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Zoe Druick: What is
the significance of the term "unmapping" in the
title of the book?
Sherene Razack: When colonisers first get to
a place they intend to own, one of their first acts
is to map it and give it names. Mapping enables
them to feel in control and to know themselves as
owners of the space. It is always about identity as
well as a material act of possession. When you
unmap, you ask questions about the claims and the
identity-making process that have gone into making
maps. You ask, for instance, about what the land
was called before it was mapped. You unsettle
notions that the land was simply theirs for the
taking. To unmap is to consider that there is
nothing innocent about mapping, that it is a
process born of and consolidating certain power
arrangements.
ZD: Can you explain the phrase "space becomes
race"?
SR: It is probably more accurate to talk
about how place becomes race. In the book I begin
with an example from Canadian history. It was an
offence under the Indian Act to be intoxicated on
an Indian reserve. This law marked an Indian
reserve as a special kind of place, one where the
normal rules of society did not apply. Anyone in
that space earned the mark of being somehow
abnormal or different (and negatively so). Of
course the people who are most likely to be on an
Indian reserve are Aboriginal peoples. To have such
a law is to mark as degenerate and lesser Indians.
The place is thereby effectively collapsed with
race.
ZD: What role does law specifically play in
producing space?
SR: Law plays a very direct role in
producing space. When you declare that land can
only be used to build two-storey houses, or when
you say that certain kinds of businesses cannot
operate there, for instance, you absolutely shape
the landscape and actively shape the social
relations that will take place there. In my area of
Toronto, houses had to be build in a Tudor or
English style, a law that effectively shapes the
cultural landscape of the area, marking it as the
place for settlers of British origin.
It is in this way that difference is spatially
produced. We regulate what can happen in a space,
who will feel good in it, who will profit from it,
and we regulate social hierarchies. If all our
buildings have no ramps, we are making a powerful
statement about whether we think wheelchair bound
people should have access, and, simultaneously, we
are ensuring that they cannot in fact have access.
It is a similar process with race, although often
not so obvious. If lots in a subdivision are large,
only wealthy people can live there. If people of
colour are under constant police surveillance on
the streets or in malls, you will have more arrests
and will contribute to the marking of their bodies
are deviant bodies, and so on.
ZD: Is the book of interest to law and policy
makers?
SR: The book, as a critical work, will not
be of interest to law and policy makers who are
merely seeking a recipe for finding and rooting out
racism in law. Instead, Race, Space, and the Law
will be useful to those law and policy makers who
wish to consider how racist conceptual tools and
practices invade the very foundational categories
of law. It will also build critical thinking on how
our history has been and continues to be one of
white dominance, and how we actively shape places
to make this so. With this kind of awareness, we
can begin to consider how to assess the racial
impact of various laws and policies.
ZD: What areas of research does the book
contribute to?
SR: This body of work clearly fits into what
I would call critical race theory. It makes
contributions to how we understand racial
hierarchies. It fits readily into the sociology of
law since it analyses how law produces and
maintains hierarchical social relations. It also
engages with the tools of critical geography and
thus it fits into an ever expanding body of spatial
theory. Finally, because it devotes considerable
space to national mythology, interrogating how
Canada as a white settler society is imagined and
made, it also fits readily into cultural
studies.
ZD: What are the implications of this book for
Canadian studies?
SR: Scholars in Canada often over-rely on
American work and we are plagued by an insufficient
body of work on how race operates in Canada. While
ours is a white settler society that shares many of
the characteristics and history of other settler
colonies, such as the United States and Australia
(and the book is therefore of enormous interest to
them), we also have some specific aspects that we
need to consider. For example, we have a slightly
different method of colonization (not better or
more benign but different). As well, we have
powerful national myths that insist that there is
no racism here and that we do not have a violent
colonial history. This book should help to shatter
these rather destructive myths.
ZD: The book posits that there is a fundamental
denial of white privilege in the Canadian legal
system, that the system is colour-blind. How did
this situation come to be?
SR: To begin with, law has always worked in
service of the colonisers. The first example that
comes to mind is the British law of terra nullius
which declared land to be "empty" for the taking if
the inhabitants were not civilized enough to
develop it. Here is an example of a law that leaves
the door wide open for the British to declare that
the lands that would comprise Canada were theirs
simply because Aboriginal peoples were uncivilized
nomads. In fact, this very idea is invoked today as
it was in the land claim case of the Gitskan
Wetsuwetin. At the BC supreme court, Judge
McEachern declared that the Gitskin did not have
horses and did not develop the land in a way that
would confirm their claim to it.
The law is in fact full of apparently neutral rules
that have the impact of limiting the claims of
people of colour. In the case of racial violence,
for instance, we see the law's reliance on the idea
that context and history are irrelevant. This makes
it difficult to show when violence originated in
systemic and individual racism that pre-dated the
actual encounter.
Finally, we really see colour blindness in the
law's insistence that we cannot take race into
account because to do so is to treat people
differently. In fact, what we must take into
account is racism. Thus the racial context of
individuals is an important fact bearing on the
case. To ignore it is thus to ignore vital
information, a neutrality that clearly works in
favour of the dominant group. From the book, we
have the example of the white, male murderers of
Pamela George, whose intent and actions cannot be
appreciated unless we consider what two white boys
thought they were doing when they picked up an
Aboriginal woman.
ZD: Do you think the Canadian government policy
of official multiculturalism obscures
institutionalized and spatialized forms of racism
in Canada?
SR: Multiculturalism implies an endless
variety where, as they say in the national anthem
of my birth place, "every creed and race find an
equal place." In fact, it is of enormous
consequence who fits under the multicultural
category and who doesn't. It's not a category you
want to be in because usually 5% of the budget (as
in the case of Canada Council) will go to
multicultural groups and the rest will go to the
unnamed "normal" citizens. Multiculturalism
complies with the national story that the original
citizens are Europeans and everyone else is an
after thought to be welcomed as additions to an
already existing structure. Having said that, I
will say that those slotted into the multicultural
category have taken the small space afforded them
to do wonderful things. We use this space to
resist, to make claims, to convince ourselves that
we have not disappeared.
ZD: Canadian mythology is bound up with the image
of an empty landscape: clean, pure, snowy. What are
the implications of such a myth for an analysis of
race relations in Canada?
SR: When we think of mythology, or stories
that are told about a nation's origins and history,
we first need to consider the cast of characters in
the story. A snowy, Northern land that is empty has
few Aboriginal peoples. We can easily see the
characters that make the story come to life: the
first fur traders, explorers, and so on. In fact,
the first Europeans. Europeans who are at home in
snow and wilderness are nearly always men. If we
see anybody at all in this snowy landscape it would
have to be an intrepid man paddling a canoe,
surrounded by decaying totem poles (Emily Carr),
big trees and magnificent lakes (the entire group
of Seven), or wide expanses of snow (Lauren
Harris.) Since Aboriginal peoples are all dead, and
were not very numerous to begin with on this
mythical landscape, those first Europeans literally
make the place into what it is. People of colour
who are associated with the South are woven into
the story with great difficulty. They just don't
fit. They don't have skills for snow and cold.
Remember Montesque thought that Southern peoples
did not have the proper biological qualities to
become thinkers. Their climate made them lazy.
Southern peoples make the tale messy or "stained,"
as Himani Bannerji put it, and in any event, they
came much later. The original inhabitants, a Nordic
race able to vanquish the cold, have the first
claim on the land. When the Others come, they
pollute the pristine landscape; they flood it and
make it "foreign." This story is the one we see
repeated over and over again in racist immigration
laws, in the courts when the claims for justice of
Aboriginal peoples and people of colour are
considered. It effectively shuts them out of the
national story, and thus out of any claims for
equal citizenship.
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