Afrophobia in Canadian Institutions: Youth Marginality, System Professionals and Systemic Barriers

Abstract

Until 1962, Canada was legally a Eurocentric racial state. After abandoning state-sanctioned racism in 1967, politicians soon realized that institutional entrenchment of racism would need more than laws-based anti-racism. Today, institutional racism, however, remains entrenched in Canadian institutions despite various mitigating processes by all levels of governments since the 1970s. In this qualitative paper, we analyze the marginalizing effects of system anti-Black racism and the dissonances between strategies and attitudes of system professionals and African-Canadian grassroots youth workers. From our findings, we conclude that effective youth workers prioritize behavior-in-time (experience-based) over behavior-in-discourse (text-based) in service provision.

Keywords:

• African-Canadians
• Afrophobia
• anti-Black racism
• CRT
• marginality
• mentorship
• systemic racism
• youth

Notes

1 We use African-Canadian and European-Canadian to avoid using colonial and slave era identities uch as “white,” “black,” “brown,” etc. African-Canadian refers to diaspora and continental African living in Canada. A Jamaican-Canadian of African descent, a Nigerian-Canadian and an African Nova Scotian, are African-Canadians in this context. As our decolonial ideal, we are gravitating toward spiritual identities as opposed to racialized identities (see Henry, 2005, p. 4).

2 We use “system professional” to easily refer to professionals in public institutions such as healthcare, social services, government, and law enforcement.

3 Authors 2 and 3, as professionals who continue to work with the youth, have experienced, and continue to experience, this invisibilization as community leaders. Author 3, for instance, has been struggling with an agency intending to own the name of a program he created instead of making use of his ability to lead and create programs. This is also a Canadian problem in most sectors. In their Report for YouthRex, Anucha et al. (2017) note that, “Community members identified the lack of representation of Black people within leadership roles in society as one of the consequences of systemic racism in education and the labour market” (p. 26). Lopez (2020) and Trought-Pitters (2018) have also noted the problem with African-Canadian representation in educational leadership. Cultural and experiential perspectives necessary in combating Afrophobia therefore remain lacking.

4 We would like to thank one of the reviewers for this suggestion. While the youth use Du Bois’s double conscious as a survival strategy, it can also be an empowering tool.

5 “Devushkinization”: Garang (2022) took this helpful concept from Arthur W. Frank (2005), who took it from Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis from Makar Devushkin, a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Poor Folk. Poor Folk was inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s short story, Overcoat so Devushkin noticed himself in the main character in Poor Folk, Akaky Akakievich. Devushkin was not impressed by what he perceived to be his description: “He felt himself to be hopelessly predetermined and finished off, as if he were already quite dead, yet at the same time he sensed the falseness of such an approach” (Bakhtin, cited in Frank, 2005, p. 965). This totalizing approach to people’s characters is what Frank has described as “devushkinization.” This is the description of people in a manner that seems to suggest that nothing is left to be known about the person so described after the description.

6 Also see Parents of Black Students’ Report (2022) for more case studies and other examples of Afrophobia in Ontario schools.