“The Real Toronto”: Black Youth Experiences and the Narration of the Multicultural City

Abstract

Looking back at more than 45 years of official multicultural policy in Canada, this article asks us to reflect on how the experiences of Black male youth in Toronto and the ways in which race, class, age, and gender intersect to alienate them from full access to educational and employment opportunities disrupt the construction of Canada as an “ideal” and “exceptional” multicultural democracy, built on unchallenged assumptions of inclusivity and impartiality. While Canadian multiculturalism promises respect for cultural differences, free education, and access to jobs for all citizens regardless of national origin or ethnicity, this promise is not borne out in the lives of poor black youth. The article centres the voices and perspectives of these youth by drawing on the documentary The Real Toronto, filmed during the “Summer of the Gun” in 2005, and on the findings from a three-year transnational study of the effects of violence on Black youth in Canada and Jamaica, collected eight years later in 2013. The article argues that Black urban male youth, by situating their precarious life experiences on the margins of a set of core Canadian values, destabilize our understanding of Canadian society by revealing the ways in which they are routinely criminalized and pathologized, and by demanding greater access to upward mobility.