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eBooks from GBC Library
Until we are free : reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada by Diverlus, Rodney, 1990- editor.; Hudson, Sandy, 1985- editor.; Ware, Syrus Marcus, editor.
An anthology of writing addressing the most urgent issues facing the Black community in Canada. The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white assailant inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, which quickly spread outside the borders of the United States. The movement's message found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before them. Until We Are Free contains some of the very best African-Canadian writing on the hottest issues facing the Black community in Canada. It describes the latest developments in Canadian Black activism, organizing efforts through the use of social media, Black-Indigenous alliances, and more.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2020
The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison; Ta-Nehisi Coates (Foreword by)
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books--Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2017
Islamophobia : understanding anti-Muslim racism through the lived experiences of Muslim youth by Bakali, Naved.
The 9/11 terror attacks and the ensuing War on Terror have profoundly impacted Muslim communities across North America. Islamophobia: 'Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth' is a timely exploration of the experiences of young Canadian Muslims and the challenges they have encountered since 9/11. Through framing anti-Muslim racism, or 'Islamophobia, ' from a critical race perspective, Naved Bakali theorizes how racist treatment of Muslims in public and political spheres has been mediated through the War on Terror. Furthermore, he examines the lived experiences of Muslim youth as they navigate issues relating to race, gender, identity, and politics in their schools and broader society. This book uncovers systemic bias and racism experienced by Muslim youth in a climate that is increasingly becoming hostile towards Muslims. Ultimately, the findings detailed in this work suggest that anti-Muslim racism in the post-9/11 era is inextricably linked to the effects of the War on Terror in the North American context. Moreover, Islamophobia is also impacted by localized practices, policies, and nationalist debates. This book is a unique contribution to the field of anti-racism education as it examines systemic and institutionalized racism towards Muslims in Canadian secondary schools in the context of the War on Terror.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2016
Indigenous Writes by Chelsea Vowel
In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. In 31 essays, Chelsea explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories--Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2016
New framings on anti-racism and resistance. Volume 1, anti-racism and transgressive pedagogies by Joanna Newton (Volume Editor)
Using a critical anti-racism approach, contributors to this volume demonstrate and document the resistance and futurity possible when students, educators, administrators, policymakers, and community members engage in critical anti-racism education. Relying on contemporary educational issues and personal/political reflections, this collection of essays brings together a variety of new insights on anti-racism praxis. This volume speaks to readers who are working with or seeking new conceptual framings of race, white supremacy, and Indigeneity in order to work towards a politics of decolonization. New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance: Volume 2 - Resistance and the New Futurity provides new theoretical directions and practical applications for people engaged in the field of anti-racism.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2017
Discrimination and Denial by Clayton James Mosher
Champion sprinter Donovan Bailey said it, and this book confirms it. While racism may not be as blatant in Canada as in the United States, it does exist. Members of visible minority groups are discriminated against in employment, housing, and access to public services. The increasing visibility of hate groups and calls to restrict immigration mark the growing tension. Racist attitudes against Asians and Blacks, in particular, have seeped into the criminal justice system. Ironically, since 1960 it has been illegal in Ontario to track crime by race, making it difficult for researchers to collect data. The media, our primary source of information, has sensationalized crimes where minority groups are implicated. Clayton Mosher uses historical data and media reports to expose racism in Canada's social, legal, and criminal justice systems. He considers the social contexts of discrimination, legislation directed against minority groups, law enforcement, and court outcomes. At last, we are offered an objective assessment of racism in Canada. Discrimination and Denial is essential reading for judges, lawyers, police officers, social policy makers, and community leaders. Interpretations of recent events, such as the shooting of officer Todd Baylis by a fugitive alien and gang-style slayings in Toronto's Chinatown, are guaranteed to heat up the embers of public debate.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 1998
White Guys on Campus by Nolan L. Cabrera
On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: "Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the "few bad apples" frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of "post- racialism."
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2018
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad; Robin DiAngelo (Foreword by)
The New York Times andUSA Todaybestseller! "Layla Saad is one of the most important and valuable teachers we have right now on the subject of white supremacy and racial injustice."--New York Timesbestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacytakes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and nearly 100,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Updated and expanded from the original workbook, Me and White Supremacy,takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources. Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change.The numbers show that readers are ready to do this work--let's give it to them. Additional Praise for Me and White Supremacy: "Allyship means taking action. How? Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacyteaches readers exactly how to get past the paralysis of white fragility so that they can build bridges, not walls. Read the book, look deep within yourself, sit with your discomfort, and then act. This is how we can truly say we are doing everything we can to combat white supremacy."--Sophia Bush, award-winning actress and activist "She is no-joke changing the world and, for what it's worth, the way I live my life."--Anne Hathaway "Layla Saad moves her readers from their heads into their hearts, and ultimately, into their practice. We won't end white supremacy through an intellectual understanding alone; we must put that understanding into action." --Robin DiAngelo, author of New York Timesbestseller White Fragility
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2020
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
"This is a book that was begging to be written. This is the kind of book that demands a future where we'll no longer need such a book. Essential." --Marlon James "The most important book for me this year." -Emma Watson Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for January/February 2018 Sunday Times Bestseller Winner of the British Book Awards Nonfiction Narrative Book of the Year Winner of the Jhalak Prize Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year Blackwell's Nonfiction Book of the Year Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by: NPR The Guardian The Observer The Brooklyn Rail Cultured Vultures Award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge was frustrated with the way that discussions of race and racism are so often led by those blind to it, by those willfully ignorant of its legacy. Her response, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, has transformed the conversation both in Britain and around the world. Examining everything from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, from whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge, and counter racism. Including a new afterword by the author, this is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today, and an essential handbook for anyone looking to understand how structural racism works.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2018
Black writers matter by French, Whitney - editor
An anthology of African-Canadian writing, Black Writing Matters offers a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose. As Whitney French says in her introduction, Black Writing Matters "injects new meaning into the word diversity [and] harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity." An "invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone," this collection feels particular to the Black Canadian experience
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2021
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2019
Antisemitism in Canada by Alan Davies (Editor)
This book is the first collection of scholarly essays to treat the topic of antisemitism in Canada, a complete history of which has yet to be written. Eleven leading thinkers in the field examine antisemitism in Canada, from the colonial era to the present day, in essays which reflect the saga of the nation itself. The history of the Jewish community, its struggles and its fortunes is mirrored in the wider history of Canada, from Confederation to the present. The contributors cast light on Canadian antisemitism through a thorough examination of old and new tensions, including Anglo-French, east-west and Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Attitudes to Jews in pre-Confederation Canada, French Canada from Confederation to World War I as well as the interwar years, and in twentieth-century Ontario and Alberta from 1880-1950 are illustrated in various chapters. Of particular interest are the examinations of such well-known figures as Goldwin Smith, the greatly admired liberal historian of Victorian Canada, Adrien Arcand, the would-be Führer from Quebec, and James Keegstra and Ernst Züdel, of more recent notoriety. Analyses are also provided of Nazism and Canadian Protestantism and Jewish-Ukrainian relations since World War II. This is a complex and contentious subject; yet, to understand the ideas and forces that have sought to undermine the Jewish presence in Canada is to understand the dangers that threaten any democratic society, and thereby to guard against them. This compelling collection of essays offers intelligent, readable accounts of an area of Canadian history about which we know too little.
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2006
Chop suey nation : the Legion Cafe and other stories from Canada's Chinese restaurants by Hui, Ann, 1983- author.
In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included--her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn't yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how, after generations living in a poverty-stricken area of Guangdong, China, her family had somehow wound up in Canada. Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants weaves together Hui's own family history--from her grandfather's decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father's path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest "Western" kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret--with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind "chop suey" cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like "ginger beef" and "Newfoundland chow mein," and other uniquely Canadian fare like the "Chinese pierogies" of Alberta. Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, begins her journey with a somewhat disparaging view of small-town "fake Chinese" food. But by the end, she comes to appreciate the essentially Chinese values that drive these restaurants--perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family's story as a touchstone, she explores the importance of these restaurants in the country's history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine should be recognized as quintessentially Canadian
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2019
Until we are free : reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada by
An anthology of writing addressing the most urgent issues facing the Black community in Canada. The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white assailant inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, which quickly spread outside the borders of the United States. The movement's message found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before them. Until We Are Free contains some of the very best African-Canadian writing on the hottest issues facing the Black community in Canada. It describes the latest developments in Canadian Black activism, organizing efforts through the use of social media, Black-Indigenous alliances, and more.
The Origin of Others by
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books--Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.
Islamophobia : understanding anti-Muslim racism through the lived experiences of Muslim youth by
The 9/11 terror attacks and the ensuing War on Terror have profoundly impacted Muslim communities across North America. Islamophobia: 'Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth' is a timely exploration of the experiences of young Canadian Muslims and the challenges they have encountered since 9/11. Through framing anti-Muslim racism, or 'Islamophobia, ' from a critical race perspective, Naved Bakali theorizes how racist treatment of Muslims in public and political spheres has been mediated through the War on Terror. Furthermore, he examines the lived experiences of Muslim youth as they navigate issues relating to race, gender, identity, and politics in their schools and broader society. This book uncovers systemic bias and racism experienced by Muslim youth in a climate that is increasingly becoming hostile towards Muslims. Ultimately, the findings detailed in this work suggest that anti-Muslim racism in the post-9/11 era is inextricably linked to the effects of the War on Terror in the North American context. Moreover, Islamophobia is also impacted by localized practices, policies, and nationalist debates. This book is a unique contribution to the field of anti-racism education as it examines systemic and institutionalized racism towards Muslims in Canadian secondary schools in the context of the War on Terror.
Indigenous Writes by
In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. In 31 essays, Chelsea explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories--Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.
New framings on anti-racism and resistance. Volume 1, anti-racism and transgressive pedagogies by
Using a critical anti-racism approach, contributors to this volume demonstrate and document the resistance and futurity possible when students, educators, administrators, policymakers, and community members engage in critical anti-racism education. Relying on contemporary educational issues and personal/political reflections, this collection of essays brings together a variety of new insights on anti-racism praxis. This volume speaks to readers who are working with or seeking new conceptual framings of race, white supremacy, and Indigeneity in order to work towards a politics of decolonization. New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance: Volume 2 - Resistance and the New Futurity provides new theoretical directions and practical applications for people engaged in the field of anti-racism.
Discrimination and Denial by
Champion sprinter Donovan Bailey said it, and this book confirms it. While racism may not be as blatant in Canada as in the United States, it does exist. Members of visible minority groups are discriminated against in employment, housing, and access to public services. The increasing visibility of hate groups and calls to restrict immigration mark the growing tension. Racist attitudes against Asians and Blacks, in particular, have seeped into the criminal justice system. Ironically, since 1960 it has been illegal in Ontario to track crime by race, making it difficult for researchers to collect data. The media, our primary source of information, has sensationalized crimes where minority groups are implicated. Clayton Mosher uses historical data and media reports to expose racism in Canada's social, legal, and criminal justice systems. He considers the social contexts of discrimination, legislation directed against minority groups, law enforcement, and court outcomes. At last, we are offered an objective assessment of racism in Canada. Discrimination and Denial is essential reading for judges, lawyers, police officers, social policy makers, and community leaders. Interpretations of recent events, such as the shooting of officer Todd Baylis by a fugitive alien and gang-style slayings in Toronto's Chinatown, are guaranteed to heat up the embers of public debate.
White Guys on Campus by
On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: "Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the "few bad apples" frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of "post- racialism."
Me and White Supremacy by
The New York Times andUSA Todaybestseller! "Layla Saad is one of the most important and valuable teachers we have right now on the subject of white supremacy and racial injustice."--New York Timesbestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacytakes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and nearly 100,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Updated and expanded from the original workbook, Me and White Supremacy,takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources. Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change.The numbers show that readers are ready to do this work--let's give it to them. Additional Praise for Me and White Supremacy: "Allyship means taking action. How? Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacyteaches readers exactly how to get past the paralysis of white fragility so that they can build bridges, not walls. Read the book, look deep within yourself, sit with your discomfort, and then act. This is how we can truly say we are doing everything we can to combat white supremacy."--Sophia Bush, award-winning actress and activist "She is no-joke changing the world and, for what it's worth, the way I live my life."--Anne Hathaway "Layla Saad moves her readers from their heads into their hearts, and ultimately, into their practice. We won't end white supremacy through an intellectual understanding alone; we must put that understanding into action." --Robin DiAngelo, author of New York Timesbestseller White Fragility
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by
"This is a book that was begging to be written. This is the kind of book that demands a future where we'll no longer need such a book. Essential." --Marlon James "The most important book for me this year." -Emma Watson Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for January/February 2018 Sunday Times Bestseller Winner of the British Book Awards Nonfiction Narrative Book of the Year Winner of the Jhalak Prize Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year Blackwell's Nonfiction Book of the Year Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by: NPR The Guardian The Observer The Brooklyn Rail Cultured Vultures Award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge was frustrated with the way that discussions of race and racism are so often led by those blind to it, by those willfully ignorant of its legacy. Her response, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, has transformed the conversation both in Britain and around the world. Examining everything from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, from whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge, and counter racism. Including a new afterword by the author, this is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today, and an essential handbook for anyone looking to understand how structural racism works.
Black writers matter by
An anthology of African-Canadian writing, Black Writing Matters offers a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose. As Whitney French says in her introduction, Black Writing Matters "injects new meaning into the word diversity [and] harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity." An "invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone," this collection feels particular to the Black Canadian experience
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
Antisemitism in Canada by
This book is the first collection of scholarly essays to treat the topic of antisemitism in Canada, a complete history of which has yet to be written. Eleven leading thinkers in the field examine antisemitism in Canada, from the colonial era to the present day, in essays which reflect the saga of the nation itself. The history of the Jewish community, its struggles and its fortunes is mirrored in the wider history of Canada, from Confederation to the present. The contributors cast light on Canadian antisemitism through a thorough examination of old and new tensions, including Anglo-French, east-west and Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Attitudes to Jews in pre-Confederation Canada, French Canada from Confederation to World War I as well as the interwar years, and in twentieth-century Ontario and Alberta from 1880-1950 are illustrated in various chapters. Of particular interest are the examinations of such well-known figures as Goldwin Smith, the greatly admired liberal historian of Victorian Canada, Adrien Arcand, the would-be Führer from Quebec, and James Keegstra and Ernst Züdel, of more recent notoriety. Analyses are also provided of Nazism and Canadian Protestantism and Jewish-Ukrainian relations since World War II. This is a complex and contentious subject; yet, to understand the ideas and forces that have sought to undermine the Jewish presence in Canada is to understand the dangers that threaten any democratic society, and thereby to guard against them. This compelling collection of essays offers intelligent, readable accounts of an area of Canadian history about which we know too little.
Chop suey nation : the Legion Cafe and other stories from Canada's Chinese restaurants by
In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included--her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn't yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how, after generations living in a poverty-stricken area of Guangdong, China, her family had somehow wound up in Canada. Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants weaves together Hui's own family history--from her grandfather's decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father's path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest "Western" kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret--with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind "chop suey" cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like "ginger beef" and "Newfoundland chow mein," and other uniquely Canadian fare like the "Chinese pierogies" of Alberta. Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, begins her journey with a somewhat disparaging view of small-town "fake Chinese" food. But by the end, she comes to appreciate the essentially Chinese values that drive these restaurants--perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family's story as a touchstone, she explores the importance of these restaurants in the country's history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine should be recognized as quintessentially Canadian
