Reckoning with Racism

In 1997, complacency about the racial neutrality of a predominantly white judiciary was shattered as the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of judicial racial bias for the first time. The judge in question was Corrine Sparks, the country’s first Black female judge.

Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal judges critiqued her comments, based on the tradition that the legal system was non-racist unless proven otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate.

This book assesses the case of alleged anti-white judicial bias, the surrounding excitement, the dramatic effects on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system.

Constance Backhouse is a Distinguished University Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa. She has written numerous prize-winning books, including Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 and Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada. She has been awarded the Killam Prize, the Molson Prize, and the Governor General’s Persons Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada.

"I highly recommended this book to everyone working in criminal law and those working with racialized communities, and especially those in Nova Scotia. It will also resonate with fans of true crime, community building, and anti-racist activism."

"As Backhouse notes in the introduction, decades before George Floyd, this case brought the discussion of race in our legal system into focus, challenging the white privileged and racial silence that generally characterize Western justice."

This is a landmark book about a landmark case in Canadian history.