Minimizing and Denying Racial Violence: Insights from the Québec Mosque Shooting

Abstract

On 29 January 2017, a twenty-seven-year-old white man named Alexandre Bissonette entered a mosque in a suburb of Québec City and opened fire, killing six people. Focusing on Canadian media reports, this article examines two seemingly incongruent responses to this heinous massacre. First, despite Bissonnette’s unambiguous and purposeful targeting of Muslims, the public and the courts still debated whether this massacre was racially motivated. Second, when members of the Muslim community commented on the massacre and the impact that it had had on them, there appeared to be a type of restraint in the ways in which they expressed their fears and frustrations and in the ways in which they addressed the issue of anti-Muslim racism. How do we understand these incongruences? This article draws upon Sherene Razack’s seminal scholarship on public grief, national mythologies, and anti-Muslim racism in Canada, alongside studies on public expressions of emotions to make sense of the role that race played in the responses by the Muslim community, the politicians, the courts, and the accused.