Accidental Opportunities

A Journey Through Many Doors, An Autobiography

Bridglal Pachai

Bridglal (Bridge) Pachai, a life long advocate of social justice, was born in a thatched roof cottage in Umbulwana, South Africa. His journey has taken him from South Africa to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along the way he has taught history at universities in South Africa, Malawi, The Gambia and Halifax. He has also served as director of the Black Cultural Centre in Nova Scotia and as director of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. In the words of Tom McInnis, his senior when Bridge was director… (more information)

Anti-Racism Education

Theory and Practice

George Dei

Dei argues that analyzing the intersections of race, class, gender and sexual oppression is essential if we are to fully address educational equity, social justice and change. He examines how we can value our differences while equitably sharing power, and discusses ways to counter the reproduction of societal inequalities in our schools. (more information)

Becoming an Ally, 2nd Edition

Breaking the Cycle of Oppression in People

Anne Bishop

Praise for the first Edition: After my second reading of Becoming An Ally, I see many more reprints of the well-argued, well-researched, nonpolemical but gentle and helpful book. Absorbing the topic is made that much easier by the comfortable and yet authoritative tone Ms. Bishop uses. The book makes a good friend. It listens and teaches, and it urges courage and trust. Heather Haas Barclay, Ontario Association of Social Workers Western Branch Newsletter, Sept. 2001 This new edition is expanded… (more information)

Black Canadians

History, Experience, Social Conditions

Joseph Mensah

This timely and overdue book brings into perspective the history, experience and social conditions of Black Canadians. It looks not just at recent Black immigrants to Canada but delves into their history. The first Black people came as slaves of the early European settlers. They were followed by Black loyalists and refugees from the civil war in the United States. But their numbers were small. It is only since the introduction of the “point system” in 1967 that Black people began to… (more information)

Calculated Kindness

Global Restructuring, Immigration and Settlement in Canada

Edited by Rose Baaba Folson

It has often been the perception that Northern states admit immigrants out of generosity, offering security and shelter to people forced from their own countries because of political and economic circumstances. This collection—based on case studies with immigrants—quickly dispels this myth. Immigrants are admitted to serve economic or demographic interests. They also serve to pay back the receiving countries’ own historical and political indebtedness. It is the North that both… (more information)

Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty

Welfare Fraud Enforcement in Canada

Wendy Chan, Kiran Mirchandani

The criminalization and penalization of poverty through increased surveillance and control of welfare recipients in recent years has led many poverty advocates to claim that “a war against the poor” is currently in progress. The authors argue that people of colour are most often the casualties in the governments’ desire to roll back the welfare state. Relying on myths and stereotypes about racial difference, the enforcement and policing of welfare fraud policies constructs people… (more information)

Experiencing Difference

Carl E. James

Difference is a fundamental aspect of our human existence. This anthology emerges from the editor’s attempts to navigate the complex, variable and unpredictable materiality of difference. The contributors present the various ways in which difference is experienced, interpreted and articulated. They tell of when and how they are named and/or recognized as different by others, and of their own naming and recognition of themselves as different. The essays show that gender, social class, ethnicity… (more information)

Immigration and the Legalization of Racism

Lisa Jakubowski

”The chameleon-like nature of the law–the duplicitous ways in which the law is written, the equivocal way in which it is stated and, therefore, talked about, the hiding of the truth about the resources which are expended in its implementation, the misleading way in which it casts the discretions it purports to take away and to give–its ideological functioning and its capacity to legitimate the illegitimate, all are put under the microscope in this study. It is a timely piece of… (more information)

Living the Experience

Migration, Exclusion, and Anti-Racist Practice

MacDonald E. Ighodaro

The book dissects issues facing refugees, immigrants, and other racialized minorities, both in Canada and globally, through a critical, anti-racist lens. It also investigates racist crimes, and public reaction to them, against the long-established African- Nova Scotian community. It moves beyond traditional theories by advancing an anti-racist framework toward migration and refugee studies using African refugees’ lived, and living, experiences in Canada. Based on theoretical, empirical, and… (more information)

Outsider Blues

A Voice from the Shadows

Olivia Rovinescu, Clifton Ruggles

”The articles that appear in this book originate in the shadows–those marginal spaces that black people have been forced to inhabit ever since the first slaves reached the shores of North America.” Ruggles tells us that “Black is more than just a racial category, it’s a way of viewing the world.” It is out of this set of eyes that Clifton Ruggles writes a column in the Montreal Gazette. This book is a collection of those columns and of Ruggles’ photographs… (more information)

Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education

A Critical Reader

Edited by Margarida Aguiar, Agnes Calliste, George Dei

This book addresses questions of anti-racism and its connections with difference in a variety of educational settings and schooling practices. The focus is on systems, structures and relations of domination, and particularly the racist, classist and sexist construction of reality that serve as dominant paradigms for viewing and interpreting lives and historical realities. The contributors contend that anti-racist concerns with difference matter only if they contribute to an understanding of difference… (more information)

Racism and Justice

Critical Dialogue on the Politics of Identity, Inequality and Change

Edited by Singh Bolaria, Sean P. Hier, Daniel Lett

The essays in this volume explore the prospect for post-raciality. It is common to find the prefix “post” treated as an epochal synonym for “after” or “beyond,” as somehow distinct from what came before. But the post as post-racial politics is better conceptualized in terms of a set of interrelated institutional and cultural changes that can neither be separated from historical relations nor which are reducible to the past. This volume presents a set of essays… (more information)

Social Inclusion

Canadian Perspectives

Edited by Ted Richmond, Anver Saloojee

How is the concept of social inclusion evolving in policy terms? Are we moving toward a common understanding or definition? What does social inclusion mean for issues like poverty and the growing racialization of poverty? What can we learn about social inclusion in theory and practice from the perspectives of the needs of children and their parents? What are the contributions of feminists and of the disability rights movement? What does social inclusion mean for Canada’s newcomers, for anti… (more information)

The Politics of Community Services (second edition)

Immigrant Women, Class and the State

Roxana Ng

“Students like it a lot. It is readable, although it offers a complex argument. It is practical and speaks to experiences that many (students) have had. It offers a model of what an empirical study using social organization of knowledge looks like.”–Marie Campbell, Social Work, University of Victoria (more information)

The Socialist Register 2003

Fighting Identities–Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism

Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch

September the 11th has forced many challenges upon the Western world. The recent attempts to impose preventative measures disguise the true involvement governments have in these conflicts and overshadow any real understanding of what this means to other parts of the world. Fighting Identities tackles the language and how groups are represented. Some of the questions the contributors set out to answer include: What are the roots of “fundamentalism”? Why have ethnic and religious conflict… (more information)

Walking This Path Together

Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Child Welfare Practice

Edited by Jeannine Carrière, Susan Strega

This book offers students and experienced practitioners alike the opportunity to explore a range of visions, strategies and concrete skills for anti-racist and anti-oppressive child welfare practice. Significant topics and emerging practice approaches are addressed by contributors who share a passionate commitment to the transformation of child welfare through socially just practices. The book challenges the current Anglo-American child welfare paradigm by centring Indigenous perspectives and voices… (more information)

You Must be a Basketball Player

Rethinking Integration in the University

Anthony Stewart

“Courageous and peerless, accessible and engaging, Stewart’s critique of the unseemly whiteness of the academy is a tour de force. His account of white academic privilege, homogeneity, cowardice, and hypocrisy with respect to matters of race and integration proceeds with keen insight and telling intellectual rigor. His analysis of white academia’s ‘theoretical’ evisceration of race and its practical and discursive actualities is nothing short of brilliant. The indictment… (more information)