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Published Sunday, December 23, 2007
2007 - TORONTO, Canada
By Camille Hannays-King
Upon reviewing the recent Toronto District School Board census, I was struck by a discrepancy in the numbers of black students in elementary and high school.
According to the census, 15 per cent of students in Grades 7 and 8 are black, but only 12 per cent of students in Grades 9 to 12. As I read the very comprehensive report, the absence of those 3 percentage points – or 20 per cent – of black students kept nagging at me. I kept asking myself what could have happened to them. Where are they today?
I realized that though silence and omissions don't tell us everything, if we pay attention, they can illuminate the existence of problems.
The absence of those 20 per cent of students has stayed with me. Perhaps it is because I am uncomfortable with inconsistency, but I suspect it has more to do with the current debate around the proposal to establish "black-focused" or "Africentric" alternative schools.
I must preface my thoughts by stating that I do not understand, nor can I fully envision, what black-focused or Africentric education looks like, or would entail. Unfortunately, what has not been elucidated to the general public by the proponents of these schools is the meaning of these two terms.
Though it appears that there is no clear agreement on their definition, these terms are emotionally charged. Rather than clearly illustrating what is being proposed, they have obscured it, and have created unease, tension and polarization.
Unfortunately, too many of us have deeply internalized societal messages about the negativity of blackness. Along with this comes a pervading assumption, albeit never publicly stated, that if it is black, it is – and will be – inferior.
Therefore, the very notion of a black alternative school engenders foreboding, fear and anxiety.
Although I fully support the initiative to address the issues of failure and disengagement of black students within the current system, I wish what had been proposed were alternative schools for the arts, and for science and technology, that were based in and guided by Africentric pedagogy. I think this would have not only been more palatable, but it also would have provided a common starting point for discussion and planning.
I support Africentric pedagogy because I believe it would help children to locate themselves in text where they so often are dislocated, minimized, marginalized and absent. It is essential that students see themselves front and centre within the reference points. It is of utmost importance that black students are taught to critically assess and analyze the predominant text and discourse so that they can find a place for themselves in it that is humanizing and empowering.
Sadly, although racism, whether subtle, systemic or benign, is an indisputable fact of Canadian life, it remains to a significant extent a taboo subject.
There is a silencing that is powerful and psychologically debilitating. No words can ever fully capture the soul-haunting, despair-producing impact of racism on the psyche of an individual or, equally destructive, the absence of oneself in text and discourse.
All of us, regardless of race, should ask what happens to a child when there is no congruence between who they feel they are and how they are portrayed in literature and history, or more insidiously, when they are just not there.
I don't know what happened to the 20 per cent of black students who are missing from the TDSB census, but my sense is that they became disenchanted and disengaged from the learning process because they could not find a place for themselves.
A native of Guyana, Camille Hannays-King is a psychological and academic counsellor at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. She is a former member of the Star's Community Editorial Board.
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