I must confess as a black person I don’t know much about racism. Being raised in Jamaica, you don’t get the job, or are pulled over by police or suffer mistreatment due to several other reasons, just not the color of your skin. It’s also hard to recognize it even on short vacations to North America or Europe, because I figured whoever was mean to me was just having a bad day.
My Jamaican parents met in England while studying, migrated to Canada and were living the life, until my brother and I (who were 4 and 2 respectively) started being rejected and scorned by white people and their kids, so they packed up and moved back to Jamaica. Once we were old enough to understand we could’ve been Canadian residents, with no school uniforms, endless fast food and shopping malls, we begged them to move us back, but they wouldn’t budge.
Fast forward 30 years when I decided to finally use my citizenship and migrate to Toronto. I was warned that Canadians are very sneaky with racism, but again, apart from sporadic episodes of white people acting weird, I never made much of anything. I got my first job three months after arriving (in the middle of the 2008 financial meltdown), probably because my white boss was married to a Jamaican. From there I transferred to the head office in Montreal where a lot of staff were black, and the people in my department were all kind of colors but more importantly, the most generous, loving team who I still keep in touch with to this day.
After that, I decided to switch gears and was accepted into the Vancouver Film School. A friend told me she knew a past student who claimed a teacher on staff was racist. Again, I blew her off. Maybe six months in, the friend checked in on me and this time, out of curiosity, I asked if she knew the name of this racist teacher. When she revealed it I laughed so hard….because this dude was the funniest guy with the most interesting class, and you might think his referring to me as an “anomaly” was offensive, but I took it as the greatest compliment….just like the other teacher who called me “Ms Smarty Pants.”
I am conscious of the fact that I can easily scare white people….with my skin color, height, voice and generally sour attitude. Once I was back in Toronto and living in a white neighbourhood (my white landlord was married to a Jamaican….see a trend here?), I deliberately would refrain from wearing a hoodie during my early morning walks so residents wouldn’t consider me a threat….or worse, a MAN!!…and I also kept my head straight, not offering up any “good mornings” lest they think I’m casing their joints.
The point is that I’ve been learning a lot from the unrest currently taking place and the stories from blacks across the globe. I used to get my education solely from the TV show “Black-ish” which expertly combined real black issues with comedy….but I will take it a step further, like so many others who were just kind of aware but now we genuinely SEE and HEAR and will join the call to ACT.