Sustaining Systemic Racism Through Psychological Gaslighting: Denials of Racial Profiling and Justifications of Carding by Police Utilizing Local News Media

• Author: Ameil Joseph,Heston Tobias
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368718760969
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Sustaining Systemic

Racism Through

Psychological Gaslighting:

Denials of Racial Profiling

and Justifications of

Carding by Police Utilizing

Local News Media

Heston Tobias

1

and Ameil Joseph

2

Abstract

This article examines Police Services and local media discourses on street checks in

Hamilton, Ontario, from June 2015 to April 2016 and their usage as a form of

psychological abuse known as gaslighting. Despite the widespread coverage that the

Hamilton Police Service received as a result of being linked to systemic racist

practices, a year later, the Hamilton Police Service was able to avoid being implicated

in deliberately conducting racial profiling through strategic tactics in the discourse

they relied upon and presented in the media. Through an analysis of 27 local news

media articles on the topic of street checks, it is argued that the Police Services and

local media discourse enact gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse that is used to

manipulate object(s) in order to deceive and undermine the credibility of the target.

The psychological effects of gaslighting on people of color included a sense of

alienation, disenfranchisement from the community, and distrust toward the police.

Through a case study application, it is suggested that gaslighting is part of a systemic,

historical proc ess of racism that h as been used by the police and government

organizations to both illegally target people of color and deny complicity in racial

profiling.

1

Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

2

School of Social Work, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Ameil Joseph, School of Social Work, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario,

Canada L8S 4L8.

Email: ameilj@mcmaster.ca

Race and Justice

2020, Vol. 10(4) 424-455

ªThe Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/2153368718760969

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Keywords

systemic racism, criminalization, critical race, racial profiling, racial gas lighting, media

analysis, carding

Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to

understand.

Fanon (1963, p. 189)

Issues of police brutality, racial profiling, have been sites of struggle for generations

(Hernandez, 1990; Morris, 1986; Staples, 1975; Weitzer & Tuch, 2002). The

advancementof attention to how blatant systemicracism, dehumanization,and violence

persist withinpolicing practice andsocietal discourse is oftenthe cyclical burden carried

by the racializedpeople affected by thesevery systems (Dovemark, 2013;Nelson, 2013;

Taylor, 1998; van Dijk,1992). This research drew upon critical theory and critical race

theory (CRT) to conduct a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of local news media

discourse on police carding and racial profiling in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada relying

on focused methodological techniques of grounded theory to examine how racism is

attended to, conceptualized, legitimated, or denied from 2015 to 2016.

In Hamilton, Ontario, racism against Canadians of African descent has always been

a pervasive and extremely difficult sociohistorical issue. Early histories from the

1800s have recounted anti-Black racism in Hamilton restricting where Black people

could shop, eat, and work. Since 1835, the Stewart Memorial Church (then known as

St. Paul’s American Methodist Episcopal Church), at John Street North, Hamilton,

Ontario, was a refuge for African America slaves crossing the Niagara river via the

underground railroad (Gordon, 2016, p. 24). In the 1940s, Reverend John C. Holland,

a prominent Black social activist, organized numerous sit-ins in different businesses

across Hamilton that did not serve or hire Black Hamiltonians (Gordon, 2016, p. 12).

When Stelco steel and other local companies were not hiring Blacks, Holland took

several Black men to the locations and convinced the companies to hire them (Gordon,

2016, p. 12). In 1996, the Sesquicentennial Advisory Committee (SAC) organized a

celebration for the then upcoming 150th anniversary of the city of Hamilton (Gordon,

2016, p. 24). There were no Black people on the SAC, and initially, this committee did

not intend to recognize the significant contributions of Blacks to Hamilton’s history

(Gordon, 2016, p. 24). When two prominent Black social activists in Hamilton,

Evelyn Myrie and Marlene Thomas Osborne of the Hamilton Black History Com-

mittee found out about this lack of representation in the SAC, they attended the SAC’s

next meeting and successfully got the SAC to recognize Black History in Hamilton

(Gordon, 2016, p. 24). This recognition came via a celebration of Black Hamiltonian

history at the inaugural John Holland Awards (Gordon, 2016, p. 24). Twenty years

later, the John Holland Awards is still celebrated every February where both Black

history and the accomplishments of young Black leaders in Hamilton are celebrated at

a dinner gala. This complex history of anti-Black racism in Hamilton can only be

Tobias and Joseph 425

recounted alongside the antiracist activism of people such as John C. Holland, Evelyn

Myrie, and must also be appreciated within a context of ongoing discrimination

against indigenous groups in Hamilton.

These matters are unfortunately not only historical. Recently in 2010, during the R.

v. Steele case, a mistrial was declared in a Hamilton courtroom because 25 people of a

jury pool of 75 Hamiltonian jurors stated that they were too biased against Blacks to

objectively judge the case where the defendant, Richard Steele, a Black man, was

appealing a firearms possession case on the basis that the traffic stop that led to the

charge was a case of racial profiling (DiManno, 2009). Although the appeal was

overturned, the mistrial demonstrated that anti-Black racism is still a major problem in

the city. As a statistics Canada report revealed, in 2013, race and ethnicity accounted

for half of reported hate crimes in Canada and the city of Hamilton has the second

highest number of reported hate crimes of any city in Canada (Allen, 2015). Recently,

activism around carding has occurred through the Black, Brown, Red lives matter

movement working in solidarity with the Black lives matter events and protests

beginning in Ferguson Missouri (Bennett, 2014). More broadly, movements such as

Black lives matter and widespread challenges to police brutality and racial profiling

have reinvigorated long-standing historical positions of activism while constantly

adding to the conversations and analysis (Este, Sato, & McKenna, 2017; Lindsey,

2015; Love, 2016; Yancy, 2016). These movements, challenges, activism, and anal-

yses have advanced attentions to gender, children, ability, and class as well as how we

examine the confluence of history and identity (Este et al., 2017; Lindsey, 2015; Love,

2016; Yancy, 2016).

Carding has become a widely discussed issue in Ontario over the last few years.

Carding takes places when a police officer stops a person on the street without warrant

or without havinghad a complaint lodged to gather basic information on him or her. The

information the police officer collects from the person is usually height, race, gender,

age, and any other personal information the officer thinks is relevant to his or her

policing. In total, the card has 65 fields where information is stored and categorized

(Bennett, 2015).The information is written downon a small card and then transferred to

the police database, where the information is permanently stored. Any person can be

stopped, even if they did nothing wrong. This issue initially gained traction in the

national media when it was announced in Toronto that its police force suspended the

practice in January 2015 after the public expressed outrage about the practice (Winsa &

Rankin, 2015).Carding is understood as a practicethat depends on racial profiling and is

a practice usedby the Hamilton Police Services (HPS;Hutchinson, 2015; Sayani-Mulji,

2015). The police use carding to gather information on individuals for the purpose of

building intelligence with professed intent to protect the community.

Since 2010, the HPS, in particular, the Addressing Crime Trends in Our Neigh-

borhoods (ACTION) team, has used carding as part of a larger socioeconomic ini-

tiative for the city to “clean” up the city’s downtown core and improve its growing

business (Sayani-Mulji, 2015). This initiative basically encourages and contributes to

the continual gentrification of the core while stigmatizing and criminalizing the large

percent of Blacks, Indigenous Americans, and poor people who live there. As a result

426 Race and Justice 10(4)