Robyn Maynard: Policing Black Lives

I have been reading a fair bit lately about race and antiracist theory, but most of what I’ve been reading has been written in an American context, though of course much is broadly applicable to the situation in Canada, too. Much of the Canadian material I have been able to access has focused on indigenous issues. So I was particularly happy to learn of the publication of Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

Maynard is a Black feminist writer and grassroots community organiser who has been on the forefront of resistance to police violence for over a decade.

“Working with racialized youth in state care and in street-based economies, as well as with adult street-based sex workers, I have been constantly and painfully aware of the gross racial and economic injustices at the fault lines of Canadian society. Though I have not worked exclusively with Black communities, I’ve regularly witnessed enormous and disproportionate levels of what can only be called state-sanctioned violence and concerted neglect of Black people.”

Maynard writes that she began writing Policing Black Lives as a response to her experiences, and to the realisation that little literature on this issue in a Canadian context existed.

“In combing through the world of research for something that would describe the realities that I was seeing, I realized that there was still far too little literature addressing, in one place, the specificities of how criminal and immigration laws, inequitable access to work and housing and other state policies and institutions interact to shape the conditions of Black life in this country. It has become increasingly clear that none of these incidents are isolated; they are part of a larger pattern of the devaluation of Black life across Canada.

I felt compelled to write this book because anti-Blackness, particularly anti-Blackness at the hands of the state, is widely ignored by most Canadians.”

Maynard begins by interrogating the myth of Canada as a place of racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. She argues that anti-Black racism and state violence are endemic, but unregarded, in Canada, to the point that many white Canadians are unaware of the extent to while the various institutions of the state regulate, dehumanise and injure Black Canadians, and that, like institutional racism in the United States, has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade.

As the book’s full title suggests, Maynard starts her narrative of Black experience of systemic state oppression and violence with the often ignored history of slavery in the British and French colonies that would come to be identified as Canada. While not all Black people living in the colonies prior to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire were enslaved, many were. The ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade made stops at ports such as Halifax. During the American Revolution, Black Americans who fought for the English were given freedom and promised land in Nova Scotia - at the same time that white American Loyalists migrated north with their household slaves, who remained property.

One consequence of the existence of slavery and the ideologies that supported it in early Canadian culture is that free Black Canadians were devalued as citizens, denied many of the rights and privileges accorded to other colonial settlers, and subjected to race-based discrimination and sometimes violence. Racism was endemic. The freedom runners who followed the Underground Railway north to Canada may have escaped literal enslavement, but they did not arrive in the mythologised land of racial tolerance Canadians imagine our country to have been.

“The segregation of Black communities — 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 dangerous 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. In the United States, Jim Crow referred to the de jure segregation of Black from white in the public facilities of the former Confederate states. Canada had its own iteration of practices that separated Black from white in what some historians call “Canada’s Jim Crow.” Canadians produced “their own distinct language and rationalizations” when “propping up white supremacist ideology and practices.” Segregation in the post-abolition period cut across all aspects of society. Public education, immigration, employment and housing were all subject to a veiled Jim Crow-style segregation that either formally or informally kept Black persons in social, economic and political subjugation.”

Maynard discusses the ways in which Black people have been associated with a presumption of criminality, beginning with the presentation of Black freedom runners as criminals who had escaped from their lawful owners. The presence of escaped slaves was used to justify scrutiny by both police and the general public. After abolition, vice laws were used to continue scrutiny of Blacks; assumption about the general immorality of Black people resulted in the frequent use of prostitution laws against Black women in public places, and of drug laws against Blacks, and particularly Black men. Black men were also at risk of accusations of rape committed against white women, while at the same time, it was almost impossible for a white legal system convinced of the sexual immorality of Black women to consider rape against them as a crime.

“After slavery, associations between race and crime, and particularly between Blackness and crime, took hold as an important means of legitimating the ongoing state surveillance and control over Black people’s lives. Beyond prostitution and drug laws, the creation and application of criminal laws in general were used by the Canadian government to manage deep-seated fears and anxieties about Blackness. Tracing the lineage of racism in Canada’s legal system from the 1700s to the present day, Black Canadian legal scholar Esmerelda Thornhill concludes that “the law has colluded — and continues to collude — with race in ways that accommodate and foster ongoing … anti-Black racism”. The data supports this claim. Examinations of court records between the years of 1890 to 1920 found open racism in the sentencing of Black offenders by many magistrates. From 1908 to 1960, Blacks convicted of violent offences would receive far more severe sentences. The result of these court decisions was a consistently disproportionate rate of incarceration for Black people. In 1911, Black males were incarcerated at a rate eighteen times higher than that of white males, while in 1931 they were incarcerated at a rate ten times higher than whites. Incarceration had replaced enslavement as a legal means to literally strip people of their freedom, as well as separate families and inhibit future employment opportunities. Black incarceration was thus highly effective in maintaining Black disenfranchisement and subjugation in post-abolition Canada. The association of Blackness with danger allowed for the policing of Black peoples’ lives by white settler society, law enforcement and immigration agencies — Black emancipation had not yet been actualized.”

The association of Black communities and crime has continued. Black protest is criminalised, with protestors and civil rights activists seen as thugs and hoodlums. Despite evidence that Black people are no more likely than white people to use illegal drugs, the War on Drugs focused on Black communities, with Blacks far more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted on drug offenses. Racial profiling ad carding disproportionately target Blacks, particularly Black youth.

“Though not only Black people were arrested for drug infractions, the increased police surveillance and repression of Black communities mandated by drug law enforcement had direct impacts on Black incarceration in the period immediately following Mulroney’s War on Drugs. In 1995, a large-scale investigation in Ontario documented a massive influx of Black prisoners during the period spanning 1986–1987 to 1992–1993. By the end of this period, Blacks were incarcerated at a rate five times higher than their white counterparts. Though the CSR Report found that Black and white communities engaged in crime at comparable rates in that same period, this period saw the rate of incarceration of Blacks increase by over 200 percent, compared to white persons, whose rates rose by just over 20 percent. Black women, though arrested in smaller numbers than Black men, were found to face even more disproportionate rates of incarceration than men. By the end of 1993, Black women were incarcerated at a rate of seven times that of white women. Admissions at Vanier Centre for Women increased the rate of admission of Black women by 630 percent, whereas white women’s admissions at the same prison went up by 59 percent.”

Maynard devotes several chapters to the examination of the ways in which Black women, and particularly Black trans women, are treated by the police ad other agents of the state. Presumptions of engagement in sex work are common for Black women in public spaces. Poor Black women receiving social assistance are often represented as likely to commit fraud, or other crimes, and live under heightened scrutiny in their private lives by agents of social welfare agencies. Verbal, physical and sexual abuse by state agents is common. Black Caribbean women who travel between Canada and their home countries are frequently profiled as drug couriers.

Maynard also examines other aspects of the ways in which Black Canadians are surveilled, regulated, policed and denied privacy and autonomy: the issues of migrant Blacks, including refugees, and the policing of borders and concepts of citizenship; the scrutiny and interference in Black families, pathologising of Black family life and removal of Black children from their families; and the institutionalised racism Black youth face within the educational system.

I don’t often say things like this. But in this case, I think it’s essential. Maynard’s book should be read, and seriously deliberated on, by every white person in Canada. We are far too find of congratulating ourselves for being better than the US on racism. The truth is, we aren’t. We are just further behind on having it out in the open for everyone to see.

Nnedi Okorafor: Akata Witch and Akata Warrior

Sunny Nwazue is twelve, and lives in Nigeria with her parents, but she is Naijamerican - born in America to Nigerian parents - and she’s still getting used to living in Africa. People call her “akata” - a word that means bush animal and is a pejorative often used in Nigeria against Black Americans like Sunny. She’s albino, which is making it hard for her at school. She loves reading and learning, which is making it even harder. And though she doesn’t know it yet, she’s one of the Leopard People - the African name for those rare humans born with the ability to use juju, or magic. Some cultures call them shamans, or sorcerers, or other things.

Sunny is what the Leopard People call a free agent. Most Leopard people are born to families of Leopard People, and they know from childhood what they are, and what being a Leopard Person means, even though they don’t begin to come into their powers until they are initiated in early adolescence. But free agents like Sunny are born to families where no one else is a Leopard Person, and they know nothing about their heritage until something powerful happens, or they meet a Leopard Person who figures out what they are and brings them into the society.

Sunny is lucky. Not long after she has a strange experience with a candle and a vision, she meets another Leopard Person, a girl named Chichi who guessed what she is. Together with Sunny’s best friend Orlu, another, not quite as perceptive Leopard Person, Chichi begins Sunny’s introduction to her true people.

It’s not going to be easy. She can’t tell anyone who isn’t a Leopard about what she’s going through, and her parents are strict about things like curfews - but nighttime is when some of her most important learning must be done. And then there’s the matter of a serial killer who has been preying on children in the city...

Nnedi Okorafor’s book Akata Witch is ostensibly for young adults, but I found it just as interesting and entertaining as her books for adults. It’s a magical coming-of-age story, an adventure, and a mystery thriller all in one. Sunny is a determined, courageous young girl who draws the reader into her journey and keeps them reading, eager to see her succeed.

In Akata Warrior, the sequel to Akata Witch, Sunny and her friends are a year older, and Sunny has learned more about how Leopard society works, and is getting to know her way around the magical community of Leopard Knocks, which both is and isn’t part if the mundane world, but she is still somewhat of an outsider, with gaps in her knowledge of customs, history and traditions. She has a mentor, Sugar Cream, who is the Head Librarian of the community of Leopard Knocks, and is learning to read Nsibidi, the secret Leopard language that very few, even among the Leopard People, can read.

Even though she can’t talk to her parents about being a Leopard, they have come to grudgingly accept that she sometimes goes off with her friends to do things she doesn’t talk about. They aren’t happy about it, but they aren’t trying to stop her.

And she’s having dreams about a city filled with smoke, dreams that remind her of the strange vision she saw in a candle flame that began her journey toward becoming a Leopard person.

Forces are loose and moving in the world, and once again, Sunny and her friends will be instrumental in fighting the evil that has come through from the place of spirits the Leopard People call the wilderness.

I love these books. I love it that Sunny, who is different, who can be read as disabled, is a hero. I love it that her powers are partly derived from her disability. I love it that rather than gong with the same old child with a destiny trope, Okorafir has clearly established that it is the team of Sunny, Orlu, Chichi and Sasha that together can do great things - and that it’s not, in the eyes of the Leopard people, because they have a special destiny, but because they are the ones who happen to be here, now, with one set of skills that can wage the fight. If they fall, some other group will come along and carry on the battle, maybe in a different way, but it will go on. This is not te one and only hero story but an everyone can be a hero if they act at the right time just as anyone can fail.

And it is good to read contemporary fantasy that isn’t set in Europe or North America and doesn’t draw on European traditions of monsters and magic. This is fantasy that takes its shape from other traditions, and there’s not nearly enough of that around.

Martha Wells: All Systems Red

Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries is the story of a cybernetic Security Unit that has hacked into its own programming, rendering it capable of autonomous thought and decision-making, although it has most definitely not entertained the notion of letting its employers know about that.

It’s designed to be a killing machine, and we see just how good it is at its function in the opening sequence, in which it saves teo human scientists from something large and nasty that attacks them. But what it really enjoys is consuming entertainment media - films, books, music.

It’s current contract is to provide security for a group of scientists surveying an uninhabited planet. As contracts go, it’s not a bad one. The scientists are a reasonably compatible group who have worked together before, and after sll, it’s not as if they want to socislise with their SecUnit - and their SecUnit definitely does not want to socialise with them. But after the incident with the large and aggressive lifeform, the SecUnit and the survey team have a serious problem. There’s no mention of the lifeform in the official papers on the planet - and closer inspection shows that those documents have been altered. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

This could have been your standard semi-milsf mystery thriller, and it certainly has all the elements necessary for that, but the unique voice of the narrator transforms it into something rather more interesting, a speculation on the nature of choice, responsibility and autonomy. The self-named “murderbot” has free will, and is not particularly fond of human beings. Yet it risks itself to save its employers, repeatedly. A sense of duty? The need to hide its ability to make decisions, a sort if ironic self-preservation? A sense of right snd wrong?

All Systems Red is entertaining as an action-adventure style sf story, but it’s also an interesting turn on the classic AI examination. What is self-awareness? What is free will? What does an autonomous being that has none of the human drives do when it’s left to its own choices? Wells has more stories in the Murderbot series planned, and I’ll be interesting in seeing where she takes this.

Anthology: Hidden Youth

Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, is a companion volume to the Rose Fox edited Long Hidden, also published by Crossed Genres, the sadly defunct publishing house that, in its short life, nurtured some remarkable authors and released some important volumes of speculative fiction.

The focus of this anthology is marginalised youth - narratives of children and adolescents from many settings and time periods who share the experience of being outside, oppressed, ignored, othered, and sometimes worse. They represent those who exist in the margins of history and society.

Evocative as most of these stories are, not all reach the same heights of overall craft. Some deal in familiar times and places, others unveil pieces of history not often explored in fiction, or for that matter, in factual narratives. And as always in any collection, some touched me deeply, and others, even if technically admirable, were less engaging. Among my personal favourites are:

“A Name to Ashes,” by Jayme Goh, which tells a story I was not aware of, that of Asian workers pressed into slavery in Cuba under Spanish colonial rule.

“Trenches,” by Sioban Krzywicki, about a young trans person who magically comes into her own reality after leaving home to fight in the trenches during WWI.

“The Girl, The Devil and the Coal Mine,” by Warren Bull, in which a 12-year-old black coal miner’s daughter takes on the Devil in a battle of wits to save her brother.

“How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters,” by Erik Jensen, is a bawdy yet heroic tale of two child prostitutes in ancient Greece, a cityful of animated phallic statues, and Isis’ interest in a new penis for Osiris. Not recommended for folks with castration anxieties.

“North,” by Imani Josey is the story of a young black woman who moves north during the Great Migration, where she is given a choice between comfort, and love.

These and other stories collected here shine a light on times, places and people that history tends not to care about, letting us see into hidden lives. There is fantasy, and magic, and strange creatures, but there is also truth and history.


*There are 22 short stories in this anthology, 11 written by women, 10 written by men, and one written by a person who chose not to indicate their gender.