Jobs and justice : fighting discrimination in wartime Canada, 1939-1945 / Carmela Patrias.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist employment discrimination during the Second World War and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination.

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CHOICE Review

That Canadians were racist during a world war being waged against racist tyrannies is already well established. Patrias (Brock Univ., Canada) did her archival research well and provides chapter and verse to bolster this claim. Her work focuses on job discrimination, most especially against Jews, blacks, Asians, and other non-Anglos, but she also examines the attitudes of "ambivalent allies," those Anglo-Saxon critics of racism who spoke and wrote against discrimination. Most of them she finds somewhat less racist than their fellow citizens--but only somewhat. That the past is a different country does not seem to occur to her. Unfortunately, the book wobbles on fact. The author has a federal election in 1944, for example, a non-factoid bolstered by a footnote dated 1943. And her research in secondary sources is spotty--how could she omit Gerald Tulchinsky's seminal history of the Jews in Canada (Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community, CH, Jul'93, 30-6388)? Such criticisms aside, readers will now find good archival research to back up the truism that Canadians were racist. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. J. L. Granatstein Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute