We now know that systemic racism is largely unconscious because it’s baked into our culture. It took the remains of hundreds of Indigenous and Inuit children to make Canada understand its own systemic racism, and in the US, the death of George Floyd changed how we view race by reminding us of so many other Black men and women who have died at the hands of police.

But these deaths, by craven indifference in the case of Canada’s children, and by craven involvement in the case of America’s Black people, also exemplify the power of systemic denial.