BLACK HISTORIAN Howard Sheffield had to blink back tears. His lesson to a Collingwood Grade 2 class had just been acclaimed ``the best visit of the year.'' As Sheffield, whose family arrived in Collingwood in 1857 via the Underground Railroad, recently told The Star, ``A few years ago, no one knew we (the black community) were up here. They didn't seem to want to know that we had been part of Collingwood from the beginning.''
They didn't seem to want to know.
That's precisely the point made by feminist legal scholar Connie Backhouse in an interview a week earlier, when we discussed her recently published book Colour-Coded, A Legal History Of Racism In Canada 1900-1950 (University of Toronto Press). ``Canada has a mythology of racelessness,'' she said, ``despite remarkable evidence to the contrary.'' Like snow blandly smoothing out the landscape, a blanket of whiteness seems to obliterate our true history. Despite a long past of bigoted attitudes, acts and laws - segregated schools didn't end in Ontario till 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.''
Maybe it's time that black history month was followed up with white education month?
``We also need to know that there have always been Canadians who fought against racism,'' Backhouse said. ``Usually, we gloss over the racism of earlier decades by saying we have to judge people by the standards of the times. No! There's plenty of evidence that others did reject racism and fight back.'' In other words, we should measure past deeds by the highest, not the lowest, standards of earlier times.
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, forcibly, a supposedly ``black'' man from his presumably ``white'' fiancée, they were praised by the media and complimented by the police chief, who shook their hands and recognized them as prominent Hamilton businessmen. 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 really 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 café owner in Regina challenged a law forbidding him to hire white women, most of Canada's liberal and progressive leadership seems to have gone mad with sexual frenzy. Chatelaine magazine, 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 black beautician and businesswoman from Halifax, was 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 I, went to court to protest the seizing of her costly seine net from reserve fishing grounds near Belleville. She, too, lost. A racist judge contemptuously dismissed Mohawk sovereignty and the guarantees offered by the Simcoe Deed. Still, in 1921, Spero fought for sovereignty and her rights and was aided by an idealistic white lawyer.
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 to open Backhouse's book and, with open hearts, begin to read.
Courtesy of the Toronto Star
February 26, 2000