by Guest on February 1st, 2021 at 12:47 PM 1 of 1 2 of 1
By Prof. Handel Kashope Wright
Growing up in my native Sierra Leone I had not paid much attention to being Black, since just about everyone else was. It wasn’t until I arrived in Canada in the late 1980s for graduate studies in the seemingly ubiquitous whiteness of Windsor, Ontario, that I was made to focus on race, acknowledge my own Blackness, take on Black identity and realize that, in the eyes of others, I was seen first and sometimes only as Black.
Since then, I’ve lived as a Black man in race-focused Canada and USA, including British Columbia where I’ve spent the past 15 years. What I’ve come to realize is this: it’s hard being Black in Canada; it’s even harder being Black in B.C. As a Black professor, for example, I’m supposed to be exceptional. On the one hand, this is quite true given racist overt and covert societal messages that Black kids are fed in Canada about what they can attain in terms o