Black immigration from the US almost ceased. With a horse team, axe, bucksaw, an axe and grubhole and clear out a bunch of land. You can just picture it, eh? Mud, water and frogs. Then the kids come and try and poke fun. Because most everybody was black during that time. Shiloh Baptist Church, one of the oldest black Canadian churches in Canada, was established in Edmonton in During the Great Depression and World War II, more black families from rural communities like Amber Valley and Wildwood moved to the city of Edmonton for greater economic opportunity and found refuge within the church community.
Today, Shiloh still plays an important role for the descendants of those early settlers and new waves of immigrants from the Caribbean, East Africa and other parts of the world. When colour became an issue was when our cousins came up from the States. What about our culture? Over the years, civil and political unrest in some parts of Africa have sparked new waves of migration to Canada.
Black history matters to everyone – it’s a crucial part of our nations’ story
Although the cities of Toronto and Montreal are still the first place of entry for most immigrants, many are choosing to move out west to Edmonton in search of better opportunities and better lives. I was told by my counsellor that I would never make it to university. And she wanted me to go into a different route in life. There are some people who will always see her as an outsider.
So I think she needs to know that and she needs to be able to defend that. So being black is one of the aspects that I can give to the country, that I can express myself in. And Canada allows you to do that, with multiculturalism. Throughout the 19th and early 20th Century, African Americans migrated to Canada to escape slavery and segregation. Those early families have been joined over the years by immigrants from places like Jamaica, Somalia, Ghana and Nigeria seeking a new life in one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
Nationwide, there are over a million black Canadians - a diverse group that make up 3. I used to get made fun of for my accent, how I dressed, the food that I brought to school.
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They used to call me monkey, I used to get told to go back to Africa. And that was a really vile understanding of my blackness because it was the most disturbing representation of blackness. And I really internalised a lot of those projections of blackness. I was surrounded by a blackness that was so self-assured, that was so proud, that repped-and-set, that moved with so much confidence and so much pride.
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Because the project of Canada does not include blackness, it erases blackness from its cultural landscape, from its political landscape, from its social landscape. The policy known in the city as carding , whereby police stop people without suspicion of a crime to collect their information, has been a long-standing irritant between the community and police. Statistics have revealed that black citizens are disproportionately stopped. The group, which is known for sometimes using confrontational tactics , came to prominence following a series of protests over the death of Andrew Loku, 45, who was shot and killed by police in July So to fit in and be in your own skin was a real struggle for me.
And we used to play dominoes for hours. And once you learn how to play dominoes, that sort of assimilates you to everything, how to talk or whatever the case may be. I can play dominoes and listen to reggae or I can go and listen to a lecture. Black people have been living in Canada for centuries, and are one of the fastest growing demographics in the country today. Inspired by the many black writers and speakers who have begun to spark a broader discussion about race in Canada, the BBC partnered with photographer Jalani Morgan to travel to three Canadian cities and capture a slice of the black experience today.
Kardeisha grew up in North Preston, Nova Scotia, one of Canada's oldest black communities, where her family has lived for generations. The object is the lid to a can of Royal Crown pomade. For others it may recall notions of a royal crown, an important code word, with multiple meanings in black culture. Shani Peters recently did an exhibition at GalleryDAAS celebrating the crown as a potent image in black cultural history. So, in these diptychs, the text and image together constitute the work? Now the kitchen is both a physical structure, the room where you get your hair styled; and in black culture, a code word for the nape of the neck, where the hair is nappiest.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. In many cultures, the nape of the neck is a notorious erogenous zone, where things get, you know… heated up. Concealing it and revealing it can be quite a big deal. Another is titled One Drop Period. On one hand, One Drop references the legal code asserting that one drop of sub-Saharan African blood classified you as black. But it also speaks at the level of scale, of measurement — how things become significantly this or that.
One drop, floating in a sea of whiteness. Though the drop is red, it relates to the notion of blackness. And that drop is not just a drop, it's a punctuation mark, a period, the definitive end to a statement. It refers us back also to the history of concrete poetry, too; words as material things exemplifying the very concepts they express.
A period, as you say, is a stopping point. How does this drop function then as a period? The period, made by letterpress type, is very carefully inked and then embossed into the paper. It is literally a period, yet disconnected from the letterforms on the opposite page. A period signifies the end of something, a boundary. But if we think about codes of blackness, is there a definitive stopping point or boundary? Each panel, regarded in isolation, is a stopping point; but together they are moments within a spectrum.
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When you move from black to red, you establish the range of browns in between. This is a subtle reference to skin color: In that scale of black and red you establish, white comes in — or doesn't come in — as a third element. It's excluded, in a way. Yes, visually as we move along the spectrum, black becomes brown, brown becomes red, and metaphorically red becomes blood — a measure of one's whiteness.
So there is no white in the panels, but it's implied, unspoken, floats like a ghost at the edges of the piece. What's visible and invisible? What's spoken and unspoken? Two human-scaled portraits of young black men.
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If you look at the faces directly, they're simply portraits. But look at them from an angle, askew, and text becomes visible. These Presence of Absence portraits address invisibility, being at once here and not here, physically present but not perceived — like Ellison's Invisible Man. To view the text, you must step to the side. Sidestepping is a particularly human gesture we make when we're assessing a situation, especially one perceived as dangerous. These text-portraits implicate you, the viewer, obliging you to reflect on your own predispositions and automatic assumptions. So blackness, as you've been addressing it, is a kind of code, or a set of codes.
There are codes of behavior, codes of thought, codes of appearance, gesture, even codes of sound, which are enacted and are readable. There are cultural codes, understandings expressed in gesture, speech patterns, rhythms.
Almost any black person can say it, except a black cop. It never should be spoken in mixed company. Certain brown people can say it but others can't. As black people, we use codes to regulate and measure ourselves, to define people, to regard our racialized selves. Two sides of the same coin. I remember the first time I was made aware of my blackness, as a young child. It was at a swimming pool. I was so happy. The water was blue, and I climbed up onto the diving board and leaped off. You know, the pure joy that only a kid can have in a pool on a hot summer's day.
That was the first time I became aware of an outside perception of my blackness. Nobody ever talks about those times. Nobody ever talks about the first time you realized that you were white or the first time you realized you were a girl and not a boy. Those are profound psychological experiences. Pool expresses my first realization that others see me differently than who I am. But how do we not reckon with it? And then, how do we? Again, who can and can't use it? But black, I tell them, is a glorious term — use it!
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It harbors an entire spectrum of meanings, extending way beyond that… unspeakable negation of white. In a way, black is the ever-increasing sum of all its uses, ongoing from moment to moment. Your work seems to address this spectral aspect of black, its multiplicity. So these pure blacks and reds come to imbue each other, multiplying possibilities way beyond Rembrandt's twenty-four blacks. That's where it really begins for me. My hope is that the Color Code exhibition creates a space for people to consider the blessings and baggage of heritage and skin color.
I'm asking them to think critically about race, and about the structures — social, political, educational, environmental, etc. And I want people to think creatively about how to shift this dynamic.