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

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.