Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 by Constance Backhouse (review)

494 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 secondary text for undergraduate discussion. It is less successful as an introductory volume to the genre itself. For that, it would need a more critical introduction focusing not only on what is represented in the choice of letters but also what is absent. The reasons for the choice of the years 1900-20 is not clear, but, given that choice, where is the Spanish Influenza? Why is discussion of suffrage and dower privileged over that of an epidemic that killed as many Canadians as the nation lost in the Great War? If I am to be left curious, I want to know the reason why. (JANICE DICKIN) Constance Backhouse. Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900- 1950 University of Toronto Press. xiv, 486. $60.00, $27.50 The jury has returned, and the verdict is confirmed: the Canadian tradition of racial equality is a historical myth. Several recent works have documented not only the racism that permeated Canadian society but the role of 'the law' in converting private prejudice to public policy. This documentation is especially apparent in Colour-Coded. With a team of research assistants, Backhouse sifted page by page and paragraph by paragraph through a half-century's legal record, and the result is overwhelming. They found 'hundreds of statutes and thousands of judicial decisions that use racial constructs as a pivotal point of reference.' In 1938, while many of these statutes and cases were still current, the federal government reported" that Canada had no laws that made 'race' a 'factor of legal consequence.' This denial was once characteristic of majority Canadian attitudes, and has shown remarkable tenacity. From the possibilities that emerged from the research, Backhouse selected six court cases for detailed treatment in this book. She opens her story with the instructions for the '901 census, by which all Canadians were to be listed by a colour identifying their 'race~ - white, black, yellow, or red - although, as Back)lOuse notes, 'Human beings Simply do not come in any of these colours.' Pursuing this theme of colour, the six case studies elaborate the encompassing effect of the legal system in Circumscribing the opportunities available to CanacJians according to their 'race' from 1900 to 1950, and the experience of minority members who challenged the system. Especially commendable is the inclusion of cases involving Inuit and First Nations. Despite distinctive laws and administrative structures that have usually dictated separate treatment from historians, the Aboriginal peoples do belong in a discussion of 'race' in Canada, and Backhouse adds a completeness to the rainbow of colour-coded disadvantage she contemplates . With additional cases from the Chinese- and African-Canadian communities, the arbitrary and idiosyncratic nature of 'race' designation in Canadian history is amply demonstrated. HUMANITIES 495 In her introduction, Backhouse decries those professional historians who reject a 'presentis!' approach to interpreting the past; she objects that 'it is almost universally accepted within the discipline that it is ahistorical to utilize our current understandings of the concept of racism to evaluate and assess the past.' The opposite is in fact the case: historians always utilize current understanding to evaluate the past. The presentism that most scholars try to avoid is the practice of judging the actions and behaviours of ourpredecessors as if t!tey had our current understandings. This does not mean that judgments and criticism are illegitimate, but simply that the full context within which historical events occurred mu. st form part of the evaluation. The liability of presentism is that it maybe taken to suggest that racism can be isolated as something committed by bad people who existed in the past. To accommodate the wealth of documentation generated by her project, Backhouse placed the full reference notations on the University of Toronto Press website. In the book itself are 148 pages of endnotes containing a varying amount of detail, but sometimes the printed note is merely an instruction to consult the website. Almost any reader will have to go at some stage to the full documentation and then scroll through 524 unnumbered pages, a good proportion of which duplicates what appears in the book. For those with computer access this will be...