Time for a new kind of black activism
A recent feature article in the Star contained assertions by many members of Toronto’s black activist community that there is a dearth of young black leaders ready to take up the torch.
As young members of this community, we strongly disagree with those claims.
We are graduate students whose work, as well as experience, has made us acutely aware of the plights facing black youth within a society that privileges certain groups over others. We are aware that black youth are under-represented among post-secondary graduates and in the workforce, and overrepresented in the criminal justice system. And we are working alongside members of our community to address these issues.
If the older generation of activists has not noticed our work or that of our cohorts, it may be because ours is, for our community, a new kind of more democratic activism.
Perhaps the most surprising comments in the Star article came from Valerie Steele, president of the Jamaican Diaspora Canada Foundation, whose work we greatly admire. She added her voice to the chorus lamenting the lack of young black leaders. But we had met with Steele before the article came out and explained to her our concern that too many black youth feel isolated and marginalized from the activist community. That too many of these older activists seem to fail to understand the needs and realities of black youth and in so doing actively stifle their voices.
It’s time for the current generation of activists to open the space for young voices, to democratically engage the youth they claim to champion. We strongly believe that the next generation of black leadership must work in concert with those who have slipped through the cracks or who are on the margins of society. Only then can we claim truly to represent our community.
As our antecedents have recognized, the only way to effect meaningful change is to have grassroots-level organizing. To this end, we have established the Jamaican Canadian Youth Council, a youth-led organization. We seek to establish ourselves as a supportive agent to empower, mobilize and motivate young people across Ontario to work collaboratively toward creating programs to generate change.
Our current leaders are wrong when they say there are no youth in the GTA ready to take the lead to address systemic racism or educational and income disparities
We know this can work because we’ve seen it happen. Contrary to what the older generation of activists is saying, there is an impressive group of emerging leaders who not only work for the community’s marginalized youth, but with them.
Take Janelle Brady, one of the authors of this article, who grew up in the Jane-Finch community. She well understands the particular struggles of getting a secondary education in that context. That’s why in 2010 she and some friends started a mentoring and after school program, Mentoring Arts Tutoring Athletics, which operates out of C.W. Jefferys High School. She is now drawing on her experience in the pursuit of a Master’s of education degree at York University, focusing on anti-oppressive and anti-racist education in Toronto.
Or consider the inspiring case of “artivist” Chevy Eugene, a dedicated community worker, emerging writer, photographer and filmmaker. A native of Castries, Saint Lucia, Chevy immigrated to Toronto in 2002. He is currently undertaking a graduate degree at York University. His research focuses on the arts as a key tool for Caribbean integration — an idea he not only espouses, but actively pursues.
In early 2011, Chevy started to work on his first full-length film, From Slaveships to Relationships: Narrations of Healing. He recently founded the Caribbean Arts Community initiative, which consists of members across the anglophone Caribbean. The goal of the organization is to create a platform where grassroots organizations in the Caribbean and its diasporas can create, share, and implement ideas about integration through a creative lens.
There are countless other young activists and black youth leaders from the black diaspora doing tremendous work in Toronto. Too many to name.
Our current leaders are wrong when they say there are no youth in the GTA ready to take the lead to address systemic racism or educational and income disparities. We’re doing it now. Rather than insisting that young black Torontonians are uninterested in the issues that affect our community, the older generation of leaders should start working with us to address them.