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Download Download Ethno-racial Legal Clinics and the Praxis of Critical Race Theory in Canada Vincent Wong ABSTRACT Critical race theory (CRT) is a helpful theoretical lens to understand the origins and practices of five ethno-racial legal clinics in the province of Ontario. Both the development of a distinctly Canadian CRT scholarship and the day-to-day work of ethno-racial legal clinics would be mutually enriched by a much closer and robust union between scholarship and praxis. In particular, the praxis of Ontarian ethno-racial legal clinics is put into conversation with Amna A. Akbar’s vision in “Toward a Radical Imagination of the Law,” which outlines a profoundly transformative standard of CRT that broadens the analysis of racial power to look at how the law, capitalism, and the state may operate in tandem to produce intersectional inequality. Based on the theoretical tenets of CRT, this article traces the development of ethno-racial legal clinics and their unique praxis and, using the insight of “looking to the bottom” as an epistemological approach to law, demonstrates that ethno-racial community legal clinics provide a useful vehicle to understand structural racism. CRT can therefore offer a robust theoretical framework to support the cause of advancing racial justice through legal practice. Ethno-racial legal clinics embrace a democratic approach to the law that has the potential to transform traditional forms of legal representation by engaging in systemic advocacy and community outreach and aligning advocacy efforts with social movements to help build community power and facilitate broader social change. However, they also face institutional pressures that pull their practice of the law back towards traditional models—pressures that they must delicately navigate in their day-to-day work. BCom (Toronto), JD (Toronto), LLM (Columbia). Vincent Wong is a William C Graham Research Associate in the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and a PhD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. The author wishes to thank Angela Hou, Amit Singh, Denise Réaume, and Ngozi Okidegbe for their invaluable editorial comments. He would also like to thank Kendall Thomas and fellow classmates in the Critical Race Theory Workshop at Columbia Law School, where this article was first presented. Finally, the author would like to thank his former colleagues, clients, and community partners at the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic for the privilege of working with them, learning from them, and struggling together in the fight for racial justice. 64 CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN CANADA VOL. 16 To be able to have a combination of individual client representation, along with community organizing, advocacy for law reform, political change, networking with other groups—this is so much more powerful than just having a system where you represent one client after another. And to have access to clients, as opposed to just being an advocacy organization where you just try to get into the media or get to meetings with politicians—that also is not strong enough. So it is this magical combination that makes the legal clinic system effective in terms of broadening change—more permanent and systemic change.1 — Gary Yee, former executive director, Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic I. INTRODUCTION During the first few months of my time in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, I was seriously considering dropping out. As someone who had emigrated from Hong Kong as a child and grew up in the working-class, racially diverse milieu of Scarborough, the law school seemed worlds away from any reality with which I was familiar. Growing up, I lived in a neighbourhood where race and racial identity were openly negotiated, disputed, and formed a continuing and important part of our lives. Walking through the law school’s halls, I was bombarded with images and busts of almost exclusively white, male lawyers and judges, who were honoured and revered as paragons of virtue, justice, and knowledge. While I made friends easily at my undergraduate program housed just five minutes away, at law school I felt out of place, isolated, and alone. Although there were other law students of colour, I sensed that sharing too much of your identity or raising concerns about race and power was frowned upon. The faculty was completely devoid of Black law professors. Similarly, the curriculum and course offerings seemed to entirely avoid the discussion of race or merely mentioned it in passing, even though they partially touched on Indigenous issues and topics that overlapped heavily with race and racialization, such as immigration law, criminal law, and 1 Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic (CSALC), “30th Anniversary Snapshot: Tiananmen Square” (12 October 2017) at 00h:00min:06s, online (video): YouTube <youtube.com> [perma.cc/H5AP-8MCW] [CSALC, “30th Anniversary Snapshot”]. I was involved in interviewing a number of former clinic board members, staff, partners, and stakeholders for the thirtieth anniversary video series. VOL. 16 JOURNAL OF LAW & EQUALITY 65 poverty law. There was no critical race theory (CRT) course and scarcely a mention of the scholarship’s existence. There was also little mention of the fact that intersectionality—a crucially important concept in understanding substantive inequality—constituted one of CRT’s key tenets.2 The message I received from my law school education was that race was an irrelevant factor in the daily life of the law in Canada. However, this was at odds with the reality I lived and observed in Scarborough and with the reality of institutional whiteness I was navigating at the law school. In CRT, personal narratives speak to systems of power. In that vein, I recall this personal story to lament—both then and now—the underdeveloped state of CRT in Canadian legal scholarship, its invisibility to Canadian law students and lawyers, 3 its limited application and engagement with racial justice movements in Canada, and the understudied work of ethno-racial legal clinics that are at the front lines of the praxis of using the law to advance the goals of racial, gender, and socio-economic justice. 4 This situation persists, despite the admirable contributions and work of the limited number of Canadian critical race legal scholars. As expressed by Shanthi Senthe and Sujith Xavier, “[i]n Canada, critical race theory has evolved slowly and incorporates different perspectives.”5 I also recall this personal story to share with other past, current, and prospective law students of colour how close I was to abandoning a legal education altogether as well as what ultimately motivated me to stay.6 My 2 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics” (1989) 1:8 U Chicago Legal F 139 [Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing”]. 3 Ibid at 140. 4 As a matter of definition, I use the term “ethno-racial” to describe the categorization of communities serviced by these legal clinics to reflect the unique way in which ethnicity (as defined by a social group distinguished by common ancestry or cultural tradition) overlaps and interacts with race (as defined by a social group distinguished by common observable phenotypes and behaviours that are socially significant). Additionally, I posit that ethno-racial is more appropriate than merely racial in explaining the primacy of ethnicity in contouring the specific communities served by both the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALC) and the CSALC. For more on the origins of Canadian scholarship on ethno-racial subordination and socioeconomic stratification, see “Ethnicity and Social Class” in John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965) at 60. 5 See Shanthi Senthe & Sujith Xavier, “Introduction: Re-Igniting Critical Race In Canadian Legal Spaces: Introduction to the Special Symposium Issue of Contemporary Accounts of Racialization in Canada” (2013) 31:2 Windsor YB Access Just 1 at 2. 6 Every individual’s approach to, and experience with, the law is informed by experience and personal location. I stayed in the practice of law to spend several years working as a lawyer for the CSALC. However, that experience would have never materialized had it not been 66 CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN CANADA VOL. 16 experience in navigating the erasure of race at law school mirrors the predominant ideology in Canada that race is no longer (or has never been) an organizing structure for dominance and subordination. This idea obfuscates the material ways in which the exercise of racial power has historically and presently structured economic, social, political, and legal outcomes.7 This ideology of colour-blindness helps explain the erasure of racial analysis in the law and legal institutions.8 To combat this tendency, I use CRT in this article as a theoretical lens by which to understand the origins and practices of five ethno-racial legal clinics in the province of Ontario. The five legal clinics are: the Chinese and South Asian Legal Clinic (CSALC); the African Canadian Legal Clinic (ACLC), which is now the Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC);9 the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO); the Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples (CSSP); and Aboriginal Legal Services (ALS). I start by laying the theoretical foundations of CRT as a vehicle for critical analysis. Against this backdrop, I trace the development of ethno-racial legal clinics and their praxis of a unique combination of critical race analysis, community lawyering, and political activism. Both the development of a distinctly Canadian CRT scholarship and the day-to-day work of ethno- racial legal clinics would be mutually enriched by a much closer and robust union between scholarship and praxis. The CRT tenet of “looking to the bottom” as an epistemological approach to law supports studying the work of ethno-racial legal clinics to better understand the experience of intersectionally marginalized groups and their relationship with the law.
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