Racism and gun violence in Toronto's black community

[Kentake]

Racism and gun violence in Toronto’s Black community

When her son Segun did not come home one night, Julia Farquharson became con-cerned. She had heard rumours from a neighbour that there was a shooting in the parking lot near her townhouse. When she saw the police yellow tape go up she ventured over to ask the police who had been shot. An officer asked to see her son’s picture. Julia returned with a photograph. Moments later a detective approached her and with a cold routineness said “Okay, we’re taking you down to the police station and then we’re taking you to the morgue.”
Indeed attending homicide scenes involving predominantly young Black men has become routine to police officers in Toronto. In 2005, the level of gun violence reached unprecedented levels with over 40 Black youth killed. While the general homicide rates in Toronto have not fluctuated much over the past thirty years, they have skyrocketed among Blacks and are now four times that of the general population.
Although Black youth have made up the majority of the murder victims, and although organizations like the Black Action Defense Committee have been calling on government for years to address the root causes of gun violence, it was not until a young White woman was shot and killed in the downtown commercial core of the city on Boxing day that the issue of gun violence garnered serious attention and calls for action in the media and by politicians.
Following the shooting of this 15 year old White bystander on Yonge Street, there were statements of condolences from the Prime Minister, the Premier and the Mayor. The Premier and some of his cabinet ministers attended a vigil near the scene of the killing. In contrast, no such political presence was manifest at the mass memorials and vigils organized over the years by concerned citizens in Toronto’s African-Canadian community, who by 2001 were already mourning the deaths of some 106 young murder victims who had died over the preceding six years. (The majority of these victims were killed by gunfire.)
As the African-Canadian community newspaper Share noted in a January 2006 editorial: “For months Black community leaders have been trying to get the three levels of government together to discuss the gun violence in the city that has taken so many Black lives, with little success. One young White girl was shot and killed and within a week a meeting between the three levels of government was arranged. Black leaders were not invited.”
This is the irony for many African-Canadians: In the mainstream media and in the dominant political discourse the issue of gun violence has been squarely constructed as a Black problem – the alleged perpetrators paraded across our T.V. Screens in handcuffs are Black; the victims wheeled away in gurneys are Black – and we are told that the problem is ours to solve. But when it comes to working with the government to construct a plan and find real solutions to stem the tide of violence, Black leadership is not welcome.
Unless of course that leadership does not demand systemic change and an end to economic, racial and social inequality. Advocating a plan to address gun violence that calls for greater levels of volunteerism within the community, missionary work, and the strengthening of the (patriarchal) family, Reverend Eugene Rivers of Boston, Massachusetts gained liberal access to the Mayor, the Chief of Police and the Ontario Premier in his heavily reported whirlwind three day tour of Toronto. Although Reverend Rivers also stated that funding for youth programs was an important part of his anti-violence strategy, he stressed that the “Black community has to have a stronger emphasis on the role of fathers.” He was reported as critical of “a certain kind of racial political discourse that holds up racism as the key to violence. That’s an old paradigm that doesn’t work.” This is the kind of message government does not mind hearing.
The resurgence of sexist rhetoric that causally links anti-social behaviour by some Black youth with being raised in homes headed by a single mother is symptomatic of this society’s recurring need to personalize problems that are systemic in nature. Faulting largely poor Black mothers for the violence of angry, dispossessed youth masks the extent to which inequality in Canadian society is growing.
“The connection between violence and social inequality has long been established globally. Research indicates clearly that social and economic inequality leads to intensification of social and economic alienation and a variety of anti-social behaviours including violence,” says Ryerson University Professor Grace-Edward Galabuzi, author of Canada’s Economic Apartheid. He cites a recent report by the Toronto Community Foundation titled Vital Signs 2005 that connects violence with joblessness among youth.
“In Toronto,” Galabuzi notes, “Blacks are almost three times as likely to live in poverty [than non-Blacks] whether they are employed or not. In 2001, their poverty rate was 29.5% compared to the overall average of 11.6% for those from the mainstream population. Black youth unemployment stood at 21% in 2001 compared to 7% for the rest of the population.”
Increasing Criminalization of the Black Community
The new Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper is unlikely to pay much heed to these statistics. In a pre-election speech outlining his “Stand Up For Security” plan, Harper scoffed at the idea that poverty plays a significant role in youth violence, noting that the alleged Boxing Day shooters sped away from the crime scene in a BMW.
The Harper government is poised to push through sweeping changes to the criminal justice system that will translate into longer prison sentences for gun crimes, overhauling the Youth Criminal Justice Act (with more youth to be tried as adults), and the hiring of more police officers (who will no doubt be mainly White and male).
Five million dollars has been earmarked for the new Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) and the program is already underway. As reported in the Globe & Mail, the initiative “deploys three 18 officer teams who move around the city in small groups, blanketing the 20-plus most high-risk neighbourhoods for about a week at a time.” Already subjected to racial profiling and often abusive policing, few residents in low-income neighbourhoods are likely to see this as a positive development. Prior to TAVIS, Share journalists have reported hearing “troubling accounts of houses raided [by police] – some mistakenly – where innocents have been punched; guns held to the heads of children; people wrongly arrested, all with no apologies to follow.”
The call for longer mandatory minimum prison sentences has grown stronger in Canada with members of all political parties, including the NDP, supporting such measures despite the documented failure of this policy to deter violence or crime in general in the United States. A lack of visible opposition from the labour movement and the Left will guarantee the implementation of this regressive law-and-order agenda. The construction of expensive jails such as the proposed new youth super-jail to be built in Ontario for $81 million will also mean a concomitant reduction in funds available to support strong social programs and public infrastructures.
“Incarceration strategies are futile,” comments Galabuzi. “And in the long run [they are] counter-productive because [at the end of their sentences] the imprisoned youth will re-enter society less prepared to succeed, with even fewer opportunities in mainstream societies and having garnered the wrong kind of street credibility.”
Black Community response
In August of 2005, a powerful new umbrella group sprang forward to create The Coalition of African Canadian Community Organizations, uniting some 30 major grassroots Black organizations dedicated to comprehensively addressing the root causes of violence.
The Coalition defines the problem of escalating gun violence as a threat to community safety that is related to a systematic marginalization and exclusion of African Canadians and particularly youth, anti-Black racism and a failure on the part of government, business and the broader society to respond in a socially responsible way to this crisis. The Coalition’s lengthy “Action Plan” calls for all three levels of government to work with the community to create better policing, to discontinue the discriminatory application of the Safe Schools Act which disenfranchises African Canadian youth and to fund services and programs of real value to youth among many other goals.
Although the Coalition managed to meet with then Prime Minister Paul Martin before the election call, it has had a challenging time getting the ear of local, provincial and federal governments.
The Coalition says that capacity building and strengthening Black organizations and institutions is key. It is calling for increased and sustained funding for programs, services, training and other opportunities that will serve at-risk youth, not just summer programs, counselling or “midnight basketball.” The Coalition is concerned that government will continue to respond only at severe times of crisis with band-aid initiatives and ad hoc funding. Without the establishment, by statute, of an African Canadian Social & Economic Development Agency that would facilitate government supported social and economic programs and capacity building in the Black not-for-profit sector, few in the Coalition see how decades (centuries?) of economic disparity will be turned around.
Nkem Anizor, president of the New Black Youth Taking Action, says that an educational system that is producing a 40 per cent drop/push out rate among Black youth and a lack of social programming, affordable housing, training and employment opportunities are among the socio-economic factors that contribute to crime in the Black community. She sees greater political unity and involvement among Black voters to mobilize pressure as well as a “pro-Black media presence to counteract the consistent criminalization of the Black community by the mainstream media” as necessary pieces.
“How can the Black community be asked to solve the problem on our own when our young people are being kicked out of school, we live in substandard housing; we’re discriminated against in the workforce and we don’t have our own institutions like community centres, industries and businesses to employ large numbers of Black people?” asked one young woman after a recent community forum.
Clearly, the problem of gun violence cannot be solved so long as it is constructed as a uniquely Black problem.