Constance Backhouse Quotes

Canada, Scholar
February 19, 1952

Constance Barbara Backhouse, CM OOnt FRSC is a Canadian legal scholar and historian, specializing in gender and race discrimination. She is a Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. In addition to her academic publications, Backhouse is the author of several books on feminist- and race-related legal rights topics. Backhouse is President of the American Society of Legal History, and is the first non-US scholar to hold this position.

Also known as Historian

White people are so unappreciative, they don't even acknowledge and understand what it means to be white in Canada, and all the layers of privilege that come with that. So they're shocked when somebody says, 'What just happened is racist,' and they said, 'Oh no, couldn't possibly be.' They see racism as people with KKK gowns and pointy hoods with eyes cut out. And we had those too.

Constance Backhouse
- People
- Racism
- White
It's so Canada. On some level, you laugh, but on another level, it's just depressing. We pride ourselves: We're not like the bad old U.S. where they had segregation, whites-only washrooms and hotels. We think we were the capital of the Underground Railroad, we were the place to where the slaves escaped, we were a much better country. But in fact, some of the black people in Canada at the time said, 'It's actually much easier in the United States because you know which hotels, restaurants, theatres won't let you in because the signs are there. In Canada, you never know.'

Constance Backhouse
- Pride
- Ourselves
- Canada

We hide our racism. We just go on about our lives - may I say, white Canadians go on about their lives. African-Canadians understand racism, Indigenous Canadians understand racism: they see it all the time, they live with it.

Constance Backhouse
- Understand
- Racism
- Hide
I found Viola Desmond was the first woman whose case was taken up in the courts, and it wasn't that she tried to sue them for throwing her out of the theatre; it was that they took the law and used it to arrest her. That was really shocking to me. We had no laws in Canada actually requiring segregation, like they did in the United States. But here we had people using the law - the amusements tax act - to enforce segregation, and our courts allowed them to do that.

Constance Backhouse
- Law
- United States
- Canada
The Nova Scotian black community always remembered Viola Desmond - they didn't lose track of her, ever. Her memory was very much alive there, but the rest of us didn't know anything about her. It's just so typical of Canadians that we know Rosa Parks, in that "bad country to the south of us" - they needed this lovely, courageous woman to sit down in the front of the bus - but we wouldn't know ours, because of course we "don't have racism in Canada."

Constance Backhouse
- Country
- Racism
- Canada