“We the North”? Race, Nation, and the Multicultural Politics of Toronto’s First NBA Championship

Abstract

The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) championship win, a first for the franchise and for a Canadian team, “turned hockey country into basketball nation” (CBC Radio 2020). Canadians’ burgeoning embrace of the team and the sport seemed to point to a growing celebration of Blackness within the nation. However, we problematize the 2019 championship win to tell a more expansive story about how sport and national myths conceal truths about race and belonging in Canada. We explore two particular cases—the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia—to highlight the contradictory ways that the Raptors coverage mobilized symbols of the North and multiculturalism to present the team as quintessentially Canadian and rebrand basketball for Canadian audiences. We further explore how these stark contradictions manifest in the racialized policing of basketball courts in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These cases demonstrate that the celebrations of the Raptors and basketball not only continued to police racialized bodies, but also ensured that their inclusion was contingent on the maintenance of the status quo.