I don't know what internet access I'll have for the next 7 days
I don't tell my story to fish for sympathy
Or seeking some glory recounting tragedy
It's just reality as lived day to day
And much like parity someone has gotta pay
So as I make my way I recount past fury
Surviving past forray I don't want to bury
I'm right to be angry the longer this pain stays
Set fire to my diary so it's not called a phase
I want these words maintained not to forget old pains
My soul's forever stained but I've let go of shames
I will now hold your gaze for what will seem like ages
My head's out of its haze, my heart's out of it daze
Love's not found in cages nor within tricked mazes
So I'll write for pages to release my rages
And when I get praises I'll want a few raises
Won't alter my phrases in search of more stages
-Acquired Taste
The Europeans told the USians they didn't hate
No history of slavery meant a different fate
But what about the Nazi? The 40's Germany?
The mass scale genocide didn't commit suicide
Still an Irish lady insisted her worry
Wasn't black poverty but Catholic casualty
Religion not skin was leading to sin
Beside POC wasn't her vocabulary
Inside the debate coming in a bit late
A WOC went irate cause her ego's great
Behind comp screens people got obscene and girate
So the UK mate wanted mods to compensate
Rightfully she was angry at bigotry
So this "ally" did try to educate the sly
Change the rules for the fools who think they're so cool
People assume the worse, egos presume and burst
Public apology for other's tyranny
Admit willingly that I'm human, I'm sorry
Lay out the history of present agony
Explain atrocity, silenced honesty
Have it all go to shit, be thrown into a pit
Chewed up before they spit "it" out since he won't quit
And now it's too late, he's embodied the hate
That society throws at those with his fate
-Acquired Taste
The path to and in black Canada is well worn if unwieldy, and knowledge of it has been subjugated. This coterminous existence and erasure is replicated within two dominant conceptions about blackness in Canada, which would seem to contradict one another: One is that there are no black people there, and the other is that Canada was the terminus of the underground railroad. And it was the terminus only in a manner of speaking, as most escaped slaves remained in the United States, and for those who did opt for Canada the term "underground" was a misnomer in an abolitionist context in which escape routes were unhidden and public.
[...]
Canada has officially institutionalized a policy of "multiculturalism," yet despite that, racism sets the terms of Canadian existence. The journalist Margaret Cannon has applied the term "invisible empire" to the vagaries of Canadian racism, hailing at once its strength and formidability but also its subtlety, its "invisibility" as it were. Racism in Canada is pervasive, empire-like in its reach and power yet prone to disavowal, and this "invisible empire" has, in the past and present, displaced, othered, and discriminated against black Canadians.
[...]Moreover, while Canada may have come to oppose slavery, it did not do so in an antiracist context. Escaped slaves were welcomed into Canada not just for benevolence's sake but as cheap labor. After slaves were emancipated in the United States, Canadians encouraged blacks to relocate there. And after emancipation many blacks voluntarily left Canada for the United States, not only to return to kin but also to flee Canadian racism.
[...]Canada, as a nation, can be considered something of an "invisible empire," as a huge geographical space. A nation with privilege, it is an uncentral yet certifiable member of the overdeveloped world. A case could also be made for the applicability of the term "invisible empire" to the erasure of Canada within discourses on blackness. Again, the terms "invisible" and "empire," taken together, eschew victimology, insist on simultaneous privilege and disadvantage, and observe patterns of exclusion and their consequences.
To exemplify this, I turn to another familiar instance of black border-crossing between the United States and Canada. The first meeting of W.E.B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement, which later became the NAACP, was held in Fort Erie, Ontario in 1905. The symbolic significance of the venue in light of Canada's role in African American history has been widely acknowledged. The meeting was, however, supposed to be held in Buffalo and was only relocated to Fort Erie as a result of exclusion from accommodations, a form of American racial discrimination that underscored the importance of developing this sort of civil rights organization. At the same time, as scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott and the late Robin Winks have pointed out, black Canadians were denied the opportunity to participate. As Walcott puts it: "the fact that many of the 'Canadian' blacks who would have gladly participated in the inaugural meeting were born in America, or were immediate descendants of African American slaves who had escaped to Canada, makes this exclusion interesting" (1997: 19).
[...]
For instance, because the participants in the Niagara Movement were fighting a closure of ranks by white Americans, one might expect their own political project to be more, rather than less, inclusive. And again, those black Canadians who were denied the opportunity to join the Niagara Movement were connected to African America by way of geographical origins as well as cultural and political affinities. That these Canadians blacks had direct ties to black America means theirs was a transnational subjectivity, one with multiple reference points one that exceeded national borders. THe disavowal of transnational overlap implied by the moment of black Canadian exclusion from an African American political project, even as Canada was being touted as a symbolic site of freedom for African Americans, is revealing. IT points to the inadvertent ways that hierarchies and patterns of exclusion are reinscribed within counterhegemonic projects, the ways that discourses and political agendas sometimes unwittingly reify that which they oppose.
[...]
While blacks are dispersed transnationally, there is a certain centrality, as some scholars have observed, of African American sign production to global black standards. This is primarily a function of globalization and American imperialism, and in noting this global prominence, I mean not to apportion blame, guilt, or innocence, nor to oversimplify what are obviously complex matters. First of all, African American sign production is far from uniform. American definitions of blackness are, and have always been, disparate and debated. Not only is U.S. black subjectivity contested terrain, but it is differently rendered across space and time.
[...]By extension, blacks outside of the United States are often on some level in contention with black America, whether they wish it or not. As many have observed, black subjects globally are affected by African American poiltical and civil rights struggles, as well as by other widely circulating African American discursive technologies and cultural forms, such as literature, scholarship, music, dance, fashion, and so on. This is especially the case in nearby Canada even though Canada is almost always overlooked within the writings that make this type of argument.
A number of popular sayings in Canada speak to the impact of the United States. One is "When the United States sneezes, Canada catches pneumonia." Another talks about what it is like to sleep next to an elephant. This suggests a significance of U.S. affairs to Canadians, a sense of contingency that is not mutual. Similarly, but also differently, black Canada is in contention with black America - in ways generally more apparent for those north of the border. THe fact that these categories overlap as a result of proximity, porous borders, and historical ties is one reason. This observation is meant also as a qualification that my employment of terms such as "black Canada" and "black America" is strategic and mindful of hybridity, interstitiality, and overlap.
[...]
Canada's heritage project, its "multiculturalism," as it is sometimes called pejoratively, espouses color blindness and yet constitutes itself as the "great white north." What arises, then, is a brand of disavowed racism, in which black people are perceived as "cultural" rather than "racial" others. This then translates into blacks often being treated as literal foreigners, aliens within Canada's national boundaries. "Where are you from?" or "what island are you from?" are questions often encountered by Canadian blacks, who may themselves make such inquiries of other blacks. It is significant that the majority of black Canadians claim as part of their legacy voluntary migration during the post-World War II era, but it is also the case that Canada traces its black presence to the early 1600s. Black people were not new to the Canadian scene, contrary to popular Canadian belief.
[...]Blackness is seen as American, while Canada's foremost national bond, according to countless polls, is a collective sense of self as un-American. When the most notorious "invisible empire," the Ku Klux Klan, was established in Canada in the 1920s, anti-Americanness was part of its platform.
[...]
And yet, this same multiculturalism fosters perceptions of blacks as having non-Canadian origins, a form of displacement, alienation, and expatriation (or repatriation) from the imagined community that is Canada. In the United States this type of association is uncommon for blacks and more common for, say, Asian Americans, who are often treated as recent immigrants, for instance, being complimented on their English, even if their Americanness extends back many generations.
[...]
It is the same logic that has prompted some to note that blackness, unqualified, is often coded as American. The anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot, for instance, conjectures that "the U.S. monopoly on both blackness and racism [is] itself a racist plot" (1995: 71). The politics of place, the issue of geopolitics, is every bit as consequential an aspect of identity as race, class, gender, and sexuality.
[...]
My point here is not merely about the politics of inclusion. Rinaldo Walcott says it well when he insists that it is enough that "black Canadas exist and will continue to do so" (1997: 17). But it is worth noting that the consequential fallout for those transnational black subjects inside and outside the American context who become black "others," inauthentic and inappropriate blacks, in the wake of circulating ideologies of African Americanness that unintentionally set a standard for blackness locally and globally. Canadians, for example, read black American discourses to the same extent that Americans do, a result of American primacy in publishing and other mechanisms of knowledge dissemination. And in terms of black Canadian identity formation, African American discourses named simply as "black" assist in establishing tropes, themes, and models that elide the specificities of the Canadian context.
Naomi Pabst - "Mama, I'm walking to Canada"
Or seeking some glory recounting tragedy
It's just reality as lived day to day
And much like parity someone has gotta pay
So as I make my way I recount past fury
Surviving past forray I don't want to bury
I'm right to be angry the longer this pain stays
Set fire to my diary so it's not called a phase
I want these words maintained not to forget old pains
My soul's forever stained but I've let go of shames
I will now hold your gaze for what will seem like ages
My head's out of its haze, my heart's out of it daze
Love's not found in cages nor within tricked mazes
So I'll write for pages to release my rages
And when I get praises I'll want a few raises
Won't alter my phrases in search of more stages
-Acquired Taste
The Europeans told the USians they didn't hate
No history of slavery meant a different fate
But what about the Nazi? The 40's Germany?
The mass scale genocide didn't commit suicide
Still an Irish lady insisted her worry
Wasn't black poverty but Catholic casualty
Religion not skin was leading to sin
Beside POC wasn't her vocabulary
Inside the debate coming in a bit late
A WOC went irate cause her ego's great
Behind comp screens people got obscene and girate
So the UK mate wanted mods to compensate
Rightfully she was angry at bigotry
So this "ally" did try to educate the sly
Change the rules for the fools who think they're so cool
People assume the worse, egos presume and burst
Public apology for other's tyranny
Admit willingly that I'm human, I'm sorry
Lay out the history of present agony
Explain atrocity, silenced honesty
Have it all go to shit, be thrown into a pit
Chewed up before they spit "it" out since he won't quit
And now it's too late, he's embodied the hate
That society throws at those with his fate
-Acquired Taste
The path to and in black Canada is well worn if unwieldy, and knowledge of it has been subjugated. This coterminous existence and erasure is replicated within two dominant conceptions about blackness in Canada, which would seem to contradict one another: One is that there are no black people there, and the other is that Canada was the terminus of the underground railroad. And it was the terminus only in a manner of speaking, as most escaped slaves remained in the United States, and for those who did opt for Canada the term "underground" was a misnomer in an abolitionist context in which escape routes were unhidden and public.
[...]
Canada has officially institutionalized a policy of "multiculturalism," yet despite that, racism sets the terms of Canadian existence. The journalist Margaret Cannon has applied the term "invisible empire" to the vagaries of Canadian racism, hailing at once its strength and formidability but also its subtlety, its "invisibility" as it were. Racism in Canada is pervasive, empire-like in its reach and power yet prone to disavowal, and this "invisible empire" has, in the past and present, displaced, othered, and discriminated against black Canadians.
[...]Moreover, while Canada may have come to oppose slavery, it did not do so in an antiracist context. Escaped slaves were welcomed into Canada not just for benevolence's sake but as cheap labor. After slaves were emancipated in the United States, Canadians encouraged blacks to relocate there. And after emancipation many blacks voluntarily left Canada for the United States, not only to return to kin but also to flee Canadian racism.
[...]Canada, as a nation, can be considered something of an "invisible empire," as a huge geographical space. A nation with privilege, it is an uncentral yet certifiable member of the overdeveloped world. A case could also be made for the applicability of the term "invisible empire" to the erasure of Canada within discourses on blackness. Again, the terms "invisible" and "empire," taken together, eschew victimology, insist on simultaneous privilege and disadvantage, and observe patterns of exclusion and their consequences.
To exemplify this, I turn to another familiar instance of black border-crossing between the United States and Canada. The first meeting of W.E.B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement, which later became the NAACP, was held in Fort Erie, Ontario in 1905. The symbolic significance of the venue in light of Canada's role in African American history has been widely acknowledged. The meeting was, however, supposed to be held in Buffalo and was only relocated to Fort Erie as a result of exclusion from accommodations, a form of American racial discrimination that underscored the importance of developing this sort of civil rights organization. At the same time, as scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott and the late Robin Winks have pointed out, black Canadians were denied the opportunity to participate. As Walcott puts it: "the fact that many of the 'Canadian' blacks who would have gladly participated in the inaugural meeting were born in America, or were immediate descendants of African American slaves who had escaped to Canada, makes this exclusion interesting" (1997: 19).
[...]
For instance, because the participants in the Niagara Movement were fighting a closure of ranks by white Americans, one might expect their own political project to be more, rather than less, inclusive. And again, those black Canadians who were denied the opportunity to join the Niagara Movement were connected to African America by way of geographical origins as well as cultural and political affinities. That these Canadians blacks had direct ties to black America means theirs was a transnational subjectivity, one with multiple reference points one that exceeded national borders. THe disavowal of transnational overlap implied by the moment of black Canadian exclusion from an African American political project, even as Canada was being touted as a symbolic site of freedom for African Americans, is revealing. IT points to the inadvertent ways that hierarchies and patterns of exclusion are reinscribed within counterhegemonic projects, the ways that discourses and political agendas sometimes unwittingly reify that which they oppose.
[...]
While blacks are dispersed transnationally, there is a certain centrality, as some scholars have observed, of African American sign production to global black standards. This is primarily a function of globalization and American imperialism, and in noting this global prominence, I mean not to apportion blame, guilt, or innocence, nor to oversimplify what are obviously complex matters. First of all, African American sign production is far from uniform. American definitions of blackness are, and have always been, disparate and debated. Not only is U.S. black subjectivity contested terrain, but it is differently rendered across space and time.
[...]By extension, blacks outside of the United States are often on some level in contention with black America, whether they wish it or not. As many have observed, black subjects globally are affected by African American poiltical and civil rights struggles, as well as by other widely circulating African American discursive technologies and cultural forms, such as literature, scholarship, music, dance, fashion, and so on. This is especially the case in nearby Canada even though Canada is almost always overlooked within the writings that make this type of argument.
A number of popular sayings in Canada speak to the impact of the United States. One is "When the United States sneezes, Canada catches pneumonia." Another talks about what it is like to sleep next to an elephant. This suggests a significance of U.S. affairs to Canadians, a sense of contingency that is not mutual. Similarly, but also differently, black Canada is in contention with black America - in ways generally more apparent for those north of the border. THe fact that these categories overlap as a result of proximity, porous borders, and historical ties is one reason. This observation is meant also as a qualification that my employment of terms such as "black Canada" and "black America" is strategic and mindful of hybridity, interstitiality, and overlap.
[...]
Canada's heritage project, its "multiculturalism," as it is sometimes called pejoratively, espouses color blindness and yet constitutes itself as the "great white north." What arises, then, is a brand of disavowed racism, in which black people are perceived as "cultural" rather than "racial" others. This then translates into blacks often being treated as literal foreigners, aliens within Canada's national boundaries. "Where are you from?" or "what island are you from?" are questions often encountered by Canadian blacks, who may themselves make such inquiries of other blacks. It is significant that the majority of black Canadians claim as part of their legacy voluntary migration during the post-World War II era, but it is also the case that Canada traces its black presence to the early 1600s. Black people were not new to the Canadian scene, contrary to popular Canadian belief.
[...]Blackness is seen as American, while Canada's foremost national bond, according to countless polls, is a collective sense of self as un-American. When the most notorious "invisible empire," the Ku Klux Klan, was established in Canada in the 1920s, anti-Americanness was part of its platform.
[...]
And yet, this same multiculturalism fosters perceptions of blacks as having non-Canadian origins, a form of displacement, alienation, and expatriation (or repatriation) from the imagined community that is Canada. In the United States this type of association is uncommon for blacks and more common for, say, Asian Americans, who are often treated as recent immigrants, for instance, being complimented on their English, even if their Americanness extends back many generations.
[...]
It is the same logic that has prompted some to note that blackness, unqualified, is often coded as American. The anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot, for instance, conjectures that "the U.S. monopoly on both blackness and racism [is] itself a racist plot" (1995: 71). The politics of place, the issue of geopolitics, is every bit as consequential an aspect of identity as race, class, gender, and sexuality.
[...]
My point here is not merely about the politics of inclusion. Rinaldo Walcott says it well when he insists that it is enough that "black Canadas exist and will continue to do so" (1997: 17). But it is worth noting that the consequential fallout for those transnational black subjects inside and outside the American context who become black "others," inauthentic and inappropriate blacks, in the wake of circulating ideologies of African Americanness that unintentionally set a standard for blackness locally and globally. Canadians, for example, read black American discourses to the same extent that Americans do, a result of American primacy in publishing and other mechanisms of knowledge dissemination. And in terms of black Canadian identity formation, African American discourses named simply as "black" assist in establishing tropes, themes, and models that elide the specificities of the Canadian context.
Naomi Pabst - "Mama, I'm walking to Canada"