Robyn Maynard > Quotes

“Not only is state violence rarely prosecuted as criminal, it is not commonly perceived as violence. Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“slavery never took the form of the large-scale plantations found in the American South, the Caribbean or South America. Plantations, though their establishment was desired by some colonists, were found to be incompatible with Canada’s climate and short growing season (Mackey 2010). As a result, the number of enslaved people in Canada was always lower, and the economy less reliant on slave labour than other parts of the Americas and the Caribbean. These distinctions have underpinned the assumption in some existing scholarship that enslavement in Canada was relatively benign. Yet, the absence of slave plantation economies does not negate the brutality of the centuries-long, state-supported practice of slavery. White individuals and white settler society profited from owning unfree Black (and Indigenous) people and their labour for hundreds of years while exposing them to physical and psychological brutality, and the inferiority ascribed to Blackness in this era would affect the treatment of Black persons living in Canada for centuries to come.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“That Black migrant communities were systematically de-skilled upon their arrival is an often-overlooked facet of understanding Black poverty in Canada today. Indeed, it represents the power of anti-Blackness to transcend even economic interests: even in moments when Canada required highly educated professionals, Black migrants meeting those exact criteria were nonetheless largely streamlined into low-skilled work and relative powerlessness.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Blackness, like all racial categories, is not a biological fact but has been historically and socially constructed”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Indigenous peoples are seen as “in the way,” and laws and policies are used toward destroying Indigenous communities to secure unfettered access to Indigenous land (Sium 2013; Tuck and Yang 2012: 6; see also Wolfe 2007). The overarching goal of white settler colonialism is to eradicate Indigenous peoples, either through assimilation or genocide — to turn them into “ghosts” (Tuck and Yang 2012: 6). The reserve system, the imposition of residential schools intended to “kill the Indian in the child,” forced sterilization of Indigenous women, ongoing resource extraction and pipelines extending across Indigenous territory are only a few examples that demonstrate a unique logic of genocide and theft targeting Indigenous peoples (Palmater 2011).”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“To be Black is not only to be targeted for questioning or arrest, it is also to be "proximate to death"—that is, to live with an accentuated vulnerability to being violently beaten by police or by prison guards, to being placed in long-term solitary confinement for months that a time, or to being killed by the police.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Within sentencing, couriers, far more so than many other drug offenders, are routinely blamed for the ills ideologically (and erroneously) attributed to drugs. Couriers were said to be "responsible for the gradual but inexorable degeneration of many of their fellow human beings" who were "contribut[ing] to what is nothing short of the destruction of this society" but "placing a 'lethal weapon' in the hands of drug dealers, wreaking havoc on the streets of our cities" and "tear[ing] at the fabric of our sicety".”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Countries do not use prison as a direct, rational measure to reduce crime. Rather, they choose—through a complex process of ideological, moral, political and judicial negotiation—the level of pain that they are willing to inflict on their citizens.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“A criminal race analysis of criminalization reminds us not to abandon those seen as deviant or criminal to disproportionate punishment for their apparent transgressions. Race, after all, and Blackness in particular, largely determines who is seen, caught, arrested, charged, found guilty and sentenced for breaking the law. Race also influences which crimes are most heavily targeted and punished.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“...the criminalization of drugs was related not to the pharmacological or social harms engendered by drugs, but was a result of anti-Black and anti-Chinese sentiment.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“...though a human being may be deemed "illegal", the alleged crime has no victim: "within common discourses, the victim of this criminal act is the state, and the alleged assault is on its borders.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“In the abolitionist journal Voice of the Fugitive, Shadd Cary neatly summed up the Canadian contradiction, calling the white Canadian an “anti-slavery Negro hater” (November 4, 1852 in Silverman 1985: 158). Indeed, freedom runners often experienced the same anti-Black racism north of the border that they had sought to flee in the U.S. For example, in 1891, in Chatham, a town where many of the freedom runners had settled, a band of armed whites tried to force an elderly Black couple from their land (though they were fought off by gunfire) (Winks 1997: 327). Black lives, whether recent Black Americans or Canadian-born, while nominally free, were relegated to a separate and unequal status in all realms of society.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“In a racially hostile society, cultural knowledge is crucial for the development of self worth and community.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Criminalization, which is defined as "the attachment of the criminal label to the activities of groups which the authorities deem it necessary to control", has allowed for poor and racialized migrants to be largely excluded from the realm of public sympathies.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“The Mammy represented a fictionalized, celibate and idealized—good—Black woman who gratefully raised the white children of her master or employer and performed her servitude willingly. This figure served a dual purpose: it at once justified Black women's economic exploitation and helped remove white culpability from slavery. [...] An opposing but complementary representation of Black femininity may be seen in the trope of the "Black Jezebel." Characterized by hypersexuality and deviance, this trope historically served the purpose of absolving white, male sexual violence against Black women.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“The imposition of different categories of citizenship, in effect, delineate who "belongs" to the realm of humane treatment and state protections, and who is excluded—deemed "temporary", "illegal" and disposable.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Indeed, immigration status remains a de jure and state-sanctioned way to take certain people's rights away and subject them to labour exploitation as well as the violence of indefinite captivity and expulsion.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Only a few decades after Black peoples' bodies and lives ceased to be reduced to property, Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, decried in 1868 the "frequency of rape committed by Negros, of whom we have too many in Upper Canada".”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Black women with little social, economic and political power are nonetheless represented as holding enormous amounts of lethal power by the current applications of Canadian drug law.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“...though, of course, "proportionate" police violence is not a viable end goal toward racial and gendered justice.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Immigrant detention and deportation stretch the harmful effects of imprisonment and family separation across national borders. Africans were dragged out of their homeland, tied, bound, and brought to the West under torturous duress. Today, coercion has changed in form, content, and direction, thus policing the boundaries and preventing Africans from coming to the West.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“[The judge] found that Sergeant Ruffino's actions were "consistent with a manifestation of racism whereby a white person in a position of authority has an expectation of docility and compliance from a racialized person, and imposes harsh consequences if that docility and compliance is not provided".”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Black "womanhood" has never protected Black women from being forced to perform difficult manual labour, or from the systemic and institutionalized sexual and physical violence structured into the institution of slavery.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“[on the Caribbean Domestic Scheme] While Caribbean women could live and work in Canada under this program, it nonetheless reproduced Black women's economic, political and social subordination in Canadian society. Economic precarity and vulnerability to abuse was structured into the program itself: because the workers' immigration status was tied directly to their employers, their ability to work and live in Canada was entirely in the hands of their bosses.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“It is impossible to know how many more Black people have been killed at the hands of the police across Canada: the information is not released by police, their oversight unions (if they exist) or at the federal level. Ontario's SIU does not keep race-based statistics, nor does Statistics Canada, the Toronto or Montréal police, Correctional Services or the Ministry of Community Safety”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Being uniquely positioned at the intersections of multiple forms of societal and state violence has allowed Black women to be at the forefront of community-based anti-racist, feminist, queer-friendly and class-conscious responses to gendered and state violence in Canada.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Indeed, just as Black enslaved people who ran away from captivity were punished with incarceration and other state-sanctioned violence, African-descended migrants the world over continue to be placed in captivity in immigration detention as punishment for fleeing the impoverishment, persecution, starvation and warfare that has resulted from slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism.”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“More people cheat on their income taxes and lie about their cross-border shopping than defraud the welfare system. Corporate crime, white collar fraud and tax evasion, in Ontario cost the public more every year than the entire cost of the social assistance system. (Addario 2002: n.p., emphasis added)”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

“Derived from a program of the same name run by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the United States and imported by the RCMP in the late 1980s, Operation Pipeline is a training program geared toward the enforcement of drug laws. It has since been used to train Canada Customs officers, provincial police officers and officers in Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Training methods analyzed by David Tanovich found that literature emphasized highly racialized "profiles" of likely drug traffickers, and included racial and ethnic characteristics, such as dreadlocks, as a means of singling out criminals and criminal organizations, making specific mention of Caribbean men and women (as well as Chinese people and other racial groups).”
― Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present