A Face for the Cause
One year ago today, we Toronto folk first became acquainted with the above image upon learning of this young lady meeting a premature demise in the crossfire of a gunfight. In the months hence, her death fueled cries for tougher legislation against those who brandish weapons - the ones without badges, anyway. The name Jane Creba is now etched in our collective memory. She has attained immortality.
In the year since the world lost Jane, I can't begin to count the number of people just like her were taken from us by acts of violence. How many children have been claimed by violent acts this year? How many dead children in Darfur? or in Iraq? Afghanistan? Somalia? or anywhere else, for that matter? Where is the attention for these unfortunate souls? They, too, were caught in the crossfire of "gang warfare", if you will, and, like Jane, they were loved by family and friends. While we lay memorials for Jane, in a war zone, the public is in a perpetual state of grief, as not a day goes by without someone you know being killed.
In the wake of such tragedy, we call for the heads of the perpetrators. We feel a sense of security knowing we can throw people in jail, yet we don't see crime disappearing. The same people who start these wars to which I alluded earlier start the wars in our own backyard. The neoliberal world is one hustle after the next. It's a war out there, both overseas and at home. Much like our men and women in uniform, for many, violence is a means for survival, for advancement in the game of capital. More will suffer the same fate as Jane if we continue to dismiss the idea of a gun being a source of income.
The next time you look to scapegoat guns or impoverished Black youth or video games or violence on television, ask yourselves the following: who controls what you see on your television sets? who wants you to buy the video games? who makes and sells the guns?
Jane, may you one day rest in peace.
posted by G. @ 22:32
6 comments
6 Comments:
There's a lot more to the face that Toronto has chosen to represent "gun violence" in this city.
I remember when this story first hit the presses, everyone was looking for a scape-goat. Of course the scapegoat according to the neo-con "globe and mail" was 'ghetto culture' and fiddy cent.
Ref: Editorial: “Time to Talk about Violence and Culture”
Re: December 29, 2005, Pg A18
I was really incensed with these stupid articles and wrote to the papers (of course my letters weren't published).
The problem with this symbolic representation of violence, is not to deny that Jane Creba is a victim of gun violence, but that this representation of "Jane Creba" being a victim of violence MASKS the real victims of violence in the city of Toronto, who are predominantly and more than 70% of the time BLACK MALE YOUTH.
For further info - you should check out this documentary: “A Deathly Silence” about Youth violence and Toronto.
Reference: Director & writer, Alison Duke; producer, Nataline Rodrigues.
Toronto: Ace Pictures, 2003.
48 minutes
....nice post otherwise.
I think there's a lot of blame to go around in the death of Creba and the overall violence that's hit the City of Toronto (where I live). I do however think White liberals share in some of the blame. For example, they were the ones who glorified drugs (remember Timothy "Expand Your Consciousness" Leary), favoured expanded welfare (I'm not against welfare where people really need it, but under people like Bob Rae practically anybody could access it), and generally advocated an abdication of personal responsibility. Yes, I think "ghetto culture" plays some role too. But it was the so-called "progressives" who glamourized this culture as well.
Emilia Liz (emilia_e_murphy@yahoo.ca)
Emilia:
I, too, have noticed a glaring lack in emphasis on taking personal responsibility for society's ills, especially since we "middle-class" Westerners are, by far, the most comfortable of peoples. For the lot of us, our only exposure to a war zone has been through the newspapers and teleivision. Poverty and murder are background noise at the dinner table while we complain that the food sucks. When we do absorb these stories, we become so afraid of this or that for lack of knowing any better, clearly indicative of how far removed we are from the reality of it all.
Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters - by no means were these two the first - enjoyed their drugs as many of us would a steak. The drug trade is not what it is without violence, but how different is it from any other commodity? Our closest ally, our largest trading partner, fights wars for the means we use to heat our homes and power our vehicles. The ritual diamonds exchanged during our promises to marry one another are soaked in the blood of many. The clothes on our backs were made in inhumane conditions, most likely by the hands of a child, earning as much in a month as most of us do in an hour.
In our economy, drugs are yet another commodity being consumed to drive it, guns comprise its infrastructure, and blood is what's left in its wake.
Seventy-eight other people suffered the same fate as Jane Creba during the year 2005; in some countries, seventy-eight is a typical day.
I appreciate your reply.
I'll just expand on the point in my last post.
I clearly remember the day Jane Creba died. I was returning home from a haircut in Toronto’s Chinatown, and as I passed by the Eaton Centre, I noticed that Yonge Street was closed off and several police cars were parked nearby. A shooting had occurred, somebody said. I had half a mind to investigate the matter further, but my better judgement prevailed and I continued walking along Dundas Street. The next day more details about the crime emerged. A woman had been killed, caught in the crossfire of what appeared to be gang warfare. Her name was Jane Creba, and she was a fifteen-year-old student at Riverdale Collegiate Institute. Within a week a memorial was set up at the spot where she was shot, with hundreds of passersby leaving flowers, stuffed animals and other paraphernalia there.
Jane Creba’s death was the 78th murder of 2005, a relatively high number compared to previous years. People wondered aloud whether Toronto was safe anymore. After all, if Ms. Creba could be shot on a busy downtown street in broad daylight while doing nothing more dangerous than looking for Boxing Day sales, anybody could be shot. Another fact that stood out was that Creba was White and her shooters were Black. Memories of the Just Desserts slaying more than a decade earlier, in which a young Greek-Canadian girl by the name of Georgina Leimonis was killed at a popular Toronto eatery during a robbery by several Black youths, came flooding back. And as in the Just Desserts incident, there was no shortage of commentary on the Creba case.
Like vultures gnawing at a corpse, White Supremacists, not surprisingly, jumped on Ms. Creba’s death to spout off on the supposed dangers of non-White immigration to Canada. Individuals who hadn’t given a hoot about her during her lifetime suddenly acted as if she were a long-lost sister. Even American racists like the Stormfront White Nationalist Community sat up and took notice.
But liberals of all colours weren’t above using Jane’s demise to advance their own causes either. Some blamed the actions of the young men who shot her on former Ontario Premier Mike Harris’ cutbacks to social programs. “These are the children of Mike Harris” became a familiar refrain. Racism was also proffered as an explanation. Toronto Sun columnist Rachel Giese, who is White, suspected that part of the reason for these youths’ involvement in crime was that “for their entire lives, they were made to feel worthless, that they didn’t matter and that if they died no one would hold a vigil or mourn.”
Ms. Giese wrote as well, “Whatever side of the gun they’re on, young, poor Black men are in crisis.” Indeed, a disproportionate number of the homicides committed in Toronto in 2005 involved Blacks, both as perpetrators and as victims. Many, though by no means all, of the latter had previous criminal records. This thus begs the question: why are Blacks overrepresented in crime in comparison to their numbers in the population? The reason traditionally given by liberals - like Rachel Giese - is racism, with poverty and lack of social programs as close seconds. However, this explanation is belied by the fact that East Asians, who too have faced discrimination in Canada (the Chinese head tax, the internment of Japanese Canadians, etcetera), are on average LESS likely to engage in crime than Whites are. So while I certainly won’t deny the existence of racism in this country or the possibility it may have played some part in the Creba and Leimonis shootings, something else is clearly going on here.
It is also an open secret that most of the “Black” crime in Toronto is committed by people from the island of Jamaica. Jamaica, as it happens, has one of the highest murder rates in the world – so much so that it’s lost favour as a tourist destination in the last twenty years or so. Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente put it this way: “The violent culture of Jamaica sheds far more light on Toronto’s gun-and-gang problem than [Mike] Harris’ cruel decision to shut down the Anti-Racism Secretariat.”
Nonetheless, I can’t let Whites completely off the hook for many of the problems within the Black community. Some Whites have, albeit unintentionally, set in place a series of social trends that have proven disastrous to the Black population (not that they’ve been good for Whites either). Take the issue of drugs. One of the men involved in the Just Desserts case was reported by witnesses to have been high on something when he fired the shot that killed Georgina Leimonis. A good number of the gang-related shootings in Toronto have involved conflicts over drug deals or dealers’ “territory.” As one poster to a website stated, some young Black men get involved in selling and distributing illegal substances because there is an eager and willing market for them - consisting primarily of upscale Whites. But who promoted the use of drugs as “cool” and “hip?” Think of Whites like Timothy “Expand Your Consciousness” Leary or the marijuana-loving glitterati of Ithaca, New York.
I do not, by the way, support the War on Drugs. For one, I think it’s both futile and wastefully expensive, and two, in a democracy we should be free to make foolish decisions. It’s something else, though, to openly encourage people to make foolish decisions or condone their doing so. For instance, it’s perfectly within my rights to dance naked on my balcony in minus 20 Celsius weather. I would also hope that if I ever showed any inclination to do such a thing, the people who claimed to care for me would tell me how incredibly stupid I was being. So by glamourizing drugs, Whites like the above-mentioned Leary have done Blacks no favour.
To end on a more upbeat note, some members of the Black population are taking measures to stem violence in their community. Here the Black church has a proactive role to play. Much attention was given to the visit to Toronto of Eugene Rivers, the African-American minister responsible for the “Boston miracle,” a series of faith-based programs that reduced crime rates in that city dramatically. Even before Rivers’ trip to Toronto, however, a number of Black pastors in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood had stepped forward to urge gang members to lay down their guns. It is in the hands of individuals like these, who are literally “on the ground” and who don’t necessarily subscribe to dogma of any political stripe, in which the Black community’s problems have the best chance of being resolved.
Emilia Liz
A comment for Aradhana: many (though by no means all) of the "real vicitims of violence in Toronto" had criminal records.
Emilia Liz
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