In 2021, the federal government pledged to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive public service by hiring and promoting more Black, Indigenous and racialized people.
Historically, and with some high-profile exceptions, Ottawa’s constellation of government departments and agencies, as well as government-financed institutions, have been lethargic in recruiting and retaining Black minorities.
The challenge is cultural. For decades, the sought-after Canadian attitude included narratives of two colonial regimes, English and French, with strong European and American influences. The last 40 years have been covered for the next 40 years with a thin veneer of multiculturalism and, more recently, an Aboriginal issues.
Colonial states, including Canada, adopted imperial perspectives that disrespected other people of color and their views. In these scenarios, the population of the conflict-ridden regions of the world – and the indigenous peoples – have just failed in the European civilizing project and, therefore, have failed. They have been the authors of their own misfortunes.
Governments and commentators downplayed black slavery and its consequences as an obligatory contribution to progress, rather than a major contributor to global inequality and injustice, and saw blacks as inferior.
Canada wants an education that looks deeply and justly at the past.
Black history month in February provides an opportunity for federal and provincial governments to focus on the means and methods to reverse long-standing prejudices against Black people in Canada.
In 2020, Statistics Canada reported that 63 per cent of Black respondents had experienced discrimination in the five years prior to the pandemic or COVID-19, nearly double the share of the white population (32 per cent).
There are statistics, and then there is the lived experience of discrimination that prevents black people and some other minorities from integrating harmoniously into the ranks of public service and Canadian society.
Writer David Ess describes how he referred to it as the N-word at his best middle-class school in Ottawa. Tonni Brodber returned to Trinidad from Ottawa after being told her skin was “the color of,” among other insults. In Ontario, young black nurses exposed deep-rooted racism in the office in a 2022 report.
Comments I’ve heard in my 35 years of living in Ottawa include, “It’s a smart neighborhood, there are no black people. “Jamaicans are guilty of crimes in Canada. ” If the dark ones get you in trouble, shoot them. “Africans are climbing trees again. ” We are bigger than those third countries in the world. “The area where I live is a mix of Caucasians and other people of color and there are constant discussions and confusion about racial issues.
The challenge also permeates public service. The federal government’s 2019 Anti-Racism Strategy has begun to address the consequences of systemic racism in the public service, but more schooling and schooling is needed.
Black public servants are locked in a three-year legal war with Ottawa with no end in sight
The federal Auditor General’s 2023 report noted that in six organizations representing 21 percent of public service, there is “little evidence that measures for labor inclusion are making a difference for racialized employees. “
The report also notes that none of the organizations analyzed knowledge about how they dealt with court cases of racist behavior and the resulting imbalances of force, despite racialized workers’ considerations of existing processes. Racialized workers who speak out can be called “cowards. “cannons. “
Negative attitudes toward blacks arose spontaneously. For four centuries, Western confidence in the inferiority and availability of blacks rationalized the transatlantic slave trade.
An estimated 10-12 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Around two million fewer landed. Men, women and children were packed like sardines onto disease-ridden slave ships. Sick, elderly and rebellious people were thrown overboard to feed the sharks or drown. On arrival, many New World planters worked enslaved people to death.
In Brazil, Barbados, Canada/New France, and Jamaica, the average life expectancy of an adult employee in slavery was well under 30 years. In Canada, which had about 4,000 slaves of African descent, this lasted 25 years.
Only in the United States did the slave population increase, perhaps due to a higher birth rate. In the Caribbean and Brazil, the number of people emancipated in the nineteenth century was only a small fraction of those who were brought to the New World.
The emancipations of the nineteenth century did not eliminate old stereotypes, bad words, or assumptions of inferiority and disposability. Across the Western Hemisphere, and in Canada, other people of color faced segregated laws, public policies, and school systems that marginalized and discriminated against them. The American civil rights movement of the 1960s was at the forefront of the world in reaffirming the human rights of black people.
In Canada, formal policy against racist restrictions on education, employment, and housing did not begin to emerge until the 1950s and 1960s. The Black Lives Matter movement points out that old prejudices persist in Canada, a country that believes itself to be free of rights. racism.
Ignoring the meaning of black slavery leads to the elimination of prejudice and supports it.
“You weren’t the only slaves,” an Ottawa manager recently told an employee, according to a complaint filed through the employee. A Nigerian came here to say that my great-grandfather sold slaves, but that he didn’t deserve to be judged by today’s standards. ” Well, it was obligatory and useful for Africa,” an official “explained” to me.
These are mistakes.
There are decades of studies that show how the slave trade damaged Africa. A recent Harvard study noted a correlation between the most politically and ethnically fragmented parts of Africa and the areas with the highest number of kidnapped people centuries ago.
Erasing the history of black slavery also obscures the enormous contribution of enslaved Africans to Western capitalism. The profits from slavery provided the initial capital for commercial revolutions, the structure of large manorial houses, for emerging banking systems, universities, and agricultural revolutions in crops such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco, as well as technological advances.
The current failure to recognize the contribution of enslaved peoples to global progress (and the value they paid for it) is now undermining the momentum for equality.
In Ottawa, the stated purpose of expanding black representation in the control of the public service is still insufficient. Successful bureaucrats rarely challenge dominant narratives.
There is a wave of Black studies programs at several Canadian universities, driven by demand from Black Canadians.
Ottawa should view those programs as a means of integrating the story of Black slavery, and the wider issue of Black history, into a Canadian perspective. Their findings and teachings could be incorporated into the professions and used for training the public service.
At a minimum, the teaching of progress, whatever the discipline, could usefully acknowledge the capital accumulated by the theft of humans from Africa and the theft of indigenous lands in the Americas.
Community is built on the foundation of understanding. Canada is a varied country where “driving while black” is a scourge. The police, like most Canadians, need more education and education to decolonize their belief in blackness.
The Winnipeg Museum of Human Rights is a leader in the debate on the history of black slavery. Others are expected to follow with permanent exhibitions. Anti-racism systems in schools are also important.
Efforts, such as a memorial to enslaved Africans and their contribution on Dundas Street in Toronto – the site of a current renaming controversy – might also help provide perspective.
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