All in History
By the 1680s, the institution of slavery in the Atlantic colonies was premised on race. Blackness became intertwined with servitude, whiteness became an attribute of the free and by extension white identity functioned as a “shield from slavery.” In the American and Caribbean colonies, a tiered system based on skin colour distinguished whites and light-skinned Creoles from Africans.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enslaved men, women, and children were culled from West African ethnocultural communities of the Wolof, Mandingo, Mende and Yoruba. Africans were frequently resisting their enslavement. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica for instance, outbreaks occurred on an average of every five years.
If the nineteenth century was the age of mechanical reproduction, wherein the image became the most valued visual form, and print and photography were its agents, in the twentieth century, visual forms were also subject to the latent demands in society. These new images helped to co-create the modern visual landscape, and in so doing, Black women and men became part of the "new."
To have hope you have to dare to question the things you have taken as essential truths. Where many folks read the image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1965, Colin Kaepernick in 2017, and Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, as depicting the act of kneeling in protest to systemic racism and against systems of capital that have benefited from Black servitude and disenfranchisement, others see anti-heroes, unpatriotic rebel rousers, and non-citizens who are not “grateful” for all that they have been given.
During Black History Month in 2023, Montreal-based artist Franck Sylvestre performed a puppet show geared toward Black children. The show included a puppet named “Max” who appeared with coal black skin, jagged teeth, bright red lips, wide eyes, and an ape-like nose. Many Black community organizations publicly denounced Sylvestre and his puppet.
I completely understand the logic behind Black Excellence — Black people, especially students are underrepresented, under acknowledged, and often are made to feel like outsiders at universities, especially in Canada where universities are still predominantly White. However, when you only celebrate a people’s accomplishments and ignore the challenges they have had to endure, and systemic realities they lived (and continue to live) through, Black Excellence becomes the veil that shields us from seeing how our systems and institutions are still rooted in White supremacist notions of “success”.
