5 Black Women Talk About Their Lives In Canada–Past, Present And Future

From history to healthcare, it’s frustratingly rare for Black women’s issues to get mainstream attention.

Black women’s resilience and magic is on display every day, from body-positive musician Lizzo to mental health-advocate Summer Walker to Issa Rae’s TV and film empire. Such high-profile magnificence lends energy to the grassroots, where many regular Black women are active in movements and groups that push back against exclusion and discrimination. Those achievements are happening worldwide, but in Canada, it’s frustratingly rare for Black women’s issues to get mainstream attention.

Too often, Black Canadian women are left out of the national conversation–though to be fair, Canada tries to avoid any discussions of anti-Black racism at all. Instead, it points the finger at race relations in the United States in an attempt to argue that it’s not so bad here. That’s a hard thing to disprove, since race-based data collection—an essential practice in the U.S. and U.K., one that has been used to understand health disparities within racialized communities—is barely implemented in Canada.

This knowledge gap leaves Black women at a double disadvantage, since we’re both a gender and racial minority (the term for anti-Black misogyny, by the way, is misogynoir). Our limited race-based data reveals the results: In Canada, Black women are still discriminated against in the healthcare system, where we face alarmingly high rates of maternal death. We continue to be victims of police and state violence, and in the workplace, continue to be paid less than both white men and white women.

Canada has a lot of work to do to ensure a better quality of life for Black women. Here, we talk to five women about what it means to be Black in Canada today, and how our history affects Black women’s present and future health, families and lives....