Open Your Eyes: Teaching and Learning about Anti-Asian Racism and the Law in Canada

Recently, policymakers, institutional actors, and the public have made greater efforts towards being attentive to issues relating to anti-racism and discrimination, as well as equity, diversity, and inclusion more broadly, prompted in part by growing calls for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and the increasing visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, there has been a relative dearth of attention paid to the specific ways in which anti-Asian racism manifests and is maintained, particularly in the Canadian context. More than just being a relic of the past, anti-Asian racism is an ongoing phenomenon both within and beyond Canada’s borders, as events in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have painfully demonstrated. 

This article identifies some of the ways that laws and policies have contributed and continue to contribute to the oppression of Asian people in Canada. It considers the role of legal education in both perpetuating and addressing systemic racism, especially vis-à-vis Critical Race Theory and the recent backlash against it and argues that members of the legal profession—and by extension, the law schools that educate them—have a professional and moral responsibility to take seriously the historic and contemporary experiences of exclusion to which all marginalized groups have been subjected. In so doing, it emphasizes the importance of understanding various struggles for racial justice as profoundly interconnected and inseparable, but also distinct.