On January 22, 2025, Amazon announced it was shutting down all seven of its Quebec warehouses. Over 1,700 permanent staff and 250 temporary employees were being let go (The Globe and Mail) — with the real number of affected workers, including subcontractors and delivery drivers, estimated at over 4,500 people who lost their livelihoods overnight. One of the largest mass layoffs in recent Quebec history. A $2 trillion corporation walking out the door. Thousands of working-class families, many of them immigrants, suddenly without income or job security. A reporter asked Premier François Legault about it. His response: “The Habs won last night, and I did not drink any orange juice this morning.” ...

It was not a grand moment. No cameras. No audience. No reason for anyone to perform anything. Two female officers responded to the call. Both Caucasian. They arrived, assessed the situation, took the report. Standard procedure. The kind of interaction that happens dozens of times a day across Montreal without anyone thinking twice about it. But the blonde one saluted the security guard on her way in. A simple gesture. A professional acknowledgment. The kind of thing you do when you recognize someone doing their job in a difficult position — legally unable to intervene, standing in a neighborhood that the system has never fully protected, having watched a theft happen in real time with his hands tied by protocol. The security guard she saluted was a visible minority. In Quebec. In 2026. In a province where the relationship between law enforcement and Black and immigrant communities carries decades of weight, suspicion, and unresolved tension. Where carding happens. Where names get you treated differently. Where simply existing in certain spaces means being watched before you have done a single thing wrong. And yet — a blonde cop walked in and showed respect. Unprompted. Naturally. Like it was the only logical thing to do. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she salutes everyone. Maybe it meant exactly as much as a salute means and nothing more. But in a story full of systems failing, biases operating on autopilot, and a community absorbing indignities it never earned — a small gesture of mutual human respect from someone who did not have to offer it lands differently. It does not fix the broken security laws. It does not undo the profiling culture. It does not bring back the bottle or change what happened that shift. But it is a reminder that the people inside the system are not all the same as the system itself. That sometimes, in a small branch in a Montreal neighborhood that most of Quebec ignores, two people from completely different worlds meet in a professional moment and treat each other exactly right. It was just a salute. But the guard noticed. And so did we. ...

Think about how easily this story flips. Same SAQ. Same neighborhood. Same theft. Change one detail — the appearance of the person walking out with that bottle — and suddenly there is a news segment. A tweet that goes viral. A comment section that writes itself. Politicians referencing the clip in speeches about public safety. Community leaders being asked to respond to something their community did not do. That is how fast it moves. That is how little it takes. ...

First day. First hours. New post, new branch, new faces. The neighborhood is majority Black. Afro-Caribbean, Haitian, Congolese, Jamaican — a community that has been in Montreal long enough to know exactly how they get treated when they walk into a SAQ. The extra glance. The guard that appears from nowhere. The staff member who suddenly needs to restock the shelf right next to you. The invisible tax that Black customers pay just for existing in a retail space in this province. You know the assumption before anyone says it out loud. Everybody in that room knows it. It does not need to be written in the employee handbook. It is transmitted in a look, in a posture, in which direction the attention naturally flows when someone walks through the door. Then the first real incident of the shift happens. And it is not who the system was built to watch. He came in wearing a pink coat. Black makeup ringing his eyes like a man who discovered goth culture twenty years late and committed fully. He moved through the store without urgency, without nerves, without any of the body language that supposedly triggers professional suspicion. He looked at the shelves the way someone looks at a menu when they already know what they want. He picked up a long bottle. And he walked out. No hesitation. No rush. No looking over his shoulder. Because he knew, on some level that does not even require conscious thought, that nobody was watching him the way they watch everyone else in that neighborhood. The surveillance gaze that hangs over Black customers like a permanent weather system simply did not apply to him. He moved through the store in a different atmosphere entirely. And he was right. The report got filed. The police were notified. Whether anything comes of it is another conversation — this is Quebec, and the follow-through on petty theft is not exactly the stuff of legend. But the theft itself is almost secondary to what it revealed. In a branch surrounded by a Black community that has been quietly profiled and monitored and made to feel like suspects for years — the first person to actually steal something was the one nobody was treating like a suspect. That is not a small irony. That is the entire argument. The profiling culture that exists in Quebec retail does not make stores safer. It makes certain customers more comfortable and certain other customers more uncomfortable. It directs attention based on appearance, based on neighborhood demographics, based on assumptions so baked into the environment that most people who hold them do not even recognize them as assumptions. They call it instinct. Experience. Reading a room. What it actually is, is a blindspot. A structured, institutionalized blindspot that tells you exactly where not to look — and hands everyone who fits a different profile a free pass to operate in that shadow. The vampire in the pink coat did not outsmart anyone. He just walked into a system that was never pointed at him. And he took full advantage of it, probably without even realizing the mechanics of why it worked. Meanwhile the community that actually belongs to that neighborhood — the people who shop there regularly, who live two streets over, who have never stolen anything in their lives — will walk in next week and feel the eyes follow them before they even reach the first aisle. This is the stereotype that Quebec has been protecting. Not with malice necessarily — but with indifference. With the comfort of never questioning which direction the suspicion flows and why. One shift. One observation. One pink coat walking out the door with a bottle he did not pay for. And the whole narrative falls apart. ...

There is a uniform. There is a badge. There is a person standing near the entrance, arms crossed, eyes scanning the room. It looks like security. It feels like security. It is, by every legal definition in the province of Quebec, almost entirely decorative. This is not an insult to the people doing the job. Most of them know exactly what they signed up for. The problem is that the public does not — and neither do the customers who feel safer because someone in a vest is standing nearby. Here is the truth: in Quebec, a private security guard cannot detain you. Cannot chase you. Cannot put a hand on you to stop you from walking out the door with merchandise that does not belong to you. The moment a theft occurs, the guard’s options collapse to exactly this — watch, remember the details, and call the police. That is the entire toolkit. The law is not ambiguous about this. Private security agents in Quebec operate under the Private Security Act and are explicitly not law enforcement. They have no powers of arrest beyond what any ordinary citizen has — and citizen’s arrest in Canada is itself so legally risky that most lawyers advise against it in all but the most extreme circumstances. Touch someone without the right conditions and you are the one facing assault charges. The thief walks. You go to court. So what does a guard actually do when someone grabs a bottle off the shelf and walks out the door? They watch. They note the clothing. The hair. The direction of flight. They file a report. They call the police, who may or may not arrive before the trail goes completely cold. In a petty theft situation — a bottle of wine, a six-pack, a quick grab-and-go — the police response time makes the report largely academic. By the time anyone with actual authority shows up, the person is three neighborhoods away. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working exactly as the corporations that designed it intended. Having a security guard on premises lowers a business’s insurance premiums. That is the primary function. The deterrence is secondary — and as anyone who has watched a determined thief operate already knows, the deterrence only works on people who do not know the rules. Anyone who understands that the guard cannot legally stop them walks in with full confidence. And they walk out the same way. The cruelest part of this arrangement falls on the guards themselves. They are put in a position where they witness crimes in real time, are trained to recognize them, and are then legally prohibited from doing anything meaningful about it. They carry the weight of a security title with none of the authority it implies. And in communities that are already over-policed in terms of surveillance but under-protected in terms of actual response, that gap becomes something much more serious than a corporate liability strategy. Because here is what does work in Quebec retail security: watching. Following. Making certain customers feel uncomfortable. The parts of the job that require no legal authority — the hovering, the profiling, the quiet signaling that you are being monitored — those happen freely and constantly. The power to intimidate exists. The power to actually intervene does not. A guard can make a Black customer feel like a suspect from the moment they walk in the door. But when a real theft happens in front of their eyes, they legally cannot stop it. That contrast is not an accident. It is the architecture of a system that was never actually built around stopping crime. It was built around optics, insurance tables, and the comfort of certain people — and the discomfort of others. Until Quebec reforms how private security operates — giving guards clearer legal tools, real training, and actual authority proportional to their responsibilities — the uniform means very little. It is a costume. A checkbox. A way for corporations to say they are doing something while making sure they are never liable for anything. The thief knows this. The guard knows this. The only people who do not know this are the ones the system was designed to keep in the dark. ...

There is a story nobody in Quebec wants to tell out loud. Not because it is complicated. But because it destroys a narrative that too many people have been comfortable with for too long. It happened in a SAQ branch in Montreal. A neighborhood that is majority Black — Afro-Caribbean, Haitian, Jamaican, Congolese — people who built their lives here, work here, shop here, and get watched here. You know the look. The extra glance from staff when a Black customer walks in. The security guard hovering two steps closer than necessary. The silent assumption written all over the room. Then he walked in. Pink coat. Black makeup around his eyes. Looking like a desperate vampire who got lost on his way to a 2009 Halloween party and never found his way back. He moved through the store with the confidence of someone who has never once in his life been followed by a security guard. And he was right not to worry — because nobody was watching him the way they watch everyone else in that neighborhood. He grabbed a bottle. A long one. And he left. Just like that. The report went to the police. Maybe they catch him. Maybe they don’t. This is Quebec — the follow-through is not always the strong point. But that is not really the point of this story. The point is this: for years, a certain image has been sold to justify the surveillance, the suspicion, the quiet racism baked into retail security culture in this province. The image that theft has a face — and that face looks like the neighborhood. That the people who live in these Afro-Caribbean, immigrant, working-class communities are the ones you need to watch. One vampire in a pink coat just made that argument collapse in real time. He walked into a majority Black neighborhood, into a store where the unspoken assumption is always pointed in one direction, and he stole in broad daylight — unbothered, unwatched, and completely unburdened by the suspicion that follows other people just for existing in the same space. Nobody profiled him. Nobody hovered. Nobody sent a security guard to stand near him with a clipboard and a look. And the bottle walked out the door. This is not about one man in bad makeup. This is about what gets assumed, what gets ignored, and who pays the price for a stereotype that was always a lie dressed up as common sense. The communities in these neighborhoods are not the problem. They never were. The vampire already left. But the bias that let him walk right through — that one is still in the building. ...

There is a version of Black America that is celebrated loudly. The protest signs. The hashtags. The viral dances. The slogans on T-shirts that sell for forty dollars. And underneath all of it, a community that has been robbed twice — first by the system it was born into, and second by the people who claimed to be fighting for it. That second robbery is the one nobody wants to talk about. You Cannot Fight What You Do Not Know The first problem is historical. And it is severe. Black people in America are one of the few groups on earth that have been systematically cut off from their own origins. Not by accident. By design. Centuries of deliberate erasure — of language, of names, of lineage, of memory. That is a documented fact, not a grievance. But here is the part that is harder to say: at some point, the external erasure stopped being the only problem. Because the knowledge exists now. The books are written. The historians have done the work. The archives are available. You can trace African civilizations, the mechanisms of the slave trade, the reconstruction period, the deliberate dismantling of Black Wall Street, the COINTELPRO operations that killed or discredited every serious Black leader in the twentieth century. All of it is documented. All of it is accessible. And yet the majority of the cultural conversation is not about any of that. It is about the party. The brand. The aesthetic. The performance. A people that does not know where it came from cannot decide where it is going. That is not an insult. It is a law of navigation. You cannot chart a course without knowing your position. And right now, collectively, the position is lost — not because the map was burned, but because nobody is looking at it. ...

It sounds like a comeback. It reads like confidence. It is one of the most historically incorrect statements an African citizen can make — and the consequences of not knowing this are not academic. They are alive right now, in your country, today. “Anyway, America has never even come to visit my countries.” Read that again slowly. Because whoever said it either does not know history, does not know geography, or has been educated by a system that was specifically designed to make sure they would say exactly that. America has not just visited Africa. America has never left. ...

An African citizen declares they would never live in America. Fair enough. But who exactly did they just talk about — and did they mean to? “I’ve always said — where they don’t love me, I’ll never set foot there to live. Maybe tourism. But never to live.” It sounds principled. It sounds dignified. It sounds like self-respect speaking. And in one sense, it is. Nobody should spend their life in a place that rejects them. That logic is sound. The problem is not the principle. The problem is the target. Because when an African makes that statement about America, they are not insulting the American government. They are not insulting Wall Street. They are not insulting the corporations that extract cobalt from the Congo and book the profits in tax havens. They are insulting the Black American who has been in that country for four hundred years fighting for the right to exist in it with dignity. They are insulting the Latino family that crossed a desert to build something. They are insulting the Asian immigrant who rebuilt their life from zero. They are insulting every ordinary American — white, Black, brown — who wakes up every morning $105,000 in debt, works two jobs, and still cannot afford the healthcare system they pay taxes into. “America doesn’t love me” — directed at those people — is not a statement of dignity. It is a misfire. ...

Foreigners smile at Africa. They speak softly. They bring cameras and handshakes and development programs. And then they leave with everything that was under the ground. The respect was never for the people. It was for the inventory. Someone said it plainly: “In my country, foreigners respect us. So things are fine.” And they are not wrong about the respect. The respect is real. The question is what it is paying for. When a mining executive flies into Kinshasa with a firm handshake and a development promise, that respect costs nothing and returns everything. When a European delegation arrives in Dakar with aid packages and trade agreements, that respect is the opening line of a negotiation Africa does not know it is already losing. When a foreign investor smiles at you across a table in Abidjan, that smile is backed by a spreadsheet you have never seen. Of course they are respectful. You are sitting on the most valuable inventory on the planet. ...