Doing Justice To and With: Decolonized (Un)Learning of Slavery in Canada at McGill’s Faculty of Law
Yuan Stevens, Autumn 2016
In the collection of short stories called Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, editor Walidah Imarisha writes that, “[w]henever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.”[1]
The collection is named after Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose work is understood by Imarisha as “visionary fiction” — fiction that “form[s] the foundation for the fantastic” and “build[s] a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.”[2] Visionary fiction, Imarisha writes, “encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice.”[3] And it is this space that is vital for any process of decolonization — particularly of our imaginations — because it is there where “all other forms of decolonization are born.”[4]
In our Slavery and the Law course, we have also invariably crafted our own visionary reality from our collective imaginings. This required first for us to (un)learn and finally, to dream. So we did (un)learn and we continue to dream. Photography archivist Joanna Sassoon has observed that we can only do justice with archived material when we do justice to it.[5] In a keynote speech delivered to a rapt audience in Montréal, she asserted that photography, particularly in the context of Indigenous people vis-à-vis the State, can only be emancipatory and revolutionary for reconciliation when its archiving and representation is participatory and led from within. Only then, she stated, can the subjects of archived material avoid the thin, unilateral retelling of their stories for other purposes.
Through our (un)learning, the Slavery and the Law course has emancipated us from some colonized and fixed ways of thinking. This course has offered us a new way of knowing the law, ourselves, and Canada as a slave society. Through these new modes of learning and knowing, we have done justice to these critical stories. We are therefore compelled to do justice with the narratives of slave society in Canada to which this course has opened our eyes.
Below, I explore the meaning that key course material and experiences have held for me as it relates to both teaching and learning slavery and the law particularly at McGill University. I canvas steps that make up what I see as a continual process of decolonized (un)learning, imagining and doing justice to and with. Such steps do not necessarily happen in a specific order and as we shall see, can quite easily occur at the same time: through courageous vulnerability, our curiosity leads to dissatisfaction with our understanding; we also adopt new habits of learning and discussing questions to which the law should respond; and finally, we resist the status quo through reframing.[6]
I begin first with the necessity of our decision to be vulnerable as a precursor to curiosity and dissatisfaction with our knowledge. In a class discussion with Afua Cooper, author of The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal, I asked Cooper how she wanted to reframe people’s understanding of slavery in Canada. She responded that her dream is that her readers have as many frames as possible, “so that people wouldn’t be surprised by history.”[7]
Through dissatisfaction with our own understanding and channeling this dissatisfaction into acted-upon curiosity, we, as students of the law, signal the incompleteness of our knowledge. This signaling allows us to integrate new frames in our understanding of Black people’s experiences of racism in Canada and the systemic discrimination and oppression to which Black have been and are continually made subject.
Indeed, it was undoubtedly in order to satisfy our curiosity that McGill law students decided to enroll in our Slavery and the Law course this term. Yet quite sadly and perhaps not surprisingly, I have experienced a pervasive fear in the law faculty of not knowing. Both students and professors alike are complicit in this fear of vulnerability. For example, I have taken some courses with professors who respond to some students’ questions as though these questions are not intelligent. The result is that McGill law students are often afraid to ask what could be basic questions (that many may be wondering), allowing fear of what a professor or some classmates may think of them to override the quality of what and how they learn.
Another interesting phenomenon I have noticed relates to the primacy of the rule of law and how this may affect students’ relationship to the texts that they read. It was only in my third year of studying law that I realized that it is not always my own fault when I find something difficult to understand. Asking certain types of questions is often discouraged by professors in law school, who encourage students to perform their perceived intelligence levels. Published texts such as legislation and case law are also seen as holding significant power as extensions of the rule of law, which relies on the interpretive and discursive power of these documents.
Because of these factors, it seems that students may believe that failing to understand a given legal text or piece of academic writing is necessarily not their own fault, but can, in fact, relate to unclear, vague, or simply poor writing or reasoning. Thus the institution of law, while predicated upon a thirsting curiosity for how the law evolves, can actively discourage the vulnerability that allows a person to signal dissatisfaction with what and how they know.
But it is up to us — as perpetual students of decolonized learning and knowing — to courageously reject such fear of vulnerability. We ought to claim, first in our minds, the truth that we do deserve to be here despite any historic exclusion. And before we do justice to and with materials that unearth hidden realities about Canada as a slave society, we ought to realize that we have much to contribute to conversations in law school about how law, society and race relations intersect. As a matter of fact, it is our duty to ask the difficult questions that upend our previous ways of learning and knowing as they relate to Canada as a slave society and the continued oppression of Black people in society.
How else do we facilitate habits of (un)learning — particularly in McGill’s Faculty of Law — that give rise to shared recognition of all the possible frames of understanding with respect to Canada as a slave society? Indeed, this has been the work of each author whose material we read in our slavery and the law course, which is one reason why the offering of this course at McGill’s law faculty has been crucial. Nothing in my three years of legal education, save for this course (perhaps because I have not yet taken the course Critical Race Theory), has so clearly and potently explained the origins of racism in Canada. Through Cooper’s writing on the history, life and court transcription of Angélique, we have traced the genesis of Canada’s modern-day race relations, wherein Black people are continually robbed of their ability to be understood as full, complex human beings and citizens who deserve dignity and humanity of treatment — to use the words of multiple interviewees in Ava DuVernay’s landmark documentary 13th.[8]
Take the tragic, recent death of Darius Brown, a 17 year-old Black teen who was a “positive” person and was loved by his community in Montreal (some of them being my own friends).[9] It was through community activists that mainstream media were compelled to write about the police’s initial reporting as to the cause of Darius’s death. At first, Montreal police erroneously stated that Darius had died as a result of a fall while attempting to rob a 19 year-old woman.[10] The police later recanted this story; surveillance videos and autopsy reports revealed that Darius’s death was a suspected homicide. It is armed with an understanding of the historical reality of Canada’s race relations that we can be in agreement with Montreal activists, who contend that such misreporting stems from “an automatic association of young black men and crime.”[11]
If preconceived, stereotypical notions about black Canadians are one frame through which we can understand race relations, another frame this course has taught me is one that involves the necessity of mourning. That is exactly what both M. NourbSe Philip’s masterful book of poetry (Zong!) and Barrington Walker’s essay collection inspire in us: the need to mourn with and for those who have been subject to human servitude, subject to the justice system’s injustices, or even tragically subject to murder all in the name of economic dominance — despite the fact that we in law school have been conditioned not to exhibit the vulnerability required to do so.[12] By mourning, we disrupt law school’s status quo.
As jurists whose work can contribute to academic and popular understandings of race relations and the law, we can also learn from slave narratives in other colonized territories that reveal the power of multiple frames. Caroline Fick’s analysis in The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below demonstrates that the enslaved masses in Haiti reconfigured the ethical and legal productivities of landholding as a means of obtaining freedom, social identity, and dignity.[13] And Lea VanderVelde’s socio-legal historiography, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier, instantiates the truth that the plight of Black people in North America is intimately linked with that of Aboriginal North American peoples — as two communities who have been subject to European colonization in light of the primacy of property and contractual rights as fundamental tenets of legal and classical liberalism.[14]
By doing justice to the writings and content of the narratives in the material assigned in our course, we have disrupted the form and logic of legal education. We have upended not only what is studied (slavery in the Canadian context) but have also done so empathically, dialectically, and critically.
Through our (un)learning, we are emancipated from colonized ways of knowing the law, which wrongfully tells us that we in Canada are largely innocent of being a slave society and of modern-day racism, especially when compared to those south of the border.
We are therefore compelled to do justice with these narratives through our courageous choices to dream; to build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane; to be vulnerable enough to be actively curious and to mourn in law school; to facilitate habits of learning that allow others to see all the possible frames with respect to Canadian race relations; and to thereby avoid the thin, unilateral telling of slave narratives for other purposes. For it is through our enactment of these duties that we will stare injustice straight in the eye — all the while fighting for the dignity and humanity particularly of Black people in Canada, North America, and across the globe today.
→ References
[1] Walidah Marisha, in “Introduction” adrienne maree brown & Walidah Marisha eds, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (California: AK Press) 3 at 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Joanna Sassoon, “Photographs for Justice – Justice for Photographs: Evidence, Archives and Reconciliation across the Digital Divide” (Lecture delivered at À partir d’aujourd’hui … Reconsidering postphotography, Montréal, Canada, 2 October 2015) [unpublished].
[6] I do indeed recapitulate some conclusions reached in my previous response papers but do so pointedly, discursively and empathically.
[7] Afua Cooper, (Lecture at Slavery and the Law Course, McGill University, Faculty of Law, 19 September 2016) [unpublished].
[8] Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal, (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006); Alissa Wilkinson, “Ava DuVernay's new Netflix documentary traces a damning line between slavery and mass incarceration” Vox (7 October 2016), online: http://www.vox.com/2016/10/7/13057508/13th-movie-review-ava-duvernay-mass-incarceration.
[9] Emily Brass and Stephen Smith, “'How come you can't come home?': Parents, teachers mourn Montreal teen Darius Brown” CBC News (19 November 2016), online: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/how-come-you-can-t-come-home-parents-teachers-mourn-montreal-teen-darius-brown-1.3859203.
[10] Cecilia MacArthur, “Montreal police's mistake in reporting teen's death racially based, activists say” CBC News (23 November 2016), online: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/darius-brown-montreal-police-1.3864401.
[11] Ibid.
[12] M. NourbeSe Philip (As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng), Zong! (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
[13] Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, (Knoxville, Tennesse: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
[14] Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), citing Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
→ A huge thanks to Alexandra Lily Kather for lending me adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s book during our work together at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, Germany in 2016.