Anti-Black Racism In Canada

Anti-Black racism, which is rooted in slavery and colonialism, is a fundamental aspect of Canadian history and culture. Anti-Black racism is prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination that is directed at people of African descent and is part of their unique history and experience. In Canada, it is a history that includes almost two hundred years of slavery; housing, employment and educational segregation; and legally-sanctioned discrimination.


Anti-Black racism in Canada is often subtle and is generally not accompanied by overt racial slurs or explicitly prohibitive legislation. However, it is deeply entrenched in Canadian institutions, policies, and practices, such that anti-Black racism is either functionally normalized or rendered invisible to the larger white society. This contemporary form of racism nonetheless replicates the historical de jure and de facto substantive conditions and effects of spatial segregation, economic disadvantage, and social division. It involves systemic discrimination in the immigration and refugee system, the criminal justice system, employment, education, health, and other spheres of society. It is manifested in the current social, economic, and political marginalization of African Canadians in society such as the lack of opportunities, lower socio-economic status, higher unemployment, significant poverty rates, overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, and the general feeling of alienation by African Canadians.

Anti-Black racism is characterized by particularly virulent and pervasive racial stereotypes. The stereotypes of the Black male as being prone to criminality and violence and being "dangerous" are some of the most prevalent and dominant stereotypes in Canadian society. These stereotypes are routinely reinforced and perpetuated by the mass media, reflected and maintained by Canadian institutions, and underpin the systemic discrimination against African Canadians in the criminal justice system. Canadian courts and various commissions have repeatedly recognized the pervasiveness of anti-Black stereotyping, the overrepresentation of African Canadians in the criminal justice system, and that African Canadians are prominent targets of racism in Canadian society.

As noted by Stephen Lewis in an open letter to then Premier Bob Rae on completion of the Report on Race Relations in Ontario in 1992:

First, what we are dealing with, at root, and fundamentally, is anti-Black racism, While it is obviously true that every visible minority community experiences the indignities and the wounds of systemic discrimination throughout Southern Ontario, it is the Black community which is the focus. It is Blacks who are being shot, it is Black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is Black students who are being inappropriately streamed in schools, it is Black kids who are disproportionately dropping out, it is housing communities with large concentrations of Black residents where the sense of vulnerability and disadvantage is most acute, it is Black employees, professional and non-professional, on whom the doors of upward equity slam shut. Just as the soothing balm of multiculturalism cannot mask racism, so racism cannot mask its primary target.

Anti-Black racism in Canada contradicts Canada's global racism-free image, notwithstanding the mechanisms available to redress racial discrimination such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Provincial and Federal human rights legislation and commissions, the Multiculturalism Act, the Federal Employment Equity Act and the international human rights instruments to which Canada has acceded.

Source : African Canadian Legal Clinic