Inclusion Isn’t Enough: Reflecting on Black History Month, Antiracism, and the Long Emancipation
Mark T. S. Currie
With the ending of each Black History Month (BHM), after seeing all sorts of social media posts, news stories, and organized events about celebrating Black history, I wonder how many educators just ticked the box of having done their duty for teaching Black histories, and how many really take up the mantle of making Black histories core to their classroom curriculum. For the latter, my question then becomes about how they teach these histories. Black History Month ended a few weeks ago, but I write about it now because in these few weeks, it becomes apparent how quickly the topic of Black history fades from classrooms when it’s not the flavour of the month. I’m not going to engage here with the arguments that there shouldn’t be a BHM and Black histories should be taught all year as part of the core curriculum, or the frustrations that of all the months of the year, BHM is given the month with the fewest number of days. Of course Black histories should be taught all year long, and BHM being in February does appear a bit tokenistic to say the least. But just for now, I’ll set these points aside as I think about the act of teaching Black History and the antiracist effects of different approaches to it.
As a PhD candidate in Education, I have been and am a teaching assistant, guest lecturer, and part-time professor (a title used by the university), and I approach all roles with an antiracist pedagogy, so I commonly address racisms of the past and present in relation to teaching practices. When I ask teacher candidates why we have Black History Month and why we should teach Black history, responses are most often iterations of, “because Black histories have been excluded for so long,” and “Black people contributed to Canada’s history, so they should be included.” These are better responses than a passive shoulder shrug or a “because that’s what my school’s doing.” Even without being taught Black histories in their own student experience, it seems that an increasing number of future educators recognize that Black histories in the official curriculum are minimized if not outright excluded. And if racisms are about exclusions then it’s understandable that the teacher candidates would see the counter to exclusion to be inclusion. However, it’s this idea of “they should be included” that often gets me thinking and that I recently started linking to Rinaldo Walcott’s (2021) description of what he calls the long emancipation.
In his soon-to-be-released book, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom, Rinaldo Walcott (2021) states in the introduction that “…emancipation [of enslaved Black bodies] is a legal process and term that [he] will argue marks continued unfreedom, not the freedom it supposedly ushered in” (p. 1, emphasis in original). He adds that
one must note that at every moment Black peoples have sought, for themselves, to assert what freedom might mean and look like, those desires and acts toward freedom have been violently interdicted. It is this ongoing interdiction of a potential Black freedom that I have termed the long emancipation. (p. 1).
The introduction chapter was released as what I’ll call a teaser, and I’m looking forward to reading the complete book, but regardless of what the rest of the book brings, these excerpts continue to roll around in my mind, especially as I think about and reflect on teaching during Black History Month (BHM) or teaching Black histories at any time. In these brief statements, Walcott shows emancipation to be a shift in the societal positioning of Black bodies — not legally enslaved — but not a restructuring of power that maintains Whiteness as the norm. So, what, if anything, is changing in power dynamics when something is included? Who has the power to decide what is included and how it will be included? The solution of inclusion is not as simple as we would all like it to be. The antiracist effects of the add’n’stir approach do exist but are limited, and mere inclusion of Black histories is not enough.
Perhaps because of popular media or the fact that Black History Month was not officially recognized in Canada until 1995, there seems to be a tendency for many (not all) Canadian educators to first highlight the Black people and histories of the United States. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Movement, and the horrific past of American slavery, become the iconic people and topics representing Black history everywhere. Indeed, these histories are of great importance in our educational repertoire, not to mention their influences on society at large, but placing the focus on only them risks conveying the message that there is no Black history in Canada. Some Canadian educators recognize this American-centric approach and attempt to put the Canadian context at the centre.
In many classrooms where Canada is the main setting of historic narratives, Black history in Canada is presented in part as Black Loyalists coming to British-governed Canada during the American Revolutionary War and showing allegiance to Britain in exchange for emancipation from enslavement. Often, Black history in Canada is shown as Freedom Seekers arriving in Canada via the Underground Railroad after escaping enslavement in the United States. Sometimes, there will be mention of the 200-year existence of slavery in what is now Canada, and the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery and then the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act, which ended legal slavery in British colonies and territories. There might be some educators who include the 1850 Common Schools Act that allowed for separate “Coloured Schools” to be deemed acceptable and even necessary. Again, all of this should be learned and considered in relation to our present-day society, but also again, the lens of this approach positions Black people in Canada in particular and singular ways. Through these histories alone, Black people are shown as only victims of atrocities, and Canada, even with the admission of allowing slavery and segregated schools, is framed largely as a white country that was the saviour of Black freedom.
As some teacher candidates shared with me recently, they see some educators attempting to address histories of slavery and racism but also expanding from the narrow image of Black people as resilient victims. They see efforts of broadening efforts to teach narratives of Black contribution and excellence in Canada. There are indeed many examples of Black excellence from the past and today, both of which go underrepresented. Educators might teach the story of Mary Ann Shadd Cary as the first Black woman to be a newspaper publisher in Canada in the 1850s. They may also present Albert Jackson as the first Black postal carrier in Canada in 1882. For more contemporary content, lessons might include the Honourable Jean Augustine, elected in 1993 as the first Black female Member of Parliament in Canada’s federal government, and who championed Black History Month being officially recognized by the Canadian government in 1995. Much like the narratives of Black resilience, these examples of Black excellence should be taught, and teaching both types of histories does add to the dynamism of Black histories in Canada, but the antiracist effects still come back to how these histories are taught.
In both of the approaches shown above, there can be antiracist effects in that the exclusion of Black histories and knowledges are disrupted, but white supremacy remains. Whether teaching histories of Black resilience in Canada or of Black excellence in Canada, the common element is that the fixity of Canada — a country built and maintained through colonization — goes untroubled. Mere inclusion means that Black histories are being added into systems and spaces dominated by Whiteness, as they’re framed as “free” contributors to developing the country, a colonial project that continues to exclude Indigenous bodies from their traditional territories. When white supremacy remains undisturbed, there is no freedom for BIPOC bodies, and they remain in what Walcott calls the long emancipation. Educators must move beyond inclusion and teach in ways to disrupt white, colonial dominance.
