What you call black history, I call liberation
It may surprise you to learn that 2016 is the first year Ontario is officially celebrating Black History Month. Unofficially, the province first proclaimed the celebratory month in 1993 to mark the 200th anniversary of a law banning the importation of enslaved Africans into Upper Canada. Yet most Ontarians (and most Canadians) know nothing about slavery on this stolen soil. The word “slavery” does not appear in the provincial curriculum for mandatory high school courses in geography, history and civics. We’ve managed, for almost a quarter century, to commemorate something without discussing it.
To acknowledge the abolition of slavery, and the larger ongoing struggle against white supremacy, is to acknowledge the plight of Africans to be free in every sense of the word, to liberate ourselves from a colonial tradition that keeps trying to commodify or erase us. Given this, wise people in our communities have recommended that February be a celebration of “Black Liberation” or “African Liberation,” rather than “Black History.” If we can make such a change for next year, I will be proud that Ontario only officially celebrated Black History Month once.
We regularly fail to acknowledge histories that make our government and popular culture uncomfortable. By no accident, the highlight of black history in Canada, often to the exclusion of all other history, is the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses and routes that American blacks used to escape enslavement into Canada in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This is a critical piece of our history, but it represents one stage of the Canadian black liberation project, not its happy ending.
Black people who settled in places such as Chatham, Owen Sound, Windsor, Fort Erie and St. Catharines continued to face discrimination and segregation. The government used laws that had been created to justify separate Catholic and Protestant schools to also justify segregated schools for black children. Thanks to the continuous struggle of ancestors of the Underground Railroad, the last of those schools was closed in Merlin, Ont., in 1965.
We no longer have segregated schools in Ontario, but black students now face a different form of educational exclusion because of how often they are suspended, expelled or drop out. Although the drop out rate for black students is declining, about a quarter of all black students still don’t graduate. At last count, black students represented about 12 per cent of the TDSB’s population, and 31 per cent of its suspensions. This history of African liberation is alive, and the enduring need for it must never become fossilized to comfort those who don’t want to hear it.
Toronto journalist Norman Richmond has been promoting the idea of an African Liberation Month for years. In a recent interview, he said we avoid challenging language to describe modern political struggles.
“If you want to get a grant from government, you say, ‘we’re fighting for social justice,’ we’re not fighting for socialism . . . we’re not fighting against imperialism, we’re fighting against globalization,” said Richmond. “We have to beat around the bush.”
Local educator and activist Dr. Ajamu Nangwaya agrees, and adds trade unions, school boards, corporations to the list of institutions who feel more comfortable with “toothless” black history celebrations that ignore class struggle, sexism, white supremacy and other forms of oppression. “Essentially, (institutions) have been allowed to co-opt it and channel its potential for radical consciousness-raising and political involvement into celebrating ‘black firsts’ and ‘black notables,’ ” Nangwaya wrote of the commemoration of black history in 2014.
Maybe it’s naive of me to expect the government that just officially recognized Black History Month to now rename the occasion in dramatically more radical terms. But if people of African heritage mobilize to tell politicians how to name our struggle, who are they to argue? To quote Nangwaya, “Denying a people their name is a classic method of colonization and cultural imperialism. It is used to weaken collective consciousness, which is critical to building a resistance culture.”
Many Canadians would likely squirm at the idea of a more militant recognition of the struggle for black liberation — this is excellent evidence to push for it. The Africans who influenced the history we now celebrate did so in direct defiance of mainstream Canadian norms and expectations. They acted in spite of those who doubted, feared or misunderstood their intentions, and so should today’s black Canadians. A Black Liberation or African Liberation Month would more appropriately honour their legacy, and our ongoing fight for freedom.
Laws used to create separate religious schools were used to segregate black students