Beyond the City Limits

Since starting high school in our small township flanking the agricultural countryside outside of Guelph, Ontario, my daughter has remarked more than once on the copiously white student body. While she’s amused by events like “Take Your Tractor to School Day,” she’s also aghast that there are only a smattering of students of colour, and she occasionally wonders aloud how it feels to be one of the two or three Black teenagers in the entire building. What troubles her most? The seeming casualness with which racist epithets are sprinkled into everyday conversation.

But recently, during a day trip to Toronto, we witnessed a deeply unsettling encounter on the transit system, which challenged any preconceptions we might have had about such explicit racism being unique to rural communities like ours. Commuters were quietly keeping to themselves when, with a single word hurled in hate at a Black passenger, a white man thrust a violent past into the immediate...