Jamie Sarkonak: ‘Racial battle fatigue,’ the newest excuse for violence heard in court

Halifax law courts. Photo by STEVE BRUCE

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Just a few weeks ago, a Halifax man named Shondre Jarvis was sentenced to three years’ jail for nearly killing a fellow African Nova Scotian. It happened at a house party in 2024, where adults and children alike had gathered to continue the celebration of their historically Black neighbourhood’s annual festival.

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The men had gotten into an argument, and later when the victim went to leave, Jarvis, who was intoxicated at the time, ran at the victim from behind with a knife and stabbed him six times, inflicting life-threatening injuries. Jarvis was disarmed by good Samaritan partygoers, after which he fled and hid in the bush. A police dog sniffed him out. The charge was attempted murder, but he pleaded to aggravated assault.

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What’s perhaps more mystifying than Jarvis’ senseless act of violence was the excuse that Nova Scotia’s professional racism experts later offered for it: racial battle fatigue.

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Nova Scotia is one of the few provinces in which it is legally required for judges to contemplate racial sentence discounts for Black offenders. The province’s top judges decided this back in 2021, and it will remain the law until the federal government decides on a more egalitarian system.

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The mechanics of racial sentencing in this manner involve the federal and provincial governments paying supposed racism experts to interview offenders and assemble “Impact of Race and Culture Assessments” (IRCAs), which chronicle an individual’s subjective experience of racism as well as their community’s and family’s history of experiencing racism. These reports also tend to frame general disadvantage as systemic or structural racism. The dozens of these reports that are completed in Nova Scotia every year cost the public $7,000 each, according to federal documents obtained by the Post. Not all IRCAs result in a racial discount, but they do bring the fairness of sentencing into question by allowing for lighter sentencing based on race.

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In Jarvis’ case, the court had ordered that an IRCA be produced to assist the judge in crafting a fair sentence. The ensuing report painted a picture of a man who had a lot going for him. He was brought up in a loving, supportive home; as a young adult, he had stable employment and a strong work ethic. In his community of Beechville, he had a strong sense of belonging.

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The report, however, said that Beechville was subject to “systemic neglect, manifesting through underinvestment, exclusionary planning, and institutional indifference.” It also said that Jarvis had seen the N-word written on walls in high school, that he’d had “White power” yelled at him before, and that undercover police had asked if he sold drugs.

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These experiences, wrote the assessor, can cause “racialized battle fatigue and racialized hypervigilance.”

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“In applied forensic terms, these concepts help explain how chronic exposure to racialized suspicion and hostility can increase guardedness, mistrust, rapid threat appraisal, and defensive anticipation over time,” went the report. “They do not justify violence; however, they are part of the cumulative stress context which Shondre Jarvis was affected.”