Un/Covering White Lies: Exposing Racism in the Era of Racelessness

This project examines a Canadian court case that involves the largest arson homicide in the history of Vancouver, British Columbia. In May 2006 a fire killed four members of a Congolese refugee family (Adela Etibako and three of her children, Benedicta, Edita, and Stephane) along with Ashley Singh, the South Asian girlfriend of the target and sole survivor of the fire, Bolingo Etibako. On October 5, 2008 the accused, Nathan Fry, a 20-year-old white male, was found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Fry received an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole for 25 years. This paper considers this crime and the legal proceedings as a case study that can further our understanding of discourses of race, racism, and citizenship in Canada, and their link to Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics, what he terms as the politics of life and death. I argue that the viciousness of the crime, an offense involving a white male perpetrator and victims all of whom are racialized as Black and Brown, reflects the embodied practices and psychological processes that are both emblematic of, and integral to, the violence of coloniality, and the racial relations and structural arrangements of present-day white settler society (Martinot, 2010; Razack, 2002, 2005). I show how the crime, the investigation, and the trial communicate symbolically and materially what bell hooks (1992) characterizes as the “terrorizing force of white supremacy” (p. 344).