Reckoning With Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case

A history of the first case brought against systemic anti-Black racism in Canada.

The Canadian Supreme Court considered a complaint against judicial racial bias for the first time in 1997. The nation's first Black woman justice, Corrine Sparks, heard the initial case: a white Halifax officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. In acquitting the teen, Sparks wrote that police often overreacted toward young people of color. A debate ensued about the tradition that the legal system was not racist in its ordinary course. Reckoning with Racism is a thorough study of the case, its debate, and its lasting effects on the Canadian legal system.