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In an idealized world, public services like child welfare, healthcare, social welfare, and the justice system would exist for the safety and wellbeing of everyone. Yet, inequities remain present within these services.
Due to systemic racial biases, Black children are overrepresented in the Canadian child welfare system, are more likely to go to chronically underfunded schools, and face harsher discipline in the education system. Black adults also report less overall confidence in the judicial system, and regularly face racism in healthcare.
For Professor Alicia Boatswain-Kyte, Assistant Professor of Social Work at McGill University, these inequities are part of a bigger story. They emerged from long-standing economic and social structures that benefit from harming Black people.
“How advantageous is it for those in power to relinquish that power, to share it among those who don’t have it?” she said in an interview on the Delve podcast. “Equity requires giving away from some to redistribute to others.”
Drawing on her social work experience in institutional settings, Boatswain-Kyte researched how public institutions interact with Black communities in Quebec. Her work highlights the on-going racial disparities in how Black communities experience public services.
Boatswain-Kyte said racial capitalism is a key driver of inequity here. It describes a system that, if it doesn’t benefit economically from helping Black communities, it will opt not to – a phenomenon she documented time and again in her research.
But thankfully, she also found that community organizations often step up where government-run services fail. These organizations remind us of the different possibilities that can exist to help vulnerable, racialized people.
Boatswain-Kyte said governments can learn from these smaller organizations and initiatives. But they will have to overcome their bureaucracies to properly implement these lessons.
Racial capitalism
Boatswain-Kyte defines racial capitalism as the systemic and on-going exploitation of racialized people, especially Black individuals and communities. She describes it as an ideology that underpins the delivery of public services like healthcare, child welfare, justice, and others.
“Even though we’ve abolished slavery, we are still exploiting and taking advantage of Black bodies through our unwillingness to address the root causes of some of the problems these communities face,” said Boatswain-Kyte.
For her, rather than investing in community care, education, and prevention, resources are often redirected into state mechanisms that react to harm post hoc—or simply make it worse. In doing so, government institutions maintain their relevance and authority by failing to address the conditions that created inequity in the first place.
This dynamic was particularly evident among Black older adults during COVID-19. In one of her papers, Boatswain-Kyte found that they disengaged from public health services, often at the cost of their mental and physical health. They relied instead on faith, spirituality, and community (where possible) to get through their isolation.
The resilience of these older adults masked their suffering, explained Boatswain-Kyte. That’s part of why they avoided reaching out for help from public health providers. But she also points out another side of this story: public care providers didn’t ask how these older adults were doing, leaving a service gap that went under addressed.
“There’s a lot more emphasis on youth,” said Boatswain-Kyte, referring to the ample government programs to that aim to keep Black youth out of trouble. “When it comes to older adults, there’s less of a concern for this population.”
It’s not that Black older adults weren’t suffering during the pandemic. It’s that there was little effort to reach them, if at all.
Nothing about us without us
Boatswain-Kyte said there’s a disconnect between the kind of services a community needs, and what public institutions think the community needs and provides.
Community organizations, by contrast, fill that gap. They are often more effective at adjusting their services based on what they see on the ground. And this flexibility allows them to offer relational forms of support, grounded in trust and lived experience.
These organizations serve important needs for their constituents. But they’re often under resourced, receiving little or no help from public funders.
The distance between institutions and communities reflects fundamentally different priorities and modes of operations, said Boatswain-Kyte. Racial capitalism encourages divestment from Black-serving public programs. And to adopt a more flexible, relational approach, would necessitate new ways of working with communities.
And this, as she explained, can get messy. She offered the example of restorative justice, which is practiced by many First Nations and Indigenous communities. The Canadian justice system is built around deterrence and punishment, while restorative justice allows for other kinds of reconciliation. A victim of robbery may not want to see the culprit put behind bars. But the victim may be content with an apology and the return of their stolen items.
This kind of justice changes the distribution of power, said Boatswain-Kyte. Instead of outsourcing justice to a judge, restorative justice allows for dialogue between individuals and the community. It’s about asking those who are most affected about what they need, and giving it to them.
A community-oriented approach to service delivery, such as restorative justice, requires flexibility, said Boatswain-Kyte – a scarce resource in government bureaucracies. But it’s not completely out of reach.
For workers and decision-makers concerned about systemic racism, awareness is the first step, she said. Looking at the world through racial capitalism can reveal some of the inequities present in their work, empowering them to take some kind of action. For example, a social worker can give their personal phone number to a client instead of forcing them to use the hotline. This small gesture requires stepping out of the government bureaucracy, but it can help re-establish trust between the client and the institution.
Governments can also work more closely with community organizations overall, to invite dialogue rather than prescribing ill-adapted solutions. That means listening to the community’s needs, and redirecting resources to programs that allow for preventative and relational forms of care.
“You can ask people what they need,” said Boatswain-Kyte. “And they will tell you.”
Written by Mahin Siddiki, Content Assistant, McGill Delve.
This story was inspired by research published by Alicia Boatswain-Kyte. More here.
