Sherene H. Razack

In 1995, Pamela George was brutally murdered by two young university athletes. The men were convicted of manslaughter and given light sentences. In this article, I examine the murder of Pamela George as gendered racial violence and continuing colonization of Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that as an Aboriginal woman working in the space of prostitution, Pamela George represented a body that could be violated with impunity. Respectable white men who journey temporarily into the zone of degeneracy to engage in an encounter in prostitution are not held accountable for violence that occurs so routinely in the spaces and on the bodies of the Other. Further, this relationship between bodies, space, and justice, in which zones inhabited by racial Others as well as zones of prostitution (often one and the same) are considered to be spaces in which universal justice does not operate, suggests how the violence remains invisible in the law. The constitutive features of this violence, its role in making white men and white settler societies, suggest why it keeps on happening and is so consistently denied in law. The identity making processes I describe are vital to colonization and, in this case, specifically to the colonization of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.