Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra at the opening of We Are Hockey, an exhibit at the Sikh Heritage Museum National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple, 2019. Photo: South Asian Studies Institute Collection

An excerpt from the Spring 2022 issue of British Columbia History.

By Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra

Iam a 37-year-old PhD candidate in the department of history at UBC, and a sessional faculty member in the department of history at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), which means I’m in a contract-based, impermanent, and precarious teaching position. I am co-chair of the Race and Antiracism Network at UFV and coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV.

I am also mother to a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. I share these identities with you because they shape the kind of person, historian, and educator I am. I call myself an activist historian because I am shaping the future for my sons so they don’t have to experience the same hurdles I have been through and continue to see around me, including not seeing themselves reflected in the study of history. I refuse to let my boys be educated in a world where they don’t see themselves in the content of history.

I am honoured to be writing this piece for BC History magazine as the BC Historical Federation celebrates its centenary. BC History doesn’t work through performative gestures but through meaningful engagement with BC’s varied histories in all their complexities, diversities, equities, and creativities. In this important year for the publication, they are actively engaging with the theme of activism and the changing face of the discipline of history.

I therefore begin by acknowledging that I am writing from the unceded, ancestral, and ongoing territories of the Sto:lo peoples, the people of the river. Lately we have seen that settler-colonial infrastructures—that is, the farms—are struggling to revert to their original form—a lake—through the sheer force of Mother Earth.

I speak, of course, about the flooding of the Sumas area in the Fraser Valley, where I have lived for more than 30 years. I see this event as a reminder that we need to listen to Indigenous methodologies and practices as well as to calls to action from land defenders in this climate emergency.

I am here to share my journey over the past few years and provide you with some insight and motivation to become an activist historian yourself. I want to tell you about the challenges those
of us who identify as racialized historians face and to recentre activism as a worthwhile practice. I’ve seen the word “activism” used to mean something to be feared or co-opted by privileged white people.

When I use the word “white,” as a woman of colour, I mean it as a purposeful reminder that we need to break down systems of white supremacy within the discipline of history. I am aware that simply by virtue of who I am, my use of the word “white” is hyper-politicized.

But this isn’t meant to make you feel guilt or shame; it’s a call to action for you to be a part of the dismantling of white supremacy. Your response to the word can tell you how ready you may be to heed the call. My use of the word “white” is informed by the understanding that Black and Indigenous scholars and activists have been fighting systems of colonial white supremacy for centuries.

The racist foundations of history

To understand what it means to be an activist historian is to first question the very foundations of the discipline. The project of colonialism around the world—including in Canada, in BC—was justified through what is called “scientific racism.” The term has been defined as “a history of pseudoscientific methods ‘proving’ white biological superiority and flawed social studies used to show ‘inherent’ racial characteristics [that] still influence society today.” [1]

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra was a co-author of Challenging Racist “British Columbia” — 150 Years and Counting

The discipline of history, in other words, is not innocent in terms of how it chooses to cite certain scholars but completely relegate others to the margins. The discipline is implicated in the drawing of the “color line,” as pointed out by the brilliant Black thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. [2]

The term “was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass that was titled “The Color Line” was published in the North American Review in 1881. The phrase gained fame after Du Bois’s repeated use of it in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.

Becoming an activist historian

To be an activist historian is, in part, to teach the histories of enslaved and colonized people as central to the discipline. I have come to understand this is why, during one of my PhD committee meetings, I reflected on scholars such as Aime Cesaire (and many others) and wondered, “Why do they speak to me in ways that I have not been spoken to throughout my previous historical training?” The response from one of my committee members was, “Sharn, it’s because they don’t speak in the language
of the colonizer.”

To be an activist historian is to understand the systems that Black, Indigenous, and racialized scholars are trying to alter and to resist the discipline that puts Hegel on a pedestal. To teach against the grain of colonialism, empire, and violence is an act of resistance.

When I began my PhD in the Department of History at UBC in 2014, I was the first Sikh woman to pursue a PhD in that department. Today, as I reach the end of my studies, I reflect on how my entire outlook has transformed. I came out of my first year traumatized because I felt like I did not belong in that department.

But over the years, after reading racialized historians and theories based on critical race theory, I began to understand why I resisted so much that first year. To holistically teach the racist foundations of the history is to (hopefully) prevent other students from experiencing the trauma I faced. Having activist historians lead the way will create and move the discipline forward.

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra presenting an exhibition for the South Asian Studies Institute. Photo: South Asian Studies Institute Collection

Activism in the margins

Activism is on a spectrum that includes street protests as well as pushing back against racist faculty, racist policies, and the coded daily language of racism. It includes writing, teaching, and choosing to centre racialized histories, historians, and scholars. Activism includes moving aside to cede space to racialized colleagues and coworkers rather than constantly co-opting the space to centre your own white power.

To become an activist in history means to study the history of those who are not included within the system and the institution. It means seeing what is taking place around you and attaching those threads of history to your class lectures and how you teach the students. All of this is possible. I do it. And I love it.

To be an activist historian also means to find a place within the margins. The concept of the margins as a powerful space for acts of resistance was coined by the brilliant scholar bell hooks (she spelled her name in lowercase letters), and I wish to end this article by quoting from her, as she passed away in December 2021 but continues to inspire so many of us. She wrote the following:

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination.

We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which is difficult, challenging, hard and we know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world. [9]

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UBC, a sessional instructor in history at the University of the Fraser Valley, a co-curator at the Sikh Heritage Museum, National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple, and the coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV. She is also mother to two sons.

Endnotes

1. “Scientific Racism,” Confronting Anti-Black Racism, Harvard Library, https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism
2. W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Essays and Sketches (Chicago, Ill: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903).
3. bell hooks, “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989), 23.

There’s More to Read

If you wish to read more writing by activist historians, here is a list of authors and titles to explore:

• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Power and Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015)
• Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000)
• CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963)
• Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
• Nell Irvine Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010)
• Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Women, Native, Other (Indiana University Press: 1989)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (London: Penguin Classics, 1996)
• Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York : Grove Press, 1963)
• bell hooks, “Marginality as a Site of Resistance,” Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990)
• Sara Ahmad, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004)
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (London: James Currey Ltd, 1986)