Examining the Rights of Black Caribbean Diasporic Youth

• In Event: African Diaspora Youth Experiences: Navigating Anti-Black Racism in Education

Proposal

The globality of Black oppression signals the discursive relationality of Black scholarship and a critical race theoretical perspective to the study of Black experiences and subjectivities. Therefore, as Black women who are of Caribbean descent, we draw from our embodied ethnocultural experiences – as Black scholarship should (Dei, 2012; Nyamnjoh, 2012) – to interrogate the ways in which Black Caribbean Diasporic Youth (BCDY) who were born “back home” and in Canada, navigate anti-Black racism in the education system in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

Using data from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), and other GTA-based boards, our analysis gives keen attention to how BCDY’s rights, as outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), are being upheld — as well as compromised — in educational spaces. The discussion is framed by a combined articulation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Human Rights Theory (CHRT) because the experience of anti-Black racism, and institutional responses to such experiences, are deeply entangled within the concept of “rights” (Williams, 1987).

This research is important because the Great White North must also be taken to task in the global reckoning of Blackness that is taking place. Its public educational institutions are implicated in the continued subjugation and suppression of Black people. Therefore, invoking Busey and Coleman-King (2020), we argue that it is incumbent upon Black educationists to interrogate how “racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy” (p. 4) impact Black people’s educational experiences, and question whether or not the concept of “rights” even applies to BCDY/Black students in the GTA, and in the broader Canadian context.

Author

• Giselle Thompson, Acadia University