Zoe Druick: The book posits that there is a fundamental denial of white privilege in the Canadian legal system, that the system is colour-blind. How did this situation come to be? Sherene Razack: To begin with, law has always worked in service of the colonisers. The first example that comes to mind is the British…
Mary Ann Shadd (1823-1893) was a nineteenth-century educator, integrationist, suffragist and abolitionist. ary is best known as the first black woman editor of a newspaper in North America. Mary opened the first integrated school in Canada and became the first female black lawyer in the United States. An advocate for the social and political integration of…
Institutional or structural racism, defined as the social, economic, educational, and political forces or policies that operate to foster discriminatory outcomes or give preferences to members of one group over others, derives its genesis from the origins of race as a concept. Race as a biological fact has been invalidated by biologists and geneticists, but…
Trigger warning: Thousands of girls and boys were raped and tortured, and many were murdered, in Canada’s aboriginal boarding schools. In Canada, up until 1985, Christian churches ran around 100 boarding schools for aboriginal children. Between 100,000 and 200,000 children were forced to attend these boarding schools. Reportedly, around 50,000 aboriginal children died in these…
