In Quebec and Everywhere, Anti-Racism is Essential to Class Politics

By Richard Roys

In early 2023, Quebec’s political class erupted in indignation over comments made by Amira Elghawaby, newly appointed by Ottawa as Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. Her offense was straightforward: she suggested that many Quebecers seemed disturbingly indifferent to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the province. What followed was immediate, furious, and entirely predictable.

Rather than treat her remarks as an invitation to reflect on the social reality of racism in Quebec, the political and media establishment transformed them into a national affront. The terms of the debate were rapidly reduced to an absurd binary: either one stood with Elghawaby and, by extension, with Ottawa, or one stood with Quebec. In that framework, there could be no nuance, no complexity, no space for anyone attempting to hold together two basic truths at once: that Quebec is a nation with a legitimate collective existence, and that racism, including Islamophobia, is a real and deadly force within it.

This is one of the defining operations of contemporary right-wing identitarian politics in Quebec. It transforms any criticism of racism into an attack on the nation itself. It recasts anti-racism not as a democratic necessity, but as a foreign imposition. It suggests that to name racism is to deny Quebec’s dignity, rather than to insist that any society worthy of dignity must be able to confront its own injustices honestly.

The Elghawaby affair was never only about one public figure or one set of comments. It exposed the broader ideological terrain on which debates about race, secularism, identity, and belonging now take place in Quebec. On that terrain, acknowledging Islamophobia is treated as more scandalous than Islamophobia itself. Naming racism is seen as divisive, while the structures and discourse that produce exclusion are treated as expressions of collective self-affirmation.

The reaction reached its apex when all parties represented in the National Assembly, including Québec solidaire, voted in favour of a motion condemning Elghawaby’s remarks. At that moment, the entire parliamentary spectrum effectively closed ranks around a shared refusal to confront social and political conditions that had already produced lethal consequences. Quebec remains marked by the massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, where Muslim worshippers were murdered while at prayer in 2017. Yet even the memory of that attack has not been enough to force a sustained reckoning with the environment of normalized suspicion, resentment, and scapegoating in which anti-Muslim violence becomes more likely.

The issue is not whether Quebec is uniquely racist. Indeed, racism is a structuring reality across Canada. The issue is also not whether Quebecers have a right to self-determination – they do – although those national aspirations must be pursued in a way that respects the equal right of Indigenous nations to self-determination, rather than resting on their dispossession or marginalization.

The issue is whether the left is willing to tell the truth about the society in which it operates. And more than that: whether it is capable of understanding that the struggle against racism is not secondary to class politics, not a diversion from it, not a boutique moral concern for urban professionals, but one of the central terrains on which class domination is organized and reproduced.

The right-wing onslaught

The right-wing offensive in Quebec, much like in France and across the globe, does not operate primarily by openly defending racism in crude biological terms. It proceeds instead through euphemism, through displacement, through coded language about “integration,” “values,” “social cohesion,” “common culture,” and “secularism.” It denies the existence or prevalence of racism while constantly producing racist political meanings. It insists that the problem is not Muslims, immigrants, or racialized communities as such, but their supposed failure to adapt, their excessive visibility, their alleged refusal to conform to the norms of the host society.

This distinction is politically useful precisely because it allows a reactionary politics to present itself as universal, republican, or neutral. Exclusion is reframed as principle. Discrimination is recast as civic firmness. And those who object are portrayed not as defenders of equality, but as sectarian actors trying to import dangerous “Anglo-Saxon” obsessions with race into a supposedly colour-blind society.

This logic has become a structuring feature of public debate in Quebec. Questions that should be approached in material and democratic terms are reframed as existential threats to national identity. The debate is no longer about discrimination in hiring, housing, policing, or access to institutions. It becomes a battle over whether “they” share “our” values. It is no longer about whether Muslim women can access work, education, and civic participation on equal terms. It becomes a discussion of whether visible religiosity is compatible with Quebec modernity.

The same general mechanism has long been visible in France. The hijab, halal food, mosques, religious associations, Muslim schools, public prayer, anti-discrimination organizing – in France, all of these have been repeatedly transformed into symbols of national crisis, by the right and by large sections of the political mainstream. This constant creation of a state of crisis has little to do with concrete threats and everything to do with governing through division.

The point is not merely to stigmatize Muslims. It is to build a broader political bloc organized around resentment, fear, and a reactionary conception of national belonging. A social crisis produced by neoliberal restructuring, austerity, and democratic exhaustion is narrativized as a cultural crisis caused by migrants, racialized minorities, and the alleged collapse of authority. Instead of anger being directed upward — toward landlords, bosses, privatizers, political elites — it is redirected downward, toward those with even less power.

This is why the right’s culture war is never just cultural. It has a clear social function. It disorganizes solidarity. It weakens trade-union instincts. It fragments shared grievances into competing identities. It turns workers against one another by suggesting that some are more legitimate members of the collective than others. It invites white or majority workers to see themselves not as exploited subjects with common interests alongside racialized workers, but as members of a threatened national core under siege from outsiders.

In this framework, anti-racism becomes especially dangerous to the right because it disrupts the narrative. It insists that the problem is not excessive diversity but organized inequality and oppression. It reveals that what is presented as cultural incompatibility is often just the political management of labour, status, and belonging. It points out that those cast as problems are often the very people cleaning hospitals, delivering food, staffing long-term care homes, driving buses, filling warehouses, and holding together the most fragile parts of the social order.

The right therefore requires that anti-racism appear alien, elitist, and disconnected from ordinary life. It must be presented as a discourse imported from universities, NGOs, or Ottawa – never as something emerging from the lived experience of workers subjected to discrimination and exploitation. This is one of its most effective ideological maneuvers: to treat anti-racism as foreign to the working class while simultaneously defining the working class in ways that exclude those most affected by racism.

That is not a secondary distortion. It is the heart of the strategy.

Leftist proposals that fall short of actual left politics

Faced with this sustained offensive, large parts of the left have failed to respond with clarity. Some have chosen evasion. Others have retreated into moral denunciation without strategy. Still others have accepted the right’s basic framing and concluded that anti-racism, however well intentioned, has become a political liability best softened, postponed, or subordinated.

In Quebec, this problem is intensified by history. Much of the institutional left in the province emerged from a political culture shaped by national liberation, sovereignty, and the defence of Quebec’s autonomy against the Canadian federal state. That history matters. It contains real emancipatory elements. But it also creates a recurring vulnerability: the accusation of siding with Ottawa can still function as a political veto. Once anti-racism is coded as federalist, moralizing, or alien to Quebec’s collective experience, many on the left become cautious, defensive, and disoriented.

This helps explain the recurring temptation to return to what are often called “bread and butter” issues. The argument usually goes something like this: the left has become too preoccupied with identity, culture, and symbolic struggles; it has lost contact with working people; it needs to return to wages, inflation, housing, and healthcare; anti-racism and similar struggles are either distractions or at least should be de-emphasized in favour of more universal economic appeals.

This diagnosis is superficially attractive because it names something real: many people are suffering materially, and the left does need to speak concretely about exploitation, austerity, and redistribution. But the proposed remedy is deeply flawed. It assumes that class can be politically articulated in a way that bypasses race, religion, and immigration status. It imagines that there exists some pure social question untouched by the hierarchies that actually shape labour markets and everyday life.

When the left counterposes anti-racism to “real” class politics, it concedes the right’s central premise: that issues of race are niche, divisive, or external to common material life. It ends up reproducing the fiction of an average worker who is culturally one of the majority, implicitly white, and unaffected by the forms of exclusion directed at migrants, Muslims, Black people, and other racialized groups. In other words, it speaks of universality while quietly narrowing the universe of those it imagines.

This is not merely a moral failure. It is a strategic disaster. A left that refuses to see how racism structures class relations cannot build durable majorities. It cannot organize the sectors of the working class most exposed to precarity. It cannot explain why some workers are more vulnerable to wage theft, deportability, informalization, or public exclusion than others. It cannot account for why reactionary narratives resonate where collective infrastructures have weakened. And it cannot construct solidarity if it refuses to address the fractures through which ruling classes govern.

Québec solidaire’s difficulties have often been interpreted through this lens. Whenever the party is attacked for supposedly focusing too much on anti-racism, its representatives appear to feel a pressure to reassure, rebalance, depoliticize. But this defensive posture only deepens the problem. It leaves the right in command of the terms of debate. It permits the media ecosystem to define anti-racism as excess, and a focus on class politics turns into silence on racism. And it demoralizes those militants and communities who understand, from direct experience, that these questions cannot be split apart.

The same dynamic exists in many places outside Quebec. France is a notable example. Sections of the left there have long hesitated to engage directly with anti-Muslim racism for fear of appearing communautariste – that is, overly fixated on a particular community rather than the social whole – or anti-republican, or lenient when it comes to enforcing secularism. The result has often been paralysis: a left unable to respond adequately either to the far right’s offensive or to the realities of postcolonial exclusion in the deprived banlieues (suburbs), schools, labour market, and the criminal justice system.

In France as in Quebec, the left is too often failing to develop a materialist politics of race. It either treats anti-racism as a moral supplement detached from economic struggle, or it abandons it altogether in the name of economic universality. Both paths are dead ends. What is needed instead is a politics that understands how racism is woven into the production, management, and fragmentation of the working class itself.

Class politics is anti-racist politics

Capitalism has never exploited a generic labour force in the abstract. It has always organized labour through difference. Colonialism, slavery, immigration regimes, legal stratification, citizenship hierarchies, and racial segmentation are not side stories to capitalism’s development; they are among its principal mechanisms. The making of labour markets has always involved deciding whose work is cheapened, whose mobility is restricted, whose humanity is diminished, and whose disposability can be normalized.

Racism, then, is not simply prejudice. It is a mode of social organization. It sorts populations, allocates vulnerability, and justifies uneven treatment. It tells us who is expected to absorb risk, who is denied recognition, who can be excluded from protections, and who can be blamed when social systems fail.

This is visible everywhere. In Quebec, racialized and immigrant workers are heavily concentrated in sectors marked by low wages, difficult conditions, and weak protections: food processing, warehousing, domestic work, cleaning, care work, platform delivery, agriculture, private security, and many others. During the pandemic’s emergency period, many of the workers called “essential” were precisely those treated as disposable in ordinary times. They were praised symbolically while being exposed materially.

You cannot make sense of this with a race-blind class politics. Why are some workers overrepresented in the hardest jobs? Why are temporary migrants often more vulnerable to abuse? Why are some workers less likely to complain about unsafe conditions? Why do some face additional barriers in accessing stable public employment? Why do credential recognition, language policy, policing, and immigration status shape bargaining power? These are not marginal questions. They are central questions of class composition.

Even debates that appear symbolic or cultural often have important material content. Consider the exclusion of Muslim women wearing religious symbols from certain forms of public employment. This is often defended as a neutral expression of secularism. But in practice it means barriers to stable jobs, pensions, career progression, and unionized workplaces. It means constraining the economic horizon of a section of the working class on explicitly ideological grounds. It means telling certain women that participation in public life is conditional on effacing themselves in ways the majority never has to contemplate. That is class politics. Or rather, that is class domination articulated through racism and gender.

The same is true in France, where anti-Muslim discourse has repeatedly been used to legitimize forms of public exclusion that have direct material effects. To talk about police harassment, discrimination in hiring, school exclusion, urban fragmentation, and stigmatization of the banlieues is not to leave class behind. It is to describe how class is lived under raced conditions in contemporary capitalism.

A serious left must therefore reject two illusions at once. The first is the liberal illusion that anti-racism can be reduced to representational diversity, symbolic recognition, or ethical sensitivity while leaving structures untouched. The second is the economistic illusion that redistribution alone can solve racism without directly confronting the political and ideological machinery that produces racial hierarchy. Both are insufficient because both separate what in reality is joined.

Anti-racist class politics means recognizing that solidarity cannot be proclaimed into existence while major sections of the working class are routinely stigmatized, policed, and excluded. It means understanding that class unity is not a starting point but a project — one that requires active struggle against the divisions through which capital and the state govern. It means refusing the fantasy that one can organize workers effectively while treating some workers’ oppression as secondary, exaggerated, or politically inconvenient.

There is also a harder truth. When the left refuses anti-racism, it does not produce a more coherent class politics. It produces a more exclusionary one. It allows the rhetoric of the people, the nation, or the common good to be captured by those who would reserve those categories for some and not others. That is why anti-racism is not merely defensive. It is generative. It expands the horizon of who counts in the collective. It clarifies who the adversary is. It redirects anger away from scapegoats and toward structures. It creates the basis on which workers with different histories and positions can recognize themselves in a shared struggle without pretending they are identical. A left worthy of the name does not flatten those differences. It organizes through them.

La France Insoumise and a way forward

If Quebec illustrates the impasse, the French party La France Insoumise (LFI) offers at least a partial example of how the left can begin to move differently. Not perfectly, not without contradiction, but in a way that is strategically sound.

What has distinguished LFI, at its best, is its refusal of the false opposition between anti-racism and social struggle. In a political landscape where much of the mainstream treats anti-racist politics as suspect or divisive, LFI has insisted – unevenly but unmistakably – that “the people” must include racialized minorities, that the social question cannot be detached from the postcolonial question, and that a democratic bloc cannot be built by excluding Muslims.

This matters enormously in the French context. France has spent decades producing a specifically republican version of racial politics, in which the state claims blindness to race while managing profoundly raced inequalities in policing, schooling, housing, work, and media discourse. Under these conditions, for a left party to name Islamophobia, speak to the banlieues, oppose police violence, and link those struggles to austerity and neoliberalism is not a minor rhetorical choice. It is a strategic reorientation.

LFI has understood something that much of the traditional left in France fails to grasp: that France’s contemporary working classes are not the workers of a nostalgic industrial past. They are multiethnic, urban and peri-urban, precarious, feminized in many sectors, shaped by migration and colonial histories, and often alienated not only from the market but from institutions that treat them with open suspicion. A left that does not speak to these publics is not speaking to the working class as it really exists.

What LFI has tried to do, at its strongest moments, is build a popular bloc wide enough to include both classic redistributive demands and an explicit confrontation with racism. Letting itself be influenced by progressive social movements, it has linked pension reform, wage struggles, and public services to police repression, anti-Muslim stigma, and territorial abandonment. It has refused to treat these as separate audiences or disconnected agendas.

The significance of this approach is not that it resolves every tension. LFI has faced criticism, backlash, caricature, and internal contradictions, but it has at least shown that there is political life beyond the sterile choice between moralized liberal anti-racism and reductive economism. It has demonstrated that one can speak of class without erasing race, and speak of racism without abandoning projects of economic transformation.

This is especially important for Quebec. The lesson is not that one can mechanically import the French case, or that these dynamics are disproportionately present in the francophone world. Still, though Quebec has its own history, its own national question, and its own institutional forms, the strategic lesson of La France Insoumise is transferable: a left grows stronger, not weaker, when it confronts racism as part of the general struggle against domination. It becomes more rooted in a popular base, not less, when it organizes among those most exposed to both exploitation and exclusion. It gains coherence when it stops treating anti-racism as an embarrassment to be managed and starts treating it as one of the languages through which collective emancipation must now be articulated.

What LFI points toward is a renewed universalism: not the false universalism that asks the marginalized to disappear into an abstract white, cis, documented citizen, but a concrete universalism built from below, out of the actual plurality of the people. A universalism that does not deny conflict, history, or hierarchy, but seeks to overcome them politically. That is the way forward. Not a left that chooses between class politics and anti-racism, but one that understands the former is inseparable from the latter. Not a left that clings to an imagined social subject stripped of race, migration, religion, gender, and history, but one that wants to rebuild solidarity on the basis of the working class as it actually exists. Not a left that adapts itself to reactionary nationalism’s terms, but one that confronts it head on, understanding how capitalism governs through fragmentation.

The task, then, is to reunify anti-racism and class struggle intellectually, strategically, and organizationally. To show, concretely, how labour markets are raced, how exclusion weakens collective power, how scapegoating protects elites, how secularism can become a tool of class discipline, how immigration status shapes exploitation, and how racism helps govern precarious workers’ lives. In other words: to tell the truth about the society we live in. Only on that basis can a left worthy of the moment be rebuilt.

Reprinted from Midnight Sun, 2026.