Résumé
"Police reform advocates have continually stressed greater minority recruitment as a solution to the continuing tensions between certain minority groups and the police. This proposed solution is an example of how the contemporary racial situation works to structure and affect individual lives in new and increasingly subtle ways. Two very separate issues -police and minority group conflicts, and diversity within police forces - are conflated by the idea of race, and thus 'race' becomes a prominent aspect of the day to-day job experience for minority police officers. This thesis explores how ideas about the meaning of race affect the occupational lives of seven black members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Nova Scotia. It looks at how race works in officers' decisions to join the RCMP, white racism, black marginalization, officer attitudes towards the black community, and how black officers both use and are used by the idea of race. 'Race' is an unstable complex of different social meanings, and the experiences of black RCMP officers in Nova Scotia illustrate the increasingly complex ways in which its ideas can work to structure, represent, and define our social lives."--Abstract.