On the night of January 28, 2017, Brayden Bushby was a passenger in a vehicle cruising about in the east end of Thunder Bay. As the vehicle passed two Indigenous women walking along the sidewalk, Bushby flung a trailer hitch out the window of the vehicle. The heavy hitch struck one of the women, Barbara Kentner, in the abdomen, and Bushby yelled, “I got one!”
Kentner was seriously injured. Months later, she died in hospital.
Bushby has been charged with second degree murder and is awaiting a trial that has been delayed twice.
In the months following the incident, much commentary appeared on social media, and a theme emerged, a theme that reinforces the narrative of Thunder Bay as a racist city. The comments I read, some of them unbelievably cruel, can be summed up as follows: Kentner was a bad person and had it coming.
In other words, in the view of several Thunder Bay residents who made the comments, and all the others who gave them a “thumbs up” with a malicious tap of the “like” icon, the victim somehow deserved to have a trailer hitch thrown at her in the night. Bushby was just a random factor, a mechanism for some kind of Karmic justice.
According to some who claim to have known Kentner, she had a hard life. She had an alcohol addiction, was part of the rough scene of the city’s south core, had committed at least one assault, and was known to police.
But here’s the thing: Bushby didn’t know that. He didn’t know Barbara Kentner, a mother, a sister, and a friend. He didn’t know who he was attacking that January night. He saw two Indigenous women, and he made his decision. He threw a trailer hitch at a random person targeted because of her ethnic appearance.
And the only reason some White people in Thunder Bay are not condemning him is that they, because of their ethnic appearance, are at zero risk for that particular type of violence. That is what White privilege means. Bushby would not have thrown the trailer hitch at two White women walking down that street. We all know that. If he had, no one would be taking his part. That’s why Thunder Bay is racist. Because some people think Brayden Bushby’s actions that night were justified. Just business as usual.