The 1997 RDS case is Canada's most momentous race case. For the first time, the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of judicial racial bias. Ironically, the judge in question was Corrine Sparks, the country's first Black female judge. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which Judge Sparks was accused of bias against whites. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal judges critiqued her comments, based on time-honoured traditions that assumed the legal system was non-racist unless demonstrably proven otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate as anti-racist advocates sought to unmask the presumption of white judicial objectivity.

After centuries of racial inequities within policing and the courts, RDS made the issue impossible to ignore. This book assesses the case, the arrest that precipitated it, the people who took it to court, the excitement surrounding it, the dramatic effects on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system.