Ethnic Criminality or White Anxiety?

A French version of this op-ed is available here.

After a pause of roughly a year, the subject of youth violence is back in the news. 

A special investigation from Québécor, published last week, showed that at least 12 of the 50 murders committed so far this year in Quebec were allegedly committed by individuals under 21 years of age. 

While the report itself said nothing about the racial background or immigration status of the youth, Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon seized the moment to offer his own analysis. 

“It’s linked to demographic changes, we can’t deny it,” he said. Without serious action to address the problem, he continued, Quebec could find itself in the same situation as Europe. 

“We know of cases in Europe, cities that have lost control of certain parts of the city because of ghettoization and the infiltration of organized crime,” he said.

A brief history of “ethnic delinquency”

Such claims about ethnic or immigrant criminality in Quebec did not begin with St-Pierre Plamondon. They were first voiced during a short-lived public debate in the 1960s, when the immigrants in question were largely Italian. They became more widespread and sustained in the 1980s, as a prolonged economic crisis in Montreal coincided with immigration from the Global South, altering the city’s demographics.

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The first researcher to examine the issue of ethnic delinquency was the esteemed Université de Montréal psychologist Emerson Douyon. Born in Haiti, Douyon was frequently invited by the Directeur de la protection de la jeunesse (DPJ) to provide insights on Haitian youth brought before the youth tribunal. He soon developed a major research program on the subject of juvenile delinquency among Haitian and other ethnic youth.

Douyon’s conclusions were compelling. Youth in general engaged in delinquent acts, he found, because they faced challenges at home or at school, and many of these challenges were shaped by social conditions like poverty, racial discrimination, and the experience of immigration. The delinquency of ethnic youth, then, was often shaped by the particular conditions of their ethnic group, but these conditions did not produce more delinquency. 

The idea of surplus ethnic delinquency, he concluded, was a delusion. It was the product of white anxiety in the face of racial difference, “an irrational fear of being invaded and victimized.”

While Douyon was the foremost scholar to address this question, competing views began to emerge in the late 1980s, particularly on the far right, which was expanding rapidly in Montreal and across North America. 

The group S.O.S. Génocide, headed by Raoul Roy, made a name for itself with shocking statements about the looming “replacement” of white Quebecers and the dangers of non-white immigration to the social order. Like Plamondon, the group warned that “the massive arrival of immigrants” would lead to the problems already witnessed in Europe: “frictions, riots, [and] bloody confrontations.”

As often happens, the ideas of the far right quickly became mainstream. The priest Julien Harvey, once an ally to Haitian immigrants facing deportation, increasingly criticized the idea that “immigrants have a lower level of criminality than Québécois de veille souche” and warned that current immigration policies would produce the kind of social conflict witnessed in Lebanon and American inner cities. Harvey and several people with similar views were given a central place in the infamous 1989 documentary Disparaître, narrated by Lise Payette.

The Fraternité des policiers de Montréal, the so-called police “union,” also incorporated rising fears of immigration into its efforts to block the process of police reform initiated after the police killing of Anthony Griffin in 1987. 

“I’ve had enough of Blacks who live in the margins of society and make certain neighbourhoods unlivable and certain metro stations dangerous,” wrote the Fraternité’s lawyer in La Presse in 1988. “I’ve had enough of activists who exploit tragic events [e.g., police killings] to the benefit of their movements of the frustrated, the lazy, and the parasitic.”

A turning point in the battle between scholarly and reactionary perspectives of ethnic criminality happened in March 1989, when an employee of the Montreal police leaked an internal report on “street gangs” to the Journal de Montréal. The leak allowed the Journal to publish the first definitive story on ethnic gangs in the metropolis. While most of the gangs listed in the police report were Québécois, the Journal emphasized the report’s warning that “with the massive arrival of immigrants, criminality in the form of inter-racial conflicts has only just begun and will increase.”

A new “common sense”

The scandal caused by the leaked report led the Montreal police to create its first-ever street gang squad in September 1989, with the mandate of eliminating Black gangs, specifically. The squad arrested 150 Black youth in its first year, with each arrest and resulting media coverage reinforcing the imagined link between crime, immigration, and race.

The Black youth condemned to juvenile detention by the gang squad also provided a subject of study for a new generation of experts on ethnic delinquency, who universally ignored the conclusions of Douyon. A series of studies in the early 1990s sought to identify why the detained youth had erred, all of them concluding that immigration and racial background not only shaped their delinquency, but caused it. 

In contrast to Douyon, in other words, they argued that non-white youth were more likely to commit delinquent acts than white youth. The fact that there was an entire police squad in the city devoted to arresting Black youth was irrelevant to them.

Three decades later, someone like PSPP can claim that youth violence is linked to “demographic changes” and it is treated as a reasonable analysis, rather than a far-right provocation. 

If PSPP genuinely wants to understand and prevent youth violence, he would do well to consult the work of Anne-Marie Livingstone, Alicia Boatswain-Kyte, or Stéphanie Germain. Following Emerson Douyon, he could also investigate his own anxieties and seek treatment for what appears to be “an irrational fear of being invaded and victimized.”

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