Staying with discomfort: the suspicion that sticks to your skin

In the 2021 Census, Black people made up 4.3% of the Canadian population. Yet in 2021-2022, they represented 9.2% of people held in federal penitentiaries, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator, which stresses that they are mostly young men.

In Montreal, researchers Bernard and McAll studied the files of young people who went through the justice system in 2001. On the island, 26 young Black people per thousand had been arrested and prosecuted, compared with 13 young white people per thousand: twice as many. In 11% of the arrests of young Black people in their sample, the officer mentioned a suspicion of street gang membership. Not a single file on a young white person contained such a suspicion.

That suspicion carries weight. After the death of Fredy Villanueva in 2008, criminologist Mathieu Charest, commissioned by the SPVM, found that 30 to 40% of young Black men in Montréal-Nord and Saint-Michel had already been subjected to an identity check, compared with 5 to 6% of their white peers. The police then kept a database of some 10,000 names possibly linked to gangs, while estimating the real number of members at around 500.

These gaps say nothing about a different nature: they reveal more suspicious eyes. And eyes can be educated. Every police officer, judge, teacher or neighbour who chooses to listen rather than presume undoes a little of this prejudice. Ubuntu reminds us that justice is not only an institution: it is a way of seeing the other as a member of one's own family.