Countering Hate in Canadian Schools: Anti-Refugee Rhetoric, Anti-Black Racism, and the Politics of Belonging

This chapter examines how rising anti-refugee and anti-migrant rhetoric in Canada shapes the educational experiences of refugee students in K-12 public schools. While often framed as concerns about national security or cultural cohesion, these narratives are deeply racialized and influence how schools perceive, engage with, and support displaced children and their families. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, clinical practice, and lived experience, this chapter explores how systemic exclusion manifests through academic streaming, deficit-based interpretations, Eurocentric curricula, and punitive disciplinary practices, all of which disproportionately affect racialized refugee students and shape their long-term educational trajectories.

Grounded in lived experience as a Black Caribbean former refugee, clinician, and parent, the author introduces Embodied Intersectional Praxis (EIP) as a framework that extends intersectionality into the realm of embodiment. EIP examines how racialization, trauma, migration precarity, and exclusion are experienced somatically, offering educators tools to interpret student behaviour not as deficit, but as embodied expressions of survival, adaptation, and relational knowledge shaped by broader structural conditions.

Drawing on intersectionality, Black feminist thought, and trauma-informed approaches, this chapter calls for a shift from viewing refugee education as access to schooling towards understanding it as a site of justice, relational care, and belonging. The author outlines pathways for resisting hate-driven narratives, including anti-racist and culturally sustaining pedagogy, newcomer-centred policy development, and relational school–family partnerships that recognize and centre refugee expertise. Ultimately, refugee education must move beyond inclusion towards transformative practices that actively challenge the systems that reproduce exclusion and inequity.