Emergence of Black Canadian identity

Few events in history have contributed more to shaping Black Canadian collective consciousness than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface incident and the killing of George Floyd.

In 1971, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau permanently altered the face of Canada by adopting multiculturalism as an official policy, making possible our nation’s 25th celebration of Black History Month this month. Using the same blueprint, he would pass the progressive Immigration Act of 1976, widely opening Canada’s doors to the first big wave of Black immigrants.

In the ’70s and ’80s, hundreds of thousands of hard-working Haitian, Jamaican and other Caribbean migrants flocked to Canada, quickly swelling the ranks of the existing multi-generational Black indigenous population. They would later be joined by new cohorts of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the ’90s and early 2000s, forming a bloc of faithful Liberal supporters.

Squeezed into the French/English language divide, these disparate groups’ integration defaulted along the fault lines of Canada’s two solitudes. Absent a clear common cause or issue to bring them together, their interactions ended up mirroring the dynamics of Canadian dualism in the decades that followed. Until September 2019.

For someone who embodies diversity and tolerance, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface blunder threatened to bury his electoral prospects and his legacy. That he managed to rise from under the rubble by merely dusting the dirt off his shoulders is a testament to the strength of his personal brand, Black predisposition to forgive liberal transgressive behaviour, the limits of Jagmeet Singh’s appeal, and the Conservative’s absence of credibility on issues of importance to Black Canadians.

But in ways polls don’t measure and electoral results can’t show, the blackface episode laid bare a generation gap in the Black community when it comes to party loyalty. That clash ushered in the effective control of the Black experience narrative by a younger generation, whose parents sometimes lacked the cultural acuteness required to appreciate their children and grandchildren’s rightful indignation over images of a white man, regardless of name or fame, deliberately covered in black makeup.

Now, whether or not the prime minister could emerge today unbruised electorally from a blackface controversy is anyone’s guess. While his report card shows good grades for accomplishments for Black Canadians, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the killing of George Floyd have unleashed powerful forces that have altered the social and political landscape in a way that upends historically safe assumptions about the Black vote.

At the social level, a number of influential Black-founded and Black-mandated organizations have burst onto the national stage. They are led by a legion of young, pragmatic, and media savvy torchbearers who are not hampered by the cultural, linguistic, and technological constraints that limited their parents’ capacity to co-operate and create a disruptive force that is accelerating the cohesion of 1.2 million Black Canadians at an unforgiving pace.

At the political level, a new normal has rendered conversations about race and representation mainstream, thus allowing traditionally silent voices on Black issues to suddenly claim the mantle of racial fairness. For instance, the roster of VIP Conservatives — Erin O’Toole, Doug Ford, Jason Kenny, Leslyn Lewis — at the recent relaunch of the Conservative Black Congress of Canada signals unequivocally that the Tories now intend to compete on a turf that has historically not favoured them.

Although able and affable, Green leader Annamie Paul will not necessarily benefit from reflexive Black support. But it would be grossly misreading Black Canadians’ mood as to dismiss hers or Jagmeet Singh’s actual appeal within the Black community and their capacity to exploit that to considerable effect in a close election.

In the end, history likely will regard Justin Trudeau as the most consequential prime minister for Black Canadians. But ultimately, it will be his ability to absorb and embody the nascent Black Canadian collective consciousness that will determine whether, like his father, he secures for his party the loyalty of yet another generation of Black Canadians.