Heart-rending snapshot of Black lives in GTA

New study reveals the gap between how community members see themselves and how others perceive them

The groundbreaking study called “Black Experience Project in the GTA,” released Wednesday, does two things. 1) It provides governments and advocates concrete data to work with.

2) It offers racism deniers an opportunity to sit down, fingers on mouths, and listen . . . Ah, never mind. Reality strikes.

And so, the amended 2) — It exposes the yawning gap between how Black people see themselves and how nonBlack people perceive them.

The study launched in 2010 offers insightful snapshots of attitudes, realities and resilience that inform the experiences of the historically, ethnically, geographically, religiously and economically diverse group of about 400,000 individuals in the GTA, many of whom identify as Black.

Some of the data in this study, collected in 2015 in a North America that was still innocent of the widespread normalization of bigotry under Donald Trump, are likely already outdated.

In that pre-November 2016 era, antiBlack racism was considered to be an American sickness and those shouting hoarse about its toxicity in Canada were just over-sensitive, entitled people playing the race card.

In that world, a third said racism is less obvious in Canada than in the U.S. and that police relations were better here. At that time, Toronto hadn’t yet: Heard of 19-year-old Dafonte Miller of Whitby, allegedly beaten and blinded by off-duty police officer Const. Michael Theriault in December 2016. Miller’s lawyer Julian Falconer told the CBC, “This is the stuff you read about from an era gone by in the Deep South in the U.S.”

Seen at an inquest into the death of Andrew Loku, a mentally ill Black man, at the hands of a police officer the refusal to engage with the explicit mention of racism.

Seen a Statistics Canada study of police-reported hate crimes released in June that showed that between 2012 and 2015, Black people in Canada remained the most targeted group.

Seen hard data on the criminalization of Black people in Toronto that showed Black people with no criminal history were three times more likely to be arrested for a small amount of pot than white people and also more likely to be detained without bail.

For Wednesday’s study by Environics that attempts to draw back the cloak of invisibility around anti-Black racism, youth volunteers from the Black community conducted in-depth in-person interviews asking 250 questions about identity, experiences of racism and Black contributions to society.

On the sensitive and controversial subject of relations with police services, as the chart shows, more than half of the 1,504 people surveyed said they were stopped by police in public for no apparent reason. Among younger men, that number leapt to 79 per cent.

Here is an interesting nugget. The outcome of Black experience with law enforcement showed that education or wealth provides no insulation, no protection from being seen as suspicious. These experiences show that for police, you’re Black first.

Black people are not a monolithic group any more than whites are.

Yet, the broader community, too, responds to Blackness first when it interacts with Black people. Some two-thirds of the survey participants report having been treated unfairly because they are Black, that their income, education, country of birth didn’t make a difference.

The shared perspective leads some to identify as Black as an expression of solidarity. For some, it’s as a personal identity, for others it’s a heritage.

Even the most fraught relations have gradations and criss-crossing of experiences. Sizable portions of Black people have got help from police or have socialized with them.

Does that mean the good guys have good experiences and the bad guys are justly targeted? In fact, the study says, those who have had at least one positive experience are more likely to have had at least one negative one and vice-versa.

Attitudes toward Black people are layered in negative stereotypes, yet they are so deeply entrenched that they are rendered invisible.

If my inbox is any indication, nonBlack people commonly perceive Black people as coming from unstable families and mixed up in some form of criminality or violence. Abound one in 10 Black people thinks family instability is a challenge to the community. If the association with violence were true, the supposedly affected group would want to end that at least in the interest of survival. Instead, only 5 per cent pegged it as a challenge.

There is also a heartening sense of wanting to contribute — two in three people in the study said they have volunteered at least some time in the past 12 months. That’s a higher rate of volunteering than the general population. The study also indicates high levels of community engagement, specifically advocacy to resist racism. Participants “consider this perseverance to be one of the Black community’s strengths,” its authors say.

It’s toward the end, tucked into later pages that the study casually shatters Canada’s self-image of inclusivity and takes us back to basics. This is what 57 per cent of participants most wished society would understand about them: “Black people are the same as everyone else.” Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar.