If racism is an attitude that individuals learn from the society in which they grow up, then the law and a positive multicultural social policy can help to develop a more tolerant society.
Backhouse, however, disagrees with the view that we should reject racial distinctions in modern society. Although she agrees that such distinctions are absurd, she argues that the legacy of racism still "infects all of our institutions, relationships, and legal frameworks." Adopting a "race-neutral" or "colour blind" policy, she contends, only allows and condones the continuation of white supremacy across Canadian society. She therefore paradoxically resorts to the use of the very racial categories that she has denounced as absurd as part of her own analysis. She justifies this perpetuation of racialism on the grounds that such categories were socially meaningful in the past.
The question of what should happen in the present is, however, rather different. We cannot change the sins of history, but we do have the opportunity to make positive interventions in the present, and to transform society. In the fight against racism, racist attitudes can only be challenged from a non-racialist position -- as, for example, in the fight against racialist government policies in the treatment of the Innu of eastern Canada, a situation recently characterized by Survival International, the U.K.-based organization in support of tribal peoples, as "Canada's Tibet." The condition of the Innu gives the lie to any complacency about the treatment of First Nations and ethnic minorities in contemporary Canada. In showing how deeply racialist attitudes have been absorbed into the legal framework of Canadian society in the past, Backhouse's book gives Canadians all the more reason to continue contesting them today.
- Robert J. C. Young, “The race for equality” National Post (19 February 2000)
