A Montreal community centre has cancelled its plans for a “family-friendly” dance party after it was pilloried for stratifying admission pricing based on race.
The Shake La Cabane FAM-JAM – to be held Sunday, Dec. 8, at La Cabane community centre – advertised $25.83 general admission, but only $15.18 if the attendee was “Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour.”
The centre also set a different price by which white children were granted free entry. White children under two were free, but for Black and Indigenous children the cut-off was 12 years.
After the event was written up in a Saturday article by La Presse, it was roundly criticized by Quebec officialdom.
“This is completely unacceptable. When will it stop? What a lack of judgement,” was the online reaction of Quebec culture minister Mathieu Lacombe.
“All that Quebecers want, without regard to their skin colour, is equal treatment without discrimination,” read a post by Paul Plamondon, leader of the Parti Québécois. Plamondon described the Shake La Cabane party as the “exact reverse” of that principle.
La Presse quoted the well-known Quebec constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who called the ticketing policy “flagrant discrimination.”
“This is a very bad example that could have consequences for precisely the minority groups it’s seeking to protect,” he told the newspaper in French.
La Presse also cited a source with Quebec’s official human rights commission speculating that the race-based pricing was likely a violation of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
Specifically, section 10, which enshrines “full and equal recognition and exercise of (a person’s) human rights and freedoms, without distinction, exclusion or preference based on race.”
The event’s organizers explained in an earlier social media post that the race-centric pricing was a result of their dissatisfaction with the “diversity” of their prior Shake La Cabane parties. They explained the cheaper price for non-whites as a kind of “micro-reparation.”
The concept comes from the United States, where recent years have seen scattered examples of theatre companies experimenting with “equity-based” pricing offering discounts to non-whites. One of the first examples being the Detroit-based Afrofutures festival, which in 2019 set general admission pricing at US$40 for white people, and US$20 for everyone else.
The Shake La Cabane organizers specifically cited the example of Beloved Presents, an events organizer in Portland, Ore., that sells “Equity Price Tickets.”
“Micro-reparations in the name of solidarity, not charity, like these stand to gesture towards ways we can create more access while asking what other ways might we betray supremacies to best serve the collective,” reads an official Beloved Presents explanation.
On Saturday evening, Shake La Cabane organizers announced that the event had been cancelled, writing on their online events page, “We received SO much hate and misunderstanding about our BIPOC ticket pricing.” In a follow-up post, they said they would still pursue stratified pricing for future events, but based on family income rather than race.
Elsewhere in Canada, there are recent examples of venues attempting to restrict whole events to attendees of a specific race.
Just last year, the Ottawa-based National Arts Centre held a “Black out” performance of the play Is God Is, in which ticketing was initially restricted to “Black-identifying” patrons.
Although the performance went ahead, the NAC eventually dialled back its language explicitly telling non-Black audiences to stay away. “There will be no checkpoints for Black Out Night ticket holders and no questions will be asked about anyone’s identity, race or gender,” promoters wrote in a statement at the time.