rabble.ca and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) are teaming up to find Canada's next progressive student journalists. Generously funded by the CFS, Campus Notes will be running articles on Canada's critical post-secondary education issues. Have an idea? Pitch it here.

On June 28, 2013, the then-president of Brock University, Jack Lightstone, posted an open letter online and via email to the Brock community titled "The Need for a Program Review."

rabble.ca and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) are teaming up to find Canada's next progressive student journalists. Generously funded by the CFS, Campus Notes will be running articles on Canada's critical post-secondary education issues. Have an idea? Pitch it here.

National controversy flared up after the revelation of pictures from a party held near Queen's University campus where students dressed in highly inappropriate, culturally stereotyped costumes -- including Buddhist monks drinking beer, Vietcong guerrilla fighters with rice hats and toy guns, and Mexicans in sombreros and prison outfits. This is racism.

But this story is not about that party. It is about the culture of white privilege that permeates on major campuses around Canada and how activists at Queen's University are working to make meaningful cultural change.

"It's just a party."

That's the excuse being used to dismiss the actions of Queen's University students who recently hosted a costume party featuring racially stereotypically outfits.

Photos from the party -- with students dressed as everything from Buddhist monks to Viet Cong guerrillas to Middle Eastern sheiks -- were shared on social media and have since garnered mainstream attention.

What concerns me, maybe even more than the party itself, is the collective shrug of friends and colleagues when faced with the images.

"It's just a party. They're having fun. They're not trying to offend anyone."

rabble.ca and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) are teaming up to find Canada's next progressive student journalists. Generously funded by the CFS, Campus Notes will be running articles on Canada's critical post-secondary education issues. Have an idea? Pitch it here.

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As a mixed-race woman of Black heritage, I have always connected deeply to Shakespeare's Othello. For people of colour growing up in a predominantly white nation with a deeply Eurocentric curriculum, non-white characters like Othello are significant because they affirm our existence in literature, and help us articulate our struggles with internalized racism and white supremacy.

There are so few instances in Western literature where Black characters are permitted to exist, let alone to exist as multifaceted, sympathetic, and central. Othello is one of the rare texts in the English literary canon to make a Black character its protagonist and to focus on issues of anti-Black racism.

rabble.ca and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) are teaming up to find Canada's next progressive student journalists. Generously funded by the CFS, Campus Notes will be running articles on Canada's critical post-secondary education issues. Have an idea? Pitch it here.

rabble.ca and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) are teaming up to find Canada's next progressive student journalists. Generously funded by the CFS, Campus Notes will be running articles on Canada's critical post-secondary education issues. Have an idea? Pitch it here.

Racialized students at the University of King's College are a sparse and often isolated minority.