We need to talk about race
‘We can’t breathe’ in Canada
Despite what many seem to think, anti-black racism is by no means exclusive to our southern neighbour
Being black in Canada can sometimes be suffocating.
This feeling does not only come from being subject to anti-black racism in multiple domains of social, economic, cultural and civic life in Canada. It is overwhelmingly the result of carrying the exhausting burden of having to convince others of the truth of your lived experience.
“Maybe the police stopped you because you were driving a little faster than you should have been.” “Maybe the store clerk is not following you but is only doing their job.” “Maybe you didn’t get hired because you’re just not as qualified as the other applicants.” Maybe . . . But maybe not . . . Whereas anti-black racism is most often subtly buried and embedded in Canada’s social structures and collective subconscious, last week saw a sudden resurfacing of whips and scorn that too often sully being black in Canada.
In Toronto, a Black Lives Matter protest against the police killings of two black men temporarily shut down one of the city’s busiest expressways.
In Halifax, a coalition of black organizations and their allies called for a country-wide ban on displaying the Confederate flag.
In Ottawa, a mural memorializing Sandra Bland, a black woman who recently died in ominously suspicious circumstances while in the custody of a Texan police force, was defaced with graffiti.
And in Hamilton, the local police service is denying that racism plays any role in the fact that its own stats show that officers disproportionately target, stop, question and collect the personal information of young black people in that city.
“But this is Canada,” our sense of Canadian racial exceptionalism pushes some of us proclaim. “It’s Americans that have a race problem, not us! These attention-seeking black radical activists complaining about ‘anti-black racism,’ or whatever, are being aided by the leftleaning media to complain about American problems that we simply don’t have here.”
Blacks in Canada are so often met with this kind of response when we speak about our lived experience that just being black in Canada can feel deflating, paralyzing and oppressive. So, often many of us just sigh heavily while silently bearing our unrecognized truths and expressing ourselves in an exasperated version of the popularized protest chant, “I can’t breathe.”
But there’s a new generation of younger black Canadians that is choosing to resist suffocation by eschewing silence and pursuing outright public resistance.
While the general public might only know this resistance to take the form of protest marches or press conferences, this is only because the mainstream did not recognize this resistance when it took earlier forms.
What do you think black youth were trying to say in all those school and community-based programs where we created rap songs, spoken word poems, stories, paintings, etc.?
We were using the arts to bare our youthful souls and lament a supposedly free and democratic society that seemed to be unable to see us unless we were, or were potentially, carrying a gun, a basketball, a baby or a welfare application.
For the current generation of black Canadian youth entering adulthood, these arts and education programs gave us life. But we’re not kids anymore.
As we enter early adulthood we are collectively realizing that, despite what many think, blacks in Canada cannot speak about their lived experience and the ongoing injustices they face without being met with silencing indifference, dismissal and sometimes hostility.
While tolerating degrees of anti-black racism may have been a successful survival strategy for a previous generation of blacks in Canada, our generation has never known a Canada without a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or provincial human rights codes that enshrine our universal entitlement to equality as Canadians.
As such, we find it impossible to accept today’s black Canadian experience: extreme marginalization and disadvantage; restricted access to housing; racial profiling in policing, security, education and child welfare; criminalization; over-representation in the criminal justice system; high levels of unemployment; and disproportionate and extreme poverty.
This is part of the reason why when you tell the upcoming generation of social justice-oriented black Canadians to “Go back to your home country if you don’t like it here,” we stare at you with blank confusion, if not in angry defiance. Canada is the only home country we’ve ever known.
Our righteous resistance is not an expression of hatred for Canada, cops or Confederate flags. It’s a thrashing attempt to break the stranglehold of Canadian-brand anti-black racism and wake our society up to an irrefutable fact:
We have the right to be treated equally as human beings, but also as Canadians. And as such, we resist suffocating racism because we are true black, strong and free.