| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Sherene H. Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002)

IT IS HARD TO THINK of space as a concrete entity. Meta theories related to space and peoples' occupation and use of space have often left me with the feeling that we were not talking about issues related to location as if people mattered. In Race, Space and the Law, race, space, and law are intertwined, sometimes with chilling results.	1
The best example comes from Razack herself who contributes a chapter that examines racialized violence and spatialized justice. Razack makes a convincing argument that there is a privilege in place. Take for example, the luxury of Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky. University students in Regina, they celebrated the end of a school year by "slumming" — visiting dark hollows, the underside of bridges, and an area of town frequented and inhabited by Aboriginal people. Kummerfield and Ternowetsky are afforded the luxury of locational choice and mobility. In the continuing dispossession of Aboriginal people, re-location to the inner city is perceived as the result of a lack of choice of location and not about mobility.	2
The two non-Aboriginal men assaulted and beat Pamela George, who died from those injuries. Pamela George, a Saulteaux woman from the Sakimay First Nation, was taken from the inner city (which afforded her some safety), to a place frequented by people who did not want their activities observed. It would have been interesting to examine these places of illegal activity as spaces that were the primary sites of "border crossings" — where those with wealth and privilege cross over and those without are presumed to be unable to cross over. This race-and-space model is one that the author has obviously given great thought, and to her credit it provides a new way to interpret the vile language of hatred. At the outset, it must be said that "race" is an artificial descriptor that compartmentalizes experience and requires those categorizing or categorized to select one site of oppression as primary in their relations with others. Similarly, there is danger in removing the painful terminology of race and hatred and substituting a frame of reference that fails to name either oppressors or victims. An esoteric discussion about space subsumes the privilege to name and could result in the further cloaking of the actualities of racehate and violence against all of the intersecting groups of people.	3
In this context, the examination of the judgment in this case is not advanced very far by the race/space/law discussion. I think this is because the privilege and prejudice of the two defendants in this instance is mirrored in the judgement. The author, however, takes great pains to theorize about the assumptions built into the racehate and space occupation of the defendants and does not hold the justice system up for the same thoroughness of examination.	4
Still, the entire paper is thought-provoking, informed and persuasive. It should advance dialogue quite significantly.	5
Space seems an inadequate category for comparing and analyzing dispossession, privilege, and exclusion based upon race, culture, or religion. In fact, to draw a line between race and space (and not culture and space, or religion and space) artificially limits the signifiers that are used to mark certain locations as belonging to "in" groups versus "out" groups. The space critique is valuable in that it marks a subtle shift from victim to dispossessed.	6
In this work at least, however, it does not allow for the creation of spaces that are occupied and used in meaningful ways by Aboriginal people. Inner-city space is perceived as space that is chosen by Aboriginal people solely as a result of presumptive previous dispossession by non- Aboriginal settlers. This does not address Aboriginal urbanization as an informed choice, Aboriginal reclamation of sacred and traditional spaces, or the perceived ownership of unclaimed spaces (under bridges, in parking lots, or out-of-town rendez-vous locations). Importantly, there is an implicit understanding that non-Aboriginal settlers own and have the right to inhabit universities, cabins, and lodges, as well as "nice neighborhoods," and that they understand that to be their right. There is no room in this discussion for "border crossings" — Aboriginal people who occupy traditional territories, non-Aboriginal people who live in Aboriginal nations, neighborhoods, or homes, the privilege of urban Aboriginal people who "pass" in inner cities.	7
A few authors in this work identify their privilege (skin colour, academic position, wealth) and identify themselves as occupants of the space from which Other people were dispossessed. This is laudable. Nonetheless, the danger is that in the space metaphor, when we determine that there are the rightful dispossessed and the wrongful owners, it is implicit that this is the understanding that is shared by "right thinking" citizens. There is very little room for the individual in this paradigm — space is shared or taken. Groups move in or out. In one submission to this work, the author speaks of the privilege that allows students in a cross-cultural class to label, name and critique — with an absolute belief in the righteousness and truth of their right to do so.	8
Note, for example, the Cree MLA from The Pas, Manitoba, who was asked to leave Manitoba's provincial legislature (and ironically, called a racist by then Premier Gary Filmon) for labeling provincial governmental policy racist. Never is the depiction of settler space more clearly established than within Sheila Dawn Gill's description of the silencing of Oscar Lathlin by the Speaker of the House and the ensuing racially charged response of the premier. In a physical space, the connection between space and the silencing of race is easy to see and the metaphor of the occupation of settler space and the effect of a "border crossing" by a Cree man into a presumed settler space is powerful.	9
This is also true of Jennifer J. Nelson's discussion of the space of Africville in Halifax and in Engin F. Eisin and Myer Siemiatycki's discussion of space for mosques in Toronto. Both pieces identify the righteous occupation and presumed settler group ownership of public spaces. Both also examine the responses of the communities impacted by the spatial claiming by city planners (as representatives of "rightful" settlers) and the legal tools used to advance the claiming of space from settlers who were perceived not to be rightful ones (presumably, on the basis of their race). In these two pieces there is a direct link between space (claimed by a new settler group), race (the dispossessed not Caucasian) and law (city ordinances will be broken if plans are not followed). They are concrete examples of the theory at work as a tool to reveal the potential harm when space is presumptively owned, private, and protected.	10
Like all polemics, the space analysis is useful only to the degree that it can reveal all of the underlying factors governing social relations. Contrasting spaces (Dirty, Dark, Desolate, and Dispossessed versus Clean, White, Privileged, and Empowered) sublimates components that constitute space: wealth, power, and ownership. The discussion of race, space, and law loses its moorings when the intersection of wealth, power, and ownership, is divorced from the discussion of location of groups, whether based on race or some other stratifying factor.	11
It must be stated that the text uses rather non-problematically the macro descriptor "race." The term does not address the multiplicity of experiences and the layering of traditions, understandings, and perceptions related to culture, spirituality, language, and other group characteristics (particularly in the area of Indigeneity). The homogenous amalgamation of all race related issues leaves little room for specific personal stories, and creates a tendency to homogenize the findings of the research.	12
The book, however, is a very valuable tool for those studying race, race relations, sociology, gender studies, and the geographies of personhood and history. Several chapters would be useful for law school courses on race and law. Its strengths lie in the new approach to quantifying and researching issues and situations that were previously disregarded as not susceptible to academic analysis and its advancement of scholarship in the area of race relations in Canada. Its weaknesses lie in a varying commitment to the notion of "space" by the authors and the potential for the diminishment of the import of the factors that construct race, space, and law (i.e. relative wealth and power).	13
Tracey Lindberg Athabasca University

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