Racialized criminalization of Black people

The cultural politics that marked Black men as inherently dangerous took shape immediately after emancipation. Canadian politicians and legal actors explicitly invoked the stereotype of the Black male rapist to justify harsh penal policies, a claim thoroughly refuted by court records (Backhouse, 1999; Walker, 2010). White women’s organizations petitioned the federal government to exclude Black men from settlement, invoking lynching discourse familiar from the United States (Palmer, 1982; Valverde, 2008). The Ku Klux Klan operated across Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta during the 1920s, conducting cross-burnings and intimidation with little state interference, normalizing the view that Blackness was synonymous with disorder and criminality (Bartley, 2020; Parsons, 2024). Historical sentencing records document significant racial disparities in conviction and sentencing across Ontario between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, with Black defendants more likely to be charged, convicted, and incarcerated at disproportionate rates even where legal variables were controlled, laying the foundation for differential treatment that continues in Canadian criminal justice today (Backhouse, 1999; Mosher, 1999; Owusu-Bempah & Jeffers, 2021; Saghbini & Paquin-Marseille, 2023).

This history of racialized criminalization has direct consequences for how Black people are recognized, or more precisely, not recognized, as victims of crime. Victimology scholarship has long identified the concept of the "ideal victim": a figure constructed as wholly innocent, unconnected to the circumstances of their harm, and therefore fully deserving of compassion and institutional response (Christie, 1986). In practice, this construction has functioned to exclude Black survivors of gun violence and those bereaved by homicide from the category of those deemed worthy of protection and support. Where Blackness has been institutionally coded as inherently dangerous or criminal, Black victims are routinely perceived through a lens of suspicion rather than sympathy, their victimization treated as ambiguous, provoked, or self-incurred (Linhares et al., 2023; Collins, 2014). This dynamic is compounded by what scholars have described as the victim-offender binary: the institutional assumption that those perceived as dangerous or previously involved with the criminal justice system cannot simultaneously occupy the position of victim (Wortley & Owusu-Bempah, 2022; Richardson et al., 2016). For Black gun violence survivors in particular, Richardson et al. (2016) found that providers frequently perceived Black male survivors of gunshot wounds through a lens of culpability rather than victimization, directly affecting the quality and continuity of care they received. For homicide-bereaved families, the same logic operates when courts and media frame the deceased as implicated in their own deaths, rendering their losses less grievable and their families less deserving of institutional recognition and support (Sharpe, Bailey, et al., 2024; Collins, 2014). The cumulative effect is a system in which the historical construction of Black people as dangerous continues to determine who is seen as a victim, who receives help, and whose harm is treated as worthy of redress.