#BlackInSchool

Habiba Cooper Diallo

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780889778214
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A young Black woman documents the systemic racism in her high school diary and calls for justice and educational reform. The prevalence of anti-Black racism and its many faces, from racial profiling to police brutality, in North America is indisputable. How do we stop racist ideas and violence if the very foundation of our society is built upon white supremacy? How do we end systemic racism if the majority do not experience it or question its existence? Do our schools instill children with the ideals of equality and tolerance, or do they reinforce differences and teach children of colour that they don’t belong?
 
# BlackInSchool is Habiba Cooper Diallo’s high school journal, in which she documents, processes, and resists the systemic racism, microaggressions, stereotypes, and outright racism she experienced in Canada’s education system.
 
Powerful and eye-opening, Cooper Diallo illustrates how our schools reinforce rather than erode racism: the handcuffing and frisking of students of colour by police at school; one-dimensional, tokenistic curricula portraying Black people; and the constant barrage of overt racism from students and staff alike. She shows how systemic racism works, how it alienates and seeks to destroys a child’s sense of self. She shows how our institutions work to erase the lived experiences of Black youth and try to erase Black youth themselves.
 
Cooper Diallo’s words will resonate with some, but should shock, appall, and animate a great many more into action towards a society that is truly equitable for all.
 

Part I

#BlackInSchool

Autumn 2012

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. —Alice Walker, The Colour Purple

I am a Black student in Canada. April 6, 2013 will mark my seventeenth birthday and my thirteenth year in school. I am becoming increasingly aware of the impact of school on the bodies of Black children in Canada.

Two years ago, in the ninth grade, I recall walking down a hallway to attend a school newspaper meeting when I was struck by what I consider to be an extremely disturbing image of Black bodies on the wall. As part of an assignment, students had posted a photograph from the 1984 Ethiopian famine. The bodies depicted were naked, dark and gaunt, and shown to be crawling. I was horrified, humiliated, and indignant all at once.

I quickly went to the school’s administration to express my discontent with the photograph; it was removed from the wall the next day.

Still, I ask myself: why was I the one to bring the image to the attention of the administration? Had the students who worked on the assignment not been able to see how degrading the image was, and assess the impact it would have on Ethiopian children in the school or on other Blacks and Africans for that matter? Why had the teachers not analyzed the image? Finally—and it is shameful that I must even consider this point—as passersby, why hadn’t other staff found the image problematic? And if they had, indeed, found it problematic, why had they neglected to express that sentiment?

Such experiences are commonplace for Black students. They are incessant—in elementary through high school, and beyond; that is, if we are not too discouraged to pursue higher education.

Our humanity, it seems, is continually eroded. We experience this through Kony 20123 assemblies in which we are shown videos of slaughtered Black bodies—decapitated and severed. We experience this in the classroom when all the presentations pertaining to Africa harp on the gothic features of the continent—the perpetual “tribal” warfare, famine, and disease—or when entering school in the morning and being assaulted by a student’s voice: “The worst countries to live in are Uganda, Sudan, and Congo—if you walk into one of those places you’ll just die.”

How is it that such a one-sided story of Blackness and Africa takes precedence? What does it do to one’s spirit when one’s humanity is constantly under attack? When the academy, intentionally or not, perpetuates the idea of her “subhumanity”? When the continent of her origin is reduced to two, or three, “high conflict” countries? And when the leaders of those countries are belittled? Most importantly, what does this do to this young Black body?

Every night on returning home from school, I turn to my diary—an outlet for the release of negative sentiments which lodge themselves in my body throughout the day—or I immerse myself in Reggae and Wassoulou dance as a way of recharging my spirit by connecting with one of the most intimate aspects of my personhood, my culture, something which is abrogated and denied me, as well as the masses of other Black students, in high school.

A film whose purpose was to promote a charitable push to have Ugandan cult and militia leader, indicted war criminal, and International Criminal Court fugitive Joseph Kony arrested by the end of 2012. The film ultimately brought to the public consciousness the limits of “clicktivism” and “white saviour industrial complex” that is the foundation of so many seemingly well-meaning campaigns.

#HighSchoolAndTheBlackBody

15 November 2012

Racism is a visceral experience . . . it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. —Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

High school hurts the Black Body. High school is hard enough on any young body. {All students grapple with stress, lack of sleep, lugging heavy textbooks through icy Canadian winters, and up and down stairs, and regular teen angst,} but there is a whole other layer of constant and in some ways unseen violence that is done to young Black bodies in high school that needs to be recognized, because Black students must also deal with the racial stresses involved in going to school.

During the lunch hour a student quite often remarks, and I heard it so many times that it is sickening: “Don’t waste your food, because there are starving children in Africa who would be grateful for it,” or “There are places in the world—like Africa—where children cannot go to school, so be thankful that you’re getting an education.” “Africa” has become a kind of punctuation in our sentences, inserted wherever conscience and empathy is needed. Though, is the impetus for these catchphrases about Africa really empathy when students who self-identify as continental African contradict the notions of an impoverished, needy Africa?

Eventually these statements take on the form of violence—epistemic violence—rendering the acquisition of knowledge difficult for the Black student. How is one to concentrate on a chemistry lesson or a biology assignment after being told that Africans like herself cannot go to school?

High school stigmatizes the Black Body. At my school, I recently witnessed the arrest of a Black student. Prior to the incident, two officers were interrogating him and his non-Black friend on school property. The latter was escorted back inside the school, while the former was kept outside for further interrogation. I continued to watch through the window. The officer soon began to search him, clearly unable to find anything worthy of arrest. She persisted nonetheless, and in doing so provoked him, for he became frantic, kicking off his shoes and waving his arms as he proclaimed his innocence. The officer was unrelenting. Within seconds, his chest was pressed against the side of the car, his back to me, and his hands cuffed. Adding insult to injury, a student adjacent to me, having also witnessed the arrest, remarked, “He knows the drill.”

I could feel my heart sink, and soon the tears began to flow—a physical manifestation of the impact of high school on the Black Body—as he was driven away, coerced away, from an education, from the school that, we are told, is the most essential component of a student’s success in the future. We are told that school is a “safe” and “healthy” place. Given all that, how can it coexist with legal, police-authorized coercion away from learning?

High school hinders the Black Body. The bell rang exactly nine minutes after the arrest. Shattered and demoralized as I was, I still had to report to my fourth-period biology class. I had to fulfill my academic responsibility.

High school nullifies the Black Body. In spite of the major contributions Blacks have made and continue to make to Canadian society, and more obviously our sheer presence in the country, in school, there is an erasure of the histories and contemporary experiences of Blacks in Canada. During Remembrance Day ceremonies, why don’t we remember the Black veterans of World War I from Nova Scotia’s No. 2 Construction Battalion? I often look through my textbooks—history, chemistry, and biology, just to name a few—and count the bodies depicted as inventors, prominent political figures, and theoreticians relative to those who are victims of war, inadequate health care, famine, and political instability. The former are usually images of white bodies, while the latter people of colour—typically Blacks.

How does the erasure of the Black experience and ultimately the suppression of Black students nullify the Black Body? The first strike is psychological—Black students’ consciousness of the lack of recognition for the Black experience. This is followed by an emotional response—dejection and apathy towards school, as there is no relevance to the experience for Black students as human beings. Finally, the Black student goes into a state of corporeal shock, questioning the significance of her skin, her features, her hair, and fundamentally her body, in a system that suppresses the expression of her humanity.

#ToBeABlackStudent

1 February 2013

Many Africans succumb to the idea that they can’t do things because of what society says. Images of Africa are negative—war, corruption, poverty. We need to be proud of our culture. —Dambisa Moyo, interview, New Statesman

My time in school has been enlightening and intellectually stimulating. For literary assignments, I have had the pleasure of reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. I have had the opportunity to listen to Alexandre Trudeau and Michael Ignatieff at school assemblies. I have written about the accomplishments of French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, and the military expeditions of Napoleon Bonaparte. However, my experience in school continues to be an emotional and spiritual struggle...