This session begins with findings from a policy genealogy (Gale, 2001) of the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) in Ontario and the racialized conflicts over it between 1977–1987. Heritage-language education policies emerged across Canada in the 1970s, just after federal policies for official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) were established. As Haque (2012) argues, official bilingualism was only possible by excluding demands of Indigenous and other racialized communities for their own linguistic and cultural rights. The HLP challenged the logic of official bilingualism, and thus became the site of extended, racialized conflicts over fundamental questions of (1) whose language and culture can be included at school, (2) to what ends, and (3) who gets to decide? The session draws on notions of thick solidarity (Liu & Shange, 2018) to interpret the temporary alliances (Garland, 2014) formed among Black, Indigenous, South & East Asian, Italian, Portuguese, and Francophone communities in Toronto and their activism around the HLP.

The session then extends the lessons from this study to ask larger questions about the field of language policy. If racialized hierarchies of languages — and of the people who speak them — are often so stable over time, then under what conditions is it possible to work across difference and dismantle racial and linguistic stratification? Responses to this question, whether in language-policy scholarship or language-policy activism, require clear theoretical stances on (1) the relationship between language policy, (anti-)racism, migration and (settler-)colonialism (e.g., Bale, 2015; Flores & Chaparro, 2018), (2) the relationship between language-policy pasts and futures (e.g., Haque, 2012, 2019; Macías, 2014), and (3) what counts as change in language policy (Wiley, 1999, 2006).