Part VI of a series on the history of race in Canada and the US. After the end of World War II, there was a significant shift in race-thinking. As the horrors of the holocaust came into popular awareness, it became less acceptable to talk about the differences between races in general, and white-supremacy in…
Part V of a series on the history of race in Canada and the US. As the western world was rebuilding itself in the wake of World War I, races continued to be seen as a ‘natural’ way of categorizing humans. During this time, Caucasian became more widely used to describe an increasingly broad range…
Part IV of a series on the history of race in Canada and the US. “To become White has often been constructed as synonymous with becoming truly American” (Maher, 1997, p. 4). The end of the civil war in the US and the resulting massive internal migration of African-Americans through the 1870s, as well as…
Part III of a series on the history of race in Canada and the US. Canada is often described as a “nation of immigrants.” This telling of history often includes “Canada’s present-day Indian and Inuit [who] became this country’s first immigrants when they journeyed to America by way of the Bering Strait” (Knowles, 2007, p….
Part II of a series on the history of race in Canada and the US. In the US, whiteness was enshrined by Congress as early as 1790, when “all free white persons” had the opportunity to become citizens. Although Congress included white in the definition of who could become a citizen, it did not articulate…
This is the first of a series that I will post on the history of race in Canada and the US. The word race, as it refers to biological or genetic differentiations among humans, first appeared in the english language in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the same time that Europeans arrived for…