This has been a year of protests
about deaths of Black people at the hands of
the police – protests led internationally by
the Black Lives Matter movement -- and of
demands that the police be “de-funded.” I have
written one or two articles about books by
Blacks, but they were mostly US authors and I
wanted to know how the Canadian scene
compared. So let’s take a look at the US scene
and then see if the Canadian differs at all.
This Fall I read the award-winning
book by Ta-Nihisi Coates Between
the World and Me, Spiegel & Grau,
2015. This is set up as a letter about the
world to his 15-year-old son. Coates draws
from his childhood experience as a survivor of
violence and gangs in Baltimore streets. He
refers to “Dreamers” in the white suburbs, he
describes his time at Howard University that
he calls his “Mecca,” and at the end he
describes his wrestling with the police murder
of his friend Prince Jones. Coates makes the
reader aware of the ever-present risk to
Blacks of being killed or imprisoned by
police, but he is evidently disturbed as he
notes that in Jones’ case the murder was
committed by a black policeman who was
overseen by black politicians. The book does
not speak to whites; it addresses Blacks. But
whites will find the book powerful and moving
in conveying how it is to be Black growing up
and living in a parallel world with constant
risk of loss of one’s Black body to gangs and
police. So this is life and death stuff.
Earlier this year I did a summary
of the book by Robin DiAngelo, White
Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People
to Talk about Racism, Beacon Press,
2018. She is a white US woman who writes for
and runs seminars for whites. We whites live
in a pervasive dominant white society – a
cocoon - where values and assumptions are made
as if they are generally applicable. They are
not. For example: we have history; Blacks have
Black history. I suspect Coates is referring
to these white values and assumptions when he
talks of those living “the Dream.” I think we
whites in Canada are the same give or take a
nuance and a debate about degree. DiAngelo
does not tell us the life and death aspect
that Coates talks about. I suggest we get at
the life and death, police and gangs,
dimension before we get too preoccupied with
the hurtful comments.
DiAngelo herself is working towards
justice and equality with Blacks by working to
break down segregation. Living in a country
with Blacks calls for an ability to listen,
learn and respect the equal but different
experiences. She and other whites will do or
say things that are racist and hurtful, often
without intent. If we know and see that, we
whites need to be bold in calling each other
out. Lack of intent does not reduce the hurt
or excuse the matter or stop repeats of the
pain caused.
Important ideas were passed on by
the Black leader of a November seminar from
the Canadian Council of Refugees. The title
told us to forget our training programs in
anti-racism. People have a hard time changing
behaviour, she said. What is needed are
workplaces that systematically address racist
facts, make hiring and firing and promotions
relate to racist behaviours, have a team to
ensure correspondence correctly names Blacks
and Aboriginal Peoples. The workplace must
ensure equal pay for equal work whatever the
sex or colour of the worker - and so on. In
other words, addressing racism is not a Human
Resources “functioning workplace” exercise, it
is a structural change for more justice. It
seems to me Di Angelo is taking more of a
human resources approach to whites. Of course
it’s important for us to hear about the white
supremacist society we live in. But the
seminar would say we should see the dominant
white society as the corporation that needs
structural change. And surely the things that
Ta-Nihisi Coates describes as a Black
experience demand more justice from those of
us who claim to follow the calls for justice
and equality embodied in major religions and
the human rights structure the world has
adopted. Black Lives Matter talks of defunding
police. Certainly transforming police work and
limiting its range of responsibilities would
be part of the structural changes needed. But
what of Canada?
I found a book about Black
experience in Canada. It is Desmond Cole’s The
Skin We’re in: A Year of Black Resistance
and Power, Doubleday Canada, 2020. This
is a highly useful book about the
discriminatory experience of Blacks in Canada
and resistance to it. More than that he gives
his perspective that his Canada is a white
supremacist colonial country. His book is an
important read on account of its detailed
insights into a range of Canadian situations.
He gives a month by month account of the
issues affecting Black lives in Canada,
beginning with January 2016 and ending with
January 2018. Desmond began as an activist
journalist in Toronto. He is concerned with
“impediments to Black life: policing, public
education, prisons, the apprehension of our
children, the discrimination of our parents at
work, the disrespect of our elders on public
transit.” He has become an activist who is
also a writer.
The first chapter is about police
harassment that generates fear and appears
intended to get Blacks to move elsewhere.
Police can be pushed by neighbours. In this
case a young Black artist in Toronto was
harassed for 10 months by police in an art
gallery he managed to rent in a condemned
building waiting for Condos to be built. Then
he was literally attacked by police in his art
gallery on New Year’s Eve. By-laws and police
visits that aim to make Blacks live in fear
continue. For police to assume something bad
is going on just because a Black starts an art
gallery is not good enough. Systemic change
needed.
Cole says racism stems from white
supremacy, a system of power that seeks to
benefit white people. And here Cole connects
with both the white supremacy of DiAngelo and
the “Dream” whites live described by Coats.
Canada is no different. I always thought the
entrenched systemic racism in Canada was
against Aboriginal peoples, but Cole’s stories
show a systemic racism afflicts Blacks too.
There is discrimination in
education: in treatment in school; in
assumptions in teaching: and in suspensions
from school that fan gangs and delinquency.
Coles tells, inter alia, of a
6-year-old Black girl who was shackled and
handcuffed by police who were called to a
public school. Ending discrimination in
education calls for a range of structural
reforms including punishable trustee racist
behaviour.
Then there is death at the hands of
police inflicted on Blacks with mental health
issues and the inadequacy of the Special
Investigations Unit, SIU. The are many
complaints to the SIU, little publicity, few
charges, fewer convictions, and almost no
serious penalties. The media is a better
recourse! It becomes clear the SIU needs
transformation to facilitate police reform and
perhaps to change police solidarity that
presently supports unacceptable police
behaviour.
I need to point out to other whites
that we ourselves know about the use of
excessive force in police interventions, but
we choose to forget. The protests in Toronto
around the 2010 G20 Summit in Ontario made
international news. The Guardian newspaper
reported “More than 1,000 people – including
peaceful protesters, bystanders and
journalists – were arrested or detained in
what became the largest mass arrest in
Canada’s history. Many of them were held at a
makeshift detention centre dubbed ‘Torontonamo
Bay’ for its deplorable conditions.” Such
instances keep repeating periodically. So it
is not only for Blacks that deep police reform
is needed. And SIU reform is needed now to
deter excessive use of force. This is a matter
that goes beyond situations where mental
health is an issue.
Part of the police discrimination
against Blacks is “carding” – stopping them in
the streets and demanding ID and collecting
information for a police data bank just
because they are Black. Black people regard it
as a violation of their personal space,
privacy and freedom. It is seen as a
continuation of a tradition of surveillance of
Black and Indigenous Peoples, suggesting that
their very presence on the streets is
suspicious and in need of investigation. This
is something for whites to hear. We whites are
concerned about privacy. Let’s extend that to
everyone. Ending carding is something to
impose on police behaviour. The fact of being
Black must stop triggering archaic
stereotypes. And Coles sees police in schools
as also offensive and counterproductive.
Coles cannot see the policing of
today as contributing to Blacks’ safety or
freedom. He believes a majority of whites
believe police violence regrettable but that
some is preferable to the chaos that might
follow from being too soft on Blacks. So a
commitment to deep transformation would be
required to work for improved justice and
equality in policing with Blacks.
It is also true that the percentage
of Blacks and Aboriginals in Canadian jails is
greater than the percentage in Canadian
society. This racism runs through the criminal
justice system: the number charged; the
treatment before the courts; the number
convicted; sentences; the access to parole.
There is the question of whether there will be
trial by jury and whether only whites are on
such a jury.
Coles sees the Black cause alongside the
aboriginal cause. And that is good because a
just society is a common cause. Those of us
who are white must accept that we are part of
a white supremacist system that is experienced
as maintaining a colonial position for Blacks
and Aboriginal Peoples. Remember, our
intention does not help us. And Coles shows
how the 2017 calls for a celebration of 150
years of Canada did not resonate in Aboriginal
Peoples’ ears nor Black ears. Can they be
expected to celebrate 150 years in what is
felt to be a white supremacist colonial
system?
And this begs the question of
reparations. Does the white supremacist
colonial Canada not only change itself, but
also pay for its past actions? That
discussion appears in books by two US writers.
In November I wrote about Richard Rothstein’s
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of
How Our Government Segregated America,
Liveright, 2018. Throughout the 20th century
various levels and agencies of US government
supported and created segregated living and
employment. Ghettos were made and Blacks were
forced to be in them. Educated middle class
blacks with good jobs were howled out of white
neighbourhoods. Their houses were even torched
or blown up. The police stood by. Federal
freeways were routed to separate white areas
from Black areas – or were routed so as to
destroy Black areas. Before the 2008 housing
crash, the Black community was targeted by
banks with misleading information to encourage
house purchases that were designed to fall
through. Each chapter examines a different
policy at a different level of government in a
different part of the US that forced
segregation when there was none, created new
segregated communities or perpetuated
segregation. The residential segregation
translated to segregation in schools and
segregation in access to good schools.
Then the last chapter of the book
looks at what can be done. And it finds some
places in the US with useful practices being
tried that could be encouraged, developed and
followed more widely. After an epilogue to the
book there are questions and answers. Asked
about reparations that Ta-Nehisi Coates made a
case for in his book We Were Eight Years
in Power, Rothstein says he prefers to
talk about remedies. But basically, yes, there
should be remedies. We should think about that
for Canada too.
I hold assumptions and expectations
and values as a white Canadian. Some I can
change, others not. I grew up in the ember
days of a British empire that had colonized
India and swaths of Africa. It had settled
Canada and what is now the US, and Australia
as well as trading posts like Hong Kong and
Singapore. It used slaves until the 19th
century. Moreover, it transported or
encouraged movements of peoples from their
home colonies to other colonies around the
world for reasons of trade and commerce or
colonial management. Yet the world was largely
comprised of such empires until the end of
WWI. I cannot change that and I cannot take
responsibility on my own head.
I can continue to work as I began
in my student days. Bodies like the church
have conversations with people in churches in
those colonial places and cooperation arises.
For example churches called, together, for the
independence of colonies. And they called for
what became the new South Africa. And the
nearest to reparations in those 1960 days was
calling for government development aid.
Moreover, the calling on the government to
give development aid was matched by calling
our individual selves to fund the projects of
churches overseas in cooperation with them. My
own giving to the church reinforces my calls
for government aid and trade and no weapons
for despots. It is in church programs with
Aboriginal Peoples that I call for righting
the wrongs of governments of Canada since
1867. The same approach can apply to righting
the wrongs against Blacks.
In the end I remain white, born in
a Western former colonial power. I live in
what to blacks is a white supremacist country,
Canada. I would happily adjust that to living
in a Canada that was seen by Blacks as
providing justice and equality.