Black Experience Project exposes Canada’s big lie
The Black Experience Project shows that multiculturalism is a lie. The promise of multiculturalism is that Canada accepts and embraces all cultures openly and equally. For Black people, that has never been true. According to the Black Experience Project data released on Wednesday, 53 per cent of the survey’s 1,504 participants — who were asked about their daily experiences as Black people in the GTA — identify primarily as Black.
If, as we’ve been promised, we’re all supposed to be able to represent our different cultures, then why do a majority of Black-identified people from different backgrounds choose to identify as Black?
It’s fair to note that some participants identified primarily by their nation or culture of origin.
I can also understand that it depends on who you ask. On a government form, I self-identify as Black; it’s a strategy for ensuring the state collects data that is relevant to Black life. But when I’m hanging out with Black people of a variety of backgrounds, I identify as African. Further still, when I’m with African people, I identify as Kenyan. Identity is a complicated, varied and wonderful thing. Don’t get it twisted though: Blackness is a political category. Blackness has existed in Canada mainly as a political tool within white supremacy. Initially, it allowed colonizers to keep Black people as slaves, then, following the abolition of slavery, it was a way of preventing Black people from accessing social and economic rights.
Where it began as tool to oppress Black peoples, it has evolved into a means for Black people to organize and advocate for themselves. If you contend with Blackness as a political identity then you can see why, according to the Black Experience Report, Black people in Toronto are more likely than average to engage with politics by voting or through activism. The language of politics and policy has defined the limits of our existence. We always have one eye open.
For its part, multiculturalism was introduced in 1971 and became official government policy in 1988. It is not by coincidence that Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper called for Indigenous people(s) to be stripped of their nationhood and assimilated into communities of culture in the same way that the Italian, Irish and Portuguese have been.
These groups were once considered races too. They were also once non-white.
By nature of being Black, Black people have not been absorbed into whiteness. Nor should we aim to be. The multiculturalism project is simply white supremacy with a feelgood name.
The language of multiculturalism treats the political boundaries that have suppressed Black folks’ abilities and ambitions as little more than culture. Seen this way, Black people’s overrepresentation in the criminal justice can be explained away as cultural failings. With a nod at languages and traditions, the policy effectively erases a long history of antiBlackness and discrimination in the police, courts and justice system. Instead, it is easier to point at our music, our clothes and our language as the problem. Recent data shows the problem isn’t us. Although Black creators are a major part of the city’s cultural landscape, a study from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education found that students in the city’s art high schools are largely white. Another report concluded that Black students were twice as likely to be streamed away from academic courses.
While Black people are as likely as non-Black people to have a post-secondary education, we are half as likely to have university degrees.
In the schools that I attended, all the guidance counsellors were white; many advised me to aim lower than I wanted to as if I required their permission to achieve. Where I was lucky in having parents who were themselves educators and understood anti-Blackness, many others haven’t been so lucky.
While we are under-represented as teachers and leaders, we are overrepresented in jails and prison. Despite using marijuana at the same rates as white people, Black people who use drugs are more likely to be arrested and detained for pot possession. It’s a disparity born entirely of race. It’s not the only one.
The problem sits in the institutions — work, school, the state — that have created the stereotypes that they then insist Black people adhere to. It is in a national policy that promises to embrace diversity while doing nothing to address a long history of punishing Black people.