Stephen Dorsey was deeply scarred by racism. He experienced it, in extremely traumatic conditions, when he was still a child. His mother, white and in a relationship with a Belgian immigrant to Quebec, made him believe for several years, at the request of his spouse, that he and his brother were adopted children. It was only around the age of ten that Stephen finally learned that he was indeed, like his brother, the biological son of his mother, who had had them from a man from whom she had separated years ago.
“In fact, my stepfather wanted to hide from everyone that his wife had slept with a black man,” he wrote. This experience, Stephen Dorsey tells it from the first chapters of his book Black and white, which has just been published in French by Nimbus. As well to say it from the outset, Stephen Dorsey’s book, thick and dense, would have benefited from a more careful editing work in its French translation. There are unforgivable misprints, such as the incorrect spelling of the author’s name on the back cover.
The fact remains that his thought, like his story, sheds light on the black experience in Quebec in a way that few people have done so far. Despite a difficult family history, Stephen Dorsey has made his way in life. Today a businessman in the field of brand management and marketing, he nevertheless felt the affect of his childhood in 2020, when the filmed assassination of George Floyd by a police officer gave birth to the movement Black Lives Matter.
“All the emotions came back,” he said in an interview. I was very angry. Everyone called me to ask me how I felt, what I thought of all this. I had to do something, get involved. »
A chapter on Quebec
Starting from his personal story, Stephen Dorsey continues on the theme of systemic racism in Canada. Very annoyed by François Legault’s obstinacy in refusing to recognize the presence of systemic racism in Quebec and vigorously opposed to Bill 21 on the secularism of the state, he devotes an entire chapter to his native province entitled “Systemic inequalities, Quebec’s exceptionalism”.
By denying systemic racism, we make it a marginal history, a history of individual cases, he continues, and that “puts aside the big problem”.
An ardent federalist, Dorsey took the opportunity to criticize the Quebec system which favored French to the detriment of English, he who was one of the last cohort of children to be able to study English at school despite his parents being French-speaking.
But let’s get back to Canadian systemic racism as a whole, which Stephen Dorsey documents extensively, looking back to history first. He reports Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s desire in 1911 to adopt a decree prohibiting blacks from entering the country for an entire year, on the pretext that they were “not adapted to the climate”. However, this decree never entered into force. Later, he refers to the exclusion of blacks from medical schools practiced by major universities in the country, namely Queens University, which only abolished this measure in 1965, the University of Toronto and the McGill University, Montreal.
The white advantage
Dorsey points to the fact that these policies have had consequences for several generations of people from the black community, and are partly responsible for the economic gap that does not seem to be closing between white and black people. “We start with a generational disadvantage,” he says.
Closer to home, the police harassment suffered by black communities also prevents them from feeling on an equal footing with other citizens. “Over the past four decades, I have lived in many of Canada’s largest cities, including Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, where police have killed black citizens, people of color and Indigenous people, at a rate disproportionate to compared to the general population, and especially white people,” he wrote.
“People of color and Indigenous people are watched more often, more often accosted, and more often killed by the police,” he adds in an interview. When they go to prison, they go there longer, and it continues. »
“If you’re a parent, every time your kids come out of the house, you think they can get arrested or maybe worse, just because they’re black. A white family doesn’t need to think about that,” he says. It is all these realities that forge what Dorsey today calls “the white advantage”. In an interview, he says he believes that this expression prepares the way for fruitful discussions between the communities better than that of “white privilege”.
Stephen Dorsey finds all the same that things are improving, that consciences have been sharpened, but that there is still a lot of work to be done, in particular in the implementation of appropriate public and private policies. “It’s sad that we needed a person to be killed on video” to react to this point, he said about the Black Lives Matter movement.