INTRODUCTION
Oppression plays an integral role in the racialization of crime in Toronto. By looking at the city of Toronto as a microcosm for other cities, we will be able to see the relationship of oppression to the reality of racialized crime in our own communities and neighborhoods. This paper will look at how racialized crime is purported to exist in social housing disproportionate with the rest of Toronto; how the police purports to see crime indiscriminate of race, yet targets people of colour to such proportions that their assertions of being ‘colour-blind’ is a lie. It will show that within different racial groups there exist a corresponding number of cultural entities. It will look briefly at the role of the media in perpetuating racism; and my personal experiences and asides will be included for clarity and empirical substantiation, or evidence of self-reflection. This paper will compare racialized crime in areas where the average income is higher, namely in the centre of the city, to rural areas and small towns where the percentages of racialized populations is different.
Racialized crime is an all encompassing description adapted by media and accepted by society, both consciously and unconsciously, to depict behaviours and activities of ‘black people’ or ‘people of colour’. Racialized minorities is a group of people who because of their physical characteristics are subjected to differential treatment. Their minority status is the result of a lack of access to power, privilege, exclusion and prestige in relation to the (white) dominant group that are deemed illegal, deviant, or unacceptable by white society, and attributable only to black people, or any persons one cannot consider as being white. For example a person of colour, i.e.,
Canadian, Asian, African, Caribbean, Latin American would belong to a group subordinate to the dominant group of white, male, educated, employed persons; and even if a member of the