Strange Fruit

Interrogating the idea of race and its place within thediscourse of official multiculturalism in the Canadian context,Rawle Agard investigates how race has been coded in popular mediathrough a critical look at news articles from the Toronto Star'scoverage of: Philippe Rushton, human genome research, and racialprofiling practiced by the Toronto Police Service. Although popularCanadian media appears, ostensibly, to be critical of racism, acloser examination of these articles reveals that it, nonetheless,maintains and perpetuates dominant perceptions of race as both anobjective genetic entity and a permanent category extant toculture. Combining the semiotics of myth and tools derived fromcritical discourse analysis, Rawle reveals that a conservativeracialized narrative lies beneath the liberal veneer ofmulticulturalism as a contemporary myth in Canadiannation-building. Moreover, racialized relations of power emerganttrough the continuity of Canada's nation-building project from itscolonial past to its liberal present is exposed. In spite ofitself, then, Canada's colonial present, though officiallymulticultural, continues to bear very strange fruit: a racism defacto.