In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in the U.S., Maclean’s asked Black Canadian writers to pen open letters to America addressing the recent upheaval and the task of confronting racism that—deny it as some Canadians might—persists in their own country.
Dear Dad,
It has been a century since you were born in Missouri; 75 years since you served as a Black, non-commissioned officer in the American army in World War II; 67 years since you moved to Canada after marrying my white mother in Washington; 58 years since you became the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission; and 17 years since you have been resting in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
I remember you on Sunday mornings: you would play Count Basie on your record player, and using a miniature fork, you’d pry smoked oysters from a tin and place them onto Ritz crackers. With mustard.
After the war, when I was just 10, you told me that your own father told you that you were not made to live in a segregated nation. After you moved to Toronto with mom, you made sure that your three children knew that Canada and the United States were founded on misdeeds—stealing land from Indigenous peoples, disenfranchising and killing them, and using enslaved peoples.
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Since you’ve been gone, a Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted of second-degree murder after shooting an Indigenous man, who was just sitting in an SUV, in the head. Cops are killing unarmed Black folks. The man in the White House waits for peaceful protestors to be teargassed so he can walk to a photo-op outside a church where he does not worship.
Your slender fingers ensnare another Ritz cracker. Playfully, because you laugh to survive, you drum up your most derisive term for an ignoramus and say, “That no-account in the White House is a Willy Lump Lump.
“Do not let him and his enablers out of your sight. Raise hell until the cows come home. Put more into education and anti-poverty programs. And vote that fool and all of his down-ballot folks out of office.”
Your words continue to rise out of my soul: “They have no respect for Black folks, Muslims, Mexicans, refugees or women,” I hear you say. “They seek to turn the United States of America into a dictatorship. Don’t believe it? Hitler was elected. Give that Willy Lump Lump and his people another inch, and they’ll pervert the things that we hold most sacred.”
Dad? From the Mount Pleasant Cemetery gravestone etched with the name “Daniel G. Hill,” What else have you got for me?
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You switch the record to Duke Ellington, and start humming Take the A Train. “If you think it’s just an American problem, you’re a fool. In the 1950s, your mother and I could not rent an apartment in Toronto. In the past 20 years, dozens of Black, Indigenous and people of colour have been killed by police in Canada.”
I imagine you offering me a cracker. The oysters remind us of family and all the great things we miss from the United States. You lift your chin as your voice trails off: Keep up the good fight in Canada. We have the same problems here, but we’re just in denial.
Lawrence Hill is the author of 10 books, including The Book of Negroes and The Illegal.
Desmond Cole
A letter to the Canada-U.S. border
Things may be different on this side of the border, but not enough to save us
Andray Domise
Canada’s own legacy of racist oppression
‘To my brothers and sisters in America,’ you may be unaware that Canada aligned itself against your lives when it mattered
Esi Edugyan
‘The weight of change should not rest on the shoulders of Black people’
For true systemic shifts to occur, everyone has to feel the disgust and frustration
Sandy Hudson
‘We must defund the police’
‘Dear white people,’ through your inaction, you show us your inherent belief system
Eternity Martis
‘Black women: It’s time society fights for our lives, too’
Black women, who experience ‘misogynoir,’ a mix of misogyny and racism, are also aggressively punished by police
Rinaldo Walcott
Toward an abolitionist future
There has been something animated by the death of George Floyd that is deeply familiar and that calls out for something more
Ian Williams
The cameras on your phones make Black people invisible
‘Dear cell phone companies,’ There are software issues with your phones. My date and time function is frozen in the 18th century.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO
