Colour Coded

A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950 Like snow blandly smoothing out the landscape, a blanket of whiteness seems to obliterate history. That’s precisely the point made by feminist legal scholar Connie Backhouse in her recently published book Colour-Coded, A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950. Despite a long past of bigoted attitudes, acts and laws–segregated schools didn’t end in Ontario until 1965 –all mention of race is normally "whited out" of the legal records and history books. Backhouse quotes poet Dionne Brand, who once expressed astonishment at Canadians’ "stupefying innocence." In the U.S., Brand said, "there is at least an admission of the fact that racism exists and has a history." Backhouse’s lively new history is at pains to point out that racism is not primarily about "isolated acts ...by individuals". Instead, it resonates through institutions like the legal system, through popular culture, through intellectual theory so accepted it seems immutable. In 1930, when the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan rampaged through Oakville to burn a giant cross and break into a house to separate a man from his fiance, they were praised by the media and complimented by the police chief. The Toronto Star praised the "show of white justice" and the way the Klan had "escorted" the young woman "courteously and quietly" –though it backed down a bit later when it revealed the man was of Indian ancestry. The Globe, The Hamilton Spectator and The London Free Press all echoed the tone of approval. Only the local black leaders, Reform rabbi Maurice Eisendrath and William Templeton, white editor of the Guelph Mercury, crusaded passionately against the Klan's racism. When the Klan leaders were feebly charged with "wearing a disguise by night", only one of them was convicted and lightly punished. Backhouse's book is packed with prickly revelations. When, in 1924, a Chinese cafe-owner in Regina challenged a law forbidding him to hire white women, much of Canada's liberal and progressive leadership seems to have gone mad with sexual frenzy. Chatelaine magazine, Alberta magistrate Emily Murphy, the local Council of Women and the Regina Women's Labour League all spouted racist paranoia about the perils of white women in the clutches of "yellow" men. Petite and elegant Viola Desmond, a beautician from Halifax, was bodily dragged out of a New Glasgow movie for the crime of sitting downstairs in a seat she had paid for. She was manhandled, bruised and jailed overnight (she sat bolt upright all night, wearing her white gloves) before a travesty of a trial. Her later legal challenge of Canada's colour bar failed dismally-and that was 1946. Eliza Spero, a Mohawk widow and mother of eight, whose oldest son died in the trenches of World War One, went to court to protest the seizing of her costly seine net from reserve fishing grounds near Belleville. She, too, lost. If we want to break through the Canadian mythology of racelessness and come to grips with the whole of our past, both the splendid and the rotten, we could do no better than open Backhouse's book.