Constance Backhouse. Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racismin Canada, 1900-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1999. Pp. 485 (original) (raw)

Ghosts and Shadows: A History of Racism in Canada

A history of racism reinforces discrimination and exploitation of racialized immigrants in general and African-Canadians in particular. My paper contends that historically institutionalized structures are the ideological fulcrum from which ongoing socio-economic inequalities derive and retain their legitimacy. Specifically, I argue that the historically institutionalized system of slavery and ensuing systemic structures of racial discrimination negatively influence the incorporation of racialized immigrants into the Canadian labour market. A historically racially segmented labour market continues to uphold colour coded social and economic hierarchies. Although Canada's point system ensures that immigrants are primarily selected on the basis of their skills and qualifications, many professionally trained and experienced racialized immigrants endure perpetual socio-economic constraints, characterized primarily by low-end, precarious forms of employment. While not intended to serve as an exhaustive chronology, this essay draws on three historical periods of Black migration and experience in Canada: the first spans early sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth-century, the second dates from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, and the third extends from mid-twentieth century to the present. The following historical timeline traces the prevalence and enduring nature of systemic structures and substantiates Abigail suggestion that both "racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were and remain endemic to the Canadian state" (p. 6).

Codes of Canadian Racism: Anglocentric and Assimilationist Cultural Rhetoric

2004

HE CANADIAN DISCOURSES of power that flow around race and racism infiltrate texts as diverse as a provincial referendum, the Multiculturalism Act, and prominent newspaper ads, and these discourses, both official and popular, are sources for a much wider public perception and sensibility, ones that foster attitudes intolerant of difference. Classroom study of these texts offers an opportunity to unravel the many unquestioned Canadian assumptions regarding ethnicity, visible minorities, and especially, First Nations identity and status. One of the functions of the university environment is to examine ideologies that have been previously accepted and passively consumed, enabling a rejection of these precepts and forging the possibility of radical changes in thinking. In classroom explorations of things as specific as pronouns or as expansive as national credos, one can revise and transform a Canadian ethos that has, since its inception, been founded on racist principles. Such a view of national foundations may disturb students, but it seems essential to the kind of social justice that Canada purportedly espouses that we address and reconsider this groundwork. The language of postcolonial study, while often mired in the Canadian tradition of looking elsewhere in the world for injustice, and bound by the academic tendency to distance and generalize, does offer a resource with which to describe the intricacies of racist discourses. Alongside such writers and theorists as Smaro Kam-T

Why I Killed Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History in Canada

Histoire sociale / Social History, 2000

Anti-racism provides the basis for a richer understanding of the past, an understanding that is potentially more sensitive to the requirements of generally accepted standards of historical criticism than is the nationalist framework that shapes most historical writing about Canada. An anti-racist history takes seriously the existence of racisms and asks questions about their roles in shaping institutions and experiences, including those of dominant groups. It encompasses previously excluded meanings through a broader understanding of the historical record: written, oral, and material. It views the rise of nationalism and nation-states within the larger context of European colonialism, transforming nationalist projects (such as the making of Canada) into historical problems to be explained, rather than taking them for granted as organizing devices for the study of the past. It allows questions to be asked about how some identities come to be seen as fixed, how certain ones become normalized and others marginalized. Anti-racism thus has the potential to develop a better history than the nationalist one whose loss is lamented by J. L. Granatstein in Who Killed Canadian History?.

Race, Racism, and Empire: Reflections on Canada

2005

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE SEEKS TO INSPIRE CROSS-BORDER DIALOGUES between academics and activists on the ways "race," racism, and empire are being theorized and experienced on the ground. In particular, we would like to focus attention on the unique manner in which race, racism, and empire are articulated in the Canadian context. Canada provides an interesting site for investigations on race, racism, and empire. On the one hand, it has a long history of indigenous colonization, white settlement policies, settlement of people of color through racialized immigration polices, participation in free-trade regimes, and in British and U.S. imperialist agendas. On the other hand, Canada is located in a peripheral location within Western hegemony and is characterized in national mythology as a nation innocent of racism. In the postwar period, state policies of multiculturalism have represented Canada as a welcoming haven for immigrants and refugees, while in reality thes...