For the 102th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion last week, CBC Nova Scotia drew attention to a new study arguing that the Halifax Relief Commission systematically favoured white relief claimants over African-Canadian claimants
The study, "Racism and Relief Distribution in the Aftermath of the Halifax Explosion" by Mark Culligan and Katrin MacPhee (respectively a community legal worker and a lawyer, both with historical training) argues:
The HRC’s relief policies systemically discriminated African Nova Scotian claimants. The majority of African Nova Scotians in 1917 did not own real estate and were precariously employed low-waged workers concentrated in informal sectors of the economy. The HRC prioritized the compensation of lost property, not lost wages. When it did compensate wage earners, it tended to compensate regularly employed, skilled workers, and not workers in the sectors of the economy where African Nova Scotians were predominantly employed. This study therefore illustrates that disaster relief efforts that prioritize reinforcing the pre-disaster social order over meeting the needs of victims can perpetuate the inequalities suffered by oppressed groups.and that
while class mattered for all claimants, African Nova Scotian claimants were still undercompensated for their Explosion losses compared to white working-class claimants.The article also criticizes the "romanticization" of the Halifax explosion in historical scholarship. Perhaps due to the time lags of academic publication, the article does not engage with most 2017 writings on the explosion and relief, though it challenges an article drawn from David Sutherland's 2017 book We Harbor no Evil Design”: Rehabilitation Efforts after the Halifax Explosion of 1917 which, while noting the history of racial discrimination in early 20th century Halifax, concluded that after the explosion African Nova Scotians "were given unrestricted access to public health care, and, while evidence is limited, they appear not to have been discriminated against over the issuance of cash allowances or disability and widows’ pensions."
(Thx: Mark Reynolds)
