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RACISM, EH? A Critical interdisciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson, eds. Concord, Ontario: Captus Press, 2004; 465 pp.
Racism, Eh?, as a title raises in Canadian colloquialism the question, "Racism, what racism?" while also playing with the stereotypical toque-fashioned, beer-swilling, white male - "Not me!" - who one might expect to utter it. It speaks specifically to Canadian denial. We, as nation, vilify "the United States as a place of extreme racial (dis)ease" (p. 3) and construct ourselves as racially tolerant and inclusive at the cost of selectively ignoring our own colonial history and contemporary racial issues. Editors Charmaine and Camille Nelson, sisters of Jamaican heritage, direct this book from an impassioned and personally informed place. This is evident in the clarity and directness of their introduction. They confidently and competently lay it out as it is - unpicking and unpacking.
They write to an audience - specifically, I think, white, mainly undergraduate - providing text and context that addresses the privilege of whiteness, a construct that allows Euro-Canadians to assume their experience of "racelessness" as everyone's experience. Their commitment is to edit work by academics, junior and senior, and non- academics, showcasing a range of disciplines, approaches and theoretical concerns of historical and contemporary relevance. In so doing, they hope "to question academic discursiveness,...the structure, boundaries and function of a discipline and what it deems accessible objects of inquiry and as valid issues of intellectual contemplation" (p. 5). They identify the tool - post-colonialism - as the present most useful set of practices with which to critically intervene and locate issues of racial identity and...