The ignominious Mississippi of the North reference was used several times to describe Nova Scotia on consecutive November days.
First, the restorative inquiry report on the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children chronicled the history of abuse suffered by helpless kids at the hands of their caretakers. The very next day, Halifax Police Chief Dan Kinsella apologized for the practice of street checks that were part of decades of injustice, mistreatment and victimization of African Nova Scotians.
Robert Wright, a social worker and a member of the African Nova Scotian Decade for People of African Descent Coalition, said the Mississippi of the North description has merit.
“We have this sophisticated colonial politeness that will not give affront to your face but will certainly limit you and talk behind your back,” Wright said. “If you are not the right kind of person from the right kind of people, you are never really going to get ahead. That’s true of white classes as well as racialized people in this province.”
Wright said the history of Nova Scotia is one of a colonial, military outpost and its people have always existed in very distinctive classes, people who worked the land, the woods, the water or the mines.
In recent history, Wright said there has been an unsuccessful struggle to break down the pattern of separateness.
“We have tried at various times to delegate more authority to the people but when that doesn’t work the way a certain class of people want it to, we roll it back,” he said. “We develop school boards, we get African Nova Scotian seats on school boards, school boards start to make decisions we don’t like, we eliminate school boards.
“Absolutely, it’s institutionalized racism,” Wright said, pointing to the street check issue and the Home for Colored Children as prime examples.
Journey to Light
Journey to Light: A Different Way Forward is the 555-page restorative inquiry report that chronicled many former child residents reporting sexual abuses ranging from above-clothes touching to forced oral sex to violent sexual assaults, including vaginal and anal penetration, at the Home for Colored Children in Dartmmouth.
Among other memories of residents in the late 1930s and 40s were cold temperatures, so much so that children would keep warm in evenings by sleeping many to a bed. Despite a large and productive farm being run at the home, children uniformly reported being hungry and many reported feeling starved.
“The (inquiry) report was designed not to point the finger,” Wright said. “Apparently, although we’ve apologized for horrendous treatment of African Nova Scotians through the colored home system and we undertook a study to make sure it would never happen again, there was no one who was culpable.”
The street check apology was issued in the wake of a March report from criminologist Scot Wortley that found blacks were almost six times more likely to be street-checked than whites in Halifax.
“If we take a look at the street checks issue … in 2003 we had the Kirk Johnson human rights complaint,” Wright said. “It was settled, he was compensated, the police were directed to keep stats both on traffic stops and street checks. They were also required to have an academic study. That academic study did not happen until 2017. It was only after we campaigned heavily that they (Nova Scotia Human Rights) commissioned Wortley to write a report that was supposed to have been written in 2003.
“The Human Rights Commission, the police commission, the police, the province, no one followed through on all of the recommendations that came out of that (2003) report.
“I don’t see any revolution in education or any other place that seems to suggest we’ve learned our lesson.”
Wortley Report
In the wake of the Wortley report, Wright said he and others had to campaign to have street checks deemed illegal. They pressured the Human Rights Commission, who charged former Chief Justice Michael MacDonald with rendering a legal opinion about street checks.
“No sooner does Justice MacDonald’s report come out saying street checks are illegal then the police advance a policy to suggest that these are the new ways in which we can engage with the public and we will still stop people when there are suspicions,” Wright said. “They are using what we consider an illegal definition of suspicious activity that, like street checks, has no foundation in common law or in any legislation that we know of."
Wright said police and government have never sat down with the black community and admitted to having practised an illegality for years and to ask direction to do what is appropriate.
“This is the kind of attitude that is at the basis of this Mississippi of the North characterization of Nova Scotia – government doing what it needs to do to to continue to assume control, rejigging wherever they have legislatively or through public protest lost control, they immediately work to reassert control in some other way.
“They investigate an historical wrongdoing, they come up with compensation but without clearly articulating the culpability of the harm. These are the kinds of things that we see that are frankly exhausting to some of us out here who are having to both make a living by our day jobs while donating a significant amount of our spare time to advocating on behalf of the rights of Nova Scotians because the institutions that have been established to do that have failed us.”
Wright said the street check apology was well orchestrated but empty.
“We cannot say that street checks are now banned and give back to the same groups, that have failed us thus far, responsibility for monitoring that ban because they have proven to us an inability to understand the nature of their transgression and to honestly try to reverse the practices that are discriminatory and illegal.”
Wright said he has long called for an African Nova Scotia Justice Institute to assess adjudicated offenders, provide presentence reports and create programs for helping to reintegrate offenders into society and a body to monitor human rights.
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