Swimming in the Wake of a Slave Ship: The Sinister Reality of Police Complicity and Dehumanization in Montréal-Nord

Black people in the Americas were never intended to have control of our bodies. That is how white imperialist enslavers planned it. From our beautiful brown skin to our glorious sculptural locs, not even the substance of our biology was supposed to be within our own control. The recent policing scandal rocking Montreal’s Station 39 in Montréal-Nord is a stark reminder that we are still swimming in the wake of a slave ship. Sixteen officers stand accused of various racist offenses that range from the egregious to the horrifying, including racially motivated ticketing, targeted bullying, and cutting off the locs of black citizens to collect them as trophies.

Let me state it plainly: this type of corporeal mutilation violates the dignity, bodily autonomy, and integrity of human beings. And for black people, it is by no means about superficial cosmetic issues. Locs are never just hair for black people. Whether we have chosen them in defiance of Eurocentric ideals of western beauty—which have prominently celebrated straight and light-coloured hair over our own deeply curled, delicate, fine, and magically sculptural strands—or as a spiritual symbol of our religious convictions as Rastafarians, locs speak to the social, cultural, and spiritual commitment of the wearer.

There is even a language around locs that acknowledges the defiant commitment that wearers must demonstrate to groom and fashion their hair in that style. To cut a Rastafarian’s locs without their permission is akin to cutting the payot of an Orthodox Jewish male. But to take the locs as trophies speaks to an even deeper, more sinister, and dare I say, slavery-driven motivation.

Across the four hundred years of Transatlantic Slavery (1400s–1800s), white enslavers enshrined their control of black people and their bodies within legal discourse. Reduced to the status of chattel under the law, enslavers not only stole black people’s labour and the fruits thereof, they actively sought to control, mark, and manipulate their biological bodies. As an art historian, my life’s work has been coming to grips with how that devastating, totalized control was actualized through art and visual representation that was intentionally created to vilify and ridicule the unique beauty of black people’s bodies through the creation of heinous stereotypes—which were intended to trap us within a limited spectrum of possibilities, from hypersexual Jezebels to buffoonish Uncle Toms.

The calculated control of slavery was omnipresent, spread across discourses, domains, media, and institutions. It entailed white people weaponizing their universal control over textual and visual representations by doing things like making it illegal for enslaved people to read and write and legalizing corporal punishment so that routine acts like branding, whipping, and, yes, the cutting off of enslaved black people’s hair became ubiquitous and normal.

Within the overwhelming evidence of racial hatred meticulously documented and preserved in the colonial archives by white enslavers are letters and diary entries that recall how they deliberately and with forethought cut the hair or shaved the heads of the black people they enslaved as punishment. It is clear from their own evidence that white female enslavers readily attacked beautiful black females in this way to mutilate the very people who were already victims of their white husbands’ sexual violence.

Those police officers who stand accused of collecting black people’s locs as trophies recall yet another season of racial atrocities. In the aftermath of slavery, when the extrajudicial, white mob violence of lynching rose, those who participated were not only notorious for documenting their heinous murders with photography (even going so far as to turn the images into postcards which they addressed, stamped, and mailed), they were also known to remove body parts from the corpses of their victims, which had often been riddled with bullets and set on fire. It is hard for any decent human being to fathom the taking of another person’s body parts as trophies, today or in the past. It is also hard to sit with the terror that these police officers deliberately instilled in their victims as they, no doubt, immobilized them with threats, handcuffs, weapons, or physical force before cutting off their hair against their will, an act of sheer terror.

While the Police Chief, Fady Dagher, speaks of getting rid of the perpetrators, the larger issue surely is how individuals of such debased character ever became police officers in the first place. Sixteen people do not an airtight conspiracy make; indeed, holding such a horrible secret between two people would be a challenge, let alone close to twenty. Precinct and shift environments involve close quarters, locker rooms, and shared cruiser vehicles where locker “trophies” or boastful conversations would have leaked out. Surely, sickening whispers were overheard in the squad room, racist jokes were shared after work at the bar, and officers went home and disclosed their racist madness to various spouses and domestic partners. That it has taken so long for some “good” officers to come forward demonstrates how deeply embedded, toxic, and dehumanizing the racism of this detachment and the policing structures of the city are in general. How many people turned away, walked away, and went home to their homes for a good night’s sleep after overhearing or witnessing the horrors that are now being disclosed?

It would not be difficult to develop psychological, sociological, and educational screening tests that ensure that people capable of or predisposed to such depraved, racist behaviour never enter the police force in the first place. That the Montreal Police have not done so is because they have no will to do so. As long as black people are not seen as citizens, or even fully human, racist atrocities of this nature will continue unabated.

We are tired of listening to the promises of full and transparent inquiries after yet another egregious, or even fatal incident occurs, after which the police then oversee investigations into their own misconduct. We are tired of the community consultations and the mea culpas that lead nowhere.

Nobody should be appointed to a police force and given a gun and a badge who does not first understand basic Canadian history, including the centuries-long presence of people of African descent in Canada, and the nature and aftermath of Transatlantic Slavery, period. That should be essential learning from the beginning, and anyone resistant to that training should be shown the door. Fredy Alberto Villanueva should be thirty-six years old!