Les aventures ordinaires des jeunes Montréalais.e.s racialisé.e.s

Since the early 2000s, the public conversations and academic studies of street gangs in Quebec have focused on urban transgressive practices of racialized youth in Montréal. This stigmatization has been reinforced following a series of violent attacks in Canada and the departure of young Montrealers to Syria in the autumn of 2014. Very few studies seriously consider the everyday experiences of this social group in constructing an understanding of street gang and radicalization phenomena, an oversight which also ignores the role of such ordinary experiences in the production of the city. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork following a group of 28 young racialized Montrealers from autumn 2015 to spring 2018. My investigation focused on three different sites: 1) Collège de Maisonneuve : a reputable post-secondary school located on Montréal’s east side which gained notoriety as a hotbed of radicalization after a number of students travelled to Syria; 2) Little Burgundy: the historical neighbourhood of the Montreal Black community and one of the most diversified and multicultural of the city; 3) Saint-Michel : an east side neighbourhood of the city with a high concentration of youth, immigrant and visible minority population. This ethnography amplifies the dynamics absent in academic literature of racialized young Montrealers and their everyday experiences of stigmatization, islamophobia, racism and ordinary forms of violence. Furthermore, this research illustrates other processes at work—the silent encroachment on the ordinary and the confrontation with whiteness from racialized young Montrealers—from the margin to the center of the city of Montréal.