Heritage-language education policies, anti-racist activism, and discontinuity in 1970s and 1980s Toronto

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intersection of heritage-language education advocacy with anti-racist activism in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. The province of Ontario initiated the Heritage Languages Program in 1977. By focusing on discontinuities in the policy’s implementation, the paper identifies multiple strategies that Black anti-racist activists used to expand the understanding of heritage language to be more inclusive of all forms of racial and linguistic difference. Although anti-racist activists may not have succeeded, we argue here, recovering their arguments can – and should – inform current efforts to deepen linguistically- and culturally-sustaining programs in Ontario schools. The first part of the paper describes the historical context in which heritage language became a social problem recognizable to Canadian society. It is in this context that the Heritage Languages Program emerged as a policy solution to the perceived problem of racial and linguistic difference in Ontario. The second part reports our analysis of the intersection between public deliberation over the HLP and advocacy against anti-Black racism in the 1970s and early 1980s.