Is Queen’s racist? Etc
Is anyone else getting a little tired of the biweekly “I’m considering Queen’s, but I heard it’s racist” posts?
I understand why people ask. If you’re moving across the country and spending a lot of money to attend university, it makes sense to want to know whether you’ll feel comfortable there.
But at a certain point, these posts start to be pretty repetitive and disconnected from what Queen’s is actually like today.
Queen’s, like any large university, is not immune to racism. That said the idea that it’s some uniquely hostile environment for non-white students is simply inaccurate.
The university is very diverse, especially in programs like Health Sciences, Commerce, and Engineering. In some of these programs, nonwhite students make up the majority of the class. Walk into most lecture halls and you will see students from a wide range of backgrounds. No, Kingston isn’t Brampton or Surrey or Richmond, but neither Queen’s nor Kingston is the overwhelmingly white institution that some people still seem to imagine.
The university also spends a significant amount of time and money on DEI initiatives. Whatever your views on that, it is hard to argue that these issues are being ignored.
More importantly, people don’t regularly get hate crimed on arrival for being black/brown/Asian. Thousands of non white students attend Queen’s every year and have positive academic and social experiences.
I think it’s completely reasonable to ask about campus culture and whether you will feel welcome. But the repeated implication that Queen’s is unusually racist compared with other Canadian universities is simply false