From Raven Magazine’s Book Excerpts…
Hate has a name. Hate has a face. Hate has an address. It lives in Canada. The Ku Klux Klan’s more than one-hundred-year presence in Canada demonstrates how hate lived and flourished and still endures in the nation sometimes known as the Peaceable Kingdom. Our neighbours were partly to blame, but Canadians can also blame themselves.
“Because we believe that it can’t happen here, we are too hesitant to talk about the way in which some people — and politicians — are already admiring the reflection they see when they look south,” novelist Alexi Zentner wrote in the Globe and Mail in the summer of 2019. “We think of virulent hatred as a thing that comes from the history books. And yet, the history books are coming to life again.”
The challenges of writing a book on the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Canada go beyond creating a narrative. There is the concern that to write about hate is to condone it. To write about the leaders and their followers runs the risk of glorifying them or ridiculing them or magnifying or minimizing their ideas and impact. The odious reality of the Ku Klux Klan and its imitators over the decades speaks for itself. We need to confront that reality.
From the preface of The Ku Klux Klan in Canada: A Century of Promoting Racism and Hate in the Peaceable Kingdom (Formac Publishing, 2020), by Allan Bartley, an adjunct political science professor at Carleton.
Tuesday, December 1, 2020 in Department of Political Science, News
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