Reckoning with Racism

In 1994, a white police officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with assault and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Corrine Sparks – Canada’s first Black female judge – remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal was appealed and ultimately upheld, but most of the white judges who reviewed the decision critiqued Sparks’s comments. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada fumbled over its first complaint of judicial racial bias. This is an enthralling account of the country’s most momentous race case.

"Reckoning with Racism's strength is its humanistic focus on the people caught up in what was a routine case that spun out of control as it was framed by the media and others to focus on possible racial bias of the judge - as opposed to the tactics used by the police in their interactions with young Black people in Halifax. It is particularly impressive that Professor Backhouse gives us all the voices involved--those of the police and prosecutors as well as Mr. Small and his counsel."--Philip Girard, York University, "In Reckoging with Racism, Constance Backhouse shares voices of African Nova Scotians and other people involved in and impacted by the RDS case--and encourages the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions in how the law is used to resist or reinscribe racial hierarchies."--Michelle Williams, Dalhousie University

Constance Backhouse is a Distinguished University Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa. She has written numerous prize-winning books, including Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 and Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada. She has been awarded the Killam Prize, the Molson Prize, and the Governor General’s Persons Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada.