Anti-Black Racism

Season 3: Decoding Black

Led by Centennial College’s Centre for Global Citizenship and Inclusion, in collaboration with Marketing and Communications, the podcast Decoding Black, features hosts Dr. Christopher Stuart Taylor, expert scholar in Immigration History and Black Canadian History, and Letecia Rose, Manager of Partnerships and Programs at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Partnership. The hosts invite listeners to increase their awareness on how to destabilize, deconstruct and disrupt systems of oppression linked to anti-Black racism. Listeners of the podcast will learn diverse perspectives on the Black Canadian experience, and deepen their understanding of critical approaches on how to counteract anti-Black racism and systemic barriers affecting diverse Black communities.

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Season 9: Undiluted

In the newest season of the Centennial College Podcast, Undiluted, Centennial student Joyce Mgbolu conducts a series of interviews that tackle the pressing issue of anti-Black racism, addresses Black experiences both in Canada and at Centennial College, and shares uplifting, Black success stories.

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The Skin We're In: Pulling Back the Curtain on Racism in Canada (2017)
available via CBC Curio

Urgent, controversial and undeniably honest, The Skin We’re In is a wake-up call to complacent Canadians. Racism is here. It is everywhere. It is us and we are it. Following celebrated journalist Desmond Cole as he researches his hotly anticipated book, this documentary from acclaimed director Charles Officer pulls back the curtain on racism in Canada.

Snow-Job: Why is Black Slavery “Whited Out” in Canadian History? An Incorrect Sestina (2020)
available via CBC

Former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke was commissioned by IDEAS to write two poems for this series. Here is his poem Snow-Job: Why is Black Slavery "Whited Out" in Canadian History? An Incorrect Sestina.

What Systemic Racism Looks Like in Canada (2020)
Available via CBC Curio

The police killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed have brought renewed attention to systemic racism. In Canada, some have been quick to deny its existence. But these experts say racism has been normalized within Canadian institutions.

Ninth Floor (2015) available via
National Film Board of Canada

Director Mina Shum makes her foray into feature documentary by reopening the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations – the infamous Sir George Williams Riot. Over four decades after a group of Caribbean students accused their professor of racism, triggering an explosive student uprising, Shum locates the protagonists and listens as they set the record straight, trying to make peace with the past.

Black Mother Black Daughter (1989)
available via National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Black Mother Black Daughter explores the lives and experiences of Black women in Nova Scotia, their contributions to the home, the church and the community and the strengths they pass on to their daughters.

Journey to Justice (2000) available via
National Film Board of Canada

This documentary pays tribute to a group of Canadians who took racism to court. They are Canada's unsung heroes in the fight for Black civil rights. Focusing on the 1930s to the 1950s, this film documents the struggle of 6 people who refused to accept inequality. Featured here, among others, are Viola Desmond, a woman who insisted on keeping her seat at the Roseland movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946 rather than moving to the section normally reserved for the city's Black population, and Fred Christie, who took his case to the Supreme Court after being denied service at a Montreal tavern in 1936. These brave pioneers helped secure justice for all Canadians. Their stories deserve to be told.

Speakers for the Dead (2000)
available via NFB

This documentary reveals some of the hidden history of Blacks in Canada. In the 1930s in rural Ontario, a farmer buried the tombstones of a Black cemetery to make way for a potato patch. In the 1980s, descendants of the original settlers, Black and White, came together to restore the cemetery, but there were hidden truths no one wanted to discuss. Deep racial wounds were opened. Scenes of the cemetery excavation, interviews with residents and re-enactments—including one of a baseball game where a broken headstone is used for home plate—add to the film's emotional intensity.

'Chief Ramer, we do not accept your apology' (2022)
Beverly Bain, No Pride in Policing Coalition

At a press conference detailing new reports of anti-Black racism in the Toronto Police Service, No Pride in Policing Coalition's (NPPC) Beverly Bain told Toronto's police chief she doesn't accept his apology after race-based data was revealed.

NPPC is an antiracist queer and trans group formed to support Black Lives Matter – Toronto and is focused on defunding and abolishing the police.