of its history in educational settings and in popular culture does not mention nor reflect the slave trade that occurred on its soil. As an educational mammoth, it is dangerous for McGill not to acknowledge its dark history, and, more importantly, not to offer a program on anything relating to Black Canadian studies. What is even worse is the devastatingly low number of professors of colour employed by the vast institution, signifying McGill’s lack of progression with respect to diversity, and its continued subconscious upholding of systemic oppression.
Throughout my legal education at this Faculty, I have constantly been burdened by a weight of oppression, whether it be induced by classmates in the corridors, racially insensitive discussions within classrooms or, more frequently, in the legal texts and materials that I am forced to read. While I have been able to carve out safe spaces to combat the lonely feeling of being one out of four Black students in my class of 180 through clubs such as the Black Law Students Association of McGill.
but has served as a healing process.
By Aliah El-houni
I am by no means an expert in critical race or feminism, but I am often alarmed at the lack of familiarity with these subjects among my cohort here at McGill. Somehow an area of study that is the foundation of my interest in law, that informs all my decisions and all of my engagements, is viewed as peripheral and unnecessary by many of my classmates. While we happily engage in long conversations about adjacent issues such as democracy, civil liberties, and human rights, turning the conversation towards racial profiling or the absence of women of colour in the legal framework is met at best with silence and at worst with active resistance and shaming. This is not an equitable or productive environment. I believe in the capacity of my fellow students and I to work together to make change in the legal profession. The students with whom I have shared this class are
among my closest friends, my present and my future colleagues with whom I hope to practice law with in new and innovative ways. While twenty-five potential partners is a blessing, it would be even better to to have one hundred and eighty.
The study of slavery and its legacies in the law should be mandatory learning for all law students. Only then will our faculty begin to create an equitable and “neutral” learning environment, as opposed to one that stifles the voices and ambitions of students who have lived with this legacy.
By Simone Akyianu
Legal curriculum has often reproduced and rationalized a skewed version of history, which maintains mythologies about the triumphs of legal liberalism and human rights law in eradicating North America’s ugly past of slavery and racial discrimination. Critical legal education has the potential to disrupt dominant ideologies and
power relations in and outside of of the legal academy. Education functions both as a tool of “colonization and
[of] emancipation.” In its colonizing affinity, mainstream education tends “to assimilate and domesticate in the name of progress and prosperity and even in the name of equality and liberty.” This is made possible by including and omitting certain knowledge and perspectives from the substantive content of legal curriculum.
McGill University is not immune to this colonizing tendency. For instance, in my first year torts class, we were assigned to read Parker v Richards. I remember feeling disappointed by the lack of space given to critically interrogating the case in terms of the race, gender and class dynamics. I wondered: why was this tragic case the first time I was being introduced to an Indigenous litigant? Why did we not deconstruct the racist assumptions underlying insurance law and tort victim “valuation”? After taking Slavery and the Law, the case took on new meaning for me as I became acutely aware of how entrenched the logic of slavery is in seemingly neutral legal instruments like contracts and
Legal curriculum has often reproduced and rationalized a skewed version of history, which maintains mythologies about the triumphs of legal liberalism and human rights law in eradicating North America’s ugly past of slavery and racial discrimination
The opportunity to critically engage with the law and subject matter through a historical lens of oppression has not only been truly enlightening,
6 BLawyerisH/March, 2017