Thursday, January 17, 2008

Who is a "black" Toronto Student?

Something that hasn't been addressed in the "Afrocentric Schools" debate:

This 2006 StatsCan breakdown shows that Toronto's Caribbean immigrant population is 7% of the total, and it's African immigrant population is about 5%...in other words, a fairly even split. In all this talk of "Black" and "Afrocentric" schools, I've yet to see a single mention of the fact that "blacks" from the Americas and "blacks" from Africa have different cultures, religious groupings, languages, etc etc (and I am ignoring, for the moment, the differences within black African Canadians as a heterogeneous group, and black Caribbean Canadians as a heterogeneous group).

This is merely anecdotal, but my brother went to a majority-black school where the major racial divide was between the African kids and the Caribbean kids...and the handful of white kids picked sides. Now, it never really concerned me that my brother was in the minority (as a middle-class white Canadian male, I figured it was an experience he should have once in his life) but I was intrigued with that dynamic.

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