Book Review: Policing black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present (original) (raw)
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Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
2017
Book by Robyn Maynard Review by Kuir ë Garang In 2012, a young South Sudanese woman, Ny (not her real name), who is now a fourth-year student at the University of Calgary, told me that a White teacher made her redo a math test because the teacher doubted her math capability. Ny, as a result, generalized her experience with that teacher as a "damaging" mainstream perception of Black Canadians: "What was done was damaging and a clear example of how Black Canadians are viewed in the education system." 1 And in 2014, a mother from Jamaica told me how her children were placed in an English as a second language (ESL) class because of their accent and appearance. These devaluing experiential stories are just a few examples, among many others, that made reading Torontobased feminist writer and social activist Robyn Maynard's Policing Black Lives a personal reminder about the precarious social status of Black Canadians. Undoubtedly, Black Canadians are judged from preconceived racist ideas, not from their actual, verifiable realities, as Ny's and the Jamaican mother's examples show. This marginalizing attitude mirrors Maynard's message about Black devaluation in Policing Black Lives, the devaluing ideas used to initiate and fuel state violence. Maynard's main argument is that "marginalized social groups" experience harm as "state violence," which is mediated through government policies, actions, or inactions (p. 6). This violence is operationalized not only through the criminal justice system but also through institutions like schools, child welfare, social services, and medical institutions (p. 7). Such historical state violence, Maynard argues, now exists in modified (but still oppressive and marginalizing) forms through police surveillance and brutality, criminalization of students, and racialization of welfare services, among others. Regardless of the contemporary forms it takes, this state violence continues to have the same dehumanizing and marginalizing effect it embodied during slavery and past racist segregation (Chapters 2 & 3). Even when Canada is regarded as an exemplary land of freedom and is contrasted with the United States (p. 3), Maynard argues that Canada's racism (past and present) and participation in slavery and slave trade is now manifest in the inequality of "racial capitalism" (p. 57). An important argument Maynard makes-which needs reiterating-is that when scholars write about anti-Black violence, the literature makes it appear as if the violence is only meted out on Black men (p. 13). Admittedly, Maynard Reviewer Note
Documenting and Reinterpreting the Excluded: Black Canada's Histories and Literatures
Although the title and theoretical underpinnings of Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past are inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, his work is quite distinct, as he analyzes black Canada (particularly black Canadian literature) as intricate and essential to, yet largely ignored or convoluted in, theories of the black Atlantic and transatlantic slavery studies. Acknowledging that these omissions are symptoms of the exclusions of black Canada within broader Canadian histories and literatures, Siemerling conducts a thorough and detailed study of the important local and transnational possibilities of these works. Indeed, Siemerling emphasizes a different map, with additional times, spaces, perspectives and accounts, routed through black Canadian writings. He balances the flawed possibilities of the Canadian context throughout his analysis, by navigating the ways that certain legal and political conditions of what is now Canada made important black texts and networks possible and impossible.
" Deluded and Ruined " : Diana Bastian—Enslaved African Canadian Teenager and White Male Privilege
This essay explores the vulnerability of enslaved African Canadian Black women by examining the death of Diana Bastian, an enslaved Black teenager who in 1792 was raped by George More, a member of the Governing Council of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Though Bastian begged for assistance during the resultant pregnancy, More denied her such aid and cast her aside. Bastian further appealed to More's brother, a local magistrate, who also denied Bastian any help, and Bastian died giving birth to the twins More sired. Bastian's owner, Abraham Cuyler, appeared to have been absent from the province at the time of Bastian's rape, pregnancy, and labour. Bastian's brief and tragic history is told in her death certificate recorded at the St. George's Anglican Church, Sydney. This very succinct document brings to light the story of racial and sexual abuse on the Canadian frontier, and helps us to understand the marginal status of Black women's lives in colonial Canada. I suggest in this essay that when we place enslaved Black women at the centre of Canada's historical and colonial past, we come to a new understanding of the power and privilege White men possessed, and the catastrophic impact it had on Black women's bodies.
Southern Journal of Canadian Studies
Black Canadian artists and scholars challenge racist and nationalist discourses of Canadian nationhood and citizenship that place First Nations people, people of African descent and other people of colour who are born in Canada and can claim Canadian nationality based on birth, as outsiders. By contesting the 'master narrative' of Canadian nationhood and by interrogating blackness within Canada, these artists and scholars claim "African Canada" as a convergence of multiple African diasporic voices, coming from different ethno, cultural, linguistic and national spaces, but together articulating a deliberately transgressive Canadianness.
Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2020
This statement serves as a point of departure to reimagine how Canadian sociology can deepen and broaden its engagement with African Canadians’ experiences and anti-black racism as discussed in the papers that follow. Our discussion—occasioned by the death of George Floyd’s death and the protests that follow—is occurring as the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent (2015 to 2024) is unfolding. This time invites us to examine sociologically the social-historical and political processes that have shaped African Canadian lives while noting the pervasive structural barriers that prevent our development and well-being.
Black Canadian Feminist Thought: Tensions and Possibilities
Canadian Woman Studies, 2004
Cet article est l'etude d'une tentativie qui visait 2 remplir les lacunes dans I'ensemble des connaissances sur les Canadiennes de race noire. Les arguments de cet article discutent de la nature de lapenshe despministes noires et du besoin de dhelopper un cadre approprii enracini dans une vision communautaire, brej ce que veut dire lhppartenanceri une communautinoire. tive and transformative discursive framework rooted in the vision of AnemergingBlack communi~thatis,whatitmeansto belong to a Black community.
The Enslavement of Africans in Canada
Canadian Historical Association, Booklet #39, 2022
An in-depth exploration of the enslavement of Black people in the Canadian colonies (French and British) from 1629 to 1834. The legacies of slavery on Black people is also examined. The author also calls for reparations for Black Canadians.