Canada urged to open its eyes to systemic racism in wake of police violence | World new... - 0 views
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“It’s part of the Canadian national narrative of positioning ourselves in juxtaposition to the United States. That’s how we get this ‘exceptional Canada’ of being welcoming and warm – and not paying attention to our own parallel history of racial exclusion and the dispossession.”
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n addition to being factually inaccurate, this popular view speaks to a “refusal to take responsibility” for two centuries of slavery within the country’s history, says Henry.
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For generations, Canadian history has concentrated on the country’s position as the last stop on the Underground Railroad – a place which meant freedom for those who escaped slavery in the US. But the same narrative omits the experiences of thousands of enslaved people within Canada, says Henry.
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After emancipation, Black people in Canada still faced segregation, and the looming threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
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According to Henry’s research, the earliest record of African enslavement in colonial Canada was the sale of a young boy, named Olivier LeJeune in 1629.
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Slavery was formally ended in the British empire in 1834, including British North America, but legislation was repeatedly passed that would weaken anti-slavery laws in the years leading up to abolition.
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by the end of the 1700s, as many as 2,000 Black people were enslaved in the Maritimes region. About 300 more people were enslaved in the area known as Lower Canada (what is now the province of Quebec) and as many as 700 in Upper Canada (Ontario).
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Only in recent years has Canada grappled with the legacy of its residential schools – where many Indigenous students were sent against their will and experienced verbal, physical and sexual abuse – a period which schools have now started to teach.