Police Carding Says Blacks Don’t Belong, They’re Just Tolerated

By Xinavane Mawu Kush
PRIDE Guest Writer

The issue is not whether carding can be made to look friendlier. The issue is not whether carding can be redone so it seems nicer.
The issue is that carding–in and of itself–is wrong. Carding is similar to the New York Police Department’s infamous “stop and frisk” program.
Carding says that I am not entitled to the same rights and freedoms as white Canadians. Carding says I’m not as ‘real’ a citizen as a white person. Carding says I don’t belong, I’m just tolerated.
Carding is based on the white supremacist historical mantra that we, African people are inherently criminal; inherently lacking in civilized values and principles; inherently untrustworthy; and that we need to be reminded that we are [considered] inferior to white people, and especially, that we must keep that demeaning status foremost in our (and their) minds.
The current era’s racist policing has been given the name “Carding”, and because that name wasn’t used in previous eras, people think this is a new activity. It is not.
It had no name of which I was aware, when I was growing up (and BTW there was no gun violence at the time to use as an excuse for targeting our community), but police nonetheless, maintained exactly the same behaviours as carding.
They would come up on law-abiding, innocent Black people and demand all kinds of personal information, and talk to us in a tone as though they were an occupying army, and we were the barely tolerated suspicious enemy.
This was before computers, so the information was written into their notebooks and then transferred to wherever it went once they got to the station. In that way, you instantly became “known to police” because they have noted your information. That is precisely what happens today, too; and that is why so many of our people who are arrested for something are said to be “known to police.”
If you didn’t respond to their satisfaction, and especially if you weren’t obsequious enough for particular cops, you were taken for a visit to Cherry Beach where you were beaten soundly, before being taken to a police station.
The generation before me, my mother and father’s generation, becoming adults during the 1940’s and 1950’s complained of the same actions on the part of police. At that time, The African community was very small and there was no gun violence. Still, the police acted in the same manner as the carding of today.
I can even go back farther to the generation of my grandparents, around the 1910’s and 1920’s when the Toronto Black community was the size of a blip, and we were said to be a very law-abiding group; yet, there were ongoing complaints of systemic, unfair treatment by cops!
So, what does this mean? The targeting of our community by police is not new and it has NOTHING to do with activities within segments of our community. Excuses are made up by authorities in each generation, in order to justify the differential treatment meted out to our community members.
This traditional racist targeting is always said to be needed, and always said to be effective for policing purposes. But, it is always lacking in demonstrable, statistical proof that it has had any manner of positive impact against crime.
Furthermore, why this type of group targeting is not used against other racial or ethnic groups, who also have plenty of criminal activity in their communities, is also never explained.
Carding, investigative policing, community engagement, community contacting, hassling, discriminating, bullying—whatever term you want to use–the targeting of innocent African people by police, is really about the psychological needs of white people operating from an anti-African racist mindset, and their consequent need to feel and be in control of African people.
Are they afraid that Africans might rise up and put a stop to their system of privilege, white supremacy?
We need to watch this carding issue carefully through to the end. I expect, if the Toronto Police Services Board does get rid of carding, that some new policy and practice with a different name will soon be put in its place.
I then expect that a new and different policy to not only continue carding under a fresh guise, but to put in place aspects that will make it more difficult for us to document police encounters, while simultaneously, cosmetically making this oppressive and anti-Charter of Rights and Freedoms tradition, appear more benign and acceptable to mainstream critics.
I must say, though, I would so love to be wrong in my prediction.
This aspect of policing, targeting innocent Africans is normative to Canadian society and is approved of by Canadian society. I know it is approved of, because there have been enough “exposes” revealing to the dominant white majority of citizens, the unwarranted targeting of law-abiding Black citizens by police, and if they disagreed with this approach to policing, they would have and should have shown their disapproval of it long before now.
If they had, it would not now be an issue because it would not still be a traditional practice.
We need to fight for the absolute end to this type of policing, but in order to do so, we will have to ultimately deal with the psychopathy in Canadian cultural thought, which gives rise to it, nourishes it, supports it, maintains it and cements it within society.

Xinavane Mawu Kush is a Canadian African writer-activist and artist-educator.