The UN has declared 2015-24 the International Decade For People Of African Descent. It’s true. Our South Korean soldier in the struggle, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, wrote that “we must remember that people of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education.”
Not sure if I’m missing something here, but in the UN’s lengthy analysis, I can’t find any reference to how a well-executed reparations plan could make it rain money over here in Toronto.
Slavery was actively practised here, but black wealth and success are among Canada’s best-kept secrets. One reason for this might be that our media seem thoroughly invested in reporting on the ways Toronto is failing us – perhaps as part of a black-misery-porn exercise. (Reportage on black squalor and poverty sells more copies.) But if Toronto is failing us, what are we doing to change that?
I wonder if the creators of content and the consumers who lap this stuff up even care about what the other half – or even our “Talented Tenth” – of well-to-do African Canadians are up to. Are black folk in the 6 moving on up like The Jeffersons’ George and Weezy? Have we started at the bottom but now we’re here? Is there a Carlton Banks in Forest Hill doing that Tom Jones dance, and is his fancy footwork being ignored?
Black success goes largely undocumented and under-acknowledged in mainstream Toronto, but I sometimes get invited to community events where black boomers boast that their children will be debutantes at cotillion balls and are being accepted at high-priced private academies. These gatherings feel like meetings of a secret society that many blacks and non-blacks don’t know exist.
My own awakening to this reality began when I was summoned in 2012 to participate in a few Jamaica 50th-anniversary events to commemorate my parents’ birth country’s independence from the shackles of the Queen. It was at these gatherings that I found out there are all kinds of Jamaican millionaires around: IT entrepreneurs, hockey players, neurosurgeons, CEOs and CFOs, real estate moguls. And they are all proudly Yardie and living in Toronto.
When Harvard-educated Toronto (by way of Nigeria) millionaire Akanimo Udofia casually plopped down a cool $150K to support Danzig public housing residents, my first thought was “Where have these people been hiding – under a rock in the Scarborough Bluffs? Do I have to wait for more independence anniversaries to see more of this community economic largesse?
I’m most certainly not just waxing about those earning big coin in entertainment and athletics. Yeah, Drake and his crew of upstarts, including Grammy-nominated African-Canadian producers T-Minus and Boi-1da, are starting to rake it in like dead presidents. What I’m homing in on is that set who don’t fit the stereotypes of what it is to be black, Canadian and successful.
And I can draw on a whack of examples. I was at a press conference just before Christmas where Richard Branson announced the launch of a national-impact venture fund, and an exceptionally successful African Canadian who was born in Jamaica was in the room. A few blackish, youngish Rhodes Scholars living in Toronto are my Facebook friends – young, hip real estate moguls working on massive development projects with one of the city’s largest universities. Last week in one of my classes, where we were reading a book that centres around a female poet who comes out in Jamaica, I spent half the session having the students unlearn what they thought they knew about Jamaicans in Toronto.
Is the distribution of wealth in Toronto’s black community uneven? Hell, yeah.
The rate of poverty among blacks remains proportionately higher than among whites, and when we look at income gap variation between races, we see that men who identify as black earn 75.6¢ for every $1 earned by non-racialized men, according to Sheila Block and Grace-Edward Galabuzi’s Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market. For black women vs. non-racialize men, that number is 56.5¢.
But on the flip side, who do you think that ROM Crystal thingy is named after? How about the Ryerson School of Continuing Studies? The first is named after Jamaican billionaire Michael Lee-Chin, the second after recently departed fellow Jamaican (RIP) billionaire shot-caller G. Raymond Chang.
My worry is that future generations may not learn about our vast contributions to Toronto or about the existence of Fresh Princes of Bel-Air in Yorkville. (It’s true, there are blacks not named Drake hanging out in Forest Hill one actually mentored me – so I’ve seen the light!)
During this glorious Black History Month, as we dust off our collective dashikis, proudly hang up our Marcus Garvey and Marie-Joseph Angélique posters and tune in to those same civil rights march videos thrust into our faces annually by cultural outsiders, let’s remind ourselves that it’s also okay to tune in to mildly entertaining black TV fare like Empire, a new show about an upwardly mobile family fraught with The Young And The Restless-style drama, alongside Aminata’s journey in The Book Of Negroes.
While many of our ancestors came to the West via the Middle Passage and had to endure, as many still do, stark daily reminders of racism, we are succeeding on an uneven playing field. That story needs to be recorded and celebrated.
I’m still trying to convince my TV executive friend to cook up a Real Housewives Of Brampton pilot the script is already in my head.
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