for social justice for im/migrants. We explore the structures, ideas and power relations of an IS-NGO as a race regime and its’ race-class implications for perpetuating hierarchy’s which continue to define a Canadian colonial settler society. The purpose of this research is to stimulate renewal within IS-NGOs, as an exercise in critical reflexivity and to encourage changes at the organisational and employee/practitioner level, by fostering efforts to undermine, redirect and replace race regimes and class inequality in the interests of a still emergent democratic society and polity in Canada.