Systemic Racism in Canada. Not.

British Anti-Slavery poster, 1795.

Cathy Majtenyi, writing in the Catholic Register, makes her case that Canada is a “systemically racist” nation in part by the fact that our ice cream trucks, or somebody’s ice cream trucks, play “Turkey in the Straw,” and partly by noting that “Black people are disproportionately represented in arrests, courts, and jails both in the U.S. and Canada.”

There are problems with this latter argument. First, Blacks are also disproportionately represented as the victims of crime. Prosecuting Black criminals is therefore, right or wrong, not something done against Blacks for the benefit of Whites. Second, men are also disproportionately represented in arrests, courts, and jails in Canada. If this demonstrates systemic discrimination against Blacks, it must also demonstrates systemic discrimination against men. Shall we demand reparations?

Majtenyi blames the higher incarceration rate for Blacks on the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. She argues that Blacks simply then were charged and convicted with crimes in order to retain the use of their labour. “It was therefore in the best interests of the white economic and political elites that former slaves become ‘criminals’ so that they could legally continue to provide their free labour.”

Problem: the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution never applied to Canada. As Majtenyi has just pointed out, Black incarceration is also disproportionately high in Canada. She has just disproven her own assumption.

She has also proposed a conspiracy of monumental proportions: all that nonsense about due process, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and a jury of one’s peers is somehow a cover for a secret pogrom in which the police, prosecutors, legislators, judges, and randomly selected jury members are complicit.

Majtenyi does try to argue that slavery was a major factor in Canada as well as the US. “By the late 1790s,” she points out, “some 3,000 enslaved people of African descent were in British North America.”

She does not mention that the great majority of these had arrived only a few years earlier, with UE Loyalists fleeing the newly-independent 13 colonies. Along with a large number of former slaves freed and resettled by Sir Guy Carleton at war’s end. Or that slavery had no legal basis in these colonies. Only a few years later, as soon as cases were brought before them by slaves seeking to be free, the courts and legislatures of Canada declared slavery illegal. Upper Canada was one of the first jurisdictions anywhere to do so by formal legislation, in 1793.

All lands can be rightly accused of having at one time or another practiced slavery. Canada comes remarkably close to being the sole exception.

Majtenyi maintains that “white” Canadians traditionally considered Black persons “less than human.” Surprising if true, because the Bible makes it clear that all men are brothers under the skin, all being created by the same God in his image. John Locke, founding our current philosophy of government in the 17th century, based his principle of human equality on this fact. Before him, in the English Revolution, the Levellers rallied supporters with the chant “When Adam delved, and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” The French Code Noir, 1685, which governed slavery in their slave-holding colonies, imposed on the slaveholder the obligation of baptizing the slaves and seeing to their religious instruction. One does not need to baptize pigs or cattle.

The real reason for slavery, of course, was financial: cheap labour. Most slaveowners and political philosophers of the day seem to have been aware that it was immoral, but to have turned a blind eye because it was too lucrative. But when an attempt was made to morally justify it, in Christendom, it was not on the grounds that Blacks were less than human. It was on the premise that slavery was somehow in the best interests of the enslaved. Most often, that Africans were uncivilized, and slavery was a form of tutelage.