Black Americans and black Canadians often bitterly joke that even though we have a month to celebrate our history, “they” only gave us the shortest month of the year. In fact, the choice of February for the celebration of black history in the United States is intimately connected to its founder, the pioneering black historian Carter G. Woodson.
Woodson, the son of former slaves, was one of the most important figures in the emergence of black history as a respected scholarly endeavor. Woodson was deeply troubled by the lack of black history in U.S. textbooks. He was also concerned that when the stories of blacks were conveyed, it was done so in a manner that reaffirmed the demeaning and infantilizing anti-black stereotypes of the dominant culture. White Americans refused to see blacks and their histories as central to the country’s historical narratives.
In response to these concerns in 1926, Woodson decided that one month should be devoted to celebrating African-descended people’s contributions in the United States. He chose February because the birthdays of two pivotal figures in the history of black America—black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln—fell during this month.
Black History Month is, essentially, an American import into Canada—albeit one that was slow to receive official recognition by our federal government (not until 1995). The histories of blacks in Canada and the United States are quite different, but they are comparable in important ways that make the recognition of this month relevant in the Canadian context.
Blacks in the United States and Canada share a history of racially based enslavement and legally ed anti-black discrimination in the post-emancipation period. It’s also true, however, that in the United States the study of black peoples is much more evolved than here in Canada. The histories of black peoples, for reasons of geography, demography and an exclusionary “whites only” early 20th-century Canadian
immigration policy, are arguably less central here than south of the border.
Nonetheless, there’s a disturbing silence that permeates the histories of black peoples in Canada that’s problematic given the first arrival of black peoples in what is now Canada dates back to the 17th century.
It’s for this reason that Black History Month is important in Canada—to remind ourselves of the multicultural and multiracial origins of our country. Despite the Canadian state’s concerted efforts over most of its history to fashion itself as a white settler colony, this project, or fantasy, was never fully realized.
Blackness in Canada isn’t only a problem that was dropped on the country’s doorstep with the (mainly unwanted) arrival of Caribbean immigration in the late 20th century, but bound up in the country’s origins as a colonial outpost of two empires— and Britain. As slaves, Loyalists, refugees and fugitives, blacks played a pivotal role in shaping Canada’s early history. One cannot fully grasp Canada’s evolution from colony to nation without having some knowledge of the contributions that black people made to it or the challenges they faced fighting to carve out a place for themselves here, stubbornly refusing the dominant culture’s insistence that blackness and Canadianess were mutually exclusive.
Woodson created Black History Month as a way to use history in instrumentalist , as part of the broader civil rights movement of his time. By highlighting black American’s contribution to their nation’s history, Woodson surely hoped this would compel Americans to recognize their full humanity. These fundamental concerns still exist for black Canadians around the issue of their full inclusion into Canadian society.
Black Canadians have yet to be fully recognized as fully human by the dominant culture. True, black Canadians are no longer slaves. We have equal protection under the laws and a whole Human Rights apparatus to address racism’s systemic causes (ironically, done primarily on a case-by-case basis).
Black Canadians, however, still exist under a state of what Ryerson University sociologist Grace Edward Galabuzi has labelled “Economic Apartheid,” characterized by anti-black discrimination in housing, employment and much lower-than-average family incomes. I hope the day comes when a designated month is no longer necessary and looked upon as a quaint historical curiosity. I fear we have a long way to go before that day arrives.
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Barrington Walker is an assistant history professor and diversity advisor to the vice-principal (academic).
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