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ANTHONY J. HALL
Racial Discrimination in Legislation, Litigation, Legend and Lore
Constance Backhouse. Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 1999. 485pp. ISBN O-8020-8286-6
In a recent article in the American Anthropoligist, Karmala Visweswaran took aim at some of the uses made of the cultural relativism advanced so famously by Franz Boas and his gifted students. She alleged that their academic work has been made to paper over and divert scholarly attention away from the ongoing projectories of racist belief and practice given the full sanction of Darwinian social science throughout most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The elevation of Boas and his intellectual progeny to the heights of anthropological hagiography, Visweswaren complained, has tended to promote the impression that race theory and racial discrimination are most appropriately viewed as historical artifacts rather than active agents of contemporary life.
The Boasian initiative to discredit race and elevate culture as the major conceptual marker in the differentiation of human societies pointed toward a road of professional retreat away from intellectual complicity in by far the most vicious catastrophes ever promulgated in the name of the social sciences. As Visweswaren alleges, however, this professional exit away from "scientific" racism was negotiated in a way that is proving ill-adapted to protect against the tenacity of racism's old enticements and its resurgence in new forms. The outcome has been to obscure broad appreciation of how ideas and constructs associated with "race" have been entrenched so thoroughly into society's foundations that they continue to shape fundamental aspects of the legal, psychological, political, and economic milieus we all inhabit.
If the social sciences have added obstacles to frank and forthright reckoning with the historic and continuing force of race as a major factor in the genesis and contemporary shape of the United States, so has this same phenomenon been even more pronounced in Canada, a country where there has been no major civil war fought over the issue of race-based slavery. As Dionne Brand noted in Bread Out of Stone when comparing the way issues of race and racism are most often perceived in the United States and Canada, "Unlike in the United States, where there is at least an admission of...