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