THE SHADOW OF RACISM
Cole’s new book explores discrimination in Canada
When it comes to black resistance and examples of white supremacy, 2017 was not a particularly remarkable year in Canada.
As author Desmond Cole warily notes in his debut book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Resistance and Power, it was a case of “meet the new year, same as the old year.”
This may seem a strange admission for Cole to be making, since his debut book is specifically about black resistance and 2017 incidents he argues highlight systematic white supremacy in Canada.
But, as sobering as it might seem, the idea that 2017 wasn’t different from any other year when it came to the consistency of injustices experienced by black and Indigenous Canadians actually fits with the broader thrust of the book, which argues that the practices and attitudes that have been historically ingrained into our country’s systems of justice, immigration, education and policing continue to maintain and foster white supremacy.
“We like to talk about racism as if it’s an individual problem, that racism is about individual acts of bigotry; people who are uneducated, people who are mean-spirited and so forth,” says Cole, in an interview from his home in Toronto.
“For Canadians, if they are white, to truly resist and fight back against white supremacy, they have to name it. What is fascinating to me is that most white people I meet in this country are terrified to even say those words out of their mouth. It’s as if they believe that saying ‘white supremacy’ brings it to life. When, in reality, it’s never talking about white supremacy and how it informs everything about our country — not talking about that and refusing to name it outright — is what allows it to thrive.”
The Red Deer, Alta.-born journalist first gained prominence after writing The Skin I’m In, an award-winning 2015 cover story for Toronto Life magazine that dealt with Cole’s experiences being continuously carded and interrogated by Toronto police. He signed a deal with Doubleday that same year to expand on the story. Keeping the time frame to 12 months of injustice and action in Canada was a handy journalistic device to help rein in the overwhelming scope of the book.
But, sadly, that doesn’t mean he didn’t have plenty of individual stories to choose from that involved black and Indigenous Canadians fighting for justice in systems that seemed rigged against them.
The book begins on Jan. 1, 2017, with Cole being informed about a police raid on the Toronto gallery of a young black artist named John Samuels on New Year’s Eve.
The raid was well-publicized and brought accusations of police brutality and racial discrimination against the Toronto Police Service.
The first chapter of the book has Cole comparing the extra scrutiny and harassment Samuels faced as a black artist and business owner, which may have been prompted by complaints by neighbours, to the bylaws put in place to limit the freedoms of black loyalists in Shelburne, N.S., in 1785 at the behest of white settlers. It’s a recurring theme in the book: that the Canadian government, its practices and its institutions are “a system of power that seeks to benefit white people above all others.”
Throughout The Skin We’re In, Cole examines a number of 2017 stories that highlight injustice and the growing resistance against it.
They include, among others, the fight to remove armed police from Toronto schools; the police investigation into an off-duty police officer and his brother accused of brutally beating teenager Dafonte Miller; the attempted deportation of young Jamaican mother Beverley Braham; and the fight to hold police accountable for the shooting of Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali-born man who suffered from mental health issues.
“I wanted to look at a broad array of institutions: the child-welfare system, the education system, community programs, policing, immigration policy, black-queer struggles,” says Cole. “2017, as any year would in Canada, afforded us an opportunity to think about all of those different institutions because of the things that they were doing to thwart or hinder black life in this country.”
Cole explores not only these stories but the responses to them, offering a portrait of a new generation of activists such as Black Lives Matter and the Indigenous Idle No More movements.
It’s been five years since Cole wrote the Toronto Life article, most of which he spent doing research for the book. He admits his approach to activism changed in those first couple of years.
In April of 2017, he disrupted a Toronto police board meeting by demanding that all the data collected through carding be destroyed. When his editors at the Toronto Star, where he was a columnist, told him he was violating the paper’s policy on journalists participating in activism, he quit.
A few months later, when publicly questioning the same police board about the Miller case, he refused to leave and was arrested.
“In the last five years, the Black Lives Matter movement here in Canada and particularly in Toronto has really been the thing that started to change how I felt about systemic racism and white supremacy,” he says. “BLM-TO just changed everything when they came onto the scene here because they said, ‘We are not asking anymore.
“We are not sitting down to argue anymore. We are not going to explain to you until you, as white folks, feel comfortable enough to want to listen. Our lives matter right now. We’re demanding change right now whether you think you are ready for it or not.’
“That sense of urgency really made sense to me. And the more that I documented what they were doing, the more than I listened to the way that they framed issues of white supremacy, the more I thought they have the right approach and I’ve been doing it wrong.
“I kept coming back to the people who hurt us and asked them not to hurt us next time and that doesn’t work. You can’t ask for your freedom, you have to take it.”