Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present by Robyn Maynard Halifax: Fernwood (2017) 292 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subtitle of this book, "state violence in Canada from slavery to the present" is an accurate thesis of this book.The author illustrates how Eurocolonial Canadians' negative views of slaves (Black and brown people) has been maintained to present day through government policies, policing initiatives, media, and schools.The author also draws attention to the often overlooked and under-reported treatment of Black women in white society.Robyn Maynard breaks the book down into eight chapters to deal with specifi c areas of discrimination against Black people.From chapter one, we gain a history of slavery and the establishing of Black people as property and not as equals; thus, devaluing their worth.Black lives are demonized as something to be feared, as stronger, less intelligent, hypersexual, and deviant."One must be careful when around Blacks".This early attitude towards Black people was (and still is) a global phenomenon starting in Europe and spreading with colonization of the world.The abolition of slavery only changed the methods used to devalue Black lives.Switching from slavery to segregation, "Canadians produce their own distinct language and rationalizations when propping up white supremacist ideology and practices" (p.33).Racist policies covered all areas: education, immigration, employment, and housing."African schools" often received less funding causing disparity between Blacks and whites.Of course, poor education fuels unemployment and trapped Blacks in low paying manual labour jobs, which leads to poor housing.The subsequent chapters explored these areas in greater detail.Chapter 2 covers the creation of Black poverty and maintenance of segregation from white society.With poor education, Blacks are trapped in employment where work is hard, hours are long, and pay is less than white workers.The use of Black migrant workers creates negative situations for Black labourers and benefi ts to white employers.This is part of the immigration issue discussed with more detail in a later chapter.Black women, no matter education or experience, are channeled to be domestic
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".