Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

"I can’t believe what you say because I can see what you do."

— James Baldwin

OTTAWA—One fine morning in the mid-1960s, Donald Edward Sharpe, a Black undergraduate student at Oxford University, was walking to his church, where he taught Sunday school. He passed a house where a little white girl sat on the steps in front of her home. He said hello and walked on.

Common courtesy, or crime?

Soon after, a group of white men surrounded him and almost beat him to death.

That incident was a nasty jolt for the man who in hopes of escaping racism, set his sights on the other side of the Atlantic. America was glowing from its recently passed Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination based on race. But he saw Canada, specifically Ontario, where the last racially segregated school had just closed, as an ideal place to settle with his wife.

Donald Sharpe was likely unaware of Canada’s own history of slavery and certainly unaware that Indigenous children were being scooped from their homes and fostered or adopted out to mainly white families, or that they had been dying in abusive residential schools estimated to be in the thousands.

He would soon find out, though, that desegregation was not the same as integration.

The couple settled in London, Ont., and a year later bore their first of six children, a son, Richard.

Richard Sharpe, now in his 50s, sits in an Ottawa café as he tells of his family’s experiences. What they had to contend with is part of a broader pattern that establishes how anti-Blackness is deeply entrenched in Ontario school practices.

Sharpe has vivid memories of the first day of Grade 1 at Lord Nelson Public School in London in the early 1970s.

"I remember going to the schoolyard and a group of white kids surrounded me and said, ‘Why are you here? You don’t belong here.’ So I turned around and went home. And my father said, ‘Why are you home? If they don’t let you in, fight and go in.’"

So every morning Sharpe would fight the boys to get in at the school gates, and every evening he would fight them to get out of the gates.

"I learned to fight," he says. Eventually, he also learned something else. Beat up the instigator — the leaders — and the others will back off. "I learned to fight strategically at a very young age."

While his teachers liked him — he was a bright kid — they didn’t intervene, he said, and he did get into a lot of trouble for defending himself.

"I never instigated violence. But I was the one charged by the school administrators with the crime."

When Sharpe, who calls himself a daydreamer, told his Grade 3 teacher he wanted to be an astronaut, she said, "Richard, people like you don’t become astronauts.’"

"I remember how I felt looking around the class and realizing I was the only Black child and that the others were being encouraged to follow their dreams. I started to think differently of what I could attain in my life. So I focused my attention on sports and art."

Around this time, in the 1970s, the Toronto School Board, historically the most diverse in the country, had been given recommendations by a Working Group on Multiculturalism to overcome a "fundamental incompatibility" between white teachers and non-white students. They also implemented programs such as Appraisal for Better Curriculum to cater to multi-racial students.

Such discussions didn’t impact Sharpe’s school life. His mother had a Grade 8 education and told him to go to school and be a good boy. "She didn’t know how to manage the bureaucracy at school," Sharpe said. "Parents are often concerned there’ll be reprisals for children and they’re not equipped to deal with that."

Meanwhile, his father completed a master’s in education from the University of Western Ontario. It took him almost 25 years to land a permanent teaching job in Canada.

"That was very difficult for him," Sharpe said. "It was difficult for him to advocate for us because he couldn’t get into the system himself."

Donald Sharpe, pictured in the 1960s, moved from the U.K. to Canada, which he saw as an ideal place to settle with his wife. Sharpe completed a master's in education at the University of Western Ontario, but it took him almost 25 years to land a permanent teaching job in Canada.

By the time Sharpe was in Grade 6, the fighting, at least, had stopped. "But I realized people were afraid of me. I was big and strong. So I thought if I could behave in a way that made me more respectable, things would be easier.

"I became the epitome of calm. I smiled more, cultivated a discourse that was very articulate. I learned how to behave and I understood the unwritten rules about being Black in Canada and how to keep myself safe."

Years later, in 1992, following the Yonge St. riot — some call it an uprising against police brutality — Stephen Lewis wrote a Report on Race Relations for premier Bob Rae. It was the first to officially name the injustice in education as anti-Black racism. He called the lack of progress in dealing with racism in education "shocking."

"It’s as if virtually nothing has changed for visible minority students in the school system over the last 10 years," Lewis wrote.

"Everywhere, the refrain of the Toronto students (was) … where are the courses in Black history? Where are the visible minority teachers? Why are racist incidents and epithets tolerated?"

Another report that year, Towards a New Beginning, identified concerns for Black students including streaming below ability (pushing them out of university-bound courses), high dropout rates, lack of Black educators, Eurocentric curriculum and interpersonal racism.

But in the late ’90s, Ontario’s Conservative Mike Harris government cancelled the requirements that school boards develop anti-racism and ethnocultural equity policies. It took steps to remove references to pro-equity goals from future curriculum policy documents. It also implemented a stricter enforcement of suspensions and expulsions, even though studies in the U.S., U.K. and Nova Scotia since the mid-1970s had all shown the disproportionate impact of suspensions and expulsions on Black students and students with disabilities.

It would take a decade to replace those zero-tolerance policies with a progressive disclipine approach.

Fast-forward to the new century.

Sharpe was a federal government worker in Ottawa. His wife, Sandhya Singh, was a university-educated woman whose father was a teacher. They checked all the boxes in the respectability requirements. "We figured we had everything to advocate for our children."

Years after they had given up hope of conceiving, they had a baby in 2001. "It was a miracle baby," Sharpe said. Thinking they could only have one child, the couple heaped greatness into his name: Mandela Mahatma. (They ended up having three children.)

"When he started school, we thought we’d just be present, engage with teachers and make sure everything’s good,"Sharpe said.

"But right after Grade 1, the tone and approach with him changed. He was suddenly the problem.

"We raised him to be opinionated. To speak his mind, to ask for what he needs, to challenge.

"He had difficulties reading and writing. He was very verbal. He would speak to (adults) as though he was also an adult. And people didn’t like that."

He asked too many questions, a teacher said, who then made Mandela stand in a small square made of tape on the floor. "They said this was behavioural adjustment required to ensure he and the other children would get the best out of school," Sharpe said.

"Too loud," "disruptive," "too rough in the schoolyard" were some of the descriptors sent home from school.

After many run-ins with the school, Sharpe and Singh decided to home-school Mandela and their other kids. They did so for years.

Mandela Mahatma Sharpe, left, and his father Richard Sharpe. Mandela was home schooled for a number of years after encountering anti-Black attitudes at school. Shree Paradkar/Toronto Star

Students who don’t have that option end up risking suspensions and expulsions from the public school system.

The Roots of Youth Violence report to the provincial government in 2008 argued that Ontario’s school suspensions and expulsions contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline.

"We said we can’t do anything about anti-Black racism without tackling education," said Rinaldo Walcott, a University of Toronto professor who wrote one of the background papers for that report. The authors Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling also raised serious concerns about the Eurocentricity of the curriculum, pointing to the "use of stereotypes, the failure to include the negative history of Canada’s interaction with Aboriginal peoples, the institution of slavery, exclusionary race-based immigration policies and so on."

After five years at home with his family, Mandela went back to school in Grade 7. The tone of the feedback from school changed in the higher grades: "Threatening" and "physically imposing." A drama teacher once called home to say she was concerned that Mandela had made comments on drug use in class, and someone else said he smelled of marijuana. "Yes," said Mandela when he came home, he and his classmates had floated the idea of being a pothead as part of a skit. His parents felt racial stereotypes influenced these interpretations, especially because he has no history of drug use.

Matters came to a head in the spring of 2017, when Mandela was in Grade 10 and got suspended after he accuused his vice-principal of racially profiling his friends. It happened after the vice-principal told a group of assembled Black and brown kids to remove their bandanas. Mandela wasn’t wearing one that day, but "I had seen many students wear them," Mandela said. "Nobody stopped them.

"I was asked to go to the office, where I thought we’d at least have a discussion," he said.

But he was just handed a day’s suspension. "Persistent opposition to authority" was the reason in the note.

"There was at least one dress-code assembly," Mandela recalled. "They had never mentioned bandanas."

An Ottawa District School Board spokesperson said that while the board was familiar with the case, "due to privacy legislation we are not able to comment on the details of situations involving individual students."

After exhausting the appeal process within the school board, Sharpe turned to community support to deal with the suspension and found "almost every Black family I met had similar experiences."

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A coalition of Black parents was formed, following in the footsteps of a long Canadian history of Black parental advocacy.

Documents in the Archives of Ontario show that as far back as 1842 — even as Ontario’s education system was being shaped — Black parents in Hamilton, in Chatham, in Windsor were calling on white trustees to intervene in what was happening with local schools, especially with segregation, said Natasha Henry, a historian and Peel school board curriculum consultant.

"We had parents challenging that in the court system and pushing for racial equality," she said.

In Ottawa, getting together gave voice to a common experience for Black families. Black families began coming to Sharpe in droves. "They call to say, ‘my child is catching hell at school’ or ‘the teacher is humiliating them, what can we do,’" Sharpe said.

The coalition has been pushing the school board for identity-based data and continuous engagement with the Black community.

"We have anecdotal qualitative data," Sharpe said. "We have stories. This is how we feel. What we don’t have is the hard numbers."

The Sharpe family’s experiences are echoed across the province.

In 2015, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal found there was a glaring racial disparity in Durham’s public and Catholic board schools after parents of Black youths complained of racial bullying and unduly severe discipline ranging from suspensions to arrests.

Another report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 2017 stated that “racialized students receive harsher treatment or punishment than their white peers for similar behaviour.”

The Toronto District School Board remains the national leader in gathering detailed race-based data on students. Student outcomes — dropout rates, suspension rates, streaming practices, (non-gifted) special education designations — show that Black children in particular continue to bear the brunt of the failures of schools.

Black students had the lowest rate of graduation and highest rate of suspension and expulsion between 2011 and 2016, compared to white students and other racialized groups. Almost half of all high school students expelled were Black. (The researchers did not include Indigenous students in this study.)

After five years of high school, Black students have a dropout rate twice that of white students. According to the board’s Enhancing Equity Task Force report, 53 per cent of Black high schools students were in academic programs of study — the pathways to university education — compared to 81 per cent of white students and 80 per cent of other racialized students. They were also underrepresented among gifted students, while white boys whose parents have prestigious jobs are overrepresented.

Since structural anti-Black racism does not recognize national or municipal boundaries or fizzle out as it traverses Highway 401, schools across Ontario could extrapolate from Toronto’s data and embark on the hard task of transformation. Instead, many continue to treat each complaint from Black families as one-offs, as rootless anecdotes rather than part of a pattern of anti-Blackness in the system.

"‘Where is the evidence of racism?’ they ask," said Sharpe.

The late U.S. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once said: “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being."

A few researchers sought to document Black experiences in Canadian school boards to provide this evidence.

The result was a seminal report from the community perspective that made for a compelling reflection of the historical and systemic nature of anti-Black racism in schools.

Towards Race Equity in Education, co-authored by Carl James, chair of the faculty of education at York University, and Tana Turner, of Turner Consulting Group, found the TDSB data validated community experiences in school systems across the GTA.

Black students and their parents told researchers that they were being streamed below their ability, and their streaming began in kindergarten.

"A kindergarten teacher told a parent her child isn’t academic material," said Turner. "That gets documented and put into the student’s academic record, then gets read by the Grade 1 teacher. If they act on that assessment it creates a self-fulfilling cycle."

Societal inability — and therefore educators’ inability — to see Blackness as an asset leads to insidious anti-Blackness in our social institutions. A Yale Child Center study in 2016 showed teachers’ implicit biases against Black students begin in pre-school.

That these outcomes are showing up across generations shows that this isn’t about the students, said Turner. "This is really a systemic issue that’s baked into our school system."

All the data in the world — apart from being a tool to identify a problem — cannot by itself shift outcomes. This is chiefly because data (if collected and analyzed with integrity) is rational, prejudice is not.

Data can also be manipulated. In 2009, the Toronto Star found school principals formally "excluding" students to stay out of suspension statistics, because exclusions were not reported to the education ministry.

Turner’s conversations with staff of school boards since the York report was released found Black parents were being "pressured to put students voluntarily into expulsion programs" that are learning programs for expelled students, so they wouldn’t count in the expulsion statistics.

"What we heard from students and parents and teachers is that Black students don’t drop out of school, they’re being pushed out," said Turner.

Said the U of T’s Walcott, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education: "When you begin with an attitude towards slaves, saying slaves can’t be taught to read and write … that’s the attitude that plays in the system, all the way from segregation to now, the idea that Black people are poor and need to be educated. To be sanitized. To be taught how to be clean. They need to be helped but also disciplined."

To determine education that is relevant to all our lives and empowering to our children, change needs to happen on three levels: structural operations, systemic policies and individual actions.

That the Toronto board is phasing out streaming at Grade 9 is an example of structural change. That it is implementing a targeted strategy to improve Black student outcomes with its Strategy for Black Student Achievement and Excellence is an example of systemic change.

Yet, if all that data, all those policy recommendations and plans by school boards only manage to nudge the needle from A to B, then it’s time to deal with an uncomfortable truth: individuals need to change.

What teachers, as the frontline workers, do impacts an individual’s chances of personal and financial success and growth as a global citizen. This, in turn, impacts our economic and social prospects as a nation.

How could teachers start to address anti-Black racism? In Ontario, where a majority of teachers are white women, seeking equity means asking people least affected by racism to understand it and deeply feel the need for change.

The first step to that change requires an understanding of what oppression looks like.

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Mandela graduated from high school in June on the honour roll and as an Ontario Scholar. He received a scholarship to play soccer at Guelph University. He is actively pursuing his dream of a pro soccer career. His father, Richard Sharpe, said Mandela was asked to practise with the Ottawa Fury professional team for parts of the summer.

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy awards a seasoned Canadian journalist the opportunity to pursue a yearlong investigation into a current policy issue. The project is funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family and the Toronto Star.