Uzodinma Ukagwu | Contributor
Earlier this week, Justin Trudeau made some unconventional remarks not usually associated with the office of the Canadian Prime Minister. In a speech marking Black History Month, at the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec, Trudeau said: “It’s time we recognize that anti-black racism and unconscious bias does exist…It’s time we hear and—believe—the stories of men and women who have been judged by the colour of their skin. It is time we take action to ensure equal opportunity and equal treatment of black Canadians in our schools and our places of work.”
O, music to my ears! It is refreshing and heartwarming, in my opinion, for the Canadian Black community to see our cause, mainly championed previously by fringe groups like Black Lives Matter, to be recognized and hopefully taken on in a substantive way by the highest levels of power in the country.
Is this perceived injustice, however, more than anecdotal? Does proof for this unconscious bias against black people exist in Canadian society? The answers to these questions are an unequivocal yes!
A United Nations working group released a report late last year on this issue, after an October 2016 mission to Canada. The report suggests that “anti-black racism and racial stereotypes” are “deeply entrenched in institutions, policies and practices,” and also simultaneously “functionally normalized and rendered invisible to the dominant group.”
A 2013 report by the then-ombudsman for federal inmates, Howard Sapers, stated that Black people made up 10 per cent of federal inmates (despite only making up 3 per cent of the overall Canadian population), and had second-class status in prison. They were more likely to do time in maximum security and solitary confinement, more likely to face the use of force from guards, less likely to hold prison jobs, and less likely to be released on parole.
Perhaps most damning, and significant, of all is the limited opportunities that Black Canadians face in business and politics. An example of this is highlighted in the 2016 report of a Law Society of Upper Canada working group that found that racialized persons working in the legal profession faced problems including “assumption of incompetence from judges and clients, denial of opportunities for professional advancement, and colleagues who shut them out of workplace social gatherings”.
Trudeau also acknowledged as much on Monday when he suggested that Black Canadians were insufficiently represented in parliament.
What then, is the way forward on this issue? Professor Kirk Atkinson of the York Department of Politics suggests that government policy addressing this issue must aim for “substantive justice over formal justice.” He acknowledges that it is “really tough” to enforce legislation preventing racial bias, because it is hard to establish the evidentiary standards of proof against erring organizations.
Professor Atkinson, however, suggests that a way to overcome this burden-of-proof problem is to gain greater social and political legitimacy for the cause against systemic racism, by forming alliances with other social movements that have a historical track record of having their grievances against injustice and denial of equal substantive rights legitimated and institutionally recognized, especially the feminist movement.
He says that the movement for racial justice must seek a dialogue of solidarity with the feminist movement, and that the feminist movement must now use its relative institutional legitimacy and privilege to support the movement for racial justice and fair dealings. This is strategically important to advance the cause of racial justice.
Also, Professor Jonathan Kerr of York University’s School of Administrative Studies advocates for a business hiring process that, as much as possible, eliminates the identities of the individuals being considered for positions. This would mean, in practice, hiring committees evaluating identity-blind resumes to eliminate unconscious bias from the hiring process.
One then hopes that Justin Trudeau’s ode to the issue of systemic racism and unconscious bias against Black Canadians is the beginning of a substantive government effort to tackle this problem, and that this recognition does not terminate with the end of Black History Month.
