SFU School for Contemporary Arts held an interdisciplinary webinar hosted by Dr. Henry Daniel to highlight Black academics’ work in arts, sciences, technology, and business. This panel featured Black faculty, students, and staff to discuss identity, history, and the institutional barriers they face.
“This information needs to be shared [ . . . ] It needs to be shown to students who don’t think they have a place in this university,” said Daniel.
Dr. Taiwo Afolabi, assistant professor in applied theatre at the University of Regina, explored matters how the system is broken for Black people in Canada, among other matters. Black Canadians are more likely to be unemployed, have a low income, and not go to post-secondary, as a product of the institutional barriers that bar them from these opportunities, according to CTV News. He said he sees a lot of immigrant families with education, but “by the time [ . . . ] they came to Canada, they couldn’t get a job, not because they were not qualified — but because of the system.”
Afolabi noted if he had come to Canada 20 years ago, he wouldn’t have been afforded the same opportunities he has been today. He encourages students to go beyond recognizing institutional barriers to create change, asking attendees, “What are you doing in your own capacity?”
“We talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion, but how do we actually start doing things?” asked Daniel.
Fellow panelist and associate professor at the Beedie School of Business, Dr. June Francis, also discussed institutional barriers in her conversation. Francis researched the “markets that created the first internal market system in Jamaica.”
She explained enslaved people in Jamaica were allowed to grow agriculture for themselves on extra land known as “slave plots.” It was Black enslaved women “who transported and connected the rural economy to the urban markets and provided the first system in Jamaica.
“To my great dismay, I came to understand what a colonial white system looked like — I was told that I would not get tenure if I insisted on pursuing this direction,” said Francis. She abandoned that research. It was not until decades later, after receiving tenure, that Francis went back to conduct research in this area.
Daniel noted the importance of allowing Black students today to pursue research and work rooted in the place where they come from.
Webster McDonald, a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas, experienced the challenges of finding his identity as a Black queer man growing up. He said it was in primary school “that I realized that my identity — my queer identity — was always going to be under heavy surveillance.”
He found growing up in Jamaica that “a boy is supposed to embody ideas of masculinity” in the way he walked, spoke, and carried himself. “I realized that I could not meet those masculinist, heterosexist signifiers, and so I felt as if I had to perform and assimilate to some of these social codes to be safe — to stay alive in these violent spaces.”
McDonald said he found an outlet in the performing arts to explore and discover his identity. With his background in the performing arts, he was able “to find some of these creative tools to critique some of these inherited knowledge systems and to disrupt [them].”
“Creativity is courage, creativity is boldness, creativity is also vulnerability. That’s the work that needs to be done first and foremost,” said associate professor in the faculty of health sciences Dr. Angela Kaida.
“To be able to do that work, you need to know who you are, who your authentic self is, and you have to know that you matter.”
Daniel noted the importance of students putting themselves “in a position where you are able to create new things for yourself and for others.”
