HALF-CASTE

Cranston explores the Canadian color line in this debut memoir.

Having lived in Canada for more than half a century, the author, a scholar and activist, is a quintessential Canuck who hikes, camps, skis, and ice-skates, played hockey as a kid, and “even slept in a quinzhee on nights when the temperature was close to -20⁰C.” Yet, because of his racially ambiguous features and brown skin, his life has been plagued by a constant refrain, delivered by taxi drivers, cashiers and colleagues: “Where are you from?” In this memoir of “self-discovery and self-acceptance,” the author grapples with his lifelong quest to belong in a racialized society whose “polarized Black-or-White world” only serves to further marginalize a “Brown” population that defies categorization. The book’s early chapters center on how these racial dynamics and questions of identity affected Cranston’s childhood. “We’re Anglo-Indians,” his mother often emphasized, reminding him that “We aren’t even from India…We were as British as the British.” The author ultimately chooses to identify as a “half-caste,” a term chosen “as a form of linguistic reclamation” for simply being “an exception to a flawed system” designed to keep him “on the outside peering in.” The author is open about his struggles to accept that he was abused by his father (“He just hit me a few times. Three times; that’s all”) and about the ways in which his racial identity empowers his solidarity with Black and Indigenous Canadians. As vice provost at the University of Saskatchewan and author of multiple books on building equitable classrooms (written during his career as an associate professor), Cranston is an acclaimed scholar-activist. His book, underpinned by a solid theoretical understanding of inequality and systemic racism, is an accessible memoir that highlights the ways in which the subtleties of racism continue to shape modern society.

This engaging and intimate memoir does not avoid difficult conversations.