Thank you.
First, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I want to let you know, though, that I am not speaking as a representative of the York Region District School Board; the views will be my personal views.
I also want to begin in the spirit of reconciliation, and acknowledge that I sit on the traditional territory of the Algonquins of Ontario. I also recognize that as a later settler to Turtle Island, now called Canada, I owe a lot to the first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples who looked after this wonderful country I now call home.
As an educator, I want to get to a place where our indigenous students learn in an education system that expressly admits that in the past, for them, education has meant the destruction of their families, their communities, their languages, and their very souls.
I also say that while we think about reconciliation, we cannot simply brush aside the ugly truth of our history, of colonialism, of attempting to whitewash the Indian out of the Indians through the policies, which included the horrors of the residential schools, and generally of our long history of anti-indigenous racism. Our latest census reveals that indigenous Canadians are resilient peoples. They are among our fastest-growing population. Let us lean into the truth of the ugly history of our relationship with indigenous Canadians and look to move toward reconciliation.
About the topic at hand, systemic racism and religious discrimination is an unquestionable reality in today's Canada. I have lots of narratives of individual acts of anti-black racism from my more than 25 years as an educator in both Quebec and Ontario.
One recent example was when, during some professional learning, a participant felt safe enough to say that perhaps black students wouldn't always be in trouble and get suspended if their mothers would stop having children with multiple partners, and if they had male role models in their lives. Another one from the not-so-distant past is what I would call casual anti-black racism. While a staff member was escorting members of the fire department to a secondary school, they passed a group of black students. The staff member said the students shouldn't worry because it wasn't the police.
As I've said, I have lots of narratives of individual acts of racism, but the reality is that systemic racism is not individual; it is structural. It's what the Honourable Murray Sinclair, whom I had the very distinct honour of meeting in 2015, told this very committee. Its the “racism left over after you get rid of the racists”.
Yes, I would like to think about systemic racism and its impact on the black community in general and on black students in particular. First of all, systemic racism stems from values, structures, policies, and practices that result in discrimination against identifiable groups of people.
Let's look back at Canada's immigration laws. Before Donald Moore led 34 representatives from the Negro Citizenship Association on that historic train ride to Ottawa on April 27, 1954, Canada's immigration policy and practice could be described as a perfect example of systemic racism. At the time, Canada allowed entry to subjects from British colonies or former British colonies; however, it's definition of “British subjects” only applied to those from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland. British subjects from the then-British West Indies, India, Pakistan, and Africa were denied entry to Canada.
This policy, resulting practices, and the attitude that stemmed from it did not specifically say that Canada did not want black or brown people as immigrants, but the result was a systemically racist exclusion from Canada of people who look like me.
I like to tell this story because I consider myself a son of Donald Moore. It was his landmark brief to the then-Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Walter Harris, and his subsequent press conference that resulted in the relaxation of Canada's immigration laws and allowed West Indian nurses and domestics into Canada. My mother was one of those domestics.
This was a perfect example of systemic racism, as are structures, attitudes, and practices that today result in black students being overrepresented in non-academic streams, suspensions and expulsion rates, and high school dropout rates. For black Canadian parents, the school-to-prison pipeline is not just an American reality.
Systemic racism has an insidious nature. As an educator, I've witnessed well-meaning, caring teachers send newly arrived black students to the guidance department to change their destination from academic to applied, because after all, if you come from Jamaica, you couldn't possibly be a candidate for academic English. I would argue that this type of attitude and belief that devalues students is also internalized by students, who come to believe that the academic track is, indeed, not for them. One black student said to me when I started teaching English in Ontario, “Come on, Mr. Roach, you know black kids don't do OAC English”.
That June I took it upon myself to walk through every single OAC exam and what I saw shocked me. In a school with a significant black student population, black students were nearly absent from the exams that determined university entrance. I remember musing to another black teacher that perhaps we were intellectual anomalies who were able to be successful in school and get to university. He was quick to point out to me that almost every black teacher he knew had their primary education outside of Canada.
Back then we used the term “institutionalized racism”. What's interesting is that more than 20 years later, we are having the same debate about the systemic racism in schools and the impact that streaming has on black students.
I know that for most educators the idea that we work in a system that has an established systemic bias to the success of black students seems like an enigma. After all, we see ourselves as caring professionals with good intentions for all our students. Some have called this the “but I'm a good person narrative”. This emotional response is something that we have yet to manage as we look to move forward with the work of eliminating systemic barriers to the success and well-being of all students, including black students and others left at the margins. The great thing is that many school districts are beginning to do the work to develop critical consciousness in staff and to help them recognize that systemic racism exists in our society and in our institutions and that we must take explicit and deliberate actions to combat it.
I know that motion 103 calls for the condemnation of Islamophobia and all forms of religious discrimination. I also know that some seem to question whether we should call the irrational fear or hatred of Muslims “Islamophobia”. First of all, Islamophobia is real, and it's particularly real for Muslim Canadians whose very belonging to this country is sometimes questioned simply because they are Muslims. For my Muslim colleagues in education, it is real when their children are called Osama terrorists at school. It is real when a small minority carry out terrorist acts in the name of Islam and they ask me whether I think it's safe for them to send their children to school. It's real when, after an attack in some European city, they choose to drive their children to school rather than have them take public transportation or the school bus. It is also real when their children come home wanting to change their names because of the incessant Islamophobic bullying that they suffer at school.
We know that in Canada hate crimes again Muslims have increased by an alarming 60% in one year, and they are second only to Jewish Canadians as targets of hate based on religion. We also know that law-abiding Muslims face great scrutiny at airports, at border crossings, and generally when going about their everyday lives as ordinary Canadians. Of course, we saw this irrational fear of Muslims explode into violent murder at the Quebec City mosque when six Muslim men were murdered in cold blood while they prayed. In my view, calling the irrational fear or hatred of Muslims “Islamophobia” is absolutely the right thing to do.
We also know that anti-Semitism is very real for Jewish Canadians. In Canada, Jews are still the number one target of hate based on religion. Hateful acts and hate crimes against Jews have spiked recently. In education we are seeing the rise of anti-Semitic graffiti, students making anti-Semitic comments or posting anti-Semitic images on their social media. We also cannot ignore the fact that white supremacists seem to now feel emboldened and are crawling away from their computer screens, publicly demonstrating their hatred for Jews, Muslims, for immigrants, and for all racialized people. The question then becomes how to fight against systemic racism and religious discrimination which, I'm sure we all agree, lessens us as Canadians.
I would make a couple of recommendations.
First is that the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Government of Canada act relentlessly in naming and shaming anti-black racism, anti-indigenous racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. When acts of hate occur anywhere in our wonderful country, the condemning voice of our government has to be front and centre.
Second is that the Department of Canadian Heritage develop an anti-racism action plan, which includes funding for community initiatives aimed at peacefully fighting hate and building inclusive communities. Some of this funding should explicitly be directed at students and young people who, I believe, are ready to take on the task. This initiative must include accountability measures that are both qualitative and quantitative.
Last is that the Government of Canada declare indigenous education as a national emergency and develop a plan of action with defined timelines to ensure that the national dropout rates of indigenous students fall within the average of white students. I would call for the same thing for black students, but I realize their education falls under provincial jurisdiction.
I hope I've stayed within my 10 minutes. I want to say to the members of the committee, systemic racism and religious discrimination is a national scourge that lessens us all as Canadians.
