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.
SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com