From The Skin We’re In. Copyright 2020 Desmond Cole. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

In my experience, the average white Canadian doesn’t know that British and French settlers enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples on these lands for two centuries, and simply shifted legislative tactics once they had abolished “legal” slavery. Those who do acknowledge slavery in Canada often add that it was “not as bad as in the States,” a nod to the white Canadian proverb used as a checkmate end to a conversation. No need to consider anti-blackness here.

This idea that Canada’s racial injustices are not as bad as they could be—this notion of slavery lite, of racism lite, of what my friend calls the “toy version of racism”—is a very Canadian way of saying “remember what we could do to you if we wanted to.” Passive-aggressive racism is central to Canada’s national mythology and identity. White supremacy warns Black people against setting our own standards and pursuing dreams that stray too far from the global atmosphere of anti-blackness.

The ongoing reality of police surveillance of Indigenous communities across Canada is also rooted in the country’s colonial laws. In 1885, the federal government enacted pass laws to control the movement of Métis people in and around what is now Winnipeg who were engaging in armed resistance against white settlers. The practice soon expanded across the country and lasted for nearly sixty years without formal approval from Parliament. Hayter Reed, one of the government officials who lobbied for and implemented the pass laws, described his vision in a letter to a superior: “No rebel Indians should be allowed off the Reserves without a pass signed by an I. D. official. The dangers of complications with white men will thus be lessened, & by preserving a knowledge of individual movements any inclination to petty depredations may be checked by the facility of apprehending those who commit such offences.”

When police engage in what we now call carding, they are maintaining a tradition of surveilling Black and Indigenous people, suggesting that our very presence as free people on the street is suspicious and in need of investigation. At one time, the prospect of free Black people informed the actions of slave catchers. In our time, white Canada continues to view Black people as an inherent threat to its safety and sense of order. The fear informs the police practice of stopping and questioning us. Maynard is clear, though: police do not act in isolation. Rather, they are carrying out the will of Canada’s white majority, in the service of maintaining a colonial settler state where whiteness is supreme.

The modern era of carding in Toronto began, as so many police interventions do, in the wake of a crisis. Toronto’s media dubbed the summer of 2005 the “summer of the gun,” after the city witnessed twenty-five gun-related homicides between June and September. In response, local police vowed to step up their presence in areas where many of the shootings had occurred. The force created a new unit, called the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy, or TAVIS, to police so-called high-crime areas. TAVIS and the modern carding regime quickly became the citywide norm, and the unit was responsible for a disproportionate share of carding and, by extension, the disproportionate surveillance and profiling of Black people, particularly Black youth.

Carding data across Canada is collected sporadically and has historically been made public only after residents and the media demand access to it. The data we do have is damning, and in conjunction with the testimonies of people who experience police surveillance, it hints at the overwhelming scope of police interference into the daily lives of the people they target: Black people, Indigenous people, sex workers, people in crisis, homeless people, poor people, queer people, trans people, two-spirit and gender non-conforming people, and people living with physical disabilities, addictions, or mental health issues.

In 2012 the Toronto Star published “Known to Police,” its most comprehensive investigation into carding. The paper reported that “between 2008 and 2012, police filled out 1.8 million contact cards, involving more than a million individuals, in stops that typically result in no arrest or charge. The data end up in a massive police database that currently has no purging requirements.”In the areas of Toronto where higher concentrations of Black people live, the stats were equally devastating. According to the Star’s investigation, “from 2008 to 2012, the number of young black males, aged 15 to 24, who were documented at least once in the police patrol zone where they live exceeded the young black male population for all of Toronto.” The report noted that, as police continued the practice of carding, it was likely that all young Black men in certain areas of the city would end up in the carding database. Subsequent reporting showed how carding records had destroyed education and job opportunities for the Black people police target. For example, in April 2014, Transport Canada revoked the security clearance of Ayaan Farah, a young Somali woman working for an airline at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. The RCMP used carding data to claim that Farah had contacts with criminals which jeopardized airline safety, but refused to name those people for privacy reasons. Farah could no longer work at the airport, and two years passed before the Federal Court ruled that stripping her of her security clearance because of unnamed contacts was unfair, incomprehensible, and unreasonable. But the judgment didn’t include compensation for Farah’s years of lost income and the assault on her reputation.

In 2014, two years after “Known to Police” had exposed the scope of carding, the Star documented that the total number of carding stops had decreased by 75 percent from the previous year, yet the proportion of stops of Black residents had actually increased. The same report noted that Black residents, who made up roughly 8 percent of the city’s population, were involved in 27 percent of carding stops. In one predominantly white area, Black people were 17 times more likely than white residents to be carded.

In one of its most striking revelations, the Star exposed that manypolice superiors had been using an informal quota system to encourage officers to surveil the public. One supervisor told her officers she expected them to perform at least three street checks per shift and that officers who failed to meet these standards might not qualify for a promotion.

“Known to Police” was part of a long effort by the paper’s reporters to illuminate the practice of carding and its implications for racialized people. The Star’s 2002 series “Race and Crime” had revealed that police disproportionately took Black people to police stations for simple drug offences, kept us overnight more often than white residents, and ticketed us more often than white motorists after pulling us over for no apparent reason. In response to this reporting, the Toronto Police Association sued the Star for an astronomical $2.7 billion in damages for allegedly labelling every individual Toronto police officer as racist. Although the Supreme Court ultimately threw out the case, it was a clear instance of the police association leading the charge to discredit the Star and, by extension, Toronto’s Black population.

“Known to Police” did re-energize media attention to racial profiling and surveillance and helped to elevate the ongoing resistance in local Black communities like Weston–Mount Dennis, where I had first heard the term “carding” at the York Youth Coalition meeting. They and other community groups, including the African Canadian Legal Clinic, Jane Finch Action Against Poverty, No One Is Illegal–Toronto, Justice for Children and Youth, and later the Anti-Black Racism Network, and Black Lives Matter–Toronto, documented community experiences with the police and agitated for change. They were all continuing the 1980s and ’90s work of the Black Action Defence Committee and community activists like Sherona Hall, Akua Benjamin, Dudley Laws, Charles Roach, and Lennox Farrell.