The suffocating experience of being black in Canada

Anthony Morgan on the Black experience:

As we enter early adulthood we are collectively realizing that, despite what many think, blacks in Canada cannot speak about their lived experience and the ongoing injustices they face without being met with silencing indifference, dismissal and sometimes hostility.

While tolerating degrees of anti-black racism may have been a successful survival strategy for a previous generation of blacks in Canada, our generation has never known a Canada without a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or provincial human rights codes that enshrine our universal entitlement to equality as Canadians.

As such, we find it impossible to accept today’s black Canadian experience: extreme marginalization and disadvantage; restricted access to housing; racial profiling in policing, security, education and child welfare; criminalization; over-representation in the criminal justice system; high levels of unemployment; and disproportionate and extreme poverty.

This is part of the reason why when you tell the upcoming generation of social justice-oriented black Canadians to “Go back to your home country if you don’t like it here,” we stare at you with blank confusion, if not in angry defiance. Canada is the only home country we’ve ever known.

Our righteous resistance is not an expression of hatred for Canada, cops, or Confederate flags. It’s a thrashing attempt to break the stranglehold of Canadian-brand anti-black racism and wake our society up to an irrefutable fact:

We have the right to be treated equally as human beings, but also as Canadians. And as such, we resist suffocating racism because we are true black strong and free.

The suffocating experience of being black in Canada | Toronto Star.