Confronting Canada’s ugly record of anti-Blackness

A needed counterpoint to the sanitized version of Canadian history. However, the arguments might be stronger if the book was not only”grounded in the work of countless renowned Canadian anti-racist scholars and activists,” but included a wider range of scholars:

In the early 20th century, the Canadian Department of Immigration went to great lengths to dissuade Black Americans from immigrating to Canada. Working with doctors, they provided them with monetary rewards for turning Black migrants away at the border and mandated that these medical professionals inflict invasive and unnecessary examinations as deterrence from entering Canada. The government also sent doctors to Oklahoma and Kansas to spread propaganda to Black Americans around the unlivable weather conditions of Canada—some even going as far as telling Black men their daughters would be vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.

This was done alongside two things: active courting of white settlers and a deep investment in the public appearance of a polite and welcoming neutrality, set apart from the outward race-based discrimination of the United States. This is just one of hundreds of seamless historical examples cited in the new book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present, written by Black feminist writer, activist and educator, Robyn Maynard.

Maynard plainly corrects and downright disrupts the friendly, welcoming and multicultural narrative on which Canada’s national identity relies. Her book examines anti-Black racism alongside every historical moment that Black people have been present in this country, starting from settler colonialism to present day. By characterizing Canadian nation-building as settler colonialism, Maynard effectively calls out the white theft of Indigenous land in the building of Canada and traces it through to a white-dominated hierarchy that exists to this day. It is grounded in the work of countless renowned Canadian anti-racist scholars and activists.

Maynard traces the 200 years of slavery in Canada, often erased or downplayed in the study of our history, noting the same dehumanizing and violent treatment of Black bodies we see in accounts of slavery in the U.S. Anti-Blackness through segregation characterized the post-slavery abolition period, an era often reimagined in Canada as purely positive.

Maynard recounts “Canada’s Jim Crow”, government-enforced racial segregation that had an impact on housing, employment, education and immigration for Black people in Canada. “Racial segregation—a form of violence in and of itself—entails the enforced (rather than voluntary) confinement of racialized populations to particular spaces (e.g. particular neighbourhoods, schools, public spaces, and businesses),” she writes. “The segregation of Blacks—which, like slavery, was a form of controlling Black movement and institutionalizing subordination—was based on the idea that Black people were both inferior and a danger to whites. Formally and informally, segregation was one of Canada’s foremost strategies for maintaining white dominance across all aspects of society after slavery’s end.”

Source: Confronting Canada’s ugly record of anti-Blackness – Macleans.ca