Thank you.
That project that I did was only in Alberta. Now, the survey that we're doing currently—with 2,000 Black youth and 50 interviews—is across Canada. In that project, we interviewed 129 Black youth in that focus group. The most frequently talked about contributor to their mental health was racism.
For example, let's take the case of Black boys. Many of them discussed the perception that toxic masculinity was a Black male thing, which, of course, it's not. They also discussed, for example, having always to prove themselves innocent because the first perception is that you're guilty. For everyone else, you're innocent until proven guilty. For Black people, especially Black males, you're guilty before you're proven innocent.
With regard to racism, I remember a quote that one of the youths said. She said, “God, I grew up with so much internalized anti-Blackness. I hated myself. I wanted to be white so bad. I wanted to have lighter lips.” Then she discussed an experience in which she was crossing the street when someone threw a Slurpee at her and calling her a racist bad word. That continues to shape her perception. She's internalized that racism, and it continues to shape her mental health.
Those are some of the things that Black youth deal with in the province of Alberta and, as we've seen in interviews that we've conducted across Canada, across Canada, too.