OTTAWA – A day after the death of Abdirahman Abdi at the hands of police officers, Canadian media have pulled their coverage, realizing the incident did not take place in America.
“Oh wait, this happened in Canada?” said the publishers of Canada’s national newspapers. “Well, we can’t run that. There’s no story since Canadian police don’t have a systemic problem with racism.”
Canadian media, which often run stories about American police brutality on the front-page, say it’s unfortunate that the Somali-Canadian was killed in a country that’s so egalitarian and harmonious. If he had been brutally slain in another place, they continued, it would make for a really explosive expose on the human cost of prejudice.
“It’s like when Aboriginal men and women are found dead in jail cells or beaten in the backs of police cruisers,” explained the leaders of Canada’s fifth estate. “If only this country had a racial history it wasn’t addressing, this could have been a real story.”
“But what are we as professional journalists supposed to do about that?”
A recent survey of news coverage confirms this is probably the only time Canadian police have unjustly killed a person of colour in the last few months.
