While walking with some of his Tamil friends late at night in Scarborough, Elango Cheran became the brunt of racist slur. A nearby group of white youths yelled out “f—— Tamils” in their direction.
A member of the Tamil Students’ Association, Cheran said he was “obviously shocked at the insult.”
Nevertheless, he was also impressed at the “perpetrator’s ability to be able to identify his ethnicity so accurately-something which would not have happened in America,” where he grew up, Cheran told the audience Tuesday at a “Hot Talks @ Hart House” discussion on racial profiling.
He was of the many panelists who discussed the racial profiling and blanket stereotyping of minority groups that occurs in the post-9/11 world.
“Today, racial profiling is extremely detrimental to society because of being very general in nature.” said Nazim Baksh, a CBC producer and a 2005/2006 Canadian Journalism Fellow at U of T.
“None of us can condone the end result of racial profiling, but we also cannot deny that the Muslim community has been placed under an unfair microscope.”
Baksh said Muslim men face similar problems as other minority groups. “Muslim men all over the world are also being unfairly targeted because they might match a certain stereotype.”
Fitting the profile of young, bearded Muslim male himself, Baksh has felt racial profiling first-hand on a commercial airliner in America.
While reading the 9/11 Commission Report, Baksh said he was “escorted from his seat and humiliated by an Air Marshall for the choice of such a book.”
U of T criminology Professor Scott Wortley was also present at the talk. Wortley claimed that “racial profiling is also practised by the Canadian police and criminal justice system.”
“Race is a crucial factor why certain groups become targets of surveillance. Blacks are four times more likely to be stopped by police than their white counterparts,” explained Wortley.
“Because black neighbourhoods are put under surveillance, the chances of a black youth getting caught while smoking marijuana are extremely high, as opposed to a [white] U of T student doing the same thing.”
As a result, Wortley asserted that “in Canada, race does matter.”
The main interactions police have with blacks and other minority groups are during “abnormal situations,” said Wortley.
“Therefore, these situations do not always present a correct picture about such communities. Instead, they end up strengthening stereotypes about such groups.”
“What kind of messages are we sending to black youth today when they see that prisons are overrepresented with Aboriginal and black Canadians?”