History of ... football? racism? wierdness?

Connoisseurs of the stories of Grey Owl and Long Lance and other white men personifying indigenous people may be the only ones not astonished by the story of William "Lone Star" Dietz, a German American who passed himself off as Sioux (or whatever) while pursuing a career as a football player and coach. He became the first coach of what became Washington, DC's new professional football team in 1935, and it was renamed the Redskins -- because of Dietz!

History of anti-black racism: the reading list

From the archives of the New York Times, "A History of Race and Racism in 24 Chapters" in which Ibram X. Kendi proposes one book a decade from the 1770s to the 2000s on the black experience in the United States.

No list can ever be comprehensive, and “most influential” by no means signifies “best.” But I would argue that together, these works tell the history of anti-black racism in the United States as painfully, as eloquently, as disturbingly as words can. In many ways, they also tell its present.

Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herbert Spencer, Margaret Mitchell, Gunnar Myrdal, Malcolm X  -- it's some list 

History of Fred Christie

In 1987 James W. St.G Walker, a historian  (a "white" or EuroCanadian historian, I might say) at the University of Waterloo, published “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada, which proved to be a groundbreaking work both in the history of racial issues in Canada and in Canadian legal history.

Once of its case studies was Christie v. York, a 1939 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which held that the York Tavern at the Montreal Forum was within its rights in refusing to serve Fred Christie, a black chauffeur hockey fan, because the tavern's freedom of commerce ("Any merchant is free to deal as he may choose with any individual member of the public.") negated Christie's claim to equal treatment.

This month marks the 80th anniversary of the decision (now-overruled -- but only since the Quebec Charter of Rights came into effect in 1975).  Montreal human rights activists wanted to find out a bit more about Fred Christie, who was believed to have left Montreal soon after the decision.

Well, Fred Christie died in 1985, but they found his descendants, with some help from CBC News. It's a nice story, and it even gives credit to Jim Walker's pioneering historical research.   

History of Race and the Halifax Explosion

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)