Massey [Virtual] Book Club: Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard

This free event will be broadcast online and is welcome to all – there is no login or registration required to tune in from the comfort of home. Please click here to attend the livestream.

Note that a recording of this event will continue to live on the Massey College YouTube channel following the live broadcast.

Massey College Book Club will meet to explore and discuss Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard. The Honourable Mr. Justice Michael Tulloch and Alumna Hadiya Roderique will discuss this critically acclaimed work. Junior Fellow, and Book Club committee member Alexander Sarra-Davis will moderate and facilitate questions from the audience.

About the book

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.

While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates.

Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

Buy Policing Black Lives here

The Honourable Mr. Justice Michael Tulloch of the Ontario Court of Appeal has a long and distinguished career of service as a member of the Canadian judiciary, a Crown prosecutor, a lawyer in private practice, and a renowned writer, speaker and professor. Justice Tulloch has led systemic reviews of the justice system at various levels, provided leadership on legal and judicial committees, designed and delivered international justice sector reform programs, and contributed to a myriad of civic, charitable, and community development initiatives. Justice Tulloch was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2012 after serving as a Justice on the Ontario Superior Court of Justice since 2003. Prior to Justice Tulloch’s judicial appointment in 2003, he served as an Assistant Crown Attorney in Peel and Toronto from 1991 to 1995 before entering private practice where he specialized in criminal law until his appointment to the bench. Justice Tulloch holds degrees in Economics and Business from York University and graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University with a law degree in 1989. He was called to the bar in Ontario in 1991.

Hadiya Roderique is a lawyer, a writer, a journalist, a podcast host, an Ultimate Frisbee player, and if that wasn’t enough – she’s pursuing her PhD in Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Management at the Rotman School of Management. Hadiya has been a transformative force in every community, institution, and organization of which she has been a member. It is one of her signature gifts as a leader in public service that she has been able to deliver uncompromising calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion across a range of organizations in such a way that they can be truly embraced. Her commitment to this advocacy, and the impressively forthright style that she brings to it, has meant real changes in the private and public sectors across Canada. She was named one of the 25 Most Influential Lawyers in 2018 by Canadian Lawyer magazine and named as a finalist for Best New Magazine Writer by the National Magazine Awards. Her 2017 Globe and Mail article, “Black on Bay Street” is a crucial call for institutional change among law societies everywhere.

Junior Fellow Alexander Sarra-Davis is a PhD candidate studying literature here at the University of Toronto, and is in the fourth year of his Massey Junior Fellowship. He was born in Toronto, grew up on Toronto Islands and Bowen Island (BC), and has earned degrees from the Universities of British Columbia and Cambridge. His friends call him Book.

This event will be broadcast online and is welcome to all – there is no login or registration required to tune in from the comfort of home. Please click here to attend the livestream.