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“Their blood is in there, and they can’t throw it out.”

— Yvonne Wilson

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As a PhD student and black American living and raising my children in Quebec, I have found myself over the last four years most interested in research involving the history of Quebec and Canada — particularly, comparative histories between the United States and Canada. I have come to think of my own research involving the history of anti-black public schooling practices throughout Canada in the first half of the 19th century as an archetype for understanding race and racism within this country, for explaining the patterns of Canadian anti-black racism that so many of my friends native to here struggle to shape into both word and emotion.

This historical period was, of course, the time when Egerton Ryerson was dreaming into existence Canada’s first public school systems. It was also the period that saw the first large migrations of black enslaved who unshackled their bodies and risked everything to journey north to Canada, only to be met with a virulent white Canadian racism that bore down upon the bodies of black children who were shoved into segregated and inferior schools.