Blacks have faced centuries of racism, author says
A Montreal writer told an audience Monday that the policing crisis that faces Canada’s black community today is rooted in centuries of racism that dehumanized black people.
In a speech to about 200 people at the Ottawa Public Library auditorium, Robyn Maynard described four centuries of anti-black racism in Canada: slavery, deportations, immigration bans, criminalization and police shootings.
“The ways of viewing and treating blackness were not abolished when slavery ended,” said Maynard, author of a new book, Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present.
She wrote the book, Maynard said, because she felt the need to correct the “near total erasure of blackness” from Canada’s official history. To illustrate her point, she asked the audience how many were taught about U.S. slavery during their academic careers — everyone raised their hand — but no one raised a hand when she asked how many had been taught about slavery in Canada.
“Anti-black racism has been a long-standing practice,” she told the audience. “There’s nothing that’s new to our communities.”
In her book, Maynard draws a line between early Canadian history — the enslavement of African people in New France — and the violence experienced today by black Canadians at the hands of police officers, child welfare agencies and immigration officials.
Black Canadians, she noted, are represented in federal prisons at a rate three times higher than people in the general population. They’re also “disproportionately vulnerable to police violence and killings,” she said, noting that one report found that black people in Ontario are 10 times more likely to be killed by the police than others.
What’s more, she said, black families are being disproportionately pulled apart by child welfare agencies and immigration officers.
They’re also more likely to be targeted by school officials: In Toronto, between 2011 and 2016, almost half of the students expelled from the public school board were black.
Maynard argued that the attitudes that govern the policing of black people have deep roots in Canadian history.
Slavery was introduced by French colonialists in the early 1600s and remained a feature of early Canadian life for 200 years — until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834. According to the Canadian Museum of History, 4,200 slaves were enumerated in Canada between 1671 and 1834. More than half were Indigenous.
Maynard contends that antiblack racism did not end with slavery. Rather, she argues, it became an embedded — and sometimes hidden — part of the country’s institutions.
In her book, she cites the private correspondence of William D. Scott, the federal government’s superintendent of immigration from 1903 to 1924, who wrote that, “Africans, no matter where they come from, are not among the races sought.”
In the 1920s, she notes, blacks were sometimes the subject of “sundown laws” that established evening curfews, and that the last segregated black school in Canada did not close until 1983.
Maynard told her audience that Canadians have to confront the meaning of police violence aimed at blacks — those such as Ottawa’s Adbirahman Abdi, 37, an immigrant from Somalia who died in police custody after his violent arrest on the morning of July 24, 2016.
“I think we’re very much trained to see evidence of injustice elsewhere and to always believe that it’s worse,” she said.
Monday’s event was organized by the Carceral Studied Research Collective at the University of Ottawa.