Part I
#BlackInSchool
Autumn 2012
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they donât have any. âAlice Walker, The Colour Purple
I am a Black student in Canada. April 6, 2013 will mark my seventeenth birthday and my thirteenth year in school. I am becoming increasingly aware of the impact of school on the bodies of Black children in Canada.
Two years ago, in the ninth grade, I recall walking down a hallway to attend a school newspaper meeting when I was struck by what I consider to be an extremely disturbing image of Black bodies on the wall. As part of an assignment, students had posted a photograph from the 1984 Ethiopian famine. The bodies depicted were naked, dark and gaunt, and shown to be crawling. I was horrified, humiliated, and indignant all at once.
I quickly went to the schoolâs administration to express my discontent with the photograph; it was removed from the wall the next day.
Still, I ask myself: why was I the one to bring the image to the attention of the administration? Had the students who worked on the assignment not been able to see how degrading the image was, and assess the impact it would have on Ethiopian children in the school or on other Blacks and Africans for that matter? Why had the teachers not analyzed the image? Finallyâand it is shameful that I must even consider this pointâas passersby, why hadnât other staff found the image problematic? And if they had, indeed, found it problematic, why had they neglected to express that sentiment?
Such experiences are commonplace for Black students. They are incessantâin elementary through high school, and beyond; that is, if we are not too discouraged to pursue higher education.
Our humanity, it seems, is continually eroded. We experience this through Kony 2012 assemblies in which we are shown videos of slaughtered Black bodiesâdecapitated and severed. We experience this in the classroom when all the presentations pertaining to Africa harp on the gothic features of the continentâthe perpetual âtribalâ warfare, famine, and diseaseâor when entering school in the morning and being assaulted by a studentâs voice: âThe worst countries to live in are Uganda, Sudan, and Congoâif you walk into one of those places youâll just die.â
How is it that such a one-sided story of Blackness and Africa takes precedence? What does it do to oneâs spirit when oneâs humanity is constantly under attack? When the academy, intentionally or not, perpetuates the idea of her âsubhumanityâ? When the continent of her origin is reduced to two, or three, âhigh conflictâ countries? And when the leaders of those countries are belittled? Most importantly, what does this do to this young Black body?
Every night on returning home from school, I turn to my diaryâan outlet for the release of negative sentiments which lodge themselves in my body throughout the dayâor I immerse myself in Reggae and Wassoulou dance as a way of recharging my spirit by connecting with one of the most intimate aspects of my personhood, my culture, something which is abrogated and denied me, as well as the masses of other Black students, in high school.
#HighSchoolAndTheBlackBody
15 November 2012
Racism is a visceral experience . . . it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. âTa-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
High school hurts the Black Body. High school is hard enough on any young body. {All students grapple with stress, lack of sleep, lugging heavy textbooks through icy Canadian winters, and up and down stairs, and regular teen angst,} but there is a whole other layer of constant and in some ways unseen violence that is done to young Black bodies in high school that needs to be recognized, because Black students must also deal with the racial stresses involved in going to school.
During the lunch hour a student quite often remarks, and I heard it so many times that it is sickening: âDonât waste your food, because there are starving children in Africa who would be grateful for it,â or âThere are places in the worldâlike Africaâwhere children cannot go to school, so be thankful that youâre getting an education.â âAfricaâ has become a kind of punctuation in our sentences, inserted wherever conscience and empathy is needed. Though, is the impetus for these catchphrases about Africa really empathy when students who self-identify as continental African contradict the notions of an impoverished, needy Africa?
Eventually these statements take on the form of violenceâepistemic violenceârendering the acquisition of knowledge difficult for the Black student. How is one to concentrate on a chemistry lesson or a biology assignment after being told that Africans like herself cannot go to school?
High school stigmatizes the Black Body. At my school, I recently witnessed the arrest of a Black student. Prior to the incident, two officers were interrogating him and his non-Black friend on school property. The latter was escorted back inside the school, while the former was kept outside for further interrogation. I continued to watch through the window. The officer soon began to search him, clearly unable to find anything worthy of arrest. She persisted nonetheless, and in doing so provoked him, for he became frantic, kicking off his shoes and waving his arms as he proclaimed his innocence. The officer was unrelenting. Within seconds, his chest was pressed against the side of the car, his back to me, and his hands cuffed. Adding insult to injury, a student adjacent to me, having also witnessed the arrest, remarked, âHe knows the drill.â
I could feel my heart sink, and soon the tears began to flowâa physical manifestation of the impact of high school on the Black Bodyâas he was driven away, coerced away, from an education, from the school that, we are told, is the most essential component of a studentâs success in the future. We are told that school is a âsafeâ and âhealthyâ place. Given all that, how can it coexist with legal, police-authorized coercion away from learning?
High school hinders the Black Body. The bell rang exactly nine minutes after the arrest. Shattered and demoralized as I was, I still had to report to my fourth-period biology class. I had to fulfill my academic responsibility.
High school nullifies the Black Body. In spite of the major contributions Blacks have made and continue to make to Canadian society, and more obviously our sheer presence in the country, in school, there is an erasure of the histories and contemporary experiences of Blacks in Canada. During Remembrance Day ceremonies, why donât we remember the Black veterans of World War I from Nova Scotiaâs No. 2 Construction Battalion? I often look through my textbooksâhistory, chemistry, and biology, just to name a fewâand count the bodies depicted as inventors, prominent political figures, and theoreticians relative to those who are victims of war, inadequate health care, famine, and political instability. The former are usually images of white bodies, while the latter people of colourâtypically Blacks.
How does the erasure of the Black experience and ultimately the suppression of Black students nullify the Black Body? The first strike is psychologicalâBlack studentsâ consciousness of the lack of recognition for the Black experience. This is followed by an emotional responseâdejection and apathy towards school, as there is no relevance to the experience for Black students as human beings. Finally, the Black student goes into a state of corporeal shock, questioning the significance of her skin, her features, her hair, and fundamentally her body, in a system that suppresses the expression of her humanity.
#ToBeABlackStudent
1 February 2013
Many Africans succumb to the idea that they canât do things because of what society says. Images of Africa are negativeâwar, corruption, poverty. We need to be proud of our culture. âDambisa Moyo, interview, New Statesman
My time in school has been enlightening and intellectually stimulating. For literary assignments, I have had the pleasure of reading Shakespeareâs Romeo and Juliet and Michael Ondaatjeâs In the Skin of a Lion. I have had the opportunity to listen to Alexandre Trudeau and Michael Ignatieff at school assemblies. I have written about the accomplishments of French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, and the military expeditions of Napoleon Bonaparte. However, my experience in school continues to be an emotional and spiritual struggle...