Living under the Radar

In 1938, the Carnegie Corporation of New York hired Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to tell Americans about their own “race problem.” His two-volume study, published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, for years framed public discussion of the issue in the United States.

Was it bizarre that the Americans required a professor from the Stockholm School of Economics to teach them about themselves? Not at all. Inquisitive outsiders are among those best qualified to reveal the true nature of a place.

In Canada too, many immigrants have helped define our very history. Michael Ondaatje, from Sri Lanka, immortalized the building of Toronto’s Bloor Street viaduct in his celebrated novel In the Skin of the Lion. Earlier this year, Afua Cooper, from Jamaica, published The Hanging of Angelique: Canada, Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, and her account of slavery in Montreal vaulted onto the Canadian...