BlackLife by Rinaldo Walcott

Author:Rinaldo Walcott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927886243
Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
Published: 2019-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

BLACK GIFTS AS A PROBLEM

In this section, we turn to what we will call three Black gifts: the Sir George Williams Affair, Africville and Caribana. We argue that these are gifts that allow for a range of relations to nation, citizenship, belonging and anti-Black institutionality that might allow for thinking differently about what is at stake in terms of thinking Canada in the Americas. These three gifts require that we think in sustained ways about Black events that refashion this nation. The ongoing salted cod cultural politics of cultural analysis, institutions and practitioners consistently means that Black cultural workers write the same essay over and over again. We have written this document before; it is why we are exhausted. So, let us turn yet again to repeating and recounting that which should by now be shaping all of our conversations about this place, this nation, this land, but still resolutely does not.

The Sir George Williams Affair encapsulates Walcott’s claim for a diasporic reading that places Canada in the Americas. The Affair concerned itself with students bringing a complaint against a biology professor, Perry Anderson, at the end of the term in April 1968 for discriminatory grading practices at George Williams University. The administration dragged its feet on the complaint hoping it would disappear by the beginning of a new term in the autumn of 1969. This was a bad calculation on the administration’s part. However, over the course of that period two important events had taken place in Montreal. The first event was the Congress of Black Writers held in October 1968, which also travelled to Toronto in a reduced fashion and with some different speakers. Among the speakers at the conference were: C. L. R. James, Stokely Carmichael and James Forman, Harry Edwards, Walter Rodney, Bobby Hill, Alvin Poussaint, Rocky Jones, Michael X, Lloyd Best and Jan Carew. Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka were denied entry into Canada to participate as was planned. Additionally, the Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam also occurred that November with participation from Bobby Seale and a number of notable Third World radicals (Roberts, 2005). It was in the context of such intellectual and activist engagements, including other conferences that ran from 1965 until 1969, that the Affair eventually unfolded. These events meant that Black people had and were making the links for justice in Canada with similar struggles elsewhere—they were not just imitating or voicing support for struggles elsewhere. They understood their plight as one characterized by global forces, but especially the historical forces of the Americas.

The main event of the Affair was the taking of the Computer Centre and its occupation by a number of students (400 of them) for two weeks at the end of January and into February in 1969. The occupation culminated in a fire and the police storming the Centre on February 11. Significant damage was reportedly done to some of the computers, apparently about two million dollars worth; this resulted in a bevy of charges being laid against the students involved.

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