RACIAL PROFILING IN CANADA

Murphy Browne © November 2017

"Profiling and the power to criminalize behavior amount to an ability to criminalize any individual, and especially to criminalize a person's sense of justice, personal dignity and self-respect - that is a person’s sense of his/her humanity. Profiling and its attendant aggressiveness signify that the police have arrogated to themselves the power to determine who will be human, whose sense of themselves as human will be respected, whose autonomy and independence will go unpunished and whose not.

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Excerpt from the 2003 published book “The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance” by Steve Martinot

The brutal beating of an African Canadian teenager by a White police officer and the officer’s brother to the point where the youth suffered broken bones and the imminent loss of one eye suggests that the two White men did not see/view this young African Canadian as human. Profiling as analyzed by White American professor Steve Martinot is one of several reasons why the very troubling and inappropriate School Resource Officers (SRO) Program at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) should end.

The program is concentrated in schools with large populations of African Canadian and other racialized students. The history of the overwhelmingly white Toronto Police Force and the African Canadian community is historically one of confrontation and hostility. Anti-African racism is a fact of life and has been since the kidnapped six year old African child who was given the name Olivier LeJeune was sold in Quebec in 1628. The inhumane practice of holding generations of Africans in slavery, buying and selling them and their children continued here in the Great White North until August 1, 1834. During those 206 years of enslavement of Africans in Canada the system was as brutal as any that has been ascribed to the USA or any Caribbean island. In Canada enslaved Africans were bought and sold with advertisements appearing in newspapers as far away as cities throughout the USA with White people in Canada seeking to buy enslaved Africans from their American cousins.

When the British retreated to Canada after their defeat at the hands of their American cousins many of them brought to British North America (BNA) the Africans they had enslaved in the USA. The violence that White people used to keep enslaved Africans “in check” during slavery transferred to the manner in which the policing system of the 21^st century is enacted on the bodies of African Canadians. The dehumanizing of African bodies during slavery has led to the mindset of Africans not feeling pain like White people (https://news.virginia.edu/content/study-links-disparities-pain-management-racial-bias) and (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Proc_Natl_Acad_Sci_U_S_A_TrendMD_0) This is also the mindset that bedevils our community when White people in authority consider African American/African Canadian children to be older than they are with corresponding treatment robbing them of their childhood (http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx) and (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/cops-tend-to-see-black-kids-as-less-innocent-than-white-kids/383247/) It is bad enough that African Canadian youth are subjected to racial profiling as they traverse/negotiate on an everyday basis and are subjected to the daily racist micro-aggressions as they “breathe while Black.” In the education system some African Canadian children as young as four years old are racially profiled as they innocently try to make sense of their new realities in the schools they attend. Imagine how anxiety making it is to be confronted by armed men and women as these students try to get an education. It is traumatic for many students. They are also being conditioned through their formative years to obey and be obeisant to these White men and women in uniforms who are armed to the teeth. In “The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance” Martinot also wrote that: “Under profiling and the criminalization of dignity and self-respect, obeisance to the police is the inverse of obedience to the law – just as profiling is the inverse of law enforcement. In law enforcement, a crime is discovered and the police then look for a suspect who might possibly have committed it. Profiling means that a suspect is discovered and the police then look for a crime for the person to have possibly committed."

That is a reality on the streets of Toronto and of course would be transferred to the school experience for African Canadian students in schools with the SRO Program. Under constant surveillance the risk of criminalization is multiplied and leads to the infamous “school to prison pipeline.”

African Canadian communities in major Canadian cities, including Halifax (https://globalnews.ca/news/3778740/un-report-on-racism-validates-african-nova-scotian-experience-senator/), (https://globalnews.ca/news/3768196/un-report-slams-nova-scotia-education-systems-treatment-of-african-nova-scotians/) Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal have complained for decades about racial profiling in schools and elsewhere.

Having armed men and women in schools would also exacerbate the high rate of “Push out/drop out” of African Canadian students. There have been numerous studies done, reports, recommendations and even books written documenting the negative effects of a White supremacist system on the lives/health of racialized people. The United Nations (UN) has consulted with racialized communities and the results have been publicized yet a program like the SRO Program has been in place for an entire decade! Racial profiling continues unabated; and here we are almost at the end of 2017, the third year of the UN declared International Decade for People of African Descent and the various levels of government have done nothing. Next year and the following year as politicians court our votes, the various levels of government in Canada must be made to realise that “Black Lives Matter.”

Murphy Browne © November 2017