Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 by Barrington Walker (review)

Since the 19th-century abolition of slavery throughout the Atlantic World, peoples of African descent have engaged in protracted and often violent struggles to realize the promises and potential of freedom after enslavement. Indeed, formal emancipation was not the end of racial oppression or discrimination, nor did it signal full and immediate equality for former slaves. Rather, abolition marked the beginning of a new kind of struggle by people who had attained the legal status of freedom but continued to face limits to those freedoms through ongoing political, social, and economic oppression and inequality. Throughout the Americas, the courts were often the forums for those struggles where former slaves asserted their rights as free people and demanded recognition, opportunity, and an end to discriminatory practices which undermined their claims to freedom. As such, courts became important sites for the negotiation of ideas about race, rights, and equality.

In Race on Trial, Barrington Walker examines how the Ontario criminal court system functioned as “an integral part of how race was produced, managed, and expressed in the racial liberal order that framed the Black experience in Canada.” (20) To achieve this, Walker analyzes a variety of cases that involved Black defendants from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, investigating the ways in which the legal system constructed Blacks in Canada as racial subjects. Appearing in courts as they did, these defendants were also subject to particular ideas about Black criminality which reified (mis)perceptions of racial difference, while also promoting particular ideas about the Canadian nation and the place of Black peoples within it. His focus on Black defendants is revealing of how discourses of both blackness and whiteness in Canada functioned not only to condemn individuals to incarceration or execution, but also in some cases to exonerate them. Walker’s close reading and analyses of these cases, and the socio-historical context that frames them, contributes a great deal towards a better understanding of race and nation in Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In setting up the context for the criminal court cases, Walker illustrates the collision and inherent contradictions and “tension between the veneer of the rule of law and biologically and culturally rooted ideas about race in Canada.” (184) While the Canadian liberal order held promise for all Canadians of equality, opportunity, and a colour-blind legal formalism (13), the lived experiences of peoples of African descent demonstrated the power of racial discourse in continuing to objectify, marginalize, and discriminate against people of colour, placing clear limitations on their experiences of freedom and the realization of full equality. Blacks in Canada, Walker writes, “lived in a state of paradox, caught between formal legal equality and deeply entrenched societal and economic inequality.” (3) The cases that he reviews and analyzes demonstrate the negotiation of this paradox by accused criminals, lawyers, witnesses, and judges as they attempted to reconcile a particular vision of the nation with the realities of racial discrimination and dominant tropes of Black inferiority.

In his analysis and creative reading of criminal court cases, Walker offers a number of compelling and sometimes surprising insights into the intersections of race and nation with ideas about justice and the liberal order. First, the court cases demonstrate a clear and continuously negotiated tension between the objectivity of the law and equality of Black Canadian citizens before it, and the power of highly subjective discriminatory rhetoric in shaping the outcomes of the respective trials. The result, according to Walker, was a variability of outcomes that demonstrated a particular ambivalence about blackness in Canada, which “helps us to explain the flexible and contradictory position that Blacks occupied in the imaginations of many whites.” (22) On many occasions, Black Canadians on trial were disproportionately incarcerated and even executed for their crimes, moments which showcased “the considerable power of the state.” (45) At other times though, this ambivalence resulted in paternalistic sympathy, mercy, and the exoneration of Black...