New university-community research collective promoting discourse on racialized youth in Montreal

A new university-community collaboration has been formed to explore better approaches to the conditions faced by racialized populations in Montreal, particularly youth.

The collective began its work Wednesday with a series of presentations and community discussions in Montreal North at the Café-Jeunesse Multiculturel.

“You don’t wait for an opportunity, you mobilize and you start acting,” said Dr. Alicia Boatswain-Kyte, an Assistant Professor at the McGill School of Social Work.

“So we’ve been meeting regularly for three years to kind of figure out how we can support Café and how we can support kind of like the discourse because I think what brought us all together is frustration regarding the discourse of youth gangs, Montreal-Nord.”

Ted Rutland, a researcher at Concordia University said the collaboration comes out of “a mutual recognition of a problem and a set of objectives that we’re developing together.”

One of the goals of the new research collective they say is “to challenge the dominant narrative that, for years, has falsely and dangerously portrayed racialized youth as a source of crime and violence.”

Slim Hammami, coordinator at the Café-Jeunesse Multiculturel, says this research collective is important, not only for their organization, but for those across Montreal.

“This association between on-the-ground expertise and academic expertise: the two feed off each other.” said Hammami. “It is time to propose other alternatives that are viable rather than sticking to the discourse that we hear everywhere on the issue of street gangs and so on that leads nowhere.”

“In recent years, the SPVM has implemented three operations intended to combat gun violence in neighbourhoods like Montreal North,” said Rutland.

“When we examine these operations, however, we see that they disproportionately target racialized youth,” he added. “And very rarely result in arrests for crimes involving firearms.”

CityNews reached out to the SPVM for comment, but did not yet hear back. 

For Anne-Marie Livingstone, a researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, these problems are part of a longer history.

“For years, the SPVM, the City of Montreal, and the media have been promoting a narrative about ‘street gangs’ that reinforces prejudices against Black and other racialized youth and supports police racism,” explains the researcher, who will also present this research.

“This narrative is empirically unfounded and relies on racist stereotypes imported from the United States that have long been refuted by researchers,” she added. “This narrative should have been abandoned long ago.”

The research collective represents a collaboration between five Montreal university researchers and the community organization, Café-Jeunesse Multiculturel de Montréal-Nord.

By bringing together researchers and stakeholders, the new collaboration aims to create an academic and scientific foundation that will help advance the crucial work of the CJM and other community organizations committed to youth well-being in Montreal.

“They helped a lot of people including me,” said Thierry Jean, a youth community worker at Café-Jeunesse Multiculturel. “If you need anything, we cover it, tyou can just come see us and we will help with anything.”

If we put a spotlight on Montreal North, we’ll see it’s a lot of good people and good opportunities,” he added. “So I think if you get a push and effort, we could make it, like the sky’s the limit.”