Follow the Drinking Gourd: Our Road to Teaching Critical Race Theory and Slavery and the Law, Contemplatively, at McGill

This short essay reflects on two recent pedagogical initiatives at McGill: the development of a regular, elective course on Critical Race Theory (CRT), and teaching Slavery and the Law as a specialized topic course. The initiatives could be seen as ad hoc, sitting outside of the various, formal, federative moments of major curricular reform that the Faculty of Law has undertaken over the past several decades, and that have come to characterize the faculty’s self-understanding as transsystemic. In this reflection, however, I argue that the progression at McGill toward teaching CRT and Slavery and the Law should be understood as an integral part of the collective project of cultivating jurists who live rooted, multilingual, and layered lives in law. These are the words of an African American slave song that pointed the way to freedom. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1962 Massey Lecture entitled, Conscience for Change, wrote the following gracious account of the “singular” relationship between African Americans and Canada: I had not expected to encounter the Drinking Gourd in law school. Like many law students, I came to the study of law expecting—or at least hoping—to engage with notions that looked more like Dr. King’s capacious vision of social justice, than a close study of riparian rights. To a first-year law student coming from undergraduate studies in history, the past too often seemed conspicuously absent, and everyday life far removed from Old Chancellor Day Hall’s ornate, elegant, and “noble” doors. Yet my first years studying law at McGill could hardly have been more context-laden: they included the fall of the Berlin Wall, alongside encounters with resistance to settler colonialism here and abroad, including a seventy-eight-day armed resistance to further territorial dispossession by Mohawk nationals of Kahnawà:ke—facing the Sûreté du Québec, the Royal Canadian Mouted Police, and ultimately, the Canadian army—in defence of neighbouring Akwesasne territory (the so-called “Oka Crisis”), and soon-to-be president Nelson Mandela’s triumphant release after twenty-seven years in prison under apartheid in South Africa. They included the tragic violence of misogyny, in Mark Lépine’s mass murder of fourteen women at École Polytechnique de Montréal. After living in deep admiration of the Honourable Justice Thurgood Marshall, I witnessed in horror the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings of his replacement on the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas: Professor Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations, located in “the overlapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between, ... resist[ed] telling.” In Montreal, the 1987 Remembrance Day shooting of an unarmed nineteen-year-old Black man who was exponentially more likely to be my classmate in high school than in law school—Anthony Griffin—led to mass community protest of systemic, anti-Black racism alongside the manslaughter and criminal negligence trial of Constable Allan Gosset, which ended with his acquittal on appeal. While social context sometimes felt distant, several professors worked hard to ensure that it was understood to be a crucial part of the legal education we received. Even on the first-day welcome of first-year students to the Faculty of Law in 1989, then Dean Yves-Marie Morissette invoked one of the most pressing legal battles to unfold in Canada: Chantal Daigle’s decision to slip across the Canadian border into the United States to obtain an abortion, in the midst of her urgent, public fight through Canadian courts against her ex-boyfriend’s successful temporary injunctions preventing her from obtaining an abortion in Quebec. The Supreme Court of Canada issued its decision—with reasons provided later—apparently to prevent any other woman from living a similar judicial nightmare. But mostly, I experienced the study of law by observing those students who …