Courts considering ‘racial battle fatigue’ in sentencing

• National Post – (Latest Edition)
• 22 Aug 2026
• JAMIE SARKONAK

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

Indeed, “racial battle fatigue” and “cumulative racialized stress” were two factors that brought about the stabbing, according to the IRCA report.

And there was the absurdity in the case. This was a near-murder, waged by one Black man against another, at a celebration of their community … and somehow, racism was to blame. That seems to be the grand theory behind most of these IRCAS: if you zoom out enough, you can blame an offender’s behaviour on abstract causes like colonialism and racism if he falls into a demographic that allows for it.

Not all IRCAS result in a racial discount, but they do bring the fairness of sentencing into question.

The judge, in this case, didn’t buy the racial battle fatigue excuse, and seemed puzzled that the IRCA report writer sidestepped the fact that both victim and assailant were African Nova Scotian.

This is not the first time a Nova Scotian court has heard about racial battle fatigue. It was also woven into a different IRCA report for a Black offender named Makayle Skinner back in February.

Skinner was convicted of manslaughter for killing

Treyvhon Bradshaw, also a Black man, in 2022 outside a Halifax nightclub. The facts agreed upon in court indicated a case of self-defence: Bradshaw had threatened to shoot Skinner and then went and grabbed a gun from his car. Skinner, who had been a gunshot victim on three separate occasions, predicted an ambush and took a position off to the side of the nightclub entrance, from which point he saw Bradshaw walking back in a crouched stance toward a group of people standing near the door. When Skinner saw Bradshaw’s gun, he fired.

The ensuing IRCA report notes that “Racial battle fatigue further contextualizes Makayle Skinner’s response” — once again blaming an act of violence between two Black men on the unpinpointable force of racism that supposedly saturates Canadian society.

Outside the criminal context, racial battle fatigue has also been advanced in the case of an Indigenous academic who accused the University of Regina of racism in the course of a labour dispute.

It was also raised by University of Ottawa law professor Rakhi Ruparelia in a 2014 paper in which she claimed to suffer from “racial battle fatigue” after teaching a course on social justice. By her own account, she took an emotional, personally probing approach to teaching about racism. At one point, a white student came to her in tears over how the course made her feel. Ruparelia told the student to examine her privilege and warned her that if she wants to work with non-white clients in the future, she needed to “constantly … reflect on (her) role as a white woman working with these communities.”

“I think perhaps this course made you uncomfortable, which you have framed as guilt, because it forced you to consider your privilege as a white woman . … If you are not willing to do this work, you really have no business working with (racialized) communities,” Ruparelia told the student.

The conversation was “physically and emotionally” draining to Ruparelia, hence her “battle fatigue.” In teaching on these topics in general, she interpreted the hostility of “resistant (even if well-intentioned) white students” as “racial microaggressions” which could be exhausting and harmful to her, seemingly oblivious to her own role in perpetuating classroom toxicity.

The original source of racial battle fatigue theory is University of Utah professor William Smith, who has published on the topic numerous times since 2003. It tries to dredge up an excuse to offset individual responsibility from a sea of past unconnected negative experiences, and it finds an audience among those who already believe in the social justice pantheon.

By that same logic, every woman charged with a crime ever should be able to blame “sexism battle fatigue”; everyone who has suffered another’s cruel words should be able to claim “bullying battle fatigue” and so on.

A person’s history of bullying should be relevant to a court if the crime had something to do with retaliating against a bully. In a similar vein, a person’s experience of racism should be considered if their charges had to do with, say, responding to racial aggression.

But to give everyone of a particular background the ludicrous pretence of “racial battle fatigue” to defend bad behaviour is to corrupt the system