Historical foundations of anti-Black victimization in Canada

Three key concepts frame the analysis that follows. Racial capitalism describes the process by which economic systems extract value from racialized groups through exploitation, dispossession, and exclusion, such that race and economic inequality are not separate phenomena but mutually constitutive ones (Robinson, 1983). Structural violence refers to the ways in which social arrangements, including laws, policies, and institutions, systematically harm groups, not just through direct physical force, but through the organized distribution of disadvantage, which includes denying them access to resources, safety, and equal treatment (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2004). Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of the psychological, social, and physiological effects of severe or prolonged harm across generations, whereby communities subjected to sustained racial violence carry forward patterns of stress, mistrust, and vulnerability that shape present-day experiences of harm and help-seeking (Brave Heart, 1998). Taken together, these concepts operate in sequence: racial capitalism created the conditions of dispossession and exploitation, structural violence institutionalized them through law, policy, and the distribution of disadvantage, and intergenerational trauma embodies their cumulative result in the lives of those who continue to carry their weight. Together, they provide the analytical foundation for understanding how Canada’s racial history is not simply a backdrop to contemporary violence but an active and ongoing determinant of it.

Any rigorous account of contemporary homicide, gun violence, and survivorship among Black communities in Canada must proceed from the endemic impacts of racial formation that began with slavery and never fully ended. The systems of control that once governed enslaved Black people did not disappear after abolition; they were transformed. After slavery formally ended, the stigma attached to being a "slave" was transferred onto the category of being "Black," shaping how institutions understood and treated Black people (Maynard, 2025). This racial stigma was built into major Canadian systems: segregated schooling that limited opportunity (Howard & Smith, 2011), immigration policies designed to restrict Black entry (Calliste, 1994), and policing and criminal justice practices that disproportionately targeted Black communities (Warde, 2013). These long-standing structures produced material inequality and normalized surveillance and punishment; they continue to shape where violence is concentrated today and influence how Black victims and their families are treated, and often overlooked, when they seek support or justice after experiencing harm (Sharpe et al., 2025).