Sherene Razack

Sherene Razack
Born	Trinidad and Tobago
Alma mater	University of Rennes 2; University of British Columbia; University of Ottawa; University of Toronto
Scientific career
Fields	Racial violence, women's studies, feminism, critical race theory
Institutions	Department of Gender Studies at UCLA; Social Justice Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
Website	Racialviolencehub.com

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Sherene Razack (/ʃəˈriːn ˈræzæk/) is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles.^[1] As a feminist critical race scholar, her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network Racial Violence Hub (RVHub).^[2] Formerly a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race and Gender Studies in the Department of Social Justice, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1991-2016), she relocated to the United States from Canada in 2016. Sherene H. Razack is of Caribbean (Trinidadian) origin.^[3]

Education[]

Razack attended l'Université de Haute Bretagne where she obtained a certificate in French studies in 1976.^[4] In 1977, Razack continued her studies at the University of British Columbia where she earned a bachelor's degree and honors in history.^[5] In 1979, Razack completed a master's degree in history at the University of Ottawa.^[6] In 1989, Razack completed her doctoral degree in the field of education at the University of Toronto.^[7]

Recurring themes in work[]

A feminist critical race scholar, Razack has published six single-authored books and three edited and co-edited collections, as well as over eighty journal articles and book chapters.^[8] Her publications illustrate the thematic areas and anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist scholarship she pursues. 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."^[9] 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.

Overview of major works[]

Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women's Legal Education Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (1991)[]

In her first book, Razack explores the history of a Canadian legal feminist organization. In Canada, no organization has been more active in fighting the inequalities of the law than the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), a feminist advocacy group established to bring forward cases under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a penetrating analysis of women’s rights before the law, Razack considers the history of LEAF and its work. She begins by exploring the language of rights in liberal theory and the impact of postmodernist thought. Razack then considers the role of women in the legal system, and how the law fails to address adequately the situation of women. She reviews the cases on which LEAF has focused, the legal issues involved, and the feminist principles which come into play. In total, she has compiled a compelling case study of legal advocacy with implications for all those struggling to create a more equitable body of law.^[10]

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

Razack traces the many ways in which sexual and racial violence against both Indigenous women and women of color disappear in the law into a story about national goodness. The work on racialized bodies and the law revealed an important feature of the law’s response to violence. Sexual and racial violence is often culturalized in law, that is, reduced to a cultural practice associated with racialized communities. Individuals come to participate in these processes through understanding themselves as members of more civilized communities and nations, as innocent and as the savior of women of color from their “barbaric” communities. Underpinning all of Razack’s work is a methodology that is based on the idea that systems of domination rely on each other. The idea of interlocking oppressions is one of her most important contributions to theory and practice and was first fully articulated in this book.^[11]

Looking White People in the Eye received honorable mention as one of the ten best books in 1998 in North America and was republished in 1998, 1999, 2001, and 2006.

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

In Dark Threats and White Knights, Razack argues that the national mythology of peacekeeping enabled Canadians to consider themselves as the world’s humanitarians while at the same time it masked practices of exploitation and violence in the aftermath of the Somalia Affair. The work illustrates how a racial logic has structured humanitarian intervention and highlights the military and racial masculinities on which such practices depend. In 2004, the book won the American Association of Political Science award for best book on race.^[12]

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

Through case studies of race and national security in Canada, the United States and Europe, Razack argues that the world is increasingly governed by the logic of the exception where whole populations are abandoned and denied the benefit of the rule of law on the basis that they are a lower order of humanity that threatens the body politic.  Exploring the practices that define the contemporary securitized state, practices that include the suspension of rights for those suspected of involvement in terrorism, and the close monitoring, surveillance and detention of refugees and migrants in the West, the book focuses on the gendered dimensions of the War on Terror.^[13]

Casting Out was republished in 2009. In 2011, the French translation, La Chasse Aux Musulmans. Evincer Les Musulmans de L’Espace Politique, was released.^[14]

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

Dying from Improvement explores state violence against Indigenous peoples. The book makes the argument that Indigenous peoples are a disposable population, incarcerated at ever increasing rates, dying in custody and living under conditions that express the settler state’s logic that such communities have no place in the modern. In settler societies, disposability is accomplished through the logic that Indigenous peoples cannot be killed since they are dying anyway. States achieve their sovereignty through the marking of certain groups as disposable. There are gender differences in patterns of disposability, however. Indigenous women find themselves treated as “wasted life” in circumstances involving sex (either forced or contracted for because they are presumed to be available for little else besides sexual consumption.^[15]

Notable work[]

Pamela George case[]

was a 28-year-old Ojibwe woman with two children, 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.^[16] 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.^[17] George succumbed to these injuries and was found dead in a muddy ditch outside of Regina.^[18] Due to the severity of the beatings George's family chose to have a close-casket funeral.^[19] On January 31, 1997, both men were convicted of manslaughter and were sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison.^[20]

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.^[21] 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.^[22] 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.^[23] 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 Malone'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.^[24] In her essay, Razack argues that white bodies enact violence and degradation on the gendered, racialized "Other" to confirm their own identity as white.^[25] 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.^[26] 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.^[27] 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.^[28][29]

Razack argues that Malone'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.^[30] All 329 passengers and crew members died.^[31] Most of these victims were of Indian descent and 280, or 85.1%, were citizens of Canada.^[32] The main suspects in the attacks were the terrorist Sikh group Babbar Khalsa.^[33]

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.^[34][35] 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.^[36] 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."^[37] 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.^[38] 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.^[39] 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.^[40]

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.^[41] 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.^[42] 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.^[43] 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."^[44] 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.^[45]

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.^[46] 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.^[47] The letter and a Pro-Palestine petition it introduced were emailed to the University of Toronto's student body and faculty.^[48] The letter was signed by 15 professors from the U of T, and 22 professors not affiliated with the university.^[49] 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."^[50] 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."^[51] According to the organisation, the letter created an atmosphere in which Jewish students, associated to Israel because of their religion, were subject to anti-Semitic 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."^[52] Another spokeswoman echoed this idea, re-affirming that the "U of T does not muzzle its community when it comes to political discourse."^[53] 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."^[54] The link to the letter and the petition were removed from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) website in late August 2002.^[55]

Select publications[]

Below is a partial list of Razack's publications.

As author[]

• Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women's Legal Education and Action Funds 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)

Book chapters[]

• “In the Vestibule of the Nation.” In Remembering Air India. The Art of Public Mourning. Eds. Chandrima Chakrborty, Amber Dean & Angela Failler. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017.
• “The Impact of Systemic Racism on Canada’s Pre-Bombing Threat Assessment and Post-Bombing Response to the Air India Bombings.” In Remembering Air India. The Art of Public Mourning. Eds. Chandrima Chakrborty, Amber Dean & Angela Failler. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017.
• “A Hole in the Wall, A Rose at A Checkpoint.” In Apartheid in Palestine. Hard Laws and Harder Experience. Ghada Ageel, editor. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016.
• “The Manufacture of Torture as Public Truth: The Case of Omar Khadr.” In At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror. Eds. Suvendrini Perera and Sherene Razack, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
• “From the Somalia Affair to Canada’s Afghan Detainee Torture Scandal: How Stories of Torture Define the Nation.” In Empire’s Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan. Eds. Jerome Klassen and Greg Albo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
• “We didn’t kill ‘em, we didn’t cut their head off”: Abu Ghraib Revisted. In Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, Eds. Daniel Martinez Hosang, Oneka LaBennett and Laura Pulido. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
• "Colonization: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” In Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada. Eds. Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi. Vancouver: UBC Press: 2011.
• “Abandonment and the Dance of Race and Bureaucracy in Spaces of Exception.” In States of Race. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010.
• “Geopolitics, Culture Clash and Gender.” Reprinted in The Politics of Race in Canada. Readings in Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Realities, and Future Possibilities. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• “When Place Becomes Race.” In Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, Ed. Sherene Razack. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002.
• “Simple Logic”: Race, The Identity Documents Rule and the Story of A Nation Besieged and Betrayed.” In Crossroads, Directions, And A New Critical Race Theory, Eds. Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris. Phil.: Temple University Press, 2002.
• "Your place or mine: Transnational feminist collaboration." In Anti-Racism Feminism: Critical race and gender studies, Eds. George Dei and Agnes Calliste. Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2000.

Select honors and awards[]

• 2018: Special Issue of Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Vol. 30, No. 3 dedicated to scholarship inspired by Razack.^[56]
• 2016: Distinguished Professor Award, University of Toronto.^[57]
• 2008, 2002: University of Toronto Connaught Fellowship.^[58]
• 2004: Counterpunch’s Edward Said award for the ten top books on empire, given for Dark Threats and White Knights
• 2003: Canadian Association of Law and Society, Award for best article published in Canadian Journal of Law and Society 2000-2002. Award given for article “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice.”^[59]

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"