State of disgrace

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/01/2020 (2329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One day in late December, Maxwell Johnson walked into a Bank of Montreal in downtown Vancouver along with his 12-year-old granddaughter. He wanted to open a bank account for her, he later told CBC reporter Angela Sterritt, so that he could transfer her money while she was on the road with her basketball team.

What happened next made headlines this week. It could be one of the most egregious cases of racial profiling at a business in recent public memory. It didn’t need to happen.

But having happened, it pushes us back to a difficult conversation that Canada has been all too reluctant to have out in the open.

The story goes like this. After Johnson — a Heiltsuk Nation man from the Campbell Island community of Bella Bella — and his granddaughter presented their government-issued identification, the bank worker voiced a suspicion: the numbers, she said, didn’t match up with the documentation she had on the computer.

She then walked away with their ID. When they were asked to go upstairs to retrieve it, they were met by police and escorted outside to a cop car. Both were then handcuffed for what Vancouver police later said was a concern of “possible fraud.” Johnson’s granddaughter, terrified, began crying.

The suspicions were unfounded, and the two were soon released with an apology from the officers. In statements, the bank and Vancouver police both corroborated Johnson’s account; a bank spokesperson told CBC they “deeply regret this happened,” and said that it was a mistake to call the police.

Johnson is now considering taking the incident to British Columbia’s Human Rights Commission.

For people of any age, unfounded accusations and physical detention can be scary and traumatic. For a child, it can be an especially terrifying event, one that permanently effects how they perceive the world and their place in it.

It’s a deeply troubling story, on many levels. For starters, it’s hard to believe the bank doesn’t have a procedure to more cautiously resolve discrepancies between client data and identification without calling the police; the bank spokesperson said the circumstances “do not excuse” what happened.

Beyond that, there can simply be no justification for putting a 12-year-old child in cuffs for trying to open a bank account, even if there were concerns about the validity of an adult relative’s ID. Whatever questions the bank or police had for Johnson — while baseless — his granddaughter did not need to be forced into it.

For people of any age, unfounded accusations and physical detention can be scary and traumatic. For a child, it can be an especially terrifying event, one that permanently effects how they perceive the world and their place in it. No child should ever have to be so aggressively introduced to the cruelty of social perceptions.

Above all, it goes almost without saying that it is difficult to imagine that race did not play a role in how Johnson and his granddaughter were treated and perceived. Surely, banks must encounter minor discrepancies between ID and customer data on a regular basis; surely, most of those people don’t end up in handcuffs.

But if this story is especially upsetting, it is only by a matter of degree. This type of discrimination is woven into Canadian society, and has been for generations; as a teen retail employee in the 1990s, I was told by multiple managers to watch Indigenous people extra closely, and watched them enact that policy themselves.

The frequency of these stories– and not just those that hit the news, but the ones people share on social media, or just to each other — speaks to how corrosive racism is to our communities.

In some coverage of this and similar events, experts say racial profiling at commercial outlets is on the rise. It seems hard to determine, given that it’s a near guarantee that most incidents are never publicly reported. Still, there is this much, at least: thanks to the advocacy of Indigenous people, more of these stories are being heard.

As a result, we end up with months such as December, when three stories of racial profiling at Winnipeg stores hit local headlines within just over a week of each other. Taken together, they speak to the same themes at work in racial discrimination, particularly of a tendency to see Indigenous people as interchangeable for others.

The incidents happened in one Superstore, where an Indigenous man said he was mistaken for an alleged shoplifter and threatened with arrest if he returned; and again at a Superstore where an Ojibwa woman says she was grabbed and physically held by a police officer, who demanded to see a receipt for the items she had just purchased.

Another incident happened at the Regent Avenue Michaels craft store, where a woman from Sagkeeng First Nation was approached by staff and told bluntly to leave, accused of stealing earlier in the day.

The woman protested, explaining that she had never been to the store before; the staff said she was “not welcome here.”

The frequency of these stories — and not just those that hit the news, but the ones people share on social media, or just to each other — speaks to how corrosive racism is to our communities. It speaks of a deep mistrust brokered by stereotypes and a tendency of non-Indigenous people to lump all Indigenous people together.

This type of racism — common and all-too-frequently defended as just part of doing business — is damaging.

To the people under suspicion, it can be frightening and humiliating; more broadly, it pushes Indigenous people to the margins, sending the disgraceful message that they are not welcome to freely engage in society’s basic commercial functions.

But what to do to confront it?

Many people in Canada, it seems, would rather not hear what people subjected to racial discrimination by police or in stores have to say. But it is a good thing these stories are being aired; it is right to put light on how our society functions.

Part of the answer, obviously, comes down to individual commercial organizations and law enforcement instituting better policies and training to counteract racial stereotyping and bias.

But that is only one part of the solution; it will take more than relying on a multitude of different outlets to make improvements.

At the very least, we have to talk about it, to know how it functions and what enables it to continue. The conversation is fraught and, for many people who aren’t affected by racial profiling, uncomfortable. That cannot stand as a barrier; if it does then, quite frankly, we will never get anywhere.

Let’s be honest — every time one of these stories hits the news, the comments are a flaming disaster.

Many people in Canada, it seems, would rather not hear what people subjected to racial discrimination by police or in stores have to say. But it is a good thing these stories are being aired; it is right to put light on how our society functions.

What we find under the light isn’t always pretty, but we have to describe it to change it.

So, let’s start with this: no 12-year-old kid should walk out of a bank in handcuffs for nothing more than trying to open an account. That seems as good a place as any to draw a hard limit and figure out how to start climbing out.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca