"#TorontoStrong", Sometimes: On collective grief & who has access to it

This morning I woke up to a torrent of tweets and news stories about the mass shooting that happened last night on Danforth Rd. here in Toronto. A now (alarmingly) familiar formula was followed which included the deployment of the #TorontoStrong hashtag, the obsessive eagerness to (erroneously) quantify the number of victims in real time, and the rallying cries for unity by politicians and police chiefs. But while all these measures have come to constitute what we may now consider "normal"--a disturbing realization in and of itself--at the heart of this collective grief is a specific kind of mourning reserved for certain spaces (and their populations). This is reflected in euphemistic claims about how "safe" the neighbourhood continues to be, and in comments such as that of Andrea Horwath in city hall this morning:

"This tragedy does not reflect the Danforth, the city, or the province." 

There are several ways we can analyze such statements. For example, we can argue about how such incidents do in fact reflect the community, the parts of it that we avert our eyes from. Though it may be too early in this moment, we can look more and more at the bigger picture on mental health and access to guns, for example. Perhaps this sort of public grief is rooted in a self-centred empathy: the belief that innocent people should not face such untold tragedy represents our anxieties about such tragedy being visited upon us, or those we love. On the other hand, we can commend such a view for challenging the tendency to conflate an individual's actions with their entire neighbourhood, community, family, environment. The issue is that this nuanced discursive approach is only applied to specific narratives and neighbourhoods.

During a time of heightened fear--and fear-mongering--around what has been called "The Summer of The Gun 2.0", there has been no shortage of news covering what is often presented as a spike in gun violence, and the defaulted to "gang violence". Upon landing at the airport a few weeks ago, the first jumbo TV screen I noticed carried story after story about a string of shootings that had occurred while I was gone. Headlines scream alarmist claims like "Toronto homicide rates higher than NYC", and almost every public conversation involves a debate around the need to deploy (and employ) more police. 

As ultimate example of the way these tragedies are collectively handled, Community Safety and Corrections Minister Michael Tibollo was recently quoted as saying,

  "I went out to Jane and Finch, put on a bulletproof vest...visiting sites that had previously had bullet-ridden people killed in the middle of the night..."

If the rallying cries to remember that the Danforth community (a.k.a "Greektown") is transcendent of such violent tragedy represents much-needed relativism, then comments and actions such as those of Tibollo represent a negligent essentialization.  Rather than share in the grief of a community already affected by unimaginable loss and direct trauma, they are subjected to further stigmatization, even to blame. These environments are to be targeted for strategic intervention, and at the very least, to be handled separately and carefully with gloves--or a bullet-proof vest. It's as though the neighbourhood's inhabitants are deserving of, responsible for, or to be held guilty for the tragedy that unfolds right around them. Not only does this problematic view assume the inherent criminality of some spaces, it is a faulty logic that obscures structural dynamics of inequality that transcend a neighbourhood's boundaries.

Everytime I skim a major publication's coverage, or read what another politician said, it feels like 2005 all over again--the original "Summer of The Gun". As a result of those events and the way they were portrayed, I watched the neighbourhood I grew up in specifically, and the surrounding region (shoutout to Scarborough) become entangled in a targeted intervention that did little more than stigmatize it and solidify all the stereotypes that served as part of the mythology that forms our space(s).