Strange Fruit - Race, Racial Profiling, and the Myth of Official Multiculturalism in the Canadian Imaginary

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Interrogating the idea of race and its place within the discourse of official multiculturalism in the Canadian context, Rawle Agard investigates how race has been coded in popular media through a critical look at news articles from the Toronto Star’s coverage of: Philippe Rushton, human genome research, and racial profiling practiced by the Toronto Police Service. Although popular Canadian media appears, ostensibly, to be critical of racism, a closer examination of these articles reveals that it, nonetheless, maintains and perpetuates dominant perceptions of race as both an objective genetic entity and a permanent category extant to culture. Combining the semiotics of myth and tools derived from critical discourse analysis, Rawle reveals that a conservative racialized narrative lies beneath the liberal veneer of multiculturalism as a contemporary myth in Canadian nation-building. Moreover, racialized relations of power emergant trough the continuity of Canada’s nation-building project from its colonial past to its liberal present is exposed. In spite of itself, then, Canada’s colonial present, though officially multicultural, continues to bear very strange fruit: a racism de facto.