The construction of the racialized Other in the educational sphere: The stories of students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of social relations from a critical race theory perspective crossed with the sociology of the life course. The objective of our study was to understand how social relations in Quebec’s educational sphere, specifically in high school, construct fixed categories of racialized students in university. With the aim of discovering the underlying process of racialization of the students of racial backgrounds in educative sphere, the study analyzes the self-reported relational experiences of 10 university students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal. Based on a narrative inquiry, the analysis of the retrospective life story interviews allowed to explain the complexity of the process of racialization in two categories of “complete racialization” and “incomplete racialization.” In the “completed racialization” category, negotiating domination relationships results in the construction of a racialized Other. In the “incomplete racialization” category, the construction process is in progress. Our study has shown that social relations in high school contribute to the construction of fixed Black and Latinx racialized groups. Interpersonal relationships at school play a role in the racialization of students with immigrant backgrounds, and, although limited in scope, persistence in school may be a reversal strategy for their experiences of racism.

minimize Black people's history of slavery, and deny the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples in Quebec's past.
The Quebec government has always relied on education to assure the normative underpinnings of society, such as the centrality of the French language and secularism. In the 1960s, a decade marked by the Quiet Revolution, Quebec underwent major societal changes, including the secularization of public institutions and the introduction of bills imposing French as the language of instruction and communication (Mc Andrew et al., 2015;Tremblay, 2012). In Quebec, as in other modern pluralistic societies, education is a powerful vehicle for securing the dominant group's privileged position. This structure can shape the teaching and intervention practices of school resource officers with decision-making power. These relational practices explain the inferiorization of the cultural differences of students from dominated groups compared with the dominant culture (Punti & Dingel, 2021;Magnan et al., 2021;Johnson and Hinton, 2018;). From a critical race theory perspective, the hidden curriculum comes into play through social relations that inferiorize the cultural characteristics and physical traits of students from historically enslaved or colonized groups (Morales & Bardo, 2020;Smith, 2020;Jay, 2003). Social relations of categorization also emerge in interactions between white and racialized students in school, when the latter feels inferiorized because of their physical traits, languages or religion (Abawi, 2021;Darchinian and Magnan, 2020).
In Quebec, numerous empirical studies have highlighted the school performance of youths with immigrant backgrounds and their high rate of enrolment in postsecondary education (Kamanzi, 2012). However, the predominance of arguments based on the overall positive picture of the educational system often obscures educational institutions' role in structuring relationships of discrimination. A study by Darchinian and Kanouté (2020) brings to light the racism, linguicism and religious intolerance experienced by youths with immigrant backgrounds who have obtained a university diploma and found stable employment in the labour market. Therefore, in this paper, we decided to examine the self-reported relational experiences of university students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal. Using retrospective life stories, we analyzed their experience in high school, a critical time in their academic journey. To do so, we wanted to underscore the role that socialization in schools plays in constructing a racialized Other. We explored moments of exclusion that the students in the study corpus faced while in high school and, if applicable, we analyzed how they coped with these moments, to assess the impact of high school life on their subsequent university education.

Theoretical Framework
To operationalize our study, we applied the concept of the racialized Other from critical race theory to the concept of turning points, which are part of the sociology of the life course. This approach allowed us to analyze the racialization process during moments of questioning in the lives of the corpus youths. We understand racialization as a Euromodern structuring process that contributes to entrenching white supremacy in social relations (Donnor, 2021;Smith, 2020;Hesse, 2007). Moreover, white supremacy, a key concept in critical race theory, is to white privilege what capitalism is to class privilege, and what the heteropatriarchy is to male and heterosexual privilege (Bilge, 2020). Thus, the racialization of students with immigrant backgrounds in the educational sphere may drive them toward a non-white space in ways they are not even aware of. Furthermore, the racialization process can have real impacts on their social standing, after their time in school, in many spheres of society already stratified according to race, gender and social class.
We focused our analyses on the students' experiences in high school, a period that generally coincides with a redefinition of youths' relationships with the world and with others (Galland, 2017). Using an inductive approach, we immersed ourselves in the participants' stories and discovered that experiences of exclusion had a structuring effect on their life courses overall. We explored the turning points that led them to redefine their identity and their relationship to the institution. We analyzed how the youths in the corpus perceived their interactions with peers, teachers, school staff and so on.
The intelligibility of the turning points in their life courses (life course perspective) makes it possible to identify the social relations that shaped these individuals' experiences in multiple social contexts, over a longitudinal time frame (Bessin, 2019;McDaniel and Bernard, 2011;Abbott, 1995). This vision explains the interactions between the various dimensions that structure a subject's social life in different social contexts (family, school, work). According to Bessin (2019), the association of affect-related turning points does not dissociate them from the rational processes of individual actions. So, these moments of questioning are crucial to understanding the social reality under study. Irreversible and unpredictable, offensive events are constitutive of the rationality behind how individuals relate to social worlds. A sociological analysis of such moments of questioning involves how individuals negotiate the relationship to self and to others (Bessin, 2019). This work of redefining the relationship to the world and the self plays a role in structuring the life course, connecting the past with the future, since individuals consider their past experiences and anticipate their future experiences at the same time. On the one hand, this vision makes it possible to go beyond the structure/agency dichotomy (human agency), because lived unforeseen events can reveal the effects of structural constraints (e.g., domination relationships) on an individual's social destiny. On the other hand, since individuals become aware of their inferiorization with respect to the dominant group in these moments, they can take action to restructure their social destiny.
This analytical approach led us to choose narrative inquiry as our methodology, allowing us to identify turning points in the stories told (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). With narrative inquiry, the lived experience, as told, is central to data analysis (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Analyzing stories exposes the connection between experiences and social events. The narrative constitution of subjectivity establishes a time dimension where the past and the future penetrate the present. Lived experiences can only be understood through individuals' interpretations and reinterpretations of their lives, whether concordant or discordant (Bruner, 1987). A hermeneutic reading is therefore made, which views individuals' existence and the stories they tell about their lives as inseparable (Ricoeur, 1985).

Methodology
Life story interviews, which are well suited for studying subjectivity and intersubjectivity (Van Manen, 2016) is a key component of critical studies. This method makes it possible to produce empirical knowledge from the views of racialized groups often excluded from Darchinian, F., Magnan, M-O. and (Dei, 2013). We therefore focused on collecting the students' words through qualitative interviews.
The participants were recruited based on the following inclusion criteria: both of their parents were immigrants born in the West Indies, Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America; they attended high school in Quebec; they were enrolled in an undergraduate program in Montréal, Quebec; and they were 19 to 35 years of age. Various recruitment techniques were used, including the use of the Facebook platform via student groups, sending a recruitment notice to undergraduate program managers, snowball technique, etc.
A total of 10 interviews were conducted with university students. Six of the students had parents who were born in Haiti; one, in Argentina; two, in different countries, i.e. Costa Rica and Jamaica, and Honduras and El Salvador. The corpus consists of 10 women. Eight were born in Quebec, and two came to Quebec while in primary school. Six had at least one parent with a university diploma, one had at least one parent with a college diploma, and three had at least one parent with a high school diploma. It was only a coincidence that the participants were only women because the baseline study was not about gender and this aspect did not often emerge in the interviews. It should be noted that in the Canadian and Quebec context, women represent the majority in higher education, which explains their over-representation here. In accordance with the guidelines of Université de Montréal's Comité plurifacultaire d'éthique de la recherche (multifaculty committee on research ethics), in this paper, pseudonyms are used to refer to participants.
In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted (Bertaux 2010) lasting between 90 and 120 minutes. This data-collection method allowed the students' point of view on the effects of environment and school interactions on their experience to be documented a posteriori. We conducted single lengthy interviews to cover the life story of respondents from birth to university. The interviews were recorded and transcribed in their entirety. In the process of analyzing the structuring effects of turning points on the study corpus youths' social destiny, we combined and contextualized their stories (Veith, 2004). Through multiple stages of analysis (listening to the interviews again, using NVivo software, summarizing the life courses in tables), we first sought to understand the internal coherence of each story within the family and school context, then we combined the stories to reveal the underlying social complexity of the experiences. Lastly, we attempted to explain how individual strategies relate to social determinants.

Findings and Discussion
Our analyses allowed us to find, in the stories, the social determinants structuring the youths' school and social destiny, and establish how they negotiated these determinants. We take social determinants to mean the structural and individual dimensions emerging from their accounts. Of the many possible dimensions, we emphasized those that were omnipresent and that explained our corpus's school and social reality: Racializing ideology in Quebec educational institutions that translates into the inferiorization of the students' phenotypic traits and cultural characteristics during day-to-day school interactions (principal-student, teacher-student, student-student), and that transpires through an educational organization built on the predominance of white teachers in primary and secondary schools.

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The participants' discursive self-representations evoke an image of young women who have been persistent and high-performing from primary school to university, and who sought to redefine their social destiny by acquiring substantial academic capital, including a university diploma. They do not form a homogeneous group, as they did not have the same experiences or interpret domination relationships the same way. Nevertheless, their persistence in school over their entire life courses can be viewed as a reversal strategy for their experiences of racism (Hall, 1997). These young women appear to have implemented this strategy to free themselves from the weight of racialization that they experienced in day-to-day school life that their parents experienced in many spheres of society, and that their group has experienced throughout the history of modernity and colonialism (Mills, 2014).
By combining the stories of these 10 young women, their social determinants and their work of subjectivation, we were able to employ two categories to explain their reality: "completed racialization," which included six women in the corpus, and "incomplete racialization," which encompassed the other four. Note that no typological separation exists between the two categories. In fact, a relative similarity was observed between the social conditions underlying all the participants' experiences. Both categories are distinguished by the relatively distinct reception of domination relationships due to the heterogeneity of the relational experiences. Generally speaking, in the "completed racialization" category, negotiating domination relationships results in the construction of a racialized Other. In the "incomplete racialization" category, the construction process is in progress. In the following paragraphs, we explain these categories with excerpts from the young women's stories.

Completed Racialization
In this category, the racialization process is complete, so the subjectivation of relationships of racism has produced fixed categories of racialized individuals. The combination of six corpus students' representations of their moments of questioning made it possible for us to place them in this category: four students of Haitian origin born in Quebec, one student of Haitian origin who came to Quebec at the age of admission to high school, and one student of Mexican origin who came to Quebec in kindergarten. Turning point intensity participates in the revelation of domination structures and how they operate. The individual interprets, negotiates and calls into question racializing structures and practices, on the one hand, and accepts their racialization, i.e., identifies as Black or Latinx, on the other. Allow us to elucidate these conceptual interpretations with highlights from two life courses in this category.
Gadine is a student of Haitian origin who was born in Montréal. Her high school experiences reveal how domination relationships operate through the racial representation of historically racialized individuals' phenotypic characteristics (Hall, 1997). Such a representation is made through the practices of school players in positions of power, the school principal in this case, or through the day-to-day interactions between peers which may, wrongly, seem insignificant. This experience is a turning point in Gadine's life course; she becomes aware of her subordination within the school's, and even society's, network of relations [translation]: But in high school, you start to see, like, how people are kind of mean. I remember this one guy who would always make fun of my hair. He was like, "Oh My God, your hair is -." I remember, like, in high school, like, sometimes I would often wear like a bandanna, just because sometimes my hair was not brushed properly, so it was sort of to stop this from happening. I remember once, one of my Guinean friends had one, and the principal, there was a student monitor who forced her to take it off, and he was like, "Ah, if you don't take it off, you can't write your exam." So then I thought, OK, but what does one thing have to do with the other? I was like, OK, I'm sure they told her that just because, like, she was Black, because I saw lots of white people at my school wearing a red bandanna, and no one ever told them not to.
Indeed, during these moments of questioning, Gadine relates her experience with racism to her immigrant parents' experiences: My parents faced, like, certain difficulties, because I know that sometimes, like, at my dad's work or, like, sometimes my mom's, because they… Sometimes, there are people, it's a little like they insult them because, like, they're Black.
Recognizing her stereotypification significantly shapes Gadine's perception in that, she notices her teachers' attitude.
On the one hand, I believe they didn't really have a choice, because when I think about it, most of my teachers were Québécois, but I think they didn't have a choice because, like, the school was, like, all immigrants, but I don't know if there are some who maybe, like, weren't… Thus, she perceives the non-discriminatory attitude of primary school teachers as a non-choice as opposed to an inclusive attitude. So, the dominance of white-majority teachers prevents her from receiving their attitude positively, because their position as white subjects is opposed to her position as a Black subject.
Gadine studies biopharmaceutical sciences at a Montréal University. She is determined to continue with pharmacy studies. She is a social agent mobilizing all her resources to reverse her experiences of racism. Gadine places those experiences in continuity with her community's collective experiences; she becomes a racialized Other (Dervin, 2016;Mills, 2008), a Black woman who will have to fight her whole life like all Haitians.
Because, like, even if I can't really, like, relate to all the struggles that people have in Haiti, but, like, I know that it's a part of me, and I recognize, like, all the suffering, like that they have, and, like, it feels like their suffering is kind of my suffering, even if it isn't totally, because, admittedly, I like it here in Canada and everything, so I could never, like, really understand their struggles, but, like, I know that they are a strong people, a proud people, despite, like, all the suffering, like the earthquake, the hurricanes, all the difficulties that, like… Farnelle, a student of Haitian origin who was born in Montréal, also experienced challenges that illustrate a completed racialization process. Starting in grade school, the way that students with immigrant backgrounds and white Québécois pupils were treated differently had a lasting effect on her [translation]: I remember that the daycare educators reacted relatively well. However, I have the impression that when children were unruly, sometimes their approaches were a little more different. I have the impression that their pedagogical approaches were very different depending on whether the boisterous children were French-Canadian or racialized. I noticed this difference in treatment.
However, in high school, her difference became even more obvious to her. Surrounded by white peers and teachers, her skin colour sparked a dual existence: a self-seeking security by adopting the cultural traits of the white majority vs. a self who could identify with her own racial group. So, she adopted a Québécois accent to avoid inferiorization.
I have the impression that I changed a little in that respect, in the sense that I would use certain expressions with my immigrant friends that I no longer used, that I wouldn't dare use with my Québécois friends, because I was afraid that they would question me about what they were, and those expressions, and also about, that's it, so I was a little afraid and… I really became aware that I was different in high school, because I was the only Black girl, and I also noticed that there were certain behaviours that I didn't display because I was socializing with my white Québécois friends. For example, the language I used, the way I communicated, when I was in grade school, I didn't speak Quebec French at all, like Québécois, but in high school. I think it's normal, it's really due to that. I started to speak with a very, very thick Québécois accent.
Farnelle's parents share her fear, having experienced racism in their relationships with the dominant group in the labour market, where the weight of racializing ideology appears heavier than in the rest of Canada. Political trends are promoting or producing bills that fuel xenophobia. For example, Farnelle and her parents perceived themselves as directly targeted by political parties pushing for bills which angered minority groups.
My parents faced discrimination. Sometimes, they were more critical about certain legislation, but I know that, for both my parents, their political ideologies are very similar, they lean toward a more liberal ideology. They support the Liberal Party a lot more than the Parti Québécois, the CAQ or the other parties than they did before. I don't know, maybe it's because the ideas, the political projects, the ideas that are presented by that party suit them better, or maybe it's just easier, I don't know. Sometimes, I wonder if they really looked into these political ideologies. Maybe they're considering another party just to see what they're proposing and maybe what could be of interest to them, I don't know if it's also because of trends, because I know that it's not the first time that we hear, well, that the Liberal Party is a party that ethnocultural communities join a lot more, so yes.
A horizontal analysis of her life course shows remarkable persistence in school in spite of the challenges that she faced. She is currently in university to obtain a bachelor's degree in a field related to immigration and the issues associated with it. Farnelle is a resilient, critical subject who took control of her destiny. She was born Black, but during socialization in high school and at a specific turning point, she realized that she had long been afraid of the colour of her own skin and her own behaviour, and that she felt the need to hide her phenotypic and ethnocultural characteristics. From then on, she no longer feared being Black. She developed several personal projects and is now an activist in an association that shares antiracist and anticolonial knowledge.

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The accounts of the participants in this category show how relationships of racism are perpetuated by a hierarchy of biological features and cultural characteristics (Hesse, 2007). The school space becomes a political space that, through implicit socialization, reminds students of minority groups of their historically subordinate situation.

Incomplete Racialization
In this category, the racialization process is not complete, so the subjectivation of relationships of racism has not necessarily produced fixed categories of racialized individuals. The combination of the corpus students' representations made it possible to pinpoint when they were expressing moments of questioning resulting in incomplete racialization: one student of Costa Rican origin born in Quebec, one student of Haitian origin born in Quebec, one student of Honduran origin born in Quebec and one student of Argentinian origin born in Quebec. It appears that because the turning points were more moderate, the process of constructing a racialized Other was slower. The youths in this category also became aware of their racial difference through subjective challenges within the turning points, but negotiating these experiences has not yet led them to firm racial self-identification. Our analysis of their representations also made it possible to uncover the omnipresence of certain dimensions, such as the predominance of white teachers in schools and inferiorizing relations in day-to-day life at school. Note that the youths in this category are also resilient subjects who, through enrolment in university and persistence in school, are seeking to secure their social standing after high school. Allow us to elucidate these conceptual interpretations with highlights from a few life courses.
Debora is a student who was born in Montréal. Her mother is from Honduras and her father is from El Salvador. She is a resilient subject who has worked hard her entire life course. Our analysis of her representations of moments of questioning in high school revealed mixed experiences. She began to notice that her Québécois peers explicitly or implicitly inferiorized her and her friends with immigrant backgrounds. The racialized Other is constructed either through the inferiorization of phenotypic characteristics or distancing [translation]: I've seen that, especially in high school, girls are meaner. For example, some Québécois girls would say mean things about immigrant girls' bodies, because we may have a different body type. It wasn't very nice. The Québécois girls kept to themselves. Then in high school, I became more aware that cliques were forming. There weren't many Latinxs, but there were a few. We knew each other well. There were a lot of Arab students-Moroccan girls, Algerian too-but I didn't see, say, the Québécois girls try to become part of our group. Because I've had many Algerian, Moroccan friends, and I got along super well with them. I still remember it, and I still have Algerian and Moroccan friends who go to university with me now, they're my friends from high school. Like, I get along with them really well.
During these moments of questioning, the individual's reflexivity reaches its peak, and the experience of categorization is actively in dialogue with other life course determinants. So, when Debora recalls her teachers rather welcoming attitude, her feeling of being inferiorized subsides. However, she noted that they were all white-majority teachers. Darchinian, F., Magnan, M-O. and Soares, R. d. O. The construction of the racialized Other in the educational sphere: The stories of students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal The teachers were really, really nice. I remember one who helped me very, very, very much, because she knew that I was having, like, more difficulty. She helped me very, very, very much, and I know that the neighbourhood was pretty underprivileged. It's not a rich, rich, rich neighbourhood, but the teachers were all Québécois.
And yet, this fairly positive reception of her interpersonal relationships with her teachers does not prevent the subject from joining the racialized Other social groups, even though she falls under a less fixed category compared with the completed racialization category, where the participants' perception of the dominant group is not positive at all. I know that I was born here, but, like, people say, for example, people say, "Where are you from?" I say, "I'm Latina." "But you speak French?" "Yes, because I was born in Montréal." I don't know why, but it's more natural for me, maybe because I am in fact close with my family, I only speak Spanish with my family, and with my parents as well. My mother only speaks to me in Spanish. But with my brother, for example, it changes; I speak in French with my brother.
Debora studies biochemistry at a Montréal University. She chose this program to be able to study medicine. At the time of the interview, she told us that she had reached the required threshold for the medical program.
It appears that in the "incomplete racialization" category, the determinative effect of Othering was partially offset by moments during which the youths perceived themselves as uncategorized. Often, teachers' inclusive attitude defined these experiences. However, to us, if certain teachers have a different attitude, it appears to be for personal reasons and not the result of institutional practices. As mentioned, the same structural dimensions are constitutive of the youths' life courses in this category.

Conclusion
The objective of this paper was to understand how social relations in Quebec's educational sphere, specifically in high school, construct fixed categories of racialized students in university. Our analyses showed that these relations emerge and materialize through the categorization and even inferiorization of students with immigrant backgrounds, within teaching and intervention practises and during informal interpersonal interactions (teacher-student; student-student). Inferiorizing relations also develop through educational organization, i.e. the demographic predominance of white teachers in an environment where the majority of students is non-white. Note that racialization targets not only the students' phenotypic features, such as skin colour, but also language and ethnocultural characteristics.
We believe these youths become aware of their subordinate situation and their racialization at the specific and irreversible moments when these relational experiences occur. They are turning points that unleash their interpretation and negotiation repertoire on many elements of the past and the future. Their representations of these elements reveal how they relate their racialization experiences to the discrimination that their parents have faced, society's political discourses and trends, as well as their fears about their social future as racialized individuals. They make up a heterogenous group in how they receive and negotiate relationships of racism. Darchinian, F., Magnan, M-O. and Soares, R. d. O. The construction of the racialized Other in the educational sphere: The stories of students with immigrant backgrounds in Montréal They are a heterogenous group of social agents who have attempted to free themselves from the weight of racialization through enrolment in university.
Thus, our study highlights how educational institutions in modern and pluralistic societies like Quebec are in fact political spaces that reproduce relationships of racism and perpetuate the process of constructing racialized Others, targeting students belonging to historically racialized groups in particular-despite Quebec policies that value ethnocultural diversity and aim for the inclusion of groups with immigrant backgrounds (Ministère de l'Éducation et de l'Enseignement supérieur, 2017). However, the originality of our study lies in our emphasis on the irreversibility of turning points in high school, i.e. moments when the subjectivation of relationships of racism result in their objectivation, because from that point on, youths are no longer students with immigrant backgrounds, but Blacks, Latinxs. This realization is crucial, because it shows how powerful the racialization process is and how it can even weaken the youths' reversal strategies for their experiences of racism. In other words, even though their strategies for reversing their experiences of racism, in conjunction with the practices of an educational system that is successful in terms of academic achievement, led them to university, their status as non-white subjects has not changed. On the contrary, it has been reinforced. More research is required to uncover how educational institutions, with their neoliberal practices, entrench the process of racializing students with immigrant backgrounds.