The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, Desmond Cole

Desmond Cole. (Photo: Kate Yang-Nikodym)

(Photo courtesy Penguin Random House Canada)

By Mugoli Samba, Broadview, February 27, 2020

In "The Skin We're In," Desmond Cole, journalist and activist, creates an incriminating account of institutionalized white supremacy.

Over 20 years ago, writer and scholar Rinaldo Walcott described blackness in Canada as “an absented presence always under erasure” in his seminal work Black Like Who? His words still ring true today — most mentions of Canada’s real relationship to Black people are met with the refrain that “things here are not as bad as in the United States.” Then and now, Black Canadians have written against this erasure by insisting that what happens to Black people in this country matters.

Desmond Cole builds on this legacy with his first book, The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. Cole gained prominence as a journalist thanks to a story he wrote for Toronto Life in 2015 detailing his own experiences with police carding. He later became a Toronto Star columnist, but left the position after an editor informed him that his protest at a police board meeting violated company policy (even if the paper had given columns to activists in its past).