Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case

In 1994, a white police officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assault and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Corrine Sparks - Canada’s first Black female judge - remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal was appealed and ultimately upheld, but most of the white judges who reviewed the decision critiqued Sparks’s comments. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada fumbled over its first complaint of judicial racial bias. This is an enthralling account of the country’s most momentous race case.