The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

Desmond Cole, a Black Canadian journalist and activist, organizes his account of anti-Black racism in Canada around each month of 2017, drawing on personal experience, historical research, and investigative reporting to argue that Canadian institutions perpetuate white supremacy through policing, education, immigration, and child welfare. Cole's parents emigrated from Freetown, Sierra Leone, and are of Krio heritage: They descend from enslaved Africans who gained liberation in British colonies and resettled in West Africa. Born in Red Deer, Alberta, in 1982 and raised in Oshawa, Ontario, Cole grew up navigating racial assumptions and was first stopped by police as a university student, the first of dozens of such encounters. He frames white supremacy not as individual prejudice but as a systemic hierarchy that benefits white people, positions Indigenous peoples for erasure, and designates Black people as disposable. He traces this system to centuries of British and French colonization, including two centuries of slavery in the territory that became Canada.

Cole opens by reflecting on 2016 as a year of growing awareness, marked by Black Lives Matter-Toronto's (BLM-TO) sixteen-day Tent City protest outside Toronto Police headquarters after the decision not to charge the officer who killed Andrew Loku, a Black man, in 2015. On New Year's Day 2017, Cole learned that police had attacked John Samuels, a young Black artist, at his Toronto gallery on New Year's Eve. Officers had repeatedly visited the gallery searching for drugs without warrants, finding nothing. After liquor licensing officials confiscated champagne Samuels served without a permit, police arrived in force. When Samuels questioned an officer seizing his cashbox, officers pinned him down and repeatedly tasered him. Samuels was charged with assaulting police and lost his gallery space; BLM-TO and other community members rallied around him with donations and legal support. Cole connects the raid to a 1785 bylaw in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, that banned Black social gatherings, a measure designed to control Black Loyalists, formerly enslaved people promised freedom for serving with the British in the American Revolution.

In February, Cole examines the case of a six-year-old Black girl he calls "Symone," who was handcuffed by Peel Regional Police officers inside her Mississauga school in September 2016. Officers bound her ankles and wrists and kept her face-down for twenty-eight minutes. The incident became public only when Symone's mother filed a racial discrimination complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Cole contextualizes the case within systemic disparities: Toronto District School Board (TDSB) data showed Black students were suspended over three times more often than white students. He also covers the forced resignation of Nancy Elgie, a York Region school board trustee who called Charline Grant, a Black parent, a racial slur after a meeting on equity. Elgie resisted for eighty-seven days before Grant and supporters disrupted a board meeting and forced trustees to individually demand her departure.

The March chapter centers on the killing of Abdirahman Abdi, a thirty-seven-year-old Somali-Canadian man, in Ottawa. On July 24, 2016, Abdirahman, whom local residents believed had a mental health condition, assaulted several women near his apartment. Constable Dave Weir pursued him on foot, pepper-spraying and striking him with a baton. A second officer, Constable Daniel Montsion, wearing reinforced assault gloves, delivered what witnesses described as heavy blows to Abdirahman's head while he lay on the ground. Police handcuffed him and left him bleeding on the sidewalk without attempting life-saving measures; he died the following day. In March 2017, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), a provincial agency that investigates police-involved deaths and serious injuries, charged Montsion with manslaughter, aggravated assault, and assault with a weapon. Ottawa police responded by selling wristbands bearing Montsion's badge number.

In April, Cole staged a sit-in at the Toronto Police Services Board meeting over carding, the police practice of stopping people not suspected of any crime and recording their personal information. He connects carding to centuries of surveillance of Black and Indigenous peoples, citing the Toronto Star's 2012 investigation, which revealed that police filled out 1.8 million contact cards between 2008 and 2012, disproportionately targeting Black residents. Cole's protest led the Star to inform him he had violated its code of conduct. He resigned, arguing the rules were applied inconsistently along racial lines.

The June chapter chronicles BLM-TO's relationship with Toronto's Pride festivities. In 2016, the group halted the Pride parade to present nine demands addressing anti-Black racism, including the removal of police floats and more support for Blockorama, a Black queer gathering space created in 1999 by the collective Blackness Yes! Pride's executive director signed the demands on the spot but revoked his commitment the next day, saying he and the co-chair lacked the authority to honor them. In early 2017, Pride's membership voted to implement all nine demands, and BLM-TO returned to the parade without registering, asserting their right to the space.

In July, Cole examines Canada's 150th-anniversary celebrations alongside Indigenous resistance. He documents the erection of a ceremonial tipi on Parliament Hill by Anishinaabe land and water defenders, who were blocked and arrested by RCMP officers. Families of missing and murdered Indigenous women criticized the national inquiry as colonially co-opted. The inquiry's 2019 final report described the violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people, an Indigenous term for certain gender-diverse identities, as part of an ongoing genocide.

August focuses on Dafonte Miller, a nineteen-year-old Black man beaten in the early hours of December 28, 2016, by off-duty Toronto police constable Michael Theriault and his brother Christian Theriault in Whitby, Ontario. The brothers chased Dafonte after he declined to explain why he was in the neighbourhood, then beat him with fists, feet, and a metal pipe, leaving him with injuries including a lost left eye. Durham Regional Police treated Dafonte as the assailant and charged him. Neither Durham nor Toronto police notified the SIU; the agency learned of the incident four months later from Dafonte's lawyer. Cole reveals that the brothers' father worked in the Toronto Police unit responsible for reporting officers to the SIU.

In September, Cole recounts the alleged assault of D!ONNE Renée, a Black disability justice advocate, by a police officer at Toronto Police headquarters. The SIU investigated but declined to charge the officer, concluding that D!ONNE had thrown herself to the floor; police claimed a lobby camera that should have captured the incident was not working. Cole also documents the fight to prevent the deportation of Beverley Braham, a Jamaican woman facing separation from her Canadian-citizen husband and infant son. After sustained advocacy by BLM-TO, Braham received permanent residency in February 2019.

October examines the arrival of Haitian and other Black asylum seekers at the Canadian border, contextualizing their treatment within centuries of immigration policy designed to exclude or exploit Black people. November covers the decade-long campaign to remove armed police from Toronto's public schools. After the 2007 fatal shooting of fifteen-year-old Jordan Manners inside a school, police placed officers in predominantly racialized schools without public consultation. Community groups organized sustained resistance, and on November 22, 2017, the TDSB voted to permanently end the program.

In December, Cole critiques the Federation of Black Canadians (FBC), a lobby group launched at a national summit by Ontario Court Justice Donald McLeod. Cole reveals FBC had already met privately with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and that Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen sat on its working group. Cole argues FBC bypassed grassroots organizers in favor of institutional professionals. The book closes in January 2018 with the fight to prevent the deportation of Abdoul Abdi, a twenty-three-year-old Somali refugee whose citizenship was never secured by the Nova Scotia child welfare system that served as his legal guardian. Cole, El Jones, a Nova Scotia professor and activist, and Idil Abdillahi, a professor at Ryerson University, mobilized supporters after border officials placed Abdoul in immigration detention. His sister Fatouma Abdi confronted Trudeau at a public town hall, asking why the Prime Minister was not helping her brother. After sustained public pressure, the Federal Court overturned Abdoul's deportation order, and the government announced it would not pursue his removal. In a postscript, Cole provides updates: The movement to remove police from schools spread across Canada, courts delivered mixed verdicts in the cases he covered, and Abdoul and Fatouma filed a lawsuit against Nova Scotia detailing abuse they experienced in the child welfare system.