Systemic racism and the justice system

BY OMNIYA ALI

“Racism, and in particular anti-black racism, is a part of our community’s psyche. A significant segment of our community holds overtly racist views. A much larger segment subconsciously operates on the basis of negative racial stereotypes. Furthermore, our institutions, including the criminal justice system, reflect and perpetuate those negative stereotypes. These elements combine to infect our society as a whole with the evil of racism. Blacks are among the primary victims of that evil.”

The aforementioned quotation was taken from the defense council of R. v. Parks, a murder case that was tried in 1993 at the Court of Appeal for Ontario. In this case, the defendant was black while the deceased was white, all throughout the trial the defendant was referred to as a “black Jamaican immigrant”, none of which was relevant information but was used to sway the jury heedlessly.

Fast-forward to 1999, in a similar case in the US where Adnan Syed was tried for the murder of Hae Min Lee his then girlfriend, merely based on hearsay and little to no physical evidence. The matter of the fact is a thorough investigation was not pursued and many can associate that to both his ethnicity and religion. In more recent events, anticlimactically enough, mass shooters like Alexandre Bissonnette are given the benefit of the doubt as long as they are white. Bissonnette attacked a Mosque in Quebec in 2017 injuring eight and killing six people. Although he was sentenced to 40 years in prison with no parole, his lawyers were quick to claim he was not racist or driven by a hate for Muslims in an attempt to lighten his sentence. Bissonnette’s legal team claimed that he “offered a portrait of a mentally troubled young man who needed a target for his violent rage.” As opposed to the cases above where irrelevant information such as immigration status was shared, Bissonnette’s legal team went on to explain that he had been suicidal since his teens, further driving the point that he was mentally unstable as a justification for his gruesome actions.

This is not news to any member of a minority group. Countless other recent incidents consist of the same theme. White man commits a horrible crime and is automatically labeled a mentally unstable lone wolf, while people of colour are expected to be on their best behaviour at all times and still get profiled regardless. The basis of those realities doesn’t only lay within the institution and criminal justice systems of Canada but are also associated with the language we surround different races with. The distinction that white is good and black is bad is used pervasively in the English language, and so many different concepts of that nature have been derived from that. As long as Canada and America refer to Eastern countries as “culturally deprived,” “economically disadvantaged” and “underdeveloped”, there will always be that notion that they are superior, and we infinitely need their help to survive. In order for North America to progress into a land where all individuals are equal no matter what skin colour or origins they come from; those frames of thought must be disassembled.

The sad reality is that the facts stated by the defense council in the 1993 murder case still hold true 27 years later. In order to alleviate the racism from our community’s psyche, we first need to reframe the language surrounding it. “In fact, third world children are bicultural, and many are bilingual, having grown up and their own culture as well as absorbing the dominant culture. In many ways, they are equipped with skills and experiences which white youth have been deprived of, since most white youth develop in a monocultural, monolingual environment. Burgess suggests that the term “culturally deprived” be replaced with “culturally dispossessed,” and that term “economically disadvantaged” be replaced by economically exploited.” Both these terms present a perspective and implication that provide an entirely different frame of reference as to the reality of the third world experience in U.S. society” Cheney, LaFrance & Quinteros, 2006).