UPDATE - Black History Month has been saved!

This is the update of what transpired last night at the Toronto District School Board Trustee meeting in regard to the motion to change Black History Month to a homogeneous Heritage Month that is 'inclusive'.

This was the 3rd attempt that a number of members of Toronto's Black/Afrikan community have made to deal with this issue. The turned out wasn't as large as expected given how widely the email was sent out, nonetheless it was a very significant moment for several reasons.

Here are the events as they happened:

1. While they were in closed session, the trustee who tabled the motion came out and was confronted by the community who wanted to know why he would want to pass such a motion. He had no qualms telling the tv cameras that his motion was in support of the Tamil and Somali communities, who had expressed their dislike of Black history Month to him. The community challenged this and asked him to bring those constituents so we could hear them deny the honoring of their cultures and heritage for ourselves.

2. The trustee also claimed that another trustee, of Black African descent, was in support of his motion and that he was going to help him reword his motion to make it more appealing. This was also in front of the tv cameras.

3. Clearly this trustee must have missed history and geography class because he was not aware that Somalis are Afrikans, and Tamils are Asian. What was also evident is that this trustee did not seem to know that there was a difference between Somalis andTamils proving once again that we are perceived to be all the same because we look the same!

4. Members of the Afrikan/Black community, DEMANDED an immediate apology when the session resumed. One of the other trustees also demanded an apology from the nut in question for misrepresenting himself to the entire board and hence, tarnishing them by association as a TDSB management body.

5. This guy refused to apologize and repeated he had withdrawn his motion. At that point, the community SHUT THINGS DOWN! Vickie Mcphee, a powerful First Nations and Afrikan woman warrior, confronted the trustees and publicly demanded the matter be dealt with immediately and the trustee with the bad judgment be made to apologize. The board tried to shut her down but she boldly responded by saying she did not have to respect the chair because the chair DID NOT REPRESENT OUR COMMUNITY! They owed her respect as a 6th generation First Nations Afrikan Canadian. Civil disobedience instincts took over when the group started, "We demand an apology!" This forces the meeting to grind to a halt. The trustee in question took the opportunity to literally run out of the room and he went to hide in the safety of the back room.

6. After some hasty negotiations with the chair and other TDSB reps, the chair made a formal apology to the Black/Afrikan community and to those who the trustee had smeared with his lies.

The "oppressor" has been sent away to lick his wounds but you can be sure that he or someone like him will be back to try this mess again. The will step up the lies and deceit the next time so it's up to us as a community to make sure we stay diligent. The struggle continues!

"Let's cancel Black History Month" - NOT!

I received an email from a friend in Toronto and I am very disturbed that the Toronto Board of Education is even going to entertain this motion considering all of the problems they are having with youth in their city.

To marginalize black youth further will certainly result in even greater problems. Clearly there is some failure in the understanding of the purpose for this celebration and that making it "Heritage Month" is NOT inclusionary if that means you will limit the celebration of ALL heritage groups to the month of February.

It is incumbent on school districts to find more effective, proactive ways of demonstrating the importance of the historical contributions of people of African descent while at the same time honouring the same thing for people from other diverse backgrounds. If this plan is going to come with a complete change of the current education system, then great.

Since it will be more of the same, then this is a step back to the stone age. As a community, we have worked too hard to get schools to do the bare minimum and we already know that what is being done is not enough. Our children are suffering already and having them buy further into the stereotypes of black culture will never allow us to progress forward as a people. We know that doing more of the same will not work so imagine if we do less! Shame on the board of education for thinking they can sneak this one past us and then shame on us if we don't mek dem know we are a force to be reckoned with.

Sensation and Perception

I just experienced a hilarious and sad moment today in my Sociology, Anthro, Psych class.

We are doing Sensation and Perception. While handing out the work to students I overheard one student say to another, "Isn't perception what happens to women when they give birth?" This is what happens when you let a good public school education go to waste. As Kwame Dawes pointed out in his lecture the other weekend when he was here in Ottawa, Damion Marley's lyrics to Welcome to Jamrock address this,

Come on let's face it, a ghetto education's basic
And most a the youths dem waste it
And when they waste it, that's when dem mek the guns replace it
Then dem don't stand a chance at all

This young lady unfortunately doesn't have a gun to replace her lack of knowledge/understanding but it makes you wonder what she will replace it with because she will replace it with something. What am I doing as a teacher? I have had this student on two previous occassions. She managed to pass one and fail one. She is no closer to graduating then she was when I first had her in grade nine but I find it distrubing that she has been able to progress this far. Now just because she doesn't know the difference between "perception" and "conception" doesn't mean all hope is lost but you have to ask yourself, what the hell does she know?

She has fallen so far behind in the education process that she is no longer functioning with the confidence to even get through high school. How do we rescue students like this? How do we create an education system that is full of empowering experiences for all students versus what we do now -- a series of irrelevant or unrelated experiences that allow students to accumulate credits.