Canada is touted as a diverse, tolerant, and multicultural country where the prevailing understanding is that racial injustices emanating from structural oppression are not widespread. Analysing lived experiences of racialized participants who worked in publicly funded places of employment in British Columbia (BC), this qualitative study offers a phenomenological exploration of a particular manifestation of racial discrimination: that of quarantine-like containment of mobility at work. Examining undue restrictions and mobility limitations imposed on participants, this article will use three metaphors—stranger for racialized individuals, body for workplaces, and cordon minoritaire as the process of containing the mobility of strangers within the body—to present and discuss findings on: 1) excessive targeted scrutiny; 2) wrongful seating arrangements; 3) cold and transactional interactions; and, 4) bad faith references. In this regard, cordon minoritaire is presented as a novel analytical framework to illustrate the ways in which racialized workers were cordoned off, with their professional freedoms and career mobilities restricted, in order to quarantine White ecosystems of employment. Consequently, cordon minoritaire machinations created perniciously unequal conditions that fundamentally and unjustly constrained participants into working under discriminatory conditions—depravities that are at odds with whimsical notions of Canada as tolerant, multicultural, and morally superior to its neighbour south of the border.

加拿大被吹捧为一个多元化、宽容和多元文化的国家，其中普遍的理解是结构性压迫引起的种族不公正并不普遍。这项定性研究分析了在不列颠哥伦比亚省 (BC) 公共资助的就业场所工作的种族化参与者的生活经历，对种族歧视的一种特殊表现形式进行了现象学探索：在工作中像隔离一样限制流动性。审查强加给参与者的不当限制和行动限制，本文将使用三个比喻——陌生人代表种族个人，身体代表工作场所，以及警戒线少数派作为控制陌生人在身体内活动的过程——展示和讨论以下方面的发现：1) 过度有针对性的审查；2) 错误的座位安排；3) 冷的和事务性的交互；以及，4) 恶意引用。在这方面，少数族裔警戒线作为一种新颖的分析框架呈现，以说明种族化工人被封锁的方式，他们的职业自由和职业流动受到限制，以隔离白人就业生态系统。因此，少数人警戒线 阴谋创造了有害的不平等条件，从根本上和不公正地限制了参与者在歧视性条件下工作——这种堕落与加拿大作为宽容、多元文化和道德优于边境以南邻国的异想天开的观念不一致。