Crime and Justice: The Experiences of Black Canadians (original) (raw)
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Black Racism in Canada Full.doc
Black Canadians represent approximately 3% of the entire Canadian population. However, this segment of the society comprises of at least 10% of the prison numbers in the country signaling a high level of social equality. Further, such injustices as unnecessary disturbances by police forces in a system identified as carding. In such instances, they face about 10 times more harassment than white Canadians. Black students in all cadres of the education system encounter suspensions in higher rates than their peers. In perspectives, while black students represent about 8% of the entire pupil numbers, they are exposed to a suspension status of 22%
Ghosts and Shadows: A History of Racism in Canada
A history of racism reinforces discrimination and exploitation of racialized immigrants in general and African-Canadians in particular. My paper contends that historically institutionalized structures are the ideological fulcrum from which ongoing socio-economic inequalities derive and retain their legitimacy. Specifically, I argue that the historically institutionalized system of slavery and ensuing systemic structures of racial discrimination negatively influence the incorporation of racialized immigrants into the Canadian labour market. A historically racially segmented labour market continues to uphold colour coded social and economic hierarchies. Although Canada's point system ensures that immigrants are primarily selected on the basis of their skills and qualifications, many professionally trained and experienced racialized immigrants endure perpetual socio-economic constraints, characterized primarily by low-end, precarious forms of employment. While not intended to serve as an exhaustive chronology, this essay draws on three historical periods of Black migration and experience in Canada: the first spans early sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth-century, the second dates from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, and the third extends from mid-twentieth century to the present. The following historical timeline traces the prevalence and enduring nature of systemic structures and substantiates Abigail suggestion that both "racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were and remain endemic to the Canadian state" (p. 6).
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
2011
Between the years 1840 and 1860, white prejudice played an important role in shaping blacks’ experiences in Upper Canada. This thesis explores and analyzes the history of black anti-slavery, whites’ attitudes toward blacks and the development of mandatory and free public schooling in Upper Canada during the nineteenth century, in order to demonstrate that race-relations between blacks and whites were worst both after 1850 in general, and over issues of schooling in particular.
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.
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.