What Killed Jane Creba. Anita Arvast
It might not be boy and it might not be the N-word.
It might be a far more clandestine and infinitely more dangerous disguise. Just like the cover of this book.
What colour did you assume that person’s skin was?
It’s only natural. We’ve been taught these assumptions.
Thug is a word usually applied only to bullies and they are presented in typical ways — in hoodies and in high-tops with a bit of bling around the neck and usually with some variation of brown skin.
But there are thugs who are icons in corporate culture. Like Steve Jobs. A celebrated entrepreneurial thug. Thugs are academics who claim that their version of bullying is “academic freedom.” Like Phillipe Rushton, who sought to maintain a stereotype that penis sizes, race, and intelligence were all related. Thugs are police who claim that their bullying is “keeping people safe” even while they break the law. Thugs are members of our governments who claim that their bullying is “in the public interest according to their election mandate” as they monger fear and create new legislation to deal with the fear they’ve mongered. Thugs can be the media reporters who sometimes hound people to get stories. Inside their own realms, the bullies don’t get called thugs. Sometimes they don’t even get called bullies. They get called successful.
Bullies are everywhere; they hide behind their own rhetoric to justify their behaviour.
Most bullies don’t unpack their own behaviour. They take their baggage and sell it to their corporate boards, to the pulpits, to the classrooms, to Parliament, to the public. What we think is a thug isn’t white and well off. We think that the street is the only place you can find thugs.
We’d like to believe we don’t have racism in Canada. We were, after all, the final destination of the Underground Railroad not that long ago. We represented the North Star and the road to freedom.
We don’t have twenty-one-year-old white-supremacist Dylann Roof walking into a Charleston church Bible study and slaying nine people of colour. And then going to prison where he was raped and tortured. We don’t have cops shooting down black guys like they do down in the U.S. We don’t have the fifty-year-old man shot eight times in the back after running away from police for fear that he would be jailed for failing to pay child support. He’d been pulled over for a burned-out tail light. What was his name, again? Walter Scott. His family will remember, but we likely won’t. The blame was laid on that one cop who set Walter up, planting a taser beside Scott as he was dying — all that captured by someone walking by who happened to have a cellphone. We don’t have the hundreds of other incidents that don’t get captured on a cellphone.
We don’t have Freddie Gray, who had his spine fractured as he was being brought into custody, and we don’t have the protests of Baltimore. Even if the cops who caused his fatal spinal injuries have been indicted and that bit of unrest settled, we aren’t done with unrest. For every moment captured by a camera, scores more go unseen. Unrest goes quiet. But it’s there. It’s here.
It’s far easier to lay blame on individuals rather than systems. Blame those cops who abuse their power. Blame the thugs who commit crimes. Maybe make the prison deal with all this blame. Make it out all black and white, or all light and dark. Black is wrong. White is right. Light is joyful. Dark is scary. Let’s forget about anything remotely in-between.
In Canada, we don’t have Freddie or Walter. We didn’t have Rodney King. We didn’t have Malcolm X. We didn’t have Martin Luther King. Because we don’t have riots and blatant issues of racial profiling and police brutality, we’d like to think we don’t have those issues. Of course, we did have racism when the Underground Railroad brought too many ex-slaves to the East Coast and they all got put in a place called Africville, an area the city of Halifax neglected to the point of squalor. And, of course, we did have racism when the Japanese were interned during the Second World War and had all of their belongings taken from them. And, of course, we did have racism in the residential schools and our treatment of First Nations people. And we still have racism now in the hushed sentiments of “those Muslims,” and the attacks on mosques and spiteful acts carried out against women wearing hijabs.
But no. We like to think we don’t have racism like in the U.S. We don’t have potential presidents saying that we should ban all people of a particular faith from coming to our country.
What we have is systemic … something we disguise.
On December 15, 2014, some nine years after the Creba killing, the Toronto Star broke a story that the Toronto Police Service had finally brought in a psychologist from the U.S. to investigate racial profiling by members of the police force. So now we have proof that there are problems. They range from police racial biases to the carding of individuals based on race to the detention of young, African-Canadian men even when they are not being investigated in a criminal case. These practices lead to feelings, perceptions, and behaviours that run deep and cause insecurity and even hatred. It’s been there a long time, but at least we are finally talking about it.
The practice of carding had been long-standing in Toronto. It’s a simple process of a police officer stopping, questioning, and putting the name of anyone who looks questionable into a database for further reference — no matter what the person was doing. In a city of roughly two hundred thousand African Canadians, there were over one million carding incidents in a two-year period. As shown in the “carding database,” there was an egregious over-representation of young black men.
A Toronto Life journalist wrote of being carded seven times for doing nothing more than being black in public. Desmond Cole had the nerve to write about “The Skin I’m In.” Toronto got a new African-Canadian chief of police who said that he had been carded as a teenager for wearing a ball-cap backwards. He justified the policy by saying that he somehow deserved it; he shouldn’t have dressed that way. There was a polite controversy going on in Toronto. That’s how we do things in Canada. Politely. It’s why people like to visit here. It’s why people like to live here.
We also have laws we follow to ensure we remain polite.
Carding is clearly a violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. This was confirmed by various studies that indicted not only the police, but many legal administration and enforcement agencies.[4] In 2015, the new Liberal government of Canada decided they would deal with this. No more carding. No more racism. Easier said than done. This was going to be a long fight. You can’t just tell cops to stop racist practices because the government has made it illegal. It will go underground and sideways until conversations between the affected communities and the police take place. These conversations take years, maybe decades. Until they do, both communities will continue to feel threatened.
There remains a great deal of insecurity around race, profiling, and the relationships between police, the community, and the journalists who have to report what is going on. Most of us don’t ever need to think about it. It doesn’t concern us.
Unless you have a child who is caught in the crossfire. Or unless your kid keeps getting asked what he’s doing because he has the wrong skin colour and was maybe driving the wrong car or walking in the wrong neighbourhood.
Nobody ever expects that a few minutes of someone else acting out on their insecurity will take a life. We think we will grow old and die of natural causes. We live our lives accordingly. Take speed seriously on highways. Don’t engage in dangerous activities. Wear a bike helmet. Wear sunscreen. Cross the street on a green light. Teach our children to be kind and expect kindness to be returned. Well. That’s most of us. We’re not children expecting to die. We’re not expecting the worst when we venture out on the streets. We dress each day to go about our business — yoga pants for the gym, a suit for work. In most cities in North America and Europe, we don’t expect violence to erupt. We think, if we keep living our routines and being good citizens, the problems of the world won’t affect us.
Grief doesn’t end overnight, and racism doesn’t end because we pretend it isn’t there. And a city awash with gunplay doesn’t get fixed by police forces that take away basic rights for the select people of colour who just happen to live in impoverished neighbourhoods.