The day after an 18-year-old white man allegedly murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, the Foundation for Black Communities gathered a group of 20 other community organizations for a meeting. They wanted to not only show support and solidarity with the victims, but also guard against the ripple effects of the attack in Canada.

This coalition includes the BlackNorth Initiative, NIA Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Youth LEAPS, Tribe Initiative, and other organizations committed to working with racialized people. On top of organizing a vigil in Toronto, the coalition drafted calls to action for all levels of government to consider at a time when Canada’s rate of reported hate crimes and online radicalization are on the rise. In 2020 alone, Statistics Canada recorded the largest surge in reported hate crimes since it first started collecting data on the issue in 2009. 

Most crucially, its seven calls to action put the onus for ending anti-Black hatred in Canada on governments. Some of the calls are quite broad, and that’s intentional. Alica Hall, executive director of the NIA Centre for the Arts, said the coalition spent a while talking about how specific they needed to be. But she said solving the issue of white supremacy isn’t the job of Canada’s Black communities. “We are the victims,” Hall stressed, “and the targets of hate and racism.” Rather, it is the role of government – and, to an extent, the social impact sector – to address white supremacy.

Despite claims to the contrary, Canada is not immune to acts of hateful violence like the Buffalo attack. Hall pointed to an alleged 2021 terror attack in London, Ont. that killed four members of a Muslim family. To add to the list, a van attack in 2018 by a so-called incel (a violent anti-feminist ideology) in Toronto killed 11 people. And in 2017, a white supremacist gunman murdered six worshippers at a Quebec City mosque. The number of hate crimes reported to police in 2020, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data, is on the rise.

Meanwhile, Hall said, Black communities in Canada are subject to racist acts that don’t make the news – hateful comments online or microaggressions. “It’s really easy for us sometimes, as Canadians, to feel complacent and to feel like this is not an ‘us’ problem, it’s a ‘them’ problem,” Hall said.

The coalition’s calls to action include ensuring the federal government’s National Action Plan on Combatting Hate incorporates “concrete measures such as tackling hate speech and radicalization online to address anti-Black hate”, according to a statement. In early May 2022, the federal government wrapped up consultations to ensure people with lived experience of hate can weigh in on the National Action Plan’s design. A robust federal anti-hate plan could serve as an example for social impact organizations keen on running their own anti-racism campaigns, too.

Establishing anti-Black racism directorates in every province and territory is another of the coalition’s calls to action. So is speeding up work on the Black Canadians Justice Strategy – an initiative to fight racial discrimination within Canada’s justice system. In December 2021, the government assigned Justice Minister David Lametti to begin designing the initiative. Both of these calls to action would accelerate plans to tackle systemic racism within government policies and procedures.

As well, the coalition wants the Federation of Canadian Municipalities – an organization representing Canada’s cities and towns – to encourage its members to develop anti-Black racism plans similar to Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit, a city-run department charged with rolling out Toronto’s Action Plan to Confront Anti-Black Racism.

But the coalition also wants governments to help Black-led social impact organizations – and by extension, the communities they serve. One of the coalition’s calls to action is an expansion of the Supporting Black Communities Initiative, a 2022 program to give $25 million over five years to Black-led not-for-profits. As referenced in the Dec. 2020 Unfunded report, for every $100 given out in philanthropic funding in the 2017 and 2018 fiscal year, just three cents went to Black-led organizations. Only 15 cents went to Black-serving organizations. 

It also wants the federal government to “continue to support” the Mental Health of Black Canadians Fund. In an announcement from February 2022, the federal government announced a $400,000 grant to York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute to analyze racism in academic spaces, as well as $400,000 for the TAIBU Community Health Centre, an organization serving Black communities in Toronto. (TAIBU is one of the 21 community organizations that hosted the vigil and released the calls to action.)

The coalition sees all of these recommendations as “necessary and critical steps” to counter Canada’s rise in anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and hate crimes. “We must look for and erase all explicit and implicit racism in our societies – wherever it exists, whether it’s in our judicial systems, our educational systems, or in everyday life,” the coalition wrote in a statement.

At the vigil in Toronto on May 19, dozens of people gathered in front of Toronto’s city hall to stand in solidarity with the victims of the Buffalo massacre. Some held signs condemning anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and the racist ‘great replacement theory’ allegedly held by the Buffalo gunman – that somehow white people were being replaced by racialized communities in a great conspiracy.

After a speech by Toronto Mayor John Tory, and a reading by Ontario Poet Laureate Randell Adjei, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth Marci Ien took to the stage. She talked about having to explain the horrific news of the Buffalo massacre to her 10-year-old son, Dash: how he simply couldn’t believe the victims looked like them and were out shopping when they were murdered. “It’s why our hearts are broken,” Ien told the crowd. “Brothers and sisters in Buffalo – we see ourselves.”

Her words of advice to allies in the crowd struck to the heart of the coalition’s recommendations – that it isn’t up to Black communities to end anti-Black hatred. “Please do not ask a Black person what you should do,” Ien said. “It’s not their job to tell you what to do. Frankly, it’s yours – to reach out, to read, to watch. Just be kind. Everybody can do that. Everybody can have empathy. We’re not born with hate.”

Disclosure: Adelaide Gyamfi, Future of Good’s events producer, volunteered to help put on the vigil event Thursday evening. 

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