Black History Month Remarks at UCC
Where are we now? Where do we go from here?
When I was asked to speak here at the close of February, I couldn’t help but think back to the many Black History Month speeches and presentations I’ve seen and heard over the years. With nearly 30 years of material under my belt, and a plethora of incredibly impressive historical figures to choose from, I found myself mentally scrolling through them like Snapchat stories or threads on a Reddit message board.
Harriet Tubman. BAD. ASS. Born a slave. Escaped to freedom. CAME BACK. Carried a hand cannon and stole through the wilderness of the American south to smuggle people through the Underground Railroad. She was a scout for the Union in the Civil War. A spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in an American war, when she led the raid at Combahee Ferry and freed more than 700 slaves. And then, until her dying day, she was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.
Viola Desmond. Entrepreneur and activist. Refused to leave a whites-only area of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Charged with tax evasion for violating segregation — because this is Canada, and so of course even our legalized racism has to be pursued in the most unconfrontational passive-aggressive way possible. And of course, I would be remiss in my Canadian bona fides if I didn’t point out that Ms. Desmond refused to be moved 20 some years before Rosa Parks did in the American South. Because if there’s anything more Canadian than passive aggression, it is sanctimoniously pointing out how much better than America we are!
There are the darker stories of course. The martyrs. Nat Turner, with the sickle, pitch-fork and machete. Executed for armed insurrection against a system of murderers, rapists, sadists and slavers. Medgar Evers. Shot in front of his family in the driveway for the crime of insisting on black humanity. 14 year old Emmett Till. Shot, beaten and mutilated in a lynching death straight out of a horror movie for the crime of making verbal advances on a white woman. A crime he did not commit by the way. As the same woman who accused him finally admitted, more than 50 years later, to making the whole thing up. I see Emmet’s mother, standing in front of the open casket, determined to show the world the horrific violence that was visited on her son. Knowing that the murderers would be found not guilty and live long happy lives, while her 14 year old became compost in the rich southern soil.
I flip through these stories in my mind, and I’m back sitting where you are sitting right now. Wondering to myself, what would I have done if I were there? Would I have been with Dr. King, or Malcolm X? Would I have had the guts to be out there at all? Would I have had the courage of Ruby Bridges, who was the Jackie Robinson of elementary schools? Could I, as a child, have walked to the whites-only school with my head held high every day through crowds of screaming adults, hurling curses and slurs, eggs, spoiled milk and bricks?
I wonder, and as I conduct this mental exercise the wonder turns to discomfort, and then concern, and then slowly a creeping dread. I remembered the nausea that crept over me as I realized that my vote and the votes of 66 million other Americans wouldn’t be enough to stop Sunkist Stalin from becoming the 45th President. Another flash of memory. I was speaking to a brilliant friend of mine. She is doing her PHD in Boston, and she is from Kuwait. Her husband was out of the country when the travel ban was issued. Now she tells me, between the ban and the subsequent ramp-up in racist, illegal profiling at the border, he can’t come back to Boston. And if she leaves to visit him back home, she isn’t certain she’ll be able to return to school. What do I do, she wonders? How long will I have to stay here by myself? Will any of my family be allowed to come see me? When will I be able to go and see them? I think of my friend’s mother who lives in the US. Diagnosed with cancer, and in fear of losing her health care and her life, when Obamacare is axed.
I think of how in the past month, there have been 67 threatening phone calls and bomb threats against Jewish community centres in the US and Canada. How in the US, immigration police are literally kicking down the doors to hospital rooms and dragging terminal cancer patients out of chemo to deport them. How they are storming family homes and apartment blocks, and taking every Latino-looking person to be detained, until their immigration status can be sorted out. How they have the gall to call this protocol, and enforcing the law.
How the leadership of a major Canadian political party is leaning into the racism and xenophobia of the moment and considering making unapologetic racial and Islamophobic bias the law. How in the last election, they advocated a hotline for you to call-in and snitch on your Muslim neighbours and their “Barbaric Cultural Practices”, and were rewarded with 5.6 million votes. How protections for the rights of LGBTQ communities, so recently won, are already coming under fire. I think of black folks — adults and children — being put down like dogs in the streets of America and Canada alike. I think of the first time I was ever harassed by police in Toronto. How I was 14 years old and in Year 2, cutting through the park near Davisville station. How the police car rolled up. How they asked if I was lost. How they didn’t believe I went to UCC. How they made me empty my backpack to prove I did. How I held my breath in abject terror and how my chest felt like it was going to burst. How my hands shook.
I think of these things, and the safe distance from which I used to consider Black History Month evaporates. I realize that the way we process our history, is so often, wrong. That the Civil Rights movement is not over. That we did not “win” these rights in the sense that First Hockey wins games. That so many of the things we thought were distant historical events actually happened not very long ago.
I remember that little Ruby Bridges who so bravely battled school segregation in those dusty black and white photos is still alive. That she is only my mother’s age. That the white woman whose lies got Emmett Till brutally lynched and dumped in a swamp is still alive. That there are survivors of residential schools still living all across Canada. That dozens of people who survived the anti-gay Stonewall raids and the subsequent righteous riots are still alive today. I remember that the Polytechnique massacre was barely 25 years ago. That George Takei spent 3 of his childhood years in a World War II internment camp for people of Japanese heritage and that he too is still alive. I remember that before he died last year, Holocaust survivor, author and humanitarian Elie Wiesel pointed out that there are still approximately 100,000 Holocaust survivors living right now.
And as I remember I realize something I’d never quite gleaned from Black History Month before. That the history of “progress” is not a tale of the evil dragon slain long long ago, but an invitation to join the fight. That our heroes are, quite literally, our peers. That they are waiting in the foxhole, and that we must choose to be their reinforcements.
And instead of wondering, “What would I have done if I were there?” I find myself asking, “What am I going to do today?”
