Overview

In 1997, complacency about the racial neutrality of a predominantly white judiciary was shattered as the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of judicial racial bias for the first time. The judge in question was Corrine Sparks, the country’s first Black female judge. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal judges critiqued her comments, based on the tradition that the legal system was non-racist unless proven otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate. This book assesses the case of alleged anti-white judicial bias, the surrounding excitement, the dramatic effects on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system.

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9780774868273

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Reviews

This is a landmark book about a landmark case in Canadian history. -- B. F. R. Edwards, Queen's University * CHOICE Connect * ""As Backhouse notes in the introduction, decades before George Floyd, this case brought the discussion of race in our legal system into focus, challenging the white privileged and racial silence that generally characterize Western justice."" -- Shauna Wilton * Ethnic and Racial Studies * ""I highly recommended this book to everyone working in criminal law and those working with racialized communities, and especially those in Nova Scotia. It will also resonate with fans of true crime, community building, and anti-racist activism."" -- Lori O’Connor * Canadian Law Library Review *

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

Author Information

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.

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