Legacies of slavery and anti-Black racial order

Although slavery was practiced in Canada for more than two centuries, its reality has not attained its due place in public consciousness. Slavery in New France and later under British rule was neither marginal nor benign (Maynard, 2025). It encompassed thousands of Black and Indigenous captives, formalized by royal assent in 1689 and sustained by routine physical, sexual, and reproductive violence that reduced Black personhood to exploitable property (Mackey, 2010). Enslaved women’s reproductive capacities were monetized (Foster, 2011); sexual coercion and abuse were endemic; and the everyday holding of Black people in bondage relied on minute surveillance, corporal punishment, and the ever-present threat of force (Henry-Dixon, 2024; Maynard, 2025). Fugitive slave advertisements that listed height, clothing, scars, and degrading descriptions were among the earliest public tools used to identify, track, and criminalize Black people, making Blackness itself a marker of suspicion and a justification for policing. This practice established a pattern that carried forward into stop, search, and street-check practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Maynard, 2025).