Abstract
This project examines a Canadian court case that involves the largest arson homicide in the history of Vancouver, British Columbia. In May 2006 a fire killed four members of a Congolese refugee family (Adela Etibako and three of her children, Benedicta, Edita, and Stephane) along with Ashley Singh, the South Asian girlfriend of the target and sole survivor of the fire, Bolingo Etibako. On October 5, 2008 the accused, Nathan Fry, a 20-year-old white male, was found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Fry received an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole for 25 years. This paper considers this crime and the legal proceedings as a case study that can further our understanding of discourses of race, racism, and citizenship in Canada, and their link to Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics, what he terms as the politics of life and death. I argue that the viciousness of the crime, an offense involving a white male perpetrator and victims all of whom are racialized as Black and Brown, reflects the embodied practices and psychological processes that are both emblematic of, and integral to, the violence of coloniality, and the racial relations and structural arrangements of present-day white settler society (Martinot, 2010; Razack, 2002, 2005). I show how the crime, the investigation, and the trial communicate symbolically and materially what bell hooks (1992) characterizes as the “terrorizing force of white supremacy” (p. 344).
Highlights
This project examines a Canadian court case that involves the largest arson homicide in the history of Vancouver, British Columbia
At 3:00 A.M., on Monday, May 15, 2006 a fire was reported at 2484 Cassiar Street, a public housing complex situated on the eastern boundary of Vancouver, and in the city of Burnaby, in British Columbia
The investigators estimated that 12-25 litres of gasoline were used, with temperatures reaching over 1000 degrees in the three-story structure
Summary
During the first two weeks following the fire, the police pursued several avenues of investigation: a) “the trouble back in Africa theory”; b) the $250.00 debt theory; c) the “all round asshole” theory; and d) the “not with my daughter,” South Asian “knuckleheads” theory (McLaren, 2010). Following Lubiano (1992), I contend that the VPD’s singular identification of Black and Brown malfeasance in the early weeks of the investigation acts as a cover story, because it shifts our attention away from the broader context of the legacies of violence and systemic racism. This story contributes to a fateful complacency that is integral to the maintenance of settler colonial society because it normalizes narratives of white innocence, while simultaneously locating those racialized as white as the real citizen/subjects of the Canadian nation state. The ensuing section considers the VPD’s investigation, the brutality of the crime and the aftermath to make visible the various cover stories that were offered to conceal the white racial subjectivities, cultural practices, and social arrangements that animate and maintain white racial domination
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