Book Review

In Colour-Coded, Constance Backhouse explicates six major legal cases involving the legal rights of nonwhites, effectively exploding the myth that Canada has been a "raceless" society. In the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian justice built a substantial, if at times inconsistent, fortress of white privilege. While Canadian adjudicators pursued strategies that would look familiar to American historians of racial law, they also worked within a legal and social context that differed from the United States. For these reasons, Backhouse's study reveals well how both the specificities of social context and the limits of legal reasoning structured the rewards of membership in a "white" race.	1
Backhouse astutely demonstrates how law has been central in maintaining white supremacy. Attorneys and judges justified racial differences as "natural" while depending upon a notion of "blind justice" that made their own white racial identification invisible. After a remarkably cogent introduction outlining the problems inherent in writing a history of race and racism, Backhouse explores the Re Eskimos case (1935–39), when the federal government disputed Quebec's contention that "Eskimos" were "Indians" and thus federal responsibility under the British North America Act of 1867. During the debate, both sides brought in anthropological and biological experts who measured cranium size, assessed the pendulousness of women's breasts, and discussed cultural differences. Despite contradictions in testimony based on these various "scientific" approaches, none of the white experts seemed ready to question the whole project of racial classifications. In the end, the white judges conveniently ignored contradictory scientific expertise, deciding instead to follow what they saw as precedent: the apparent assumption on the part of original treaty writers that Eskimos were Indians. The case exemplifies the importance of legal context, given that the absence of such sweeping legislation in the U.S. inclined white Americans toward broader definitions of the "Indian" race, as that identity excluded the privileges of citizenship and whiteness.	2
Still, the fluidity of race was such that Canadian officials could in effect have it both ways. They could attempt to manipulate racial definitions both to restrict membership within the category "Indian" and to insist that those within this limited group were inferiors who needed white guidance, in the form of policies that co-opted First Nation economic and cultural rights. Backhouse explores racially discriminatory federal policies by following two challenges to them, one over convictions for aboriginal dancing and another over fishing rights. In both case studies, ironies within whites' actions and the hubris of white officials loom large.	3
The point of outlawing aboriginal dances and the potlatches that traditionally accompanied them was, ostensibly, to protect Indians from their own "insane exuberance of generosity" (65). The mission of the Department of Indian Affairs was, again ostensibly, to encourage assimilation and inculcate the superior values of capitalism. And yet, Backhouse notes, by 1891 the success of the Oak River Dakota in producing bumper crops of wheat, as opposed to subsistence crops that would not compete with local white farmers, led the DIA to send a "farming instructor" who restrained their ability to "purchas[e] any more labour-saving machinery and actively interfered with their ability to market their produce efficiently" (73). Consistent with this two-faced approach to Dakota farming, the DIA prosecuted Wanduta--a Dakota who participated in a 1902 Rapid City Grass Dance--despite the fact that white city leaders had organized the dance because the spectacle was a commercially successful event for the town and in the face of challenges that demonstrated the illegality of the DIA's procedures against Wanduta. Likewise, in 1921, the courts denied Eliza Sero, a Mohawk who had no legal rights as a Canadian citizen, the right to follow traditional Mohawk fishing practices, when those practices included using a seine net restricted by provincial law. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Backhouse's extensive biographical profiles of white lawmakers, judges, and civil servants substantiates racist predispositions held by many. In Eliza Sero's case, Ontario Supreme Court Judge William Riddell had published materials revealing "an explicit and unwavering colonial mentality and paternalistic bias" (123).	4
In the last half of the book, Backhouse underscores how easily manipulated racialized thinking could be, but also that it was not universally held. In 1924, Yee Clun successfully appealed Saskatchewan legislation that prevented Chinese employers from hiring white women. On his side were several whites who realized his case defied facile racialized reasoning; he was a Christian with a good business reputation, and an increase in China's stature following the First World War had recently led the legislature to excise language in the law that singled out Asians. But the combination of a sexualized racial danger and an activist middle-class white women's group that saw protection as a feminist issue triumphed in the end, and the provincial legislature acted to remove from court review city council restrictions of Chinese employers that "protected white womanhood."	5
Backhouse's discussion of two cases involving Black Canadians illustrates the existence and limits of anti-black racism there. The 1930 census in Canada did "not list a separate category for Blacks" (175), Jim Crow legislation was not legal, and the "Kanadian Klan" prided itself on a sense of orderly restraint in their efforts to keep the white race pure. In 1930 in Oakville, Ontario, the KKK kidnapped the white fiancée of a "black" man to prevent their marriage. The local press applauded the raid, and when the province eventually brought charges against certain participants, racist predilections limited their scope. Nevertheless, one of the ringleaders was indeed convicted, and the couple in question eventually married, once the man reconfigured his racial identity as Indian, rather than Black. The success won by Ontario's black leadership was not replicated in Nova Scotia, however, in part because of that peculiarly Canadian insistence on its "racelessness." Though the refined, middle-class Viola Desmond was handled roughly by the white men who tossed her out when she refused to sit with other blacks in the balcony of a movie theater in 1946, in neither her original conviction for not paying the proper taxes to sit on the ground floor, nor in her unsuccessful appeal led by a sympathetic white attorney, was the racialized nature of the case made explicit. "Freedom of commerce," or the right of the theater owner to refuse service as he wished, won out over the equality promised in a democracy.	6
Colour-Coded is extremely useful in demonstrating how white members of the legal establishment manipulated definitions of race, gender, and the rights of capitalists to sustain white privilege. Moreover, it provides an excellent lesson that protecting such privilege did not depend on the violent and pervasive racism found during much of the same period in the United States; it could work well behind the starched collars and mannerly decorum of the court.	7
Stephanie Cole University of Texas-Arlington

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