Eleanor Sinclair at her daughter Windy’s vigil. Photo courtesy of Ryan Thorpe

It was freezing in Winnipeg, cold enough that frostbite threatened to set in minutes; the kind of cold that sets deep in the bones, down to the marrow. Unforgiving wind ripped through flat, icy streets, and snowdrifts piled along sidewalks. A frigid, stainless steel sky descended on the prairie capital.

By the time Windy Sinclair, a young Indigenous mother, went missing Christmas night in 2017, an unrelenting cold snap was stretching into its second week. In the days after she disappeared, her family phoned police, hospitals, remand centres, and downtown hotels and bars, asking whoever picked up if she was there. They monitored her social media accounts for signs of life. They loaded into an old van, maneuvering through the city’s sleet-covered streets, in search of her. Her children wondered when she was coming home. Her mother prayed.

Then, four days after the disappearance, came the knock at the door. Windy’s crumpled body had been found in a dirty, inner-city back alley, so frozen it took police two days and two space heaters to unthaw it enough to move.

Six weeks later, Eleanor Sinclair stood and stared at the spot her daughter was found frozen and dead. Her shoulders slumped forward and shook as she sobbed. Her head hung low as if in prayer. As tears crested her cheekbones, she whispered something to herself—or maybe to her daughter’s spirit. On that day, Windy would have turned 30. In her memory, Eleanor organized a vigil. Nine people showed up. One of them, a small child held in her mother’s arms, wanted to leave as soon as they’d arrived; it was still incredibly cold out. The group huddled in the back lane, bracing themselves against the elements.

It wasn’t as cold that day for the mourners as it had been when Windy arrived. The last week of her life was one long severe weather warning. It remains unclear how Windy ended up at the spot she was found. What is known, however, is that the chain of events leading to the discovery of her body was remarkably tragic, yet entirely commonplace.

Windy’s death marked one more soul snatched away from the streets of Winnipeg, a city with a long history of Indigenous murders and deaths that sits like an open scar on the community’s heart. Had Windy’s body not been found, it’s likely her death would have passed like those of so many Indigenous women: unreported and ignored.

***

On December 25, 2017, as the Sinclair family prepared to sit down to a traditional Christmas supper of turkey, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy, paramedics were dispatched to their North End home. The area has long been Winnipeg’s most socially disadvantaged and deprived, pocked by high levels of addiction, crime, and gang membership, and low levels of employment and median income. Bordered on the south by a rail yard, the North End is cleaved off from the rest of the city. Community activists say the yard serves as both a physical and psychological barrier between the haves and have-nots; one local playwright described it as Winnipeg’s Berlin Wall.

That night, Windy was intoxicated, hallucinating, and paranoid, convinced a man was coming to kidnap her and her daughter. Eleanor had been concerned with her behaviour all afternoon after she’d caught her mumbling to inanimate objects in their home. “I knew right away she wasn’t herself,” she remembers.

At 11:15 p.m., a nurse went to check on Windy and tell her she was expecting a child. But she was nowhere to be found

The erratic behaviour kept escalating. Eventually, Windy picked up the phone and dialled 911, telling the operator someone was coming to steal her children. Eleanor grabbed the phone and explained what was really going on: Her daughter was high and confused, and while she worried for her well-being, she thought the safest place for her was at home. After hanging up, Eleanor tried to calm her daughter down. It didn’t work. Windy dialled 911 again. Once more Eleanor took the phone from her. In doing so, she accidentally hung up. Two calls in one night with a disconnection meant the operator had no choice; someone had to be dispatched.

Minutes later, an ambulance pulled up to the home. Paramedics checked Windy’s vitals and asked her some questions. In an incident report, one wrote that during the conversation Windy stood up abruptly, walked to the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. Then she walked back and sat down, leaving the water running. The paramedics asked what drugs she did and Windy told them she injected methamphetamine, explaining sometimes she mixed it with opioids like fentanyl or morphine. Under the portion of the incident report labeled “Primary Impression,” a paramedic wrote: Poisoning/OD.

The paramedics told Eleanor that Windy needed to be transferred to Seven Oaks General Hospital for observation and testing. That forced Eleanor to make a decision. Two of Windy’s children—Travis, then 11, and Samarrah, then five, both of whom Eleanor has custody of—were at her home. The children had been in Eleanor’s care throughout the entirety of Windy’s battle with addiction, which began after her father died in 2015. (Windy also had two other children—Aaron, eight, and Harvey, five—who were not at the home that night. Aaron lives with his father, while Harvey is in foster care.) Eleanor knew she couldn’t leave the children at home. She also didn’t want to take them to the emergency room on Christmas. She decided she and the children would stay home and check on Windy the next day. She explained to the paramedics that should anything come up, hospital staff would have to call her at their family home, not the out-of-date number listed on Windy’s medical file. The paramedics wrote down the correct emergency contact number and promised to pass it along to staff when they arrived at Seven Oaks. As her daughter was led out the door, Eleanor pushed a winter coat into her arms. The temperature outside was nearing -30 C; she hoped it would keep her warm.

Hospital records show Windy was signed into the care of Seven Oaks emergency room staff at 8:06 p.m. Ten minutes later she was seen by a triage nurse, who noted in Windy’s file she was an intravenous meth user behaving erratically. Staff then led Windy to a nearby room, located close to a nursing station where she could be observed, to wait for a doctor. Once again it was noted in her file that she was behaving strange: Her speech was slurred and she told staff she wanted to leave. For still-unknown reasons, the decision was made to move her to a different room, tucked away at the back of the hospital wing, far from the watchful eyes of the nursing station.

At 8:48 p.m. Windy was seen by a doctor, who ordered an IV sedative and a pregnancy test, the latter standard procedure for women of child-bearing age when they come to an emergency room. The results would later show Windy was two months pregnant; there’s no evidence to suggest she knew. At 11:15 p.m. a nurse went to check on her and tell her she was expecting a child. But Windy was nowhere to be seen. Windy had pulled out her IV, gathered her belongings, wandered down the hall, and walked out the hospital’s east exit. Security footage shows her stumbling out the door, her jacket undone as she ventured outside.

When hospital staff realized she was missing, they pulled up Windy’s medical file and called the out-of-date emergency contact number listed. No one picked up. Either the paramedics did not pass along the correct phone number, or staff didn’t bother to call it. Windy’s family was not told she was missing, and no further efforts were made to contact them.

Three days later, on the morning of December 28, a woman looked out her apartment window in the city’s West Broadway neighbourhood, roughly 10 kilometres south of Seven Oaks. She saw something in her back lane, but convinced herself it was a pile of clothes. Minutes later, second guessing her eyes, she walked out back to check. It was Windy’s body, tucked away out of sight in a back alley by a heating vent.

***

There are many holes in the story of Windy’s disappearance. It’s unclear why she was moved from a room where she could be closely observed to one at the back of the hospital wing. It’s unclear why no one checked on her for so long after she was given a sedative. It’s unclear why she was left alone while exhibiting signs consistent with drug-induced psychosis and expressing a desire to leave. It’s unclear why she wasn’t held under the Mental Health Act, which allows people to be detained for their own safety. It remains unclear whether or not a “Code Yellow”—a hospital procedure used, among other reasons, to search for patients who leave against medical advice—was called after staff realized she was missing. It’s unclear why Windy’s family wasn’t notified she had disappeared. It’s unclear why Eleanor was told, when calling the next morning to ask about her daughter, that she’d completed treatment and was discharged. So much about what happened, and did not happen, remains unclear. And that, Eleanor says, is because her daughter was Indigenous in a hospital in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg: The city once dubbed Canada’s most racist by Maclean’s magazine. The city of J.J. Harper, Brian Sinclair, Claudette Osborne, Matthew Dumas, Errol Greene, Tina Fontaine, and countless others whose deaths and disappearances went unreported and whose names no one will ever know. Eleanor recognizes her daughter made poor choices that helped lead her to the alley where her body was found. She also believes her daughter was failed by Seven Oaks. That she still had time to turn her life around. That her death was preventable. Eleanor says the fact her daughter’s skin was brown altered what did and did not happen the night she went missing.

The details of Windy’s death kicked off a minor media stir, with the city’s major news outlets all chasing the story, and Canadian Press copy picked up by national publications. (The writer of this piece was among reporters covering the story.) But news cycles are quick and collective memory short. Six weeks after her body was found, only one publication sent a reporter to Windy’s vigil. The city’s meth epidemic had already offered up new casualties. In August 2017, a police spokesman told reporters Winnipeg was in the grips of a serious meth problem. Months later, the chief of police said at a press conference that the situation was so bad it was starting to keep him up at night. By all accounts meth is easily available and readily consumed on the streets of Winnipeg, which has corresponded with an uptick in violent and property crimes carried out by those desperate to fund their next hit. A local harm-reduction program estimated it gave out 1.5 million clean syringes over the past year. During a six month period that year, the Bear Clan Patrol, an Indigenous-led crime prevention group based out of the North End, said it picked up 3,000 used needles off the street.

At the vigil, Eleanor lit a candle and whispered a prayer for her daughter. Meanwhile, a few kilometres away, hundreds came together in the city’s downtown at The Forks, the historic meeting place of the region’s Indigenous peoples. They gathered in opposition to the verdict in the Gerald Stanley second-degree murder trial. Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, was shot in the back of the head at point blank range in August 2016. After deliberation, an all-white jury acquitted Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer who pulled the trigger, sparking nationwide protests and outrage.

With so much death and pain it can be hard to keep track of all the vigils. In front of flashing cameras and reporters scribbling in notebooks, demonstrators expressed frustration and anger at what many call the systemic racism of the Canadian justice system. Addressing the crowd, then-Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Sheila North declared that 150 years of Canadian history weighed on Stanley’s finger as he pulled the trigger. “It wasn’t just an accident. There were years of history that went behind that gunshot that took that life,” North said.

As the words fell from North’s lips, Eleanor wept, standing over the spot her daughter’s body had been found, lamenting what she believes is the institutional racism of the Canadian health care system. The sense Windy’s death had already been forgotten was palpable. It was exactly what Eleanor feared most: Her daughter had become a statistic. “She’s just one more dead Native woman,” Eleanor says.

Twelve days later, the jury in another high-profile murder trial ended deliberations. Raymond Cormier stood accused of murdering 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was pulled from Winnipeg’s Red River in 2014, wrapped in a duvet and weighed down with rocks. Her death was a catalyst for the creation of Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The hope of “Justice for Tina,” the rallying cry shouted at protests in her honour, was in many ways the stand-in for the overdue justice that had eluded too many for too long. The verdict: not guilty.

***

After her daughter’s death, Eleanor had a series of meetings with staff and administration from Seven Oaks General Hospital and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, the city’s governing body for health care regulation. She was looking for answers, but says she came out with more questions. (The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority declined comment for this story, saying it couldn’t speak publicly about the case due to patient privacy concerns.) When interviewed in June, Eleanor said she still had not learned whether or not hospital staff called a “Code Yellow” when Windy disappeared, which could have protected her that night. She also says a doctor who attended one of the meetings told her Windy had been “lucid” enough to leave on her own the night she went missing.

“She was hallucinating. She was clearly under the influence. They had given her a [sedative]. But she’s lucid enough to leave?” Eleanor says. “They didn’t even look for her. Her life didn’t matter to them. I even told them, ‘If it was that cold outside, you would bring in your pet. You’d have that compassion for your pet. Why didn’t you show my daughter that compassion?’”

Shortly after a local news outlet reported the discovery of Windy’s body, the Winnipeg Police Service, in one of its only public statements on the case, said it did not consider her death suspicious and would have no further updates for media. How and when she got to that back alley is still a mystery. Manitoba’s chief medical examiner has not yet provided an official cause of death.

A 2015 report says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether”

Eleanor will likely never get the answers she’s after. On one point, however, she has no doubt: Had the hospital done what it was supposed to, Windy wouldn’t have ended up in that alley. In her view, the hospital failed in its duty of care. And that, she says, is symptomatic of the systemic racism simmering below the surface in Winnipeg hospitals.

A few months after her daughter’s death, while the meetings with hospital representatives were still ongoing, Eleanor sat at her kitchen table reminiscing about her late husband, and Windy’s father, Brian. He had been chronically ill prior to his death, so the two of them often went to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, the closest hospital to their home. “The first thing the nurse would say to him when we walked in was, ‘Okay Brian, what kind of drugs do you want now?’” she says. “It’s not, ‘Hey Brian, why did you come to the hospital? What symptoms do you have?’ That’s the attitude. That’s the kind of treatment he would get.” The racism her husband experienced at Winnipeg hospitals made him increasingly unlikely to seek out medical treatment late in life to avoid the humiliation he felt being stereotyped as the drug-seeking “drunk Indian.”

Research on anti-Indigenous bias in Canadian health care shows Eleanor’s husband wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Citing a string of academic studies, a 2015 report published by the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based non-profit think tank, says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether.”

A 2011 study cited in the report took a closer look at the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people accessing care at an inner-city emergency department. The researchers found Indigenous participants believed being identified as “Aboriginal and poor” may negatively affect their credibility in the eyes of health care professionals and hinder their ability to get help.

Refusing to go to the hospital, Eleanor’s husband died of pneumonia at home in December 2015. His death served as the spark for his daughter’s struggle with addiction, which would later lead her into the emergency room of Seven Oaks. Two years to the day of Brian’s death, police arrived at Eleanor’s home, telling her Windy was dead.

Dr. Shannon McDonald, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for British Columbia’s First Nations Health Authority, who called Winnipeg home most of her life, says it’s nearly impossible to say for certain whether anti-Indigenous racism was at play in how Windy was treated at Seven Oaks. “I suppose we can say it’s possible [racism was a factor]. Knowing some of the previous circumstances in Winnipeg that have been well reported, it may even be probable,” McDonald says. These previous incidents include, among others, the death of Brian Sinclair (who shares the same name as Eleanor’s deceased husband, but is not related). Sinclair, a 45-year-old double amputee confined to a wheelchair, came to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre seeking help for a blocked catheter in September 2008. A subsequent inquest into his death determined he was ignored for 34 hours while waiting in the emergency room, with staff later admitting they assumed he was drunk, homeless, or both. He died of a treatable bladder infection in Manitoba’s largest hospital. By the time anyone noticed he was dead, rigor mortis had set in and an official time of death couldn’t be determined.

The Brian Sinclair Working Group, a collection of doctors and academics who conducted an investigation into Sinclair’s death, released a report with a series of recommendations in September 2017. That month, in response to the report, the interim president of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said it was time to “come to terms” with the way “systemic racism” can affect health care services. Three months later Windy walked into the emergency room at Seven Oaks.

“This young woman coming in, intoxicated, incoherent, she would have been considered troublesome,” McDonald says. “This young woman would have confirmed for some people their image of a drug-using Indigenous person, who may not have been considered as valuable as other patients. I’ve worked in situations where that’s the case, where people that I’ve worked with professionally sometimes see some patients as more worthy of their efforts than others.”

***

Eleanor has still been fighting to learn more about what happened that night. She’s also trying to get Seven Oaks to acknowledge the ways she says hospital staff let her daughter down. Both of those battles, Eleanor says, have so far been in vain. “Her life should matter to them. Her life did matter,” Eleanor says. “But I am going to make sure that changes are made. And if I have to go protest outside the Seven Oaks then I will do that. I can’t let them get away with this one. She mattered. She mattered to a lot of people.”

At the same time, Eleanor has been raising two of Windy’s children, Travis and Samarrah. She dreads the day Samarrah starts asking hard questions about what happened to her mother. She doesn’t yet understand it, and can’t wrap her head around the fact her mom is really gone. “She’s going to ask me what I did about it,” Eleanor says. “So I need to be able to say I made them accountable. That I did anything that I could to try and make her life meaningful. To make sure that nobody else goes through this.”

Sitting in her home, the last place she saw her daughter alive, Eleanor broke down and cried, recounting the time, not long after Windy died, when she took her granddaughter on a trip outside the city.

“I had to drop my Mom and Dad off out of town. I took her with me. On the way back she said, ‘I can see the stars.’ Because she hasn’t been out of the city in the longest time. I said, ‘Yeah baby, there’s a lot of stars out there.’ So we stopped and got out and looked, and she said, ‘I miss my Mommy.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, I miss her, too.’”

Eleanor’s voice began to quiver and shake. She tried to compose herself, holding it all in to finish the story. But the dam had cracked behind the weight of the pain. Then, it burst open. She lost control, the words barely audible through her sobs.

“I said, ‘Look for the biggest star baby, that’s probably your Mom.’ So she’s walking around the van trying to find the biggest star. Then she finally finds it and she goes, ‘That’s my Mommy. That’s my Mommy shining brightly.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, that’s her.’”

That night, Eleanor made up imaginary errands the two of them needed to run. Her granddaughter didn’t want to lose sight of the star, and Eleanor didn’t have the heart to spoil it for her. They just kept driving, staying out until the clock on the van’s dashboard read 3 a.m. Eventually, she pulled back into the city, winding through the residential streets of the North End, before parking outside their home. Then she carried her granddaughter inside and tucked her into bed, as her mother had once, long ago, in better times.

“Now once in a while she goes out into the backyard and tries to find that star,” Eleanor says, with tears in her eyes. “But here in the city, you can barely see the stars.”

We thought he was on PCP or something, one says.

He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.

He’s huge, one exclaims! Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them.

We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased.

And then he was charged with terrorism.

Literally.

Excerpted from When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir © PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS and ASHA BANDELE, 2018. Published by Raincoast Books, raincoast.com

Photo by Christopher Curtis/Montreal Gazette.

Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

When you love something,  you want to know it loves you back. It’s why we look for ourselves in art: We want to see reflections of our struggles acknowledged, and we long to hear stories where we can be heroes. As a Black and Indian child of the 1990s, I was starving to see myself in the media I consumed; besides Will Smith, things were scarce.

In the late ’90s, video games had only started to feature voice acting and recognizably human characters. I wasn’t looking for a relatable dark-skinned character as much as I was looking for a game starring a human being and not a wise-cracking bobcat or a dragon who would become a fast friend.

Since then, much has evolved: From the graphical shifts of eight-bit and 16-bit pixelated characters to 3D polygonal character models in the mid-’90s, to the near-realism and embrace of virtual reality that has defined the 2010s, games of today are unrecognizable when compared to the Super Nintendo titles I played as a child. Today’s games industry rivals Hollywood in both profitability and, more notably, production values.

For the most part, technology is no longer a limiting factor for the creative vision of game developers. If you want photorealistic renditions of known actors, it can be done. Living paintings, playable novels, interactive horror movies: They all exist, and have active fanbases to boot. Almost anything can be created in a video game—and almost anyone. Blockbuster game franchises, such as the globe-trotting treasure hunts of the Uncharted series and the gritty alien warfare of the Gears of War titles, have used performance capture technology to bring life to their digital stars. Made famous via Andy Serkis’s turn as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy starting in 2001 (as well as his turn a decade later as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy), performance capture technology allows a physical actor’s performance on a soundstage to be used as the skeleton for a computer generated character in the final product.

The possibilities, as Serkis has demonstrated, are endless: Free from the limits of their physical bodies, talented actors can embody any role their skills can match.

As more games embraced performance capture technology, I was ready to see how many opportunities a truly colour- and race-blind casting process would create for people of colour in gaming. But my optimism may have been misplaced.

***

The use of performance capture in games has only become notable within the last decade, so examples are relatively limited. But even in its infancy, developers have used the technology in the same, questionable way: to cast white people as non-white characters.

In 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief ’s End and this year’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, two characters that are portrayed onscreen as women of colour—Nadine Ross, a steely South African mercenary, and Chloe Frazer, an Indian-Australian treasure hunter— were voiced and motion captured by white women, Laura Bailey and Claudia Black, respectively. In Gears of War 4, Kait Diaz, a determined Latina soldier, was performed by two people: The motion capture actor, who performs the physical movements of the character, was Aliyah O’Brien, a Canadian of Irish, Spanish, and Welsh descent; the voice actor was, once again, Laura Bailey.

The issue doesn’t resolve itself when we focus on purely voice acting roles in gaming; if anything, it gets worse. From the daughter of a slave fighting for freedom in the historical fantasy of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, to an orphaned girl building a relationship with her adoptive guardian in the choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling of The Walking Dead, some of the most widely celebrated characters of colour in recent years (Aveline de Grandpré and Clementine) have been voiced by white women (Amber Goldfarb and Melissa Hutchinson).

To rely on technological advances to deliver diversity is to engage in active cruelty toward your hopes and dreams. On paper, technology that allows anyone to be anyone else should be the true equalizer in terms of diversity in casting. And in some cases, it has been: Merle Dandridge, an actor of Black and Asian descent, has performed the roles of Black-Asian women, Black women, and an elderly white woman, all in the last few years. But far more often, the games industry has used the smokescreen of digital performance to cast the same handful of mostly white actors across every role possible. It’s literally colourblind casting—there’s scarcely a person of colour to be seen.

***

Video games are a mongrel art form, inheriting the strengths and challenges of every medium that preceded them while dealing with problems that are wholly unique. It’s also a relatively young medium: Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985, Pong in 1972. Every decade brings a massive upgrade in technology that, in turn, transforms the idea of what a video game can be. Performance capture technology is even younger. The technique has its roots in rotoscoping, an animation method popularized by famed cartoonist Max Fleischer in 1915. He would trace over the individual frames of a live-action film reel to create a cartoon character that appeared to move with the fluidity of a human being (popularized in Talkartoons such as “Minnie the Moocher,” which featured the rotoscoped dance moves of Cab Calloway). Rotoscoping was later adopted by animation powerhouses, including Walt Disney, over the following half-century, but it was a time-consuming, labour-intensive process.

Motion capture technology as we know it today was developed as a tool in the field of biomechanics to track and analyze the movements of athletes in the late 20th century it was almost exclusively used for research and educational purposes. The core technology is largely the same: Pingpong ball-like sensors are attached to a bodysuit that the actor wears, allowing a stick-figure rendition of their exact movements to be recorded by a selection of cameras. Performance capture, however, specifically refers to an actor’s facial and finger movements being mapped to a digital character. While the technology has evolved and refined since those early days, the core mechanics remain the same. Today, motion capture studios can be found across Canada, working on projects across television, movies, and games.

But the games industry, like the tech world at large, has a systemic problem attracting and maintaining employees from diverse backgrounds. According to the International Game Developers Association’s (IDGA) 2015 developer satisfaction survey, 75 percent of developers polled identify as male, 73 percent identify as straight, and 76 percent identify as white, European, or Caucasian. Meanwhile, just three percent surveyed were Black, seven percent Latinx, and nine percent East Asian. This homogeneity becomes all the more apparent in a creative field. Video games offer a spectrum to tell unlimited stories in an ever-growing number of formats, yet they’re almost exclusively being told by a single group. This could be a matter of a group of creatives stumbling before they learn to walk, or it could be an accepted evil in the performance world. But it’s easy to trace a line from the lack of diversity behind the scenes to a lack of diverse characters being created, and in turn, a failure to hire and cast actors of colour in digital performance roles.

Canadian developers and motion capture studios are not exempt from this trend. Far Cry 4, an action-adventure romp set during a civil war in a fictional world based on Nepal, was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and released in 2014. In a game stacked with people of colour (and actors of colour to match), it’s more than disappointing that both the lead character, Ajay Ghale (a Nepalese-American) and the primary antagonist, Pagan Min (a brutal monarch born in Hong Kong) were voiced and performed by white men (James A. Woods and Troy Baker). The same goes for Gears of War 4, by Vancouver-based developer The Coalition. Side characters of colour are voiced and motion performed by actors of colour—including some high profile names like Jimmy Smits and Justina Machado. But when it comes to lead characters (including the aforementioned Kait Diaz played by Laura Bailey), well-known white actors tend to show up as people of colour, such as Robin Atkin Downes as heroic Lieutenant Minh Young Kim.

None of these casting choices have created much backlash. While the issue of whitewashing in film has become enough of a social media talking point to result in actual change, the cultural footprint of gaming is too small, and too white, to generate anything close to that level of organized outrage. But that doesn’t mean gamers of colour don’t exist, and it’s no excuse for a young industry to inherit Hollywood’s racism and dismal view of diversity. It’s not too late to believe we can do better.

Then again, the nature of this issue is complicated by the layers of technology inherent to the problem. The #whitewashOUT movement led by American comedian Margaret Cho in response to the release of Ghost in the Shell in early 2017 was easy to grasp: A Japanese character named Major Motoko Kusanagi in a movie set in Japan, based on a Japanese franchise made by Japanese people, was played by Scarlett Johansson. The grievance there is clear and obvious, and a social movement is born.

But digital performance? Voice acting? This is the realm of thought exercises and appeals toward devil’s advocacy. If Black people can sound white, why can’t white people provide the voices for Black characters? If a white woman can speak with a convincing Mandarin-accented English lilt, why should she be excluded from auditioning? All these questions and more can be found in any online message board or Twitter thread about the Uncharted controversy, and they’re not easy to answer. But solutions can be found, if you know where to look.

***

The closest neighbour to performance acting is voice acting, and Roger King, president of Ethnic Voice Talent (EVT)—an agency that gathers voice actors across dozens of accents and languages and helps get them cast for the right roles—has been working in that world for decades. King, a voice actor who traded days in the recording booth for the responsibilities of a talent agent, started EVT to address a growing demand in the market for non-white voices—not just professionally-trained voice actors speaking non-English languages, but accented English roles as well.

The majority of King’s clients work in voice-over in radio ads and narration. But he also casts for animated programs and video games. In the 13 years that EVT has existed, King has seen a marked change in how his industry, and society as a whole, treats the idea of a non-white voice. “Back then, [casting directors] would want character actors to put on these stereotypical voices, with a subtle racist undertone,” says King. A character with an accent would almost always be the butt of the joke in a comedic situation, as if saying “HERE COMES AN INDIAN MAN!” is a punchline in and of itself. “Now, there is little tolerance for anyone trying to ‘put an accent on.’ Casting breakdowns will specifically ask for authentic accents only,” he says.

The story of diversity in the voice acting industry is the history of North American immigration in microcosm. When King first started working as a voice actor, there was demand for ethnic voices predominantly from Europe; today, that demand is skewed toward Asian and Middle Eastern voices, as well as readings in accented English over non-English dialects. Likewise, earlier non-English voice acting was mainly created by minority communities, for those same communities. Over time, non-minority businesses clued into the idea that people who speak Urdu as their first language still need to buy car insurance, and that a mattress ad narrated in Chinese-accented English could draw in new customers.

The push for race-accurate casting came from a few different areas. First, practicality: The advantage of having an actual Jamaican person voice a character over a white guy with a Bob Marley accent is that your intended audience can identify and trust the authenticity of your product. Second, technology: The internet has reduced the cost of entry into voice work to the price of a quality USB microphone and a pop filter. With literally every voice actor in the world within reach, the biggest limiting factor in a project’s ability to generate a diverse cast is the willingness to seek out authentic voices. And technology works both ways—if you fall short in terms of diverse casting, the internet can bring passionate feedback into your home in a big way.

But the third, and final change in the world of casting is the world itself. “There is a genuine interest in cultural sensitivity and respect in our society now,” King says.

I spend far too much time on Twitter to share King’s optimism, but I can’t argue with his position: Within decades, he has watched his industry go from cartoony, Apu-from-The Simpsons caricatures of English speakers with accents to principled projects that will outright refuse to cast voice actors of different races from the characters they are portraying on screen.

So if the voice acting industry is making impressive strides toward respect and authenticity in diversity, why are video games getting it wrong time and time again?

“I don’t know if people in the video game industry are getting lazy and not reaching out to the right groups,” King speculates. “It’s 2017.” I’m inclined to agree with him; if you spend enough time following voice and performance actors in the gaming industry, a handful of the same names start to pop up. They’re all beloved veteran actors, they can inhabit any role, and they’re considered a sure bet when it comes to nailing a key performance for an important character—a crucial factor in an industry that’s cost-intensive and risk averse.

They’re also all white people who performed the voice and motion capture for characters of colour. Actors portraying their own race: It’s the riskiest creative decision of all.

***

Matters of diversity and erasure in the media are only fringe issues if you’ve never felt erased before. Those who have understand the slow insanity of watching shows and movies, reading books and graphic novels, and playing games where there’s no one like you. Unlimited imagination, infinite worlds—and not one where you exist.

What does that say about the average escapist fantasy? How can you escape to a place where you’re not just unwelcome, but you literally don’t exist?

If you’re anything like me, you learn to compromise. I didn’t look like Indiana Jones, but I shared his love of history, archaeology, and old-timey maps. So I chose to see myself in the movies and love them, even though those same movies would see me as a savage devourer of monkey brains. I often felt like a famished mental gymnast, accepting minor injustices and cutting stereotypes as I constantly scavenged for better representations of myself in the media.

Video games as I recognize them today are slightly older than I am. They were supposed to be better, free of the sinkholes that the art forms they emulate have found themselves mired inside. Instead, they are only as flawed or flawless as their creators: a workforce of overwhelmingly white, straight men.

This is how we can have games of infinite narrative potential that still base the majority of their gameplay around shooting and killing the Other. It’s how games can let you create your own character from a select palette of skin tones, but fail to have the facial features and hair options of people of colour—a small detail, but one that reiterates the idea that to a team of graphic animators, my natural-born hair is harder to create and animate than a race of toad-faced alien behemoths.

Most of all, it’s how the miraculous ability to cast any actor in any role becomes a parlour trick; a fun way to turn entire races into a series of digital masks for white actors. It doesn’t have to be this way—the voice acting industry is a testament to that.

But it’s hard to watch a white actress receive universal acclaim for her role as a strong Black woman and wonder if the games industry solved its diversity problem by removing the one variable factor: people of colour.

Canada, in the eyes of many of its citizens, as well as those living elsewhere, is imagined as a beacon of tolerance and diversity. Seen as an exemplar of human rights, Canada’s national and international reputation rests, in part, on its historical role as the safe haven for the enslaved Black Americans who had fled the United States through the Underground Railroad. Today, it is well known, locally and internationally, as the land of multiculturalism and relative racial harmony.

Invisibility, however, has not protected Black communities in Canada. For centuries, Black lives in Canada have been exposed to a structural violence that has been tacitly or explicitly condoned by multiple state or state-funded institutions. Few who do not study Black Canadian history are aware that dominant narratives linking crime and Blackness date back at least to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and that Black persons were disproportionately subject to arrest for violence, drugs and prostitution-related offences throughout Canada as early as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The history of nearly a hundred years of separate and unequal schooling in many provinces (separating Black from white students), which lasted until 1983, is not taught to Canadian youth. A history that goes unacknowledged is too often a history that is doomed to be repeated.

The structural conditions affecting Black communities in the present go similarly under-recognized. In 2016, to little media fanfare, the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (cescr) confirmed that anti-Black racism in Canada is systemic. The committee highlighted enormous racial inequities with respect to income, housing, child welfare rates, access to quality education and healthcare and the application of drug laws. Many Canadians do not know that, despite being around 3 percent of the Canadian population, Black persons in some parts of the country make up around one-third of those killed by police. It is not yet common knowledge that African Canadians are incarcerated in federal prisons at a rate three times higher than the number of Blacks in the Canadian population, a rate comparable to the United States and the United Kingdom. Fewer still are aware that that in many provincial jails, the rate is even more disproportionate than it is at the federal level.

In addition to being more heavily targeted for arrest, because so much of Canada’s Black population was born elsewhere, significant numbers of those eventually released will be punished again by deportation to countries they sometimes barely know, often for minor offences that frequently go unpunished when committed by whites. Black migrants, too, are disproportionately affected by punitive immigration policies like immigration detention and deportation, in part due to the heightened surveillance of Black migrant communities. Black children and youth are vastly over-represented in state and foster care, and are far more likely to be expelled or pushed out of high schools across the country. Black communities are, after Indigenous communities, among the poorest racial groups in Canada. These facts, along with their history and context, point to an untold story of Black subjection in Canada.

Though anti-Blackness permeates all aspects of Canadian society, Policing Black Lives focuses primarily on state or state-sanctioned violence (though, at times, this is complemented with an enlarged scope in instances when anti-Black state practices were buttressed by populist hostility, the media or civil society). The reason for this focus is simple: the state possesses an enormous, unparalleled level of power and authority over the lives of its subjects. State agencies are endowed with the power to privilege, punish, confine or expel at will. This book traces the role that the state has played in producing the demonization, dehumanization and subjection of Black life across a multiplicity of institutions. I use the word “state” throughout this text to include federal and provincial governments, government-funded programs such as schools, social and child services, and the enforcement wings of state institutions such as the municipal, provincial and national police.

The framework of “state violence” throughout this book is used to draw attention to the complex array of harms experienced by marginalized social groups that are caused by government (or government-funded) policies, actions and inaction. This use of the term state violence follows in the traditions of Black feminist activist-intellectuals such as Angela Y. Davis, Joy James, Beth Richie, Andrea Ritchie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others who have contributed enormously to studying anti-Black state violence while also actively organizing against it.

The state is imagined by many to be the protector of its national subjects. But this belief is a fiction—one that can be maintained only if we ignore the enormous harms that have been directly or indirectly caused by state actions. “Valorizing the state as the natural prosecutor of and protector from violence,” writes Joy James, “requires ignoring its instrumental role in fomenting racial and sexual violence.” It is more accurate to say that the state protects some at the expense of others. The purpose of state violence is to maintain the order that is “in part defined in terms of particular systems of stratification that determine the distribution of resources and power.” In a society like Canada that remains stratified by race, gender, class and citizenship, state violence acts to defend and maintain inequitable social, racial and economic divisions. As such, the victims of this violence have been the dispossessed: primarily but not exclusively people who are Indigenous, Black, of colour, particularly those who are poor, women, lacking Canadian citizenship, living with mental illness or disabilities, sexual minorities and other marginalized populations. Often legally and culturally sanctioned as legitimate, the harms inflicted by state actors are rarely prosecuted as criminal, even when the actions involve extreme violence, theft and loss of life. Grave injustices—including slavery, segregation and, more recently, decades of disproportionate police killings of unarmed Black civilians—have all been accomplished within, not outside of, the scope of Canadian law. Not only is state violence rarely prosecuted as criminal, it is not commonly perceived as violence. Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate.

When state violence is mentioned, images of police brutality are often the first that come to mind. However, state violence can be administered by other institutions outside of the criminal justice system, including institutions regarded by most as administrative, such as immigration and child welfare departments, social services, schools and medical institutions. These institutions nonetheless expose marginalized persons to social control, surveillance and punishment, or what Canadian criminologist Gillian Balfour calls “non-legal forms of governmentality.” These bureaucratic agencies, too, have the repressive powers generally presumed to belong only to law enforcement. They can police—that is, surveil, confine, control and punish—the behaviour of state subjects. Policing, indeed, describes not only cops on their beat, but also the past and present surveillance of Black women by social assistance agents, the over-disciplining and racially targeted expulsion of Black children and youth in schools, and the acute surveillance and detention of Black migrants by border control agencies. Many poor Black mothers, for example, have experienced child welfare agents entering and searching their homes with neither warrant nor warning—in some instances seizing their children—as a result of an anonymous phone call. Further, state violence can occur without an individual directly harming or even interacting with another. It can be, in short, structured into societal institutions.

This expansive understanding of state violence allows us, throughout the following chapters, to examine the seemingly disconnected state and state-funded institutions that continue to act, in concert, to cause Black suffering and subjugation. State violence is not evenly distributed across populations, but deeply infused along the lines of race, class and gender. These factors play a significant role in the likelihood of one’s exposure to either direct or structural forms of state violence. State violence has historically impacted and targeted different groups of people throughout history to different degrees, according to shifting notions of race, ethnicity, class and ability—or willingness to subscribe to social norms. In the present, it continues to impact differently marginalized groups of individuals. But it is not arbitrary that Black communities are subject to state violence at such disproportionate rates. Black subjection in Canada cannot be fully understood, and therefore cannot be fully redressed or countered, without placing it in its historical context. The endemic anti-Blackness found within state agencies has global and historical roots and can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade.

Excerpted from Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard. Copyright © 2017 Robyn Maynard. Published by Fernwood Publishing. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Photo courtesy Jagmeet Singh/Twitter.

This month, the NDP and Canada achieved a historical first. Jagmeet Singh, former Member of Provincial Parliament in the Ontario legislature was named the eighth leader of the federal NDP. The moment marked a dramatic shift for the party, which has struggled to connect with youth and racialized voters. But it also signifies new possibilities of what political leadership in Canada can look like.

At the beginning of this leadership race, there were plenty of changes I wanted to see in the NDP: namely, the party needed to return to its bold progressive principles to effectively hold the Liberals to account—particularly on their more progressive campaign promises. My vision? The NDP needed a stronger version of social democracy to emerge from the race, one that would defend and expand on principles such as environmental protection, health care, Indigenous relations, income inequality, and precarious work, all while creating an accessible pathway for the realities of racialized people to be a part of and feel represented by the party. The latter part of my vision weighed a tad more heavier.

A shift to the left is a goal often spoken of within social democratic discourse. It may be to convert to democratic socialism in order to emphasize the need to nationalize and increase public ownership of services; or to strive for a more subdued version of our current economic system that merely addresses the ailments of capitalism. However, what often gets lost in the midst of these conversations are how sexism, racism, and other forms of identity-based discrimination are accounted for. In a diverse country, with a typically three-party system, accounting for these experiences are essential in order to engage and appeal to those who are not white. This two-part version of social democracy, like the one I put forward above, in my observations, has yet to be achieved in Canada. Perhaps until now.  

On October 1, Singh captured 54 percent of the vote on the first round. It may have appeared to be a landslide victory, but the media and Canadians shouldn’t discount the hurdles Singh faced in order to get here—from a public racist heckler, to what often appeared like an “anyone but Singh campaign” during the leadership debates. Withstanding these challenges, some race-watchers, like me, felt that Singh would be the answer to the party’s woes, even while others remained in vigorous opposition.

Singh was largely criticized for what some called his “centrist” policies. To support these centrist claims, comparisons were drawn between Jagmeet’s and Niki Ashton’s campaign. Ashton, a fierce democratic socialist, came out the gate with a proposal for free tuition, a plan for a national pharmacare and dental care program and plan for economic justice. However, what set her apart from the other candidates was her desire to see increased nationalization of public services. Despite being an admirable goal, it’s one that translates poorly to the overall general public—firing up a small subset of Canadians: the highly educated and disenchanted socialist.

The criticisms launched against Jagmeet for not being left enough had me reflecting on what success should look like for the NDP post-leadership race. I’m of the belief that before the NDP can make such a democratic socialist shift, the party needs to bring racialized and young people into the fold. A hard left would not only alienate those who are unfamiliar with the principles of social democracy, much less, democratic socialism; but it would impart a purity test willing to exclude those whose viewpoints don’t exactly line up. This would make it nearly impossible to grow the party and form a pathway for new members to feel welcomed and view the NDP as a place to learn and grow within. A Singh-led NDP can help to fill that gap.

***

While I commend the NDP membership for choosing Singh as their new leader, this important victory simultaneously requires a reflection on the racism entrenched within progressive politics. A lack of sensitivity over racialized voters who opposed the Ontario sex-ed curriculum that Singh worked closely with to help ease their transition were quickly labelled as conservatives during the debate and deemed not worthy of being engaged by the NDP. Furthermore, polling put forward during the race to determine whether Quebec is ready for a racialized, turban-wearing leader were disturbingly received with a sense of normalcy. As a progressive party that prides itself as the “social conscience” of Canada, an evaluation on whether Canadians are ready to have representation by historically marginalized groups are unacceptable. Public readiness should never be polled and used as justification when determining whether a person’s race or religion deems them appropriate for a job. The smear campaign launched against the new members Singh brought into the party—who were predominantly racialized—barely received an ounce of criticism from his opponents or the party. Singh still came out victorious, but this doesn’t mean that the racism plaguing progressive politics has been defeated.  

During this time, lest we forget that urge of institutions and political entities to use racialized people as props, either to win votes or receive a surge in popularity. The tendency to want to appear inclusive and responsive to the changing demographics of Canada, at times, often overrides the need to actually do the necessary work to address and/or change both pre-existing attitudes and workplace culture—all of which are necessary for people of colour to thrive and be successful. Political institutions and parties of all stripes are guilty of this.

Without a doubt, Singh’s win is a pivotal moment for the party. But he is not the only charismatic, progressive-minded person of colour working hard to join and take on leadership roles within the NDP. The stories often missing from this historic moment are the countless racialized organizers, volunteers, and candidates who see the NDP as a party worth joining—partly in fact due to Singh and the courage he displayed when he joined the race. He did what many saw as an impossible, inspiring a new generation of future political leaders.

It is now the responsibility of the NDP to support and nurture these candidates, new members, or those simply interested in the political vision the party has to offer, to encourage them and provide them with the resources that are needed in order to be successful. The party cannot rest on their laurels now that they have a person of colour at the helms of their leadership. This act of history-making must be followed-up with an organizational shift in attitude and approach. In doing so, the NDP can then truly be a party where justice, inclusion, and equity is not only preached but also enacted from within. 

]]> https://this.org/2017/09/14/hey-margaret-wente-racism-is-still-a-serious-problem-in-canada/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:50:07 +0000 https://this.org/?p=17193

Columnist Margaret Wente. Photo courtesy of the Globe and Mail.

Margaret Wente is confused about racism. That is the most generous interpretation I can offer for her recent Globe and Mail article, “The good news about racism,” in which she argues that racism is vanishing from society. It is declining at such a rate, in fact, that the recent resurgence of white supremacy is a negligible blip, because “overtly racist behaviour…has become taboo.” Wente seems to have mistaken the fact that racism has been acknowledged as a societal factor with the end of racism entirely. She seems to have confused an improved sense of decorum around tragedies with the end of them altogether.  

Wente is a shrewd woman: She does not attempt to argue that discrimination is entirely non-existent. She relents, as an example, that Black and Indigenous men “can expect” to be stopped by police due to their skin colour—but still decries “systemic” racism as an invention of the progressive left. In her requisite admission that racism is not entirely a fabrication, however, she points to one of the most pervasive examples of systemic racism: the Ontario police practice of carding.

Wente believes that those who call out systematically discriminatory practices are, at best, malingering. At worst, they are the undercover agents of the progressive left. Why? Because she believes that since overt racism is passé—it is automatically on its way out. But racism isn’t going away, and we are not making progress “by every measure available.” Us white people are merely becoming aware of what has been going on around us. The work, for the most part, has yet to be done. Still, the exhaustive effort of acknowledging racism as a fact makes Wente want to believe that racism is no longer a defining feature of our society. And she wants you to believe it, too.

While Wente declined to define the terms she sarcastically put in quotes, systemic racism is a phrase coined by sociologist Joe Feagin to describe anti-Black practices that are institutionally entrenched in society. “Structural” racism refers to one of the ways systemic racism manifests itself, and is defined by Frances Henry and Carol Tator as “inequalities rooted in the system wide operation of a society.” The hallmark of systemic racism is that this form of discrimination is embedded in society: It does not require its agents to be hateful, or even personally bigoted. It is self-perpetuating: It only requires that we do nothing at all.  

In her article, Margaret Wente proved hasty to dismiss the concerns of marginalized folks. In this spirit, she joyfully brought us the Good News of racism: It’s not as bad as you think! Wente’s gospel springs from a 2017 study conducted by criminology professor Brian Boutwell and his team. Using data obtained from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Boutwell et al attempted to assess the prevalence of perceived discrimination in the United States. But the Add Health questionnaire is poorly suited to measure racial discrimination—likely because this was never its intended purpose.

Add Health itself was a comprehensive study designed to follow a nationally representative sample of twins from early adolescence to young adulthood. The aim of the questionnaire was primarily to provide measurement on “friendship networks, school activities and health conditions.” Because the survey was not designed specifically to study racism or discrimination, the sample is not consistently adjusted to reflect an evenly intersectional population. This is notable in one area in particular: As the authors of the Add Health study acknowledge in their recruitment analysis, “Add Health…oversampled African American adolescents with highly educated parents.” It has been repeatedly proven that a higher level of parental education correlates with higher socioeconomic status, and economic status itself is a protective factor against discrimination of any kind. This sampling flaw, however, seems to have been overlooked in Boutwell’s secondary analysis.

Boutwell only examined the results of two questions from the Add Health questionnaire:

“Question one: In your day-to-day life, how often do you feel you have been treated with less respect or courtesy than other people?

Question two: What do you think was the main reason for these experiences?”

Participants were only allowed to choose one response from a list of 11 mutually exclusive categories. Women and LGBTQ folks were not given the opportunity to report multiple experiences of discrimination, but instead had to decide which they felt was most pressing. The most common category selected? “Other”—making up a plurality of responses within every subgroup. With the Other category removed, race was the most common reason selected across Black, Asian, and Hispanic subgroups.

The wording of the questions is also troubling. In a study about discrimination, where the results are based exclusively on participant response, the word “discrimination” does not appear anywhere in the survey question. Neither does any approximation of this term. And because Boutwell et al didn’t conduct the questionnaire themselves, the participants had no context for their answers: Lack of respect or courtesy and discrimination are in no way mutually exclusive terms. Boutwell et al are out of their depth making claims about racial discrimination. Quite simply, they didn’t ask the question.

But of course, the Boutwell study is only one prong of Wente’s argument. The other? You (meaning her) just don’t see racism that much anymore. When racial tragedies are splashed across the headlines, the public responds appropriately. It doesn’t matter that these things continue to happen: What matters is that now it would be considered impolite not to send your thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. Sure, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, and sure, in Thunder Bay, Ont., “Indigenous kids have been found in local rivers.” But systemic racism? That’s just the last gasp of those “invested” in the narrative of racism. You know, those who profit from it.

Conservative pundits joke about a kind of racism so insidious it’s “invisible”—but it isn’t. It is, however, easy to ignore if you are white and unwilling to take people of colour at their word. Systemic racism has existed long before us and it will continue to function unless it is purposefully dismantled. Racism can thus exist in an organization like the police force, independent of the intentions of individual officers, through discriminatory mandates and practices set up long before polite society became #woke.

Ontario’s police practice of carding is one example of these mandates. Carding refers specifically to the Community Contacts Policy, an intelligence-gathering policy that allows police to randomly stop, identify, and document community members. An analysis by the Toronto Star in 2013 showed that this policy has had unequivocally discriminatory results. The Star found that Black, Indigenous, and people of colour were more likely than white people to be targeted in every single patrol zone across Toronto; in predominantly white zones, the disparity increased. The analysis also revealed a grim but telling statistic: “Looking solely at young [B]lack male Toronto residents, aged 15 to 24…the number who were ‘carded’ at least once between 2008 and 2012—in the police patrol zone where they live—actually exceeds by a small margin the number of young [B]lack males, aged 15 to 24, who live in Toronto.”

Wente acknowledges that despite the good intentions of individual actors in the police force, the organization as a whole is incapable of functioning without racial bias. She says as much in her concession that we as Canadians are not, in fact, perfect: “Most [B]lack or Indigenous men,” she admits, “can expect to be stopped by police because of their skin colour.” To live with the expectation that you will be randomly stopped by the police in your own neighbourhood, due to you skin colour alone, is to live under the thumb of systemic racism. Wente can sneer at the terms we have chosen to define these problems, but she herself acknowledges the truth behind them. She admits that systemic racism is real and visible when she admits that she is aware of pervasive, policy-based discrimination enacted by the police force.

Wente knows that millions of people across North America still experience discrimination. But, unfortunately for all of them, she does not find this knowledge terribly compelling. She does not seem to find evidence of lived discrimination much more than a tedious vestige of ancient history (after all, the last segregated Black school in Ontario was closed in the distant past of 1965). If your example of racism isn’t utterly grotesque to behold, if it is instead the story of a quiet but pervasive injustice, then your story can’t be trusted—you must be “invested” in the racism narrative propagated by the progressive left.  

Wente is not affected by the problems of systemic racism, so she chooses to believe that nobody is. If nine out of 10 people can tolerate the idea of an interracial marriage, that’s a win. If “onlookers are outraged” by outward displays of white supremacy, we are living in a post-racial epoch. If Quebec can find the space to bury the Canadian victims of a terrorist attack, committed in a place of worship, due to the perceived otherness of said place of worship? Well then, Margaret Wente thinks we’re doing pretty darn good.

A CN train passes through Africville in 1965. Photo courtesy of Bob Brooks/Nova Scotia Archives.

Fifty years ago, the city of Halifax destroyed the historic Black Nova Scotian community of Africville, demolishing its church and homes and forcibly relocating nearly 400 residents. In 2010, Halifax’s mayor apologized and funded the rebuilding of the Seaview United Baptist Church. The following year, the mayor, in response to activism by former residents, also renamed a commemorative park after Africville. But for many, the reparations do not sufficiently address the devastating effect the loss of Africville has had on Nova Scotia’s Black community. More than 40 descendants have been seeking compensation for communal lands through a class action lawsuit since 1996.

Anti-Black systemic racism remains rampant across the province. In Halifax, Black people are three times more likely to be street-checked than white people. Black Nova Scotians are overrepresented in child welfare and incarceration systems. Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates. Last fall, when Halifax’s North End elected Lindell Smith, he became the city’s first Black councillor in 16 years.

At the same time, members of the North End’s Black community gathered at a meeting to mourn and discuss the deaths of several young men to gun violence. When the community requested the event be private, some white residents were outraged over being excluded. Meanwhile, in rural areas, Black communities like Lincolnville and Shelburne endure severe environmental racism, with nearby landfills polluting the air and water.

For the most part, white Nova Scotians ignore and dismiss these issues. The willful ignorance serves a purpose. As poet and activist El Jones writes in the Halifax Examiner, “By erasing the historical Black presence in Canada, and the anti-Blackness ingrained in Canadian history, Canada is able to present itself as a peaceful, progressive, and multicultural nation.”

Photo courtesy of Howard J. Davis.

She strolls softly through a deserted modern-day Montreal. Her outfit—and the way she seems to float through the streets—indicate her lack of connection to this modern scene. This is Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a slave “owned” by François Poulin of Montreal in the early 1730s.

Canadian filmmaker Howard J. Davis uses his film C’est Moi as an ethereal glimpse of a person swallowed by history’s tendency to whitewash and provide attention only for those it deems worthy. Though short at its eight-minute run time, C’est Moi provides enough information on Angélique’s story to encourage questioning our preconceived notions of Canada’s history—including its often inherent yet frequently overlooked racial discrimination.

It is rare to see films on a Canadian event that highlight important historical figures of colour. We are used to hearing stories of racial disparity and dissension from our neighbours to the south, but as Davis helpfully reminds us, Canada’s history is far from the clean version that is often portrayed.

Davis takes a symbolic approach to the telling of Angélique’s story. The majority of the film is dedicated to watching her, played by actor Jenny Brizard, glide through Montreal. The film then incorporates a text-based description of her story, where the key points are highlighted by evocative imagery and music. Here is where we learn of the fire Angélique was accused of starting, and the price she had to pay. Davis wanted this project to be a starting point for Canadians to look at the country differently. “We see Canada as a haven away from slavery,” he says. “As Canadians, we go, ‘Oh, no, it didn’t happen up here.’ But it did.” It is not often that stories of residential schools and internment camps get the attention they deserve.

Davis notes that, near where he resides in Niagara-onthe-Lake, houses still stand that once kept slaves. He adds that New France had many slaves, yet we don’t hear about it. The remnants from some of Canada’s most horrific moments are still very much around.

Davis is deeply invested in his subject matter—as a person of mixed race, he has been interested in race-related stories for many years, beginning in his time at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Marginalized stories are often front-of-mind for Davis, with a special interest in stories about female figures as well, stemming from his “desire to tell more stories of people who are subjects of oppression who aren’t at the forefront of our history.”

This push toward uncovering hidden stories can be seen increasingly in the mainstream media, especially in Hollywood films from the past year. Hidden Figures, the historical drama that tells the story of the Black women who were integral in launching John Glenn—the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth—into space, is similar to C’est Moi in this respect. Davis points to some of the other films this year that focus on telling race-centric stories, such as Moonlight, Fences, and Loving. These stories have long been desperate to be told, and Hidden Figures’s success at the box office is proof that there are people ready to see them.

C’est Moi attempts to take an objective look at a snapshot in history, presenting the discovered facts and leaving interpretation up to the audience. With this impartiality, Davis makes clear his goal of uncovering stories and allowing them to speak for themselves, rather than to use his platform to preach.

As for his hopes for this film, Davis only wants for his subject matter to be discovered. Currently, the short film is set to be screened at film festivals in Florida, California, and New Jersey. While he is overjoyed at the American response, Davis hopes some of the many Canadian film festivals will show it as well so that the message of the film can come through to those who are living directly after the generations that actually perpetrated it.

As Canadians, we need to forgo the tendency not to confront the conflict that has happened in our midst because it makes us uncomfortable, and instead face it.

As Davis explains: “The whole point is starting a dialogue and recognizing our accountability to uncover the truth.”

Photo by HELEN TANSEY

TORONTO PLAYWRIGHT ANDREA SCOTT started to wonder about the secret lives of her neighbours after watching the U.K. television film I am Slave, based on the true story of a modern-day captive. In the film, Arab militia snatch Mende Nazar from her Sudanese village and sell her into slavery; she eventually lands in England, where she continues her forced bondage. It made Scott question whether similar domestic servitude happened in Canada.

The result of these musings is her play Better Angels: A Parable. In it, Canadian employers strip the protagonist Akosua, a 28-year-old Ghanaian nanny, of her liberties bit by bit: first they take away her passport, then they confine her to the house, and finally they kill her only friend, a spider lodging in her room. But Akosua is not a compliant victim—eventually she frees herself (but no spoilers).

The play hit a chord with audiences and a jury selected it as the Best Production of 2015 at the Summerworks Festival in Toronto, after an eight-day run in August. Summerworks’ artistic producer Michael Rubenfeld praised Scott “for telling the story with wit, cohesion, and a fierce intelligence.” But that’s not all. Better Angels was also performed at the prestigious Athena Festival in Chicago in December. It was the only Canadian play in the festival. “To have people who don’t know me at all say ‘yes’ to my play is very validating,” says Scott.

Especially since her heroine defies racial stereotypes. “I’m a little tired of seeing African lives saved by whites,” says Scott, adding that many playwrights, particularly white ones, often show black women as weak. The strong-minded Akosua is meant to be an antidote to these biases. Scott wanted to create an African character who was empowered, stressing that a woman like Akosua is far from an anomaly in real life. “I have a lot of African friends who are just fine,” she says. “They are financially well-off and don’t need to be saved.”

Better Angels is Scott’s third play. She often returns to the same themes of social injustice and society’s false perceptions of black women. In Eating Pomegranates Naked, her second play, Scott confronted the stereotype of the black maternal figure. The heroine in Pomegranates is happily married but unapologetically childless. Scott hopes her plays will help audiences readjust their racial constructions. “I would really like for people to see women of color,” she says, “as people who have lives as valid as theirs.”

Scott has been writing since age seven, back when she scoured the dictionary for interesting words. As a young adult, she decided to focus on acting and went on to earn both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in drama at the University of Toronto. It wasn’t until 2009 that she took her childhood writing dream out of mothballs and wrote her first play, Damaged, about the life of a transgender woman.

Currently, Scott works 17-hour days and finds it hard to sleep because she has so many ideas. She is now working on a new play to be performed at Summerworks next year. Don’t Talk to Me Like I’m Your Wife weaves through time, flashing from France in 1917 through to 2016. The play chronicles the last 12 hours of the convicted spy Matahari, who was ultimately executed by a firing squad. It also examines the progression of slut shaming throughout history.

Since her award for Better Angels, Scott has also taught a playwriting workshop for high school students in Toronto at the Young Voices Conference held by the Toronto Public Library. She believes in the power of mentorship, particularly for racialized teens. “I would love to play that role to those who haven’t been allowed to be heard,” she says. “If I can start them off having confidence in their writing, I’m doing something good.”