The Cost of Multiculturalism: Canadians Turn Blind Eye to Race Despite a Staggering Black Incarceration Rate – Atlanta Black Star

2016/04/25 Leave a comment

A reminder:

Black Canadians are jailed more than their white counterparts and part of the issue is that Canadians don’t believe they have a race problem. They stay silent on the issue.

Howard Sapers, a Canadian correctional investigator, presented an annual report to the parliament that showed Blacks in the country continue to be disproportionately imprisoned. Since Sapers started his position in 2005, he said has seen the Black prison population increase steadily. In total, the number of Black inmates has grown 69 percent.

Torontoist reports African-Canadians account for 10 percent of the federal prison population even though they only make up 3 percent of the general population. A similar statistic rings true for American prisons. Blacks make up 37 percent of the prison population and 13 percent of the general U.S. population.

Despite Canada’s Black imprisonment rates not being that far off from American rates, African-Canadian rights advocate Anthony Morgan says Canadians don’t think they face racial issues. Instead, the silence about the alarming rates of Black incarceration stems from the idea that it only affects Americans.

“It has a lot to do with what I’ve called Canadian racial exceptionalism,” he tells Torontoist. “If America is having a conversation about the hyper-incarceration of Black males, in order to maintain our sense of moral superiority, we can’t look into those issues as we experience them here in Canada.”

Though Morgan admits that rates of Black imprisonment are a little higher in America than in Canada, he says myths about Canada’s embrace of multiculturalism also plays a part.

“The truth of the matter is,” Morgan tells the publication, “when you look in our prison systems, if you go to our courthouses, if you go at children’s aid offices, to school detention halls, it is overwhelmingly Black kids who are being criminalized and punished. I think the generalized silence has to do with what we want to believe about ourselves as Canadians.”

Source: The Cost of Multiculturalism: Canadians Turn Blind Eye to Race Despite a Staggering Black Incarceration Rate – Atlanta Black Star

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Ontario’s anti-racism directorate is a promising start: Op-ed

2016/02/22 Leave a comment

Commentary from community activists on Ontario’s planned anti-racism directorate and their proposed additional measures to reduce racism. Overly ambitious, given resource and other constraints (e.g., across all ministries and institutions – some prioritization would be helpful), but helpful to internal and external discussion of scope:

The Ontario Anti-Racism Directorate, on the other hand, is understood to be part of the government apparatus and is tasked with, among other things, helping the government to “apply an anti-racism lens in developing, implementing and evaluating government policies, programs and services.”

A promising start, but this anti-racism lens should also be used to evaluate legislation. Moreover, we are not convinced that the adoption of an anti-racism lens alone will eradicate racism. Clearly, there are a few more things that the directorate should and can do.

The directorate can be a repository of anti-racism expertise that different government departments can draw on in order to address racism systematically, and be responsible for research, analysis, and policy development based on the data collected and expertise of staffers.

It should take the lead in the creation of provincial standards for race-based data collection, and intra-governmental and inter-governmental implementation of the disaggregated data collection policies.

It must support the policy, legislation and program development and design process across the Ontario government by applying a racial justice lens so as to mitigate any harmful impacts on racialized communities (both First Peoples and peoples of colour).

And finally it should be a point of contact for communities to share their experiences, concerns and ideas about identifying and dismantling all forms of racism in Ontario

And to ensure greater accountability and government support, the head of the Anti-Racism Directorate should have the same power and role as a deputy minister, and be given similar capacity and budget as that assigned to the Ontario’s Woman Directorate and the Office of Francophone Affairs.

The establishment of the Anti-Racism Directorate is an important first step to redress racial inequality in this province. More must be done, however, if the government is serious about eradicating racism.

The government of Ontario must implement other necessary structural, program and policy changes including:

  • Establishing an Employment Equity Secretariat fully mandated and adequately resourced in order to implement a mandatory and comprehensive employment equity program in Ontario.
  • Collecting and analyzing ethno-racially and otherwise appropriately disaggregated data across all provincial Ministries and public institutions.
  • Amending the provincial funding formula for publicly funded elementary and secondary schools by introducing an Equity in Education Grant – a more robust redistributive mechanism rooted in a range of relevant equity and diversity measures and considerations – to ameliorate Ontario’s growing ethno-racially and otherwise defined learning outcome inequities and disparities.
  • Applying equity principles to all current and future government infrastructure investments – particularly renewable energy and “green collar” job-creating initiatives – to best ensure stable and sustainable futures for all Ontarians.
  • Establishing both the Anti-Racism as well as Disabilities Secretariats as mandated under the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Minister Coteau has indicated that he will set up an advisory body to assist him with the next step. It is critical for the minister to engage in a full and meaningful consultation process to ensure that the voices of racialized communities are heard and included.

Source: Ontario’s anti-racism directorate is a promising start | Toronto Star

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What Kathleen Wynne can do about anti-black racism

2015/10/15 Leave a comment

Anthony Morgan, a research lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic, proposes the creation of an anti-racism secretariat to undertake research and public education to reduce racism.

Not really sure the extent to which this will be effective, compared to the Ontario Human Rights Commission as well as other activities, governmental and non-governmental, with the comparable objectives:

Peel recently joined Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and London as Ontario jurisdictions where black people are the primary targets of the humiliating, human rights violating police practice of street checks and carding. Peel Police Chief Jennifer Evans has even decided to join the line of other Ontario chiefs who are defiantly committed to continuing this practice despite evidence of its discriminatory impact on black people.

In the realm of child welfare, black children are grossly overrepresented in every Ontario region where there is a sizable black population. After initially being caught flat-footed, the Ontario government has responded by supporting two separate province-wide consultations to address the systemic anti-black racism chronically plaguing Ontario’s policing and child welfare institutions.

It’s likely only a matter of time before similar province-wide government consultations have to be launched to remedy the over representation of blacks in school dropout rates, suspensions and expulsions, Ontario prisons, mental health committals and incidents of police use of deadly force, among others.

Though not as prominent on the public radar as it should be, anti-black hate crime also remains a pressing problem in Ontario. According to annual reports by the Toronto police and Statistics Canada, for the last few years blacks have been the principal target of racist hate-crimes in not only Toronto but across Canada.

Recently in Ottawa, a Black Lives Matter mural was defaced with the following threat: “ALL LIVES MATTER, NO DOUBLE STANDARD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.” This was the third Black Lives Matter mural to be defaced in Ottawa over the last few months. In another jarring incident in April, a black assembly plant worker in Windsor faced repeated incidents of nooses being tied and mysteriously placed in and around his working space.

The above incidents are not small, isolated and unconnected mishaps enacted by a fringe few. They collectively form part of the continually creeping culture of anti-black racism embedded in the public consciousness, conventions and institutions of Ontario. This culture is critically implicated in constructing a context for black life in which chronic crime, violence, unemployment and poverty too commonly compromise the health and well-being of Ontario’s black population.

None of the above is to suggest that the Ontario government and its institutions are not leading and/or supporting some important work to directly or indirectly address anti-black racism. It is to point out that what is being done is simply not enough.

There remains a powerfully promising institutional response to anti-black racism and other forms of race-based discrimination that the Ontario government is yet to deploy: the Anti-Racism Secretariat. Since 2006, Ontario’s Human Rights Code has provided for the creation of this secretariat mandated to undertake research and public education programming designed to prevent and eliminate racism in Ontario.

For reasons that are unclear, the secretariat has never been established. In the chasm of the Ontario government’s silent inaction, it is tempting to speculate that black people being the primary targets of racism in Ontario is the reason for this.

Source: What Kathleen Wynne can do about anti-black racism | Toronto Star

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The suffocating experience of being black in Canada

2015/08/04 Leave a comment

Anthony Morgan on the Black experience:

As we enter early adulthood we are collectively realizing that, despite what many think, blacks in Canada cannot speak about their lived experience and the ongoing injustices they face without being met with silencing indifference, dismissal and sometimes hostility.

While tolerating degrees of anti-black racism may have been a successful survival strategy for a previous generation of blacks in Canada, our generation has never known a Canada without a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or provincial human rights codes that enshrine our universal entitlement to equality as Canadians.

As such, we find it impossible to accept today’s black Canadian experience: extreme marginalization and disadvantage; restricted access to housing; racial profiling in policing, security, education and child welfare; criminalization; over-representation in the criminal justice system; high levels of unemployment; and disproportionate and extreme poverty.

This is part of the reason why when you tell the upcoming generation of social justice-oriented black Canadians to “Go back to your home country if you don’t like it here,” we stare at you with blank confusion, if not in angry defiance. Canada is the only home country we’ve ever known.

Our righteous resistance is not an expression of hatred for Canada, cops, or Confederate flags. It’s a thrashing attempt to break the stranglehold of Canadian-brand anti-black racism and wake our society up to an irrefutable fact:

We have the right to be treated equally as human beings, but also as Canadians. And as such, we resist suffocating racism because we are true black strong and free.

The suffocating experience of being black in Canada | Toronto Star.

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