English-language media coverage on race: Who are you speaking for?
Who is speaking to whom turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said; in fact what is said turns out to change according to who is speaking and who is listening. (
Alcoff, 1991–1992, p. 12)
The early 2000s was a markedly significant moment of change in Black Canadian cultural production. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a slew of Black Canadian writers, poets, scholars, and artists began to articulate what it meant to be Black and Canadian in terms of representation, identity, and self-expression (
Brand, 1994;
Bristol, 1994;
Cooper, 1994;
Walcott, 1997;
Clarke, 2002). This all happened within a cultural landscape of anti-Black racism where white people continued to determine what constituted Canadian culture and history. These years were also challenging in terms of resistance to Black-focused curriculum at universities. For example, Black studies professor Afua
Cooper (2021) recalls that “teaching Black and African Canadian history was dangerous” (para. 4) because of the potential for classroom violence over the subject matter, which was challenging dominant Eurocentric notions of Canadian history. As a doctoral student at the University of Toronto researching Black Canadian history, she consciously used the terms “Black” or “African Canadian” in her writing and when teaching on the subject, she used words like “African Canadian History,” “Black Ontario,” and “Black feminist history” to disrupt and challenge presumptions about Black history and culture (para. 2).
Just as Cooper was intentional with her language, Black authors during the decade used language to articulate the parameters of Black identity. Black Canadian novels like Brand’s (1990)
No language is neutral and Philip’s (1988)
She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (1988) are two notable examples that
Walcott (1997), in his canonical book,
Black like who? describes:
“Philip’s and Brand’s (re)writings are part of a black feminist diasporic remapping of sexist and racist accusations launched against black peoples’ language and speech: accusations which suggest that black language and speech are inarticulate, that blacks lack the ability and capacity for artistic expression” (p. 74).
By focusing on language, Black writers remapped Canada’s literary landscape, establishing a particular way of speaking for, and about, Black folks. The edited collection, “
We’re rooted here and they can’t pull us up” (p. 12): Essays in African-Canadian women’s history was one of the first collections to establish a historiography of Canadian racism and colonialism, giving access to forgotten archives and a plurality of oral histories (
Bristol, 1994). The notion that “what is said turns out to change according to who is speaking and who is listening” is about the claims writers make about language and the relationship between their words and power. As
Walcott (1997) once observed, “Language can be said to structure one’s relationship to the world. It ordains the kinds of performances we are commanded to give in the context of our everyday lives. The use of language, therefore, is both a commonplace and a political act(ion)” (p. 97). Thus, by the early 2000s, there existed a Black Canadian literary canon that extended to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. By comparison, what conversations were (and were not) taking place in the CJC when it began to publish articles on Black Canadians at that time?
Wilson and Sparks’ (2001) “Impact of black athlete media portrayals on Canadian youth” was the first CJC publication to centre Black Canadians. The authors conducted a qualitative study using focus groups to investigate the impact of “media racial narratives on adolescent consumers of these narratives” (p. 2). As trained kinesiologists, their study focused on Black athletes, their portrayal in (American) television commercials, and their impacts on Black and non-Black (Canadian) adolescent male viewers who identified as sport enthusiasts. The authors conceptualized race as a social construct, qualifying the term “
Black … to identify African-Americans, African-Canadians, and Caribbean-Canadians …
Non-black refers to those individuals in the Canadian context who are not encompassed in the first term and … mainly European-Canadians and Asian-Canadians” (p. 2). Where Sparks’ specialization included social communication in advertising and the mass media, Wilson was a doctoral candidate in sociology at that time. Their article fit within Sparks’ research interests in mass media and Wilson’s interests in youth subcultures and media audiences, which formed the basis of his 2006 book,
Fight, flight, or chill: Subcultures, youth, and rave into the twenty-first century. If we consider that this was the first article published in CJC that centred Black Canadians and media, when placed in context with the wider cultural landscape and Black Canadian cultural production at that time, the question of who this article was written for matters. It asks us to think about the ways in which the field has, or has not, changed in terms of who is authorized to publish and who is not; whose voices are validated, and whose are rendered invisible when they are spoken for and about, rather than given space to speak for themselves.
For example, when
Wilson and Sparks’ (2001) discussed race in terms of Canadian anti-Black racism, they framed their study as being conducted in Canada, but then quickly added, “a nation where subtle but concrete forms of discrimination against blacks still occur, both informally in everyday life and formally through social policies that tacitly support institutional and structural disadvantages for blacks in employment, education, and the justice system, among other areas” (p. 3). The qualifying word “subtle” is an interesting one. On the one hand, it could be read as less severe or less obvious, but on the other hand, it begs the question, who is arbiter of the subtleness of anti-Black racism? If we do not overtly acknowledge the role that race and racism play in the lives of people of colour, we run the risk of reinforcing power, which will influence perceptions about race and racism (
Tator, Henry, & Matthis, 1998). In their theoretical section, for instance,
Wilson and Sparks (2001) provide a literature review of representational theories citing
Hall’s (1995) work on the production, reproduction, and transformation of racial ideologies in media representation, and
Henry’s (1994) study of Canadian news media’s role in the racialization of crime in reporting on stories involving Black people. They also point to the work of Black Canadian scholars who negotiated the complexities of Black identity (see
Walcott, 1997;
Foster, 1996;
Kelly, 1998). However, what they do not do in their conceptualization of race and racism is speak to how anti-Black racism is embedded within Canadian cultural and social institutions. While the authors qualify their focus group study by stating that “A white interviewer led the non-black groups in Vancouver, and a black interviewer led the black groups in Toronto” (
Wilson & Sparks, 2001, p. 14), an approach that was modelled after
Jhally and Lewis’s (1992) method in their study of the
Cosby Show, “where same-race moderators were used to ease the discomfort people might feel talking about race” (
Wilson & Sparks, 2001, p. 14), by not positioning their identities in relation to analyzing their results, readers are left to make assumptions about why they did the work they did, and how their subject-position might have influenced their reading of the findings.
While positioning oneself is commonplace in fields where ethnographic research occurs more often such as among anthropology or sociology researchers, it is not necessarily asked of communication studies scholars. For example, in
Gordon and Zinga’s (2012) ethnographic study of Black-focused schools in Toronto in 2009, the child and youth researchers positioned their methodological approach by stating:
“As white female outsiders, we were aware that our own location and positionality (both as exhibited by us and as inferred by the youth) would influence what we heard and understood, as well as what the youth said and were prepared to say. We also recognized the importance of providing the youth with a setting that recognized potential power differentials (e.g., privileged white researcher and black youth)” (p. 9).
Wilson and Sparks (2001) did not do this because it was likely not asked of them, in part due to a lack of ethical norms regarding research on Black communities in communication studies, and if participants were asked these questions, their concerns might well have been excluded from the study because of a disciplinary blind spot. But the issue is not about individual researchers; rather, it is about the validation process that often does not challenge white scholars to situate their social location and the inherent power relations in relation to the subject matter. As
Hill Collins (1990) once observed, “Because elite white men and their representatives control structures of knowledge validation, white male interests pervade the thematic content of traditional scholarship” (p. 201). Where the authors conclude their article by asking how “media portrayals of black athletes might impact upon gender relations and the social construction of gender within affected racial communities (both black and non-black)” (
Wilson & Sparks, 2001, p. 29), because the knowledge validation process in Canadian communication studies has historically privileged a Eurocentric knowledge validation process, it is not simply that
Wilson and Sparks (2001) were not entitled to do the research that they did; it is that no one questioned their epistemological framework and their entitlement in the first place.
D’Arcy’s (2007) “The ‘Jamaican Criminal’ in Toronto, 1994: A critical ontology” is another example that illustrates how, by the mid-2000s, the CJC continued to publish articles about Black Canadians by authors who not only did not position their identities in relation to the subjects of their work—Black people and/or communities—but who also continued to use language that othered the very subjects they purported to study. D’Arcy (2001) explains that the label of the “Jamaican criminal” emerged into public consciousness in the wake of the 1994 case of Georgina Leimonis, a white woman shot and killed in a café known as Just Desserts. Lawrence Brown, who is Black, was convicted in 1999 of first-degree murder and sentenced to an automatic life term with no parole for at least 25 years. Using a form of analysis that he called “critical ontology,” D’Arcy, an associate professor of philosophy, approached the case study not with a view of examining and contextualizing Brown, Toronto’s Jamaican community, its relationship with the media, and the public’s perception about crime and Black Jamaican men; instead, he focused on the descriptive label “Jamaican criminal” and its discursive use in media reporting in Toronto. As a scholar of critical theory, anti-capitalist activism, and democratic media, D’Arcy was concerned with the media’s ontological use of “Jamaican criminal” not the damaging stereotyping of Black Jamaican men in media representation, in general.
While scholars almost never directly intend to cause harm, the use of language can result in “disembodied, amorphous racism that simply ‘occurs’ like a natural disaster far in the past” (
Nelson, 2008, p. 24). Unless anti-Black racism is located in the context of its specific practices and structures, its operationalization cannot be unpacked; as
Nelson (2008) writer furthers, “when it remains a ‘free-floating’ concept, relegated to ‘history’ there are no implicated parties, no conscious decisions, and there is no harm” (p. 24). While
D’Arcy (2007) cites research on racial bias in Canadian media like
Henry and Tator (2002) who also conducted a study of the Just Desserts incident, and the “moral panic” that ensued in its aftermath spurred on by media reporting and political debates about immigration and gun control (
D’Arcy, 2007, p. 243), regardless, the language he uses objectives Jamaican men in other words, he is not speaking for them so much as he is speaking to others about them in the terms that reduce them to criminals. For example,
D’Arcy (2007) concludes, “Far from the Jamaican criminal being an entity that, under the right set of circumstances, could be discovered and recognized as a problem, it was rather only the
prior problematization of the Jamaican criminal — its construction as a problematic identity, to be talked about and acted upon — that made possible the realignment of the discourse and action of thousands of people” (p. 256).
Throughout the 18-page article, the word “Black” appears only once in a list where
D’Arcy (2007) characterizes the “the six essential elements that emerged from [his] reading as constitutive of the ‘Jamaican criminal’ and, by extension, the crimes that this particular ‘criminal kind’ commits” (p. 248). Further, the word “Jamaican” appears 82 times and is used either as the “Jamaican criminal,” or other variants such as “Jamaican crime,” “Jamaican criminals,” “Jamaican criminality,” “Jamaican ancestry,” and “Jamaican-Canadian youth.” Similarly, in
Wilson and Sparks’ (2001) study, when the authors use the word “Black” it is as a descriptor for “Black poverty,” “Black failure,” “Black crime,” “Black oppression,” “Black exclusion,” “Black stereotypes,” and “Black inferiority.” When we use racial disparities, ahistorical and decontextualized language (whether it be about racial disparities, crime, or poverty) focusing on a community’s challenges and minimizing long-standing structural barriers, it can have the effect of obscuring root causes of those injustices (
Vey & Love, 2020, para. 7). If it is through language that meaning is given, and these meanings shape how we live and what we practice (
Hall, 1977),
D’Arcy’s (2007) use of language is highly encoded with negative associations about Jamaicans, an act that parallels media representations in the 1990s, in general.
In films about Jamaicans or with Jamaican characters, like
Cool Runnings (1993),
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and
Half-Baked (1998), it was not uncommon for them to be represented as being out of place in white or mainstream North American spaces (
Everett, 1995). These films featured depictions that reinformed stereotypes about Jamaican men as marijuana enthusiasts, tourists in a “foreign land” or in the case of
Cool Runnings, a film about the first Jamaican bobsled team that competed at the 1988 Calgary Olympics, the depiction reinforced the notion that Jamaicans and the Caribbean, in general, are “fixed in some essentialised past” (Hall, 1989, p. 70), a primitive past that was, and continues to be, uncivilized by Western standards. While it is easy to dismiss
D’Arcy’s (2007) article as dated, given the year of its publication, as someone who studies history (and who is of Jamaican descent), in the absence of not only structural racism but importantly experiential knowledge about the 1990s and/or Jamaicans, the people discussed by
D’Arcy (2007) remain part of the CJC’s searchable articles, and can be cited by students and scholars alike, while articles that might challenge or contradict
D’Arcy (2007) run the risk of being viewed as “subjugated knowledge” (
Hill Collins, 1990, p. 202) because they were either not recorded at the time, or contradict “the Jamaican criminal” discourses.
Two years after
D’Arcy (2007),
Henry and Tator’s (2009a) “Report contributions and challenges of addressing discursive racism in the Canadian media” offered the first departure in the CJC in terms of voice and language. Their article supports “the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others” (
Alcoff, 1991–1992, p. 23). Henry and Tator, who are white, have produced a corpus of work on race and racism, a situatedness that is expressed in their writing from the outset when they write, “[Over the last three decades], our research has largely focused on the social systems that contribute to and reinforce racism in Canadian society” (p. 711). They continue, “[the] coverage of issues affecting racialized minorities is filtered through the stereotypes, misconceptions, and erroneous assumptions of a largely White-dominated group of media institutions. The media’s images reinforce cultural racism and White hegemony” (p. 711). Their article is not a research paper but a report on the state of racism in Canadian media, most of which is a summary of their previous work (see
Ginzberg, 1985;
Henry & Tator, 2002). Importantly, in a conversation with the CJC’s Chris Russill in 2021, Daniel McNeil, professor and Queen’s National Scholar Chair in Black Studies, spoke about multiculturalism and Black cultural criticism; he also provides a critique of Frances Henry’s career spent writing about Black Canada. “When I read the books and reports Henry had authored and co-authored, I kept wondering how she was performing the role of a serious academic researcher who challenged white elites who were reluctant to consider racism a very serious issue in Canadian society,” asks McNeil (2021), adding “How was she citing Black cultural theorists, for example, but not necessarily taking on board their aspirations and accomplishments in producing new forms and styles of writing?” (p. 672).
While McNeil’s (2021) critique is an important and necessary intervention into the validation process that authorized Henry’s work at that time, and it coincides with others who found
Henry’s (2013) review of David Austin’s
Fear of a Black nation: Race, sex, and security in sixties Montréal “condescending” for the way in which her review ignored “Austin’s theoretical interventions into questions of race, sexuality, citizenship, and the state while overlooking Austin’s deep engagements with the textual evidence of Canadian, Quebecois, African American, and both Anglo- and Francophone Caribbean literature and historiography” (
Hudson & Kamugisha, 2014, p. 7), in the context of the CJC,
Henry and Tator’s (2009a) article offered language on racialization that located racism not merely in Canadian media representations but as deeply embedded into the institutional language of Canadian media and cultural production.
Henry and Tator’s (2009a) observation that
“the racialized discourses of policing authorities related to so-called ‘Black crime’ reverberate in the rhetoric that flows from the newsroom and from the talk-show host. In the same way, the discourse of racialization is simultaneously used by the media and politicians to establish the danger of ‘Muslim radicalism,’ ‘illegal immigration,’ and ‘Asian and Black gangs’” (p. 713).
Stands as a counter-discourse to the articles on Black Canadians that preceded their work and remains an important point of departure in the CJC’s record. The question of who is speaking for whom still lingers in their work, especially in the backdrop of a shift that occurred in the CJC in the mid-2000s when scholars began to speak for, and about, Black Canada from a place of knowing, not from a place of objective inquiry that minimizes and/or ignores structural and historical racism.
Black visibility/invisibility: Speaking for, and about, Black Canada
Speaking should always carry with it an accountability and responsibility for what one says. (
Alcoff, 1991–1992, p. 25)
Fatona’s “In the presence of absence: Invisibility, black Canadian history, and Melinda Mollineaux’s pinhole photography” (2006) is one of the first articles in the CJC where the author, who is Black, is writing about the visibility and invisibility of Blackness in conversation with other Black scholars. Today, Fatona is an Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production at OCAD University. In 2006, she was a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Toronto.
3 While not trained in a Canadian communication studies department, Fatona raised two points about Blackness that had never, up until this point, been raised in the CJC. “On the one hand, Black Canadians are outsiders, as this prevailing multicultural narrative obliterates the history and long presence of Blacks in Canada, differentiates between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures, and allows for Anglo and French cultures to maintain their hegemonic positions vis-à-vis ‘Other’ Canadians,” writes
Fatona (2006, p. 228).
“On the other hand, Black people exist within the nation, and indeed they are often figured as an immediate internal threat in media depictions. This logic positions Black people both as absence and as excess within narratives of nation,” she noted further (p. 228–229).
Similarly,
Verrall’s (2011) examination of
artscanada’s “Black” issue, a close reading of the Canadian arts journal
artscanada’s October 2, 1967 “Black” issue, is also written by someone not located in a communication studies department. Verrall, a contract lecturer at York University in the Department of Humanities, does not locate her identity in the article, but she provides historical context for terms related to contemporary art, the Black liberation movements of the 1960s, and
artscanada’s “Black” issue including its connection to key moments in 1967 beginning with the Black Power movement to Expo ’67.
Returning to the question of whether someone has the right to speak for others,
Alcoff (1991–1992) asks whether it will “enable the empowerment of oppressed people” (p. 29), while also noting that “when one is speaking for others one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them …. Similarly, when one is speaking about others, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, that is, speaking for them” (p. 9). If the practice of speaking about others is ultimately an act of representation in that the person(s) speaking is role playing in
representing who their subjects are and
participating in the construction of their own subject-position(s), how can you step into the shoes of a group that is outside of your own, and authentically represent their needs, goals, situations, and in fact,
who they are (
Alcoff, 1991–1992)? Verrall attempts to do that when she engages in a deliberate and thoughtful account of the subject matter in ways that do not call into question her credentials or authority to speak but instead she uses a discursive approach to unpack the topic, the issues, and why it matters to our historical understanding of race and Blackness in the Canadian arts journal,
artscanada. Like
Fatona (2006) before her,
Verrall (2011) names the role of whiteness as a form of racialization moving beyond the invisibility of whiteness and white supremacist ideology in
Wilson and Sparks (2001) and
D’Arcy’s (2007) framing of Canadian media. For example,
D’Arcy (2007) only locates whiteness in one instance, when referencing “The spectre of poor Black men attacking a White woman in an affluent neighbourhood touched a raw nerve for many people, including many newspaper columnists” (p. 249).
Fatona (2006) pinpoints race not solely in terms of representation but institutional structures, writing “The colonial project of settlement and expansion, its institution of slavery, and technologies of racism very much depended on violence and the subordination of the Black bodies” (p. 231).
Verrall (2011) similarly engages in a structural analysis of race and racism, stating that “since the 1990s, critical interrogations of the ideology of whiteness extend the notion of covert racism to explain the historically constituted complex of discursive and material practices that privileges White people, white institutions, and culture over non-White” (p. 541).
Odartey-Wellington’s (2011) analysis provides another example of how to employ a structural framework to examine race and racism in Canadian communication studies. He observes that “Canadian media have a critical role in interrogating racism as a significant social issue, and also that the potential racial implications in a case such as Mohamud’s require critical media interrogation due to the ramifications for Canadian multiculturalism” (
Odartey-Wellington, 2011, p. 395). Odartey-Wellington, Associate Professor of Communication, who specializes in race and media, news and public affairs, examined the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Canadian of Somali origin who was wrongly branded an impostor by Canadian officials while she was returning to Canada from Kenya, not by focusing solely on the news coverage through a discourse analysis, but by employing a structural framework that challenged the ideology of whiteness that pervades Canadian news media where journalists enjoy “the mantle of legitimacy as a truth-teller … to reinforce the dominant ideology” (
Jiwani, 2011, p. 15). It is important to understand that prior to non-white scholars pointing to, and calling out, white racism as part of the fabric of Canadian communication studies and the white ideological bias in Canadian news media (see
Jiwani, 2006;
Mahtani, 2001;
Thobani, 2007), there was an absence of discussion about institutional and structural racism as being fundamental aspects of Canadian media. Thus,
Odartey-Wellington’s (2011) overt centring of race in his critical analysis, and his positioning of racism “[as] a part of the Canadian socio-historical fabric” (p. 397) represents a significant linguistic turn in the CJC’s record on Black Canadians. “Despite authoritative findings about the existence of systemic racism in Canada, this knowledge is yet to be mainstreamed,” he writes, further adding “as this case shows, the media are effective in influencing the public agenda. Therefore, without the active engagement of the media in the debate over systemic racism, race will continue to be erased from the public agenda to the detriment of the laudable multicultural posture that Canada has assumed” (p. 411). Since the meaning and cultural import of a text cannot be reduced to one quote, by studying discourses about race across multiple texts, it allows you to make connections between, and articulate points of departures from, what scholars are (and are not) saying at moments in history.
Fatona (2006), Verrell (2011), and
Odartey-Wellington (2011) point to how the CJC began to broaden the parameters of what constitutes knowledge in the field of Canadian communication studies shifting the conversation beyond mere representation (see
Wilson & Sparks, 2001) and content analysis of news media (see
D’Arcy, 2007) to actively contend with Canadian hegemony, structural and institutional racism, and the discursive and dialectical implications of both existing in and writing within a milieu that still prioritizes white voices. As the #CommunicationSoWhite—Canadian style creators write,
This societal structure of whiteness, then, has supported and sustained the centrality of whiteness in the field of Communication Studies, which is manifest in two ways: (a) through a long history of marginalization regarding indigenous, black and other racialized groups’ subjugation, and (b) a failure to hire and support faculty members from these groups to conduct critical research. As a result, a canon of scholarship that is predominantly white and male has been reproduced.” (
Hirji, Jiwani, & McAllister, 2020, p. 170–171)
The final article under examination here is
Kinahan’s (2013) “‘The colored lady knows better’: Marketing the ‘new century washer’ in
Canadian Home Journal, 1910–1912.” Kinahan, who specializes in communication and gender representation, feminist media, and Canadian communication history, does not identify herself racially but as an author they have consistently applied a feminist lens to the study of communication studies (see
Kinahan, 2007,
2008). “The colored lady knows better” is an analysis of a series of eight advertisements that appeared in the
Canadian Home Journal (CHJ) between March 1910 and June 1912 that marketed a range of washing machines by employing two racialized characterizations of white women (the “lady”) and Black women (the “mammy”). Given that in the Canadian communication studies field where “the unstated assumption is that feminism, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory are optional to the field, rather than integral, or are offered only intermittently” (
Alhassan, 2007, p. 104),
Kinahan’s (2013) feminist analysis challenges the assumption that feminist communication studies is not integral to the field. Kinahan examines early-twentieth-century attitudes about women’s work, as well as social, racial, and gender hierarchies and the racialized dichotomy between Black and white women in wider discussions of modernity, technology, and consumer culture. By comparing portrayals of white women with Black women,
Kinahan (2013) argues “that through the opposition between the genteel White lady and the hard-working Black woman, the advertisements portrayed a world in which White women are associated with newfangled technologies, progress, and modernity, while Black women represent pre-industrial technologies, antiquated political and social systems, and technological obsolescence” (p. 192). Ultimately, this work is political without overtly stating so given the field’s disciplinary blind spots. Her articulation of the binary oppositions cultivated in media that then become real when connected to wider sociocultural shifts echoes
Hall’s (1977) examination of media as a repository of common-sense knowledge, wherein he writes, “You cannot learn, through common sense,
how things are: you can only discover
where they fit into the existing scheme of things” (p. 325–326; see also
Jiwani, 2011, p. 15). Verrell’s (2013) work provides a scheme for locating how Black women fit into the historical representational logic of Canadian advertising.
While the articles under discussion are vastly different in focus, the presence of
Fatona (2006), Verrell (2011),
Odartey-Wellington (2011), and
Kinahan (2013) in the CJC speaks to how the journal’s parameters shifted over the decades. It moved from simplified or stereotypical representations of Black culture or, as
Martins (2018) writes, “the tyranny of ‘whiteness’ expressing itself” (p. 208) to beginning to accept some articles that give agency and voice to work that provides a heterogeneity of Black history, contesting Canada’s forgetfulness of its own history of slaveholding, its myth of origins, and persistent racism (Martins, 2008; see also
Cooper, 2021). At the same time, reading these articles has helped me understand the extent to which scholars in the field have, for the past two decades, centred race, racism, and colonialism in Canadian communication studies. As
Odartey-Wellington (2011) writes, “Canada as a nation emerged from a history of conquest and colonisation (and at certain stages of its historical development, legally permitted discrimination based on race)” (p. 398), and as
Kinahan (2013) further concludes, “[CHJ] ads suggest that racism was a central component in defining the ideal characteristics of the Canadian nation” (p. 204). Ultimately, the presence of this small handful articles in the CJC provide a counter argument to the limited racial analysis offered by
Wilson and Sparks (2001) and
D’Arcy (2007), but the question remains: how/when will Black Canada move from the margins of Canadian communication studies into its centre? When this happens, we will begin to answer the #CommunicationSoWhite—Canadian style call to “to examine how our country’s multicultural ideology supports an entrenched refusal to recognize how racism and colonialism operate in Canada” (
Hirji, Jiwani, & McAllister, 2020, p. 197).
Concluding thoughts
Nearly a decade ago, the
CLR James Journal compiled a special issue on “Black Canadian Thought” which it positioned as building on prior special editions on Black Canada published by the
Canadian Review of American Studies, the
Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, and the
Journal of Black Studies, as well as the short-lived publication,
New Dawn: A Journal of Black Canadian Studies, edited by Rinaldo Walcott (
Hudson & Kamugisha, 2014, p. 3). The special issue, which centred around the question, “What is Black Canadian Thought?” included essays from some of Canada’s thought leaders on Blackness like George Elliott Clarke, Barrington Walker, David Austin, Katherine McKittrick, and many others. Scholars offered essays, commentaries, and interviews on topics that ranged from elucidating Black Canadian literary traditions, activist and protest movements, Black communities, and geographies of race. The special issue also observed that there exist two traditions within the writing of Black Canada. There is a Black Radical Tradition defined through the uneasy relationship scholars have “to the Canadian state and a cynical take on the possibilities of Black citizenship within it” (p. 11) versus a Black Liberal Tradition which is national in focus “often deploy[ing] a vindicationist platform of historicism whose primary concern is Black representation within Canadian society” (p. 8). In their positioning of the special issue,
Hudson and Kamugisha (2014) write, “The problem of Black Canadian thought is one of institutions, not just individuals. The Canadian academy, mirroring Canada in general, is notoriously hostile to all forms of Black Thought, not just Black Canadian thought. There has been no intellectual movement in Canada paralleling that of Black Studies in the United States” (p. 6). I wrote this article to directly address the CJC’s historical publication record on Black Canada. But my critique is not about individuals; rather, my concern echoes
Hudson and Kamugisha’s (2014) point about the problem of institutions. “Black Canada still suffers from the paternalism of white Canadian scholars who have an epistemological problem with Black being and seek to reduce it to a merely sociological plotting subsumed within the paternalistic hold of the Canadian nation” (p. 7). The reasons why Frances Henry’s work was and continues to be recognized in terms of race work in Canada is precisely because she was one of the first to develop, as McNeil (2021) observes, “a strategy that they hoped would address the aggressive indifference to racism among the middle and upper levels of Canadian institutional society” (p. 673).
That said, just because someone is the “first” to tackle race or racism within a discipline, it does not mean that we cannot challenge why at an institutional level they as white scholars were first to begin with, and the implications of their approach or “the rejection of the type of close-reading strategies and slow-looking strategies that are designed to cultivate discussion and reflection about what is often dismissed as tangential” (p. 673). For example,
Wink’s ([1997]) The Blacks in Canada: A history is often touted as the first historical text on Black Canadians. Winks, a white American historian, has faced both scholarly respect for writing into what
Walker (2022) calls “a scholarly void that existed precisely because of the overwhelming Whiteness of the Canadian historical profession and its blindness with regard to a critical engagement with Black histories in Canada” (p. 32) and harsh critique for the fact that his text remains a significant part of the Black Canadian history canon, in some instances, more foundational to Black Canadian history than those writing Black Canada in the contemporary (
Thompson, 2021;
Walker, 2022). Similar to
Alhassan (2007), who asks folks in the field to consider Canada’s official image as a multicultural country where one would expect issues about interethnic diversity, gender, sex, and other forms of identity-based and geography-based groupings to feature appropriately, and prominently, in communication curricula, and yet, “if you look around your program, department, or school and see that it is not so, you may join me in asking why” (p. 115), if there is no Black Canadian scholar in a communication studies department, no emphasis on Black Canadian authors in undergraduate or graduate programs, then it is about time we not only ask why but do something about it. As this article has demonstrated, it is not that a Black Canadian communication studies canon does not exist; the problem is that too many are not looking for it.