Trustee censured over treatment of Black teenager
In a rare instance of an institution disrupting the status quo, trustees at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) crossed out a thirdparty investigator’s milder rebuke of a white colleague and explicitly named her actions involving a local teen antiBlack racism. They censured her to the fullest extent they could and urged her to step down, but they couldn’t fire her.
The teen’s family and Black community organizations also want trustee Donna Blackburn to resign. A petition to have her removed from the board has garnered close to 5,000 signatures.
“Trustee Blackburn will not be resigning from her position and does not accept that she engaged in an act of anti-Black racism,” Blackburn’s lawyer, Brenda Hollingsworth, told the Star on Thursday.
That Blackburn cannot be removed from office is one example of how the system can protect privilege; the Education Act does not give a board legislative authority to do so. Another example in this case is around the fallout of raising a fist in protest.
“The system” is a nebulous, intangible term because it works in invisible ways, without requiring oppressive or racist intentions of the people operating within its structures.
The Ottawa incident offers a glimpse of how even when the wheels of an institution roll toward progress, this hidden system can jam a stick into its spokes.
Blackburn’s censure is the culmination of an organized pushback by Ottawa’s Black community after an incident on March 27 in the city’s suburban Barrhaven neighbourhood.
COVID rules around using parks then were unclear and 17-year-old Styles Lepage was in a public park shooting hoops by himself. Blackburn approached him and told him he was breaking social distancing rules and insisted he stop playing. When he declined, she told him, “People who do not care about the rules end up in Innes Road.” Innes Road refers to the Ottawa-Carleton Detention centre — a jail — nearby.
Blackburn posted the interaction on Facebook along with a photo of the teen, setting herself up as “park patrol” and saying, “I have called by-law and will stand here until they come. I will follow the kid home if I have to. See why you elected me trustee, I never give up.”
She deleted the post and later apologized for it and for the Innes Road comment. “I do sincerely regret delivering this message in this way,” Blackburn told media in a statement in May.
The teen’s father, Matthew Kedroe, calls this apology a “publicity stunt.” Blackburn “has shown no remorse,” he told the Star. “She has never reached out to us or said sorry to my family.” “My son is now much more aware of being racialized and of discrimination. A bit of innocence was taken from him in that regard.”
In late June, a report by an independent investigator retained by the board characterized Blackburn’s threat of jail “racially insensitive, given that Black persons are routinely overrepresented in the criminal justice system and face harsher penalties than nonBlack citizens for trivial or minor infractions.”
Lawyer Zaheer Lakhani, who investigated, found Blackburn had not singled Lepage out — that she’d told others to leave the park as well. He wrote that she had “done much for marginalized communities in Ottawa, including OCDSB students, such as promoting prayers for Muslim students in OCDSB schools,” but ultimately found her encounter with Lepage did not “support a conclusion of positive community engagement.”
The trustees were having none of the slap-on-the-wrist approach. At a special meeting held Monday night to discuss the report, they called the incident “a terrible stain” on the board, barred Blackburn from the next budget meeting and from sitting on various board committees for six months and pressured her to resign.
“I feel sad and disappointed, but above all, I feel angry,” trustee Sandra Schwartz said. “I’m angry that her deplorable actions on March 27 caused harm to a young Black man … she bullied a child, she abused the power of her office.”
Trustee Justine Bell proposed adding the phrase “engaged in an act of anti-Black racism” to the recommendation of sanctions.
“The term racially insensitive, it’s not even a term that’s coined within the dictionary right now,” Bell told the CBC’s Idil Mussa.
Asked if Blackburn accepts this decision by the board, Hollingsworth said, “We do not. The investigator himself, who has expertise in this area, clearly indicated it was not racism. He was challenged by trustee Bell on this point during the hearing and maintained his position.”
“I have to commend every member of the board,” Kedroe said, reeling off their names and saying they “did a fantastic job of really understanding the bulk of the report.”
Blackburn’s refusal to resign shows disrespect for the OCDSB and the code of conduct, he said.
How much did society’s ongoing reckoning of racism influence perceptions of what had happened?
“I think this historic moment helped,” said community organizer Richard Sharpe. But two months before the killing of George Floyd, he said, half a dozen community organizations including the 613-819 Black Hub had “engaged in a Twitter, email and phone campaign. We had also engaged Black communities in Peel … We also met with the Minister of Education Stephen Lecce.” What Kedroe wrote when protesting his son’s situation is now entangled in another system: the legal one.
After Kedroe went public, Blackburn served him with a libel notice for comments he made on social media, including allegedly calling Blackburn a Becky, a term for a white woman who is unaware of her privilege and prejudice.
“In light of the very definite condemnation by the school board and their attempt to impose the most severe sanctions that they had the jurisdiction to impose, that really should be the end of the defamation action,” Kedroe’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, told the Star Friday.
Lepage graduated from high school this year, Kedroe said, and Ottawa University is eyeing him for a football scholarship.