The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has ruled that “race was a factor” in the handcuffing — no, I call it shackling — of a 6-year-old Black Peel schoolgirl by her hands and feet.

“Race was a factor” is three words too many to say “racism.”

Don’t get me wrong. The ruling, released last week, is significant and necessary. It may not mean the two cops who handcuffed the child are raging white-cone-hat-wearing, burning-cross-carrying racists or any kind of overt haters, really. But it does point to a hopelessness in Ontario’s education system that is crushing Black children underfoot.

As people in a society that’s in deep denial of the depth of racism it thrives on, we will find ways to shape the narrative around the tribunal’s finding without seeking accountability.

Here is a situation where, as the tribunal ruled (despite police denial), two male Peel cops placed a child in Grade 1 on her stomach, handcuffed her wrists behind her, cuffed her ankles together and kept her like that for 28 minutes. She weighed 48 pounds. The two officers were both about six feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds each.

Why, dear God, was there not an immediate attempt at resolution? Why did such a case need to be escalated until it had to be adjudicated by the tribunal?

Why was there not an apology, a move towards healing the child, repairing the relationship, restoring trust instead of the heel-digging that led to time spent, money spent, unimaginable stress for the mother and the child and a clear unmistakable message sent by those who manage the Peel District School Board to Black families: Your kids don’t matter. You don’t matter.

This isn’t the only incident of handcuffing at the Peel board. Nor is Peel the only school board where elementary schoolchildren are handcuffed by police.

Parents who have told me about their experiences are hesitant, afraid of the repercussions of being in the media spotlight. As much as it is in my interest as a journalist that they go on the record, as a parent, I understand their fear.

Anyone who has been discriminated against knows the Four Ds that those with power utilize to respond to allegations: deny, discredit, deflect and dismiss (or defend).

Denial is the foundation on which oppression continues to thrive. Denial permits us to never take the step towards meaningful action. Deflection is a diversionary “change the subject” tactic. One example of it in racism is white tears. A white person — usually a woman — faced with an allegation or even just a challenge cries saying she feels attacked, unsafe, unfairly accused. All the attention goes towards soothing her feelings, leaving the one who is wronged and discriminated against stranded. Dismiss or defend is the final position that employs the other three tactics.

It’s “discredit” that terrifies guardians of children. It’s fair to say that the parents and caregivers among us would willingly take hits to our own reputations or our likability if it means protecting our children. None of us, however, especially those from the most marginalized identities, would want our children to go through an already hostile school system with a new target on their backs, with adults in positions of power taking turns with the darts in our absence.

This is where Black parents find themselves on issues of handcuffing and harsh, undue disciplining. Trapped by the injustice on one hand and extreme vulnerability on the other.

Some of them share their stories with researchers under assurance of anonymity, where their experiences become part of a larger data set on racism. However, even scientifically collected data gets denied and dismissed. As I saw with a recent story on StatCan’s data that showed how Canada was continuing to fail its Black youth, there are those who read it only to contradict its findings based on unscientific stereotypes and assumptions.

It’s in this context that Black parents have been coming to the Peel school board’s public meetings week after week for months on end, sharing their stories, demanding accountability, softly, stridently, emotionally, flatly. Last week, a trustee’s motion regarding policing in schools was ruled out of order and, ironically, the trustee chair called in police after continued protestations from the public made another trustee feel “scared.”

If with all these barriers there is a parent who still resists — as with the Peel child — and wins a ruling in their favour, making denial nonsensical, they will still find their story dismissed as a one-off, an exception to the rule, made to exist in an implicit bias scenario or in egregious cases, a bad apples situation.

Not every incident of a cop handcuffing a Black child is racism, as a witness in the Peel case testified to the tribunal.

But every incident of schools calling poorly trained police rather than specially trained social workers to deal with children is about the state’s failure to look after its children.

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It’s about under-resourced schools struggling with new expectations that teachers revolutionize education by decentring it from whiteness. The province not only wants them to do this without adding adults in the buildings, but is actively fighting teachers to add more children to classrooms.

It’s about elected officials looking at education as a budget line, their minions viewing it solely through the lens of performance in exams and test scores. It’s about the province being too cheap to think about student well-being outside of policy papers.

By replacing the corporal punishment of yore with handcuffing by police, this compassionless approach simply ends up outsourcing the violence.