Earlier this year, the federal government announced that this Black History Month (BHM)’s theme would be “Black Excellence: A Heritage to Celebrate; a Future to Build.” Almost thirty years after its adoption, BHM today signals a response to persistent problems in Canadian society—anti-Blackness as old as the country itself and the histories of enslavement, neo-colonial exploitation, and carcerality that devise the present. BHM comes to us today from decades-long collaborations of historians, organizers, activists, and politicians, including the first Black Canadian woman Member of Parliament (MP) Jean Augustine, who saw our historic contributions as valuable to the national story. Yet, when we consider the precarious history of Black Canadian life, we must recognize that many of these contributions were coercive—and we are still here.
Conceptualizations of Black excellence reorder the violence that Canada continues to perpetuate. As a counter-insurgent, elitist formulation, the term segments our people and alienates those who defy the norm. It is to say that despite history, structural racism, and ongoing oppression, you must be excellent and palatable to the majority. Why should our gifts be recuperated by this nation? Has Canada not extracted enough from us? This theme erases not only longer freedom movements, but the everyday acts of resistance and refusal that Black Canadians practice; what we do quietly, for ourselves, and for our peace.
Our presence on these stolen lands marks survival, struggle, and strategy against state intervention. The enslaved and formerly enslaved people who came North knew that in the empire, freedom is always dangerous and often conditional. The sleeping car porters and domestic workers who migrated in the nineteenth and twentieth century faced abuse, exploitation, and dehumanization. In the twentieth century, African Americans fled to the Prairies seeking a better life and during the era of decolonization, many Caribbean young people came to Canada in search of education, opportunity, and cross-border solidarity. From the 1950s and 1960s, McGill and Concordia (formerly Sir George Williams students) alums ignited a vibrant protest culture that Black students in Montreal inherit to this day. My grandfather was one of these students, and is the reason I chose to attend McGill—to complete what he and his circle started.
This century, when the police killed Black and Indigenous peoples—unlawfully imprisoned Montrealer Nicous D’Andre Spring, teenaged Eishia Hudson, Black-Ukrainian-Indigenous Torontonian Regis Korchinski Paquet, Black Bramptonian D’Andre Campbell, Tla-o-qui-aht woman Chantel Moore, Somali-Canadian Abdirahman Abdi, and Montrealer Bony Jean-Pierre, and far too many others—we organized, gathered together, and demanded life. In 2020, my white-majority hometown’s Black community mobilized, and we said the unspeakable: No justice, no peace, abolish the police. Say their names again.
Black excellence is not a fitting theme for what this month should be for our community. Almost four years after the murder of George Floyd, the global reckoning against policing, imperialism, and white supremacy led simply to discursive shifts rather than material transformation. Our Prime Minister paused for 21 seconds. MPs and political hopefuls came to protests. Year by year, police budgets in Montreal and Toronto increased drastically. “Abolish” became “defund,” which became “reform,” which became “fund,” which became “expand.” Instead of hearing our calls, officials once again sought to reconfigure anti-Blackness into forms acceptable to our uneven citizenship. What did it mean in 2020 that we could no longer accept Canada’s racism, yet policies across healthcare, education, and justice still marginalize us?
I have spent my last four years at McGill working through this paradigm. This generation entered our undergraduate degrees knowing our namesake James McGill’s history of enslaving Black and Indigenous people—thanks to Professor Charmaine Nelson, who left McGill due to institutional racism, and her students, and the Black Students Network that circulated this history in popular media. Black students, staff, and faculty continue to speak out—in our ongoing revolt, the McGill we came to cannot be the same university that we will leave.
In an era of firsts, transformation and liberation can end this hyperfocus on the excellent individual. Beyond the federal government’s imposition, this month must be about recommitting ourselves to our ancestors’ radical imaginations for a free world. Refuse excellence. Dream otherwise, of an anticolonial future.
