Emancipation Day reminds us of the work to do on the road to equality

For Black Canadians, Emancipation Day is just cause for celebration, for sorrow, for frustration, for anger.

For the community at large, the day is another opportunity for humility, reflection and renewed resolve to make Canadian reality worthy of our ideals and self-congratulatory mythology.

This year, amid the coronavirus pandemic that will limit celebrations, and in the roiling social aftermath of the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, Emancipation Day might be more subdued than usual even as it is more vital.

The day commemorates the Abolition of Slavery Act, which became law on Aug. 1, 1834, and set free more than 800,000 people of African descent throughout the British Empire.

Typically, Canadians have taken pride in the fact this occurred decades before America fought a civil war over the issue and also that it was encouraged by Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe, the governor of Upper Canada who, in 1793, passed the first anti-slavery law in the British Empire and for whom the statutory holiday Monday is named in Ontario.

In 2008, the Liberal government of then-premier Dalton McGuinty designated each Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day, intended to celebrate Black identity, highlight the contributions made by people of African descent, and to provide a platform for confronting anti-Black racism.

It has the unofficial purpose of expanding historical awareness beyond Ontario’s comforting tales of the “Underground Railroad” that brought escaped slaves from the U.S. to Canada.

It almost goes without saying that enslavement along with campaigns of extermination are the most monstrous acts perpetrated by one group of people against another.

Neither obscenity is confined to antiquity. And the mere act of removing shackles does not set matters right. The journey from emancipation to equality has proven to be a long one.

Most dictionaries define emancipation as the process of being set free from legal, social, political restrictions. It’s difficult to argue, in the case of Black Canadians, that such a goal has been achieved.

There is little room for complacency and preening in Canada, not when Black people are regularly treated unjustly because of their race, more likely to be suspended or expelled in schools, more likely to be carded and questioned by police, face unemployment rates well above the national average and earn less than wages paid to their white counterparts.

The shedding of chains did not necessarily deliver equality.

In 1992, Stephen Lewis, former Ontario NDP leader and past Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, was appointed in the aftermath of riots in Toronto over anti-Black policing to advise the province on race relations.

“What we are dealing with, at root, and fundamentally, is anti-Black racism,” he said.

“While it is obviously true that every visible minority community experiences the indignities and wounds of systemic discrimination throughout southern Ontario, it is the Black community which is the focus.

“It is Blacks who are being shot, it is Black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is Black students who are being inappropriately streamed in schools, it is Black kids who are disproportionately dropping out, it is housing communities with large concentrations of Black residents where the sense of vulnerability and disadvantage is most acute, it is Black employees, professional and non-professional, on whom the doors of upward equity slam shut.”

One of the biggest chasms he had encountered in life, Lewis said, was that between the Black community and police.

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The chasm remains. And it is a matter of life and death.

In 2018, an Ontario Human Rights Commission report on anti-Black racism in policing said Black people in Toronto were up to 20 times more likely than whites to be shot dead by police.

In all, Lewis was frank and fearless three decades ago in ripping away the Canadian security blanket of denial about the long and painful legacy of slavery in this country as elsewhere.

“Just as the soothing balm of ‘multiculturalism’ cannot mask racism,” Lewis said. “So racism cannot mask its primary target.”

Almost 30 years on, we have Viola Desmond on our currency, but also the toxic environment of the Peel District School Board, and the disproportionate jailing and police shootings of young Black men make clear such ills fester still.

Yet notwithstanding Lewis’s cri du couer, or the judgment of the United Nations that Canada has yet to rid itself of racism, notwithstanding lived experiences recounted recently by Black hockey players or described by such worthies as the late Lincoln Alexander, we not long ago heard Premier Doug Ford say:

“Thank God that we’re different from the United States and we don’t have the systemic, deep roots (of racism) they have had for years.”

Ford later amended that statement. But it spoke loud and clear.

As Robyn Maynard, author of “Policing Black Lives,” has said: “One of the reasons that racism persists in Canada is because our commitment to the perception of racial tolerance and harmony seems to be prized above the actual lived experiences of people.”

Happy Emancipation Day, a grand opportunity to tell — and, more important, listen to — those lived experiences.