Aboriginals are ascribed constructionist labels such as ‘criminals’, and ‘troublemakers’, which play a profound role in their treatment by both society and police. False narratives of their life, which includes them being ‘lawbreakers’, are long-lasting results of residential schools, which have confined them to precarious living conditions. Both overt and covert racism are evident through the prison system and blatant stereotypes that have been socially constructed by society to disenfranchise the population through the process of ‘othering’. In a survey addressed by Soroka and Robertson (14) that asked respondents which groups are usually the subjects of discrimination in Canadian society, one in three answered with Muslims and Aboriginals. This survey is reinforced through both the over-policing and under-policing of Aboriginal …show more content…
Their study (209) revealed that teachers and police in schools, due to a socially constructed bias in which blackness equates to ‘criminality’, systemically targeted black and Aboriginal students. The darker their skin colour, the more punitive the social sanctions. Based on ‘white’ models of acceptable behaviour and Anglo-Eurocentric delicacies, it has pushed innocent racialized youth onto the streets as this act should be renamed to the ‘gang recruitment act’. This could be a sign of symbolic racism that states that they do not work hard or have the same morals of White people. Thus, acts as a catalyst for social distance, in which the dominant groups’ toleration for relations with those of a certain minority group weakens through racism (Reitz and