Sherene Razack

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Sherene Razack (pronunciation: /ʃəriːn ræzæk/) is a Canadian postcolonial feminist scholar, author, and activist of West Indian origin.^[1] She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies canon about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. Today, Razack is a professor in the Social Justice Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto (U of T).^[2] Razack previously taught women's studies for two years at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University.^[3]

Personal history

Razack lived in France and attended l'Université de Haute Bretagne, now called the University of Rennes 2, where she obtained her diploma in French studies in 1976.^[4] The following year, in 1977, Razack moved back to Canada to continue her studies at the University of British Columbia, where she earned a bachelor's degree and honors in history.^[5] Continuing her in her field of work, Razack completed a master's degree in the same subject, history, in 1979, at the University of Ottawa.^[6] Razack's post-doctoral degree in the field of education was completed in 1989, at the University of Toronto, where she teaches today.^[7] In 2005 Razack co-founded R.A.C.E. (The Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality/Equity), a network of scholars dedicated to feminist and anti-racist studies.^[8] In 2011, her book 'Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics," was translated into French by François Tétreau, and published under the title 'La Chasse aux Muslumans: Évincer les Musulmans de l'espace politique."^[9]

Recurring themes in work

Razack frequently discusses and denounces "race thinking," a term she coined to refer to the ways in which white people deny people of color "a common humanity."^[10]

In her writing Razack speaks of the way Third World women and veiled women are presented to the Western world as "oppressed" and needing rescuing, which contributes to an attitude that is pro-war and for the colonial invasion of Third World countries.^[11] These gendered, racialized images and discourses that circulate about Third World women, and more specifically Muslim women, portrays them as perpetual victims, and enforces the idea that misogyny is the product of a "backwards" culture.^[12] This in turn also has the effect of denying that misogyny and sexism exists in First World cultures.^[13]

All of Razack's work is rooted in the idea that Canada is a white-settler society that impedes on the land, bodies, and rights of Indigenous peoples, and that dehumanizes and enacts violence on minority groups.

Notable work

Pamela George case

Pamela George was a 28-year-old Ojibwe woman with two kids, providing for herself and her family as a sex worker. On April 18, 1995, she was murdered outside of Regina, by Alex Ternowetsky and Steven Kummerfield, two 20-year-old white men attending college.^[14] The men picked her up in their car, drove her to the outskirts of Regina where they forced her to perform oral sex, and proceeded to beat her for 45 minutes to one hour.^[15] George succumbed to these injuries and was found dead in a muddy ditch outside of Regina.^[16] Due to the severity of the beatings George's family chose to have a close-casket funeral.^[17] On January 31, 1997, both men were convicted of manslaughter and were sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison.^[18]

In 2002, Razack published an essay titled "Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George," in which she analyses the case and Ternowetsky and Kummerfield's trial in particular.^[19] In this essay, Razack specifically takes issue with the remarks of Justice Ted Malone, the judge on the case. Before the jury entered a ten-hour deliberation process, Malone emphasized that because George "indeed was a prostitute," she had, de facto, consented to sexual relations with Ternowetsky and Kummerfield due to the nature of her job.^[20] Malone also emphasized that the two young men had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol before the murder, and that they had bright futures ahead of them.^[21] Razack asserts that Malone's comments emphasized the importance of the two white men's lives despite their crime, and devalued that of George, an aboriginal woman's.

Additionally, Razack challenges Maloney’s claim that racism had not played a significant role in the murder of Pamela George. Razack centers her analysis on racism and colonialization to re-insert this perspective about the case into analyses of the Pamela George case.^[22] In her essay, Razack argues that white bodies enact violence and degradation on the gendered, racialized "Other" to confirm their own identity as white.^[23] In the same vein, she argues that Ternowetsky's and Kummerfield's attack also re-enforces their masculinity through the same mechanism of "othering" women.^[24] However, Razack emphasizes, in an intersectionalist fashion, that the racial and the gendered processes of othering that occurred in the case cannot be separated from one another. The history of sexual violence enacted on Aboriginal women's bodies since the beginning of colonization in North America must be recognized, as the degrading stereotypes about First Nations people should be, since both these practices continue to negatively affect Indigenous women today.^[25] In other words, Razack argues that George’s specific social position as an Indigenous woman is what allowed the two men who sexually assaulted and killed her to dehumanize her and carry out their crime. She frames George’s murder within the ongoing legacy of the project of colonialization, by highlighting the similarities between the logic that is used by “white colonial settlers” in appropriating and feeling entitled to Indigenous land and the logic that is used by men appropriating and feeling entitled to a female Indigenous body.^[26][27]

Razack argues that Maloney's comments coupled with the racial and gendered dynamics between George and her killers, as well as the dynamics between George, the judge, the jury members, and white citizens, influenced the jury's decision to convict Ternowetsky and Kummerfield of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder.

Air India Flight 182 case

On June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 travelling from Toronto to Delhi, passing through Montreal and London, exploded in the sky over the Atlantic Ocean, near Ireland when a bomb was detonated mid-flight.^[28] All 329 passengers and crew members died.^[29] Most of these victims were of Indian descent and 280, or 85.1%, were citizens of Canada.^[30] The main suspects in the attacks were the terrorist Sikh group Babbar Khalsa.^[31]

In 2008, within the context of the Canadian government's public inquiry into the bombing, Razack was hired as an expert witness by the families of the Air India Flight victims, to write a report on the bombing.^[32][33] In her 28-page document she outlines that the Canadian government dealt with the families and the investigation in a manner that was affected by systemic racism, notably because it took the government more than 20 years to launch a public inquiry on the 1985 bombing.^[34] She also denounces the lack of public support for the families that Canadian officials had shown after the bombing, as they had not addressed the issue as a "Canadian tragedy."^[35] She criticizes the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and Canadian ministries for not taking preventative action after being made aware of bomb threats and signs of a possible attack against the South Asian community.^[36] Razack specifies in her analysis that she thinks the racial bias that was at work in the aftermath of the bombing may not have been a conscious bias, but that it still existed nonetheless, and that this bias was a major problem that affected how the investigation unfurled, and how the families of the victims were treated.^[37] Due to these claims, Razack was accused of misconstruing emergency workers’, public security workers’, and public officials’ intentions when helping the Air India Flight 182 victims and their families by calling them racist.^[38]

Razack's report was submitted as an exhibit in the inquiry on December 13, the last day any documents could be submitted to the Canadian government's inquiry into the bombing.^[39] The following week, a request for evidence and documentation supporting Razack's argument was made to Raj Anand, the lawyer representing the families of the deceased.^[40] The lawyer refused to give these documents, calling the demand "ironic" since Razack's report on systemic racism was the only report whose validity was being questioned, and for which supporting evidence was requested, which Anand claimed was a result of systemic racism.^[41] The Department of Justice lawyer who made the request, Barnand Brukney, expressed his impression that racism had very little to do with how the Canadian government handled the Air India Flight 182, telling Razack in court that she "really [didn't] know what happened in this case."^[42] However, in the 2007 interim report on the case, John Major, former Supreme Court Judge and head of the Air India inquiry, alluded to his support of Razack's position on systemic racism in the Canadian government in the following quote:

The question that lingers among the families and other Canadians is if Air India Flight 182 had been an Air Canada flight with all fair-skinned Canadians, would the government response have been different? There is no way to answer that. As a country, we would hope not.^[43]

Controversy

In early August 2002, Razack, the director of OISE's Centre for Integrative Anti-racism Studies at the time, wrote a letter about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.^[44] In it she denounced Israeli "atrocities beyond belief" enacted on the Palestinian people during the Battle of Jenin, and the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine.^[45] The letter and a Pro-Palestine petition it introduced were emailed to the University of Toronto's student body and faculty.^[46] The letter was signed by 15 professors from the U of T, and 22 professors not affiliated with the university.^[47] Simon Rosenblum, a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish congress, called the letter "a prejudicial, inflammatory and highly biased view" of the Israeli-Palestine conflict that "pays no attention to Israel's attempts to achieve peace nor Israel's legitimate need for self-defence."^[48] B'nai Brith Canada took issue with the letter's content's because it created "a poisoned environment [...] for Jewish students at U of T."^[49] According to the organisation, the letter created an atmosphere in which Jewish students, associated to Israel because of their religion, were subject to anti-semetic attitudes. The U of T defended Razack, as Jane Stirling, a spokeswoman for the university, declared to the press that "faculty at a university must be able to voice unpopular or controversial ideas."^[50] Another spokeswoman echoed this idea, re-affirming that the "U of T does not muzzle its community when it comes to political discourse."^[51] However, acting president Shirley Neuman underlined that Razack was not speaking on behalf of the University of Toronto when she wrote the letter as Razack instead specifically stated that she was speaking on the behalf of "Canadian scholars meeting at the First National Conference on Critical Race Scholarship and the University."^[52] The link to the letter and the petition were removed from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) website in late August 2002.^[53]

Published books

As author

Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women's Legal Education and Action Funs and the Pursuit of Equality (1991)

Looking White People in The Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (1998)

Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (2004)

Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008)

Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015)

As editor

Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (2002)

States of Race Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (co-edited with Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani) (2010)

At the Limits of Justice Women of Colour on Terror (co-edited with Suvendrini Perera) (2014)

See also

• Idle No More
• Sex workers' rights
• Racism in Canada

References

External links

• Essay posted online at the University of Alberta: "Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages"