Foreword: The Long Game

Abstract

We could start with this story: A parent, herself a Black teacher, runs into her son’s French teacher, who is white. She tells him that her son has transferred to one of the technical high schools. He congratulates her, assuring her that she has made the right decision since – he tells her confidently – her beloved child will be good with his hands. Or we could begin by introducing a Black university student, also a parent, who leaves her seminar discussion almost every week as she keeps getting calls from her child’s school about his disruptive behaviour. At one point, her son is physically restrained by a teacher. Efforts to challenge this – including contacting the school superintendent – continue all year. Unsatisfied with the responses she has received, she eventually transfers her son to another school, making her commute to his school and her university significantly longer. No changes are made at her son’s former school. Another student-parent learns that her son has been moved to a special education classroom without consultation. The special ed class is taught by the school’s only Black teacher, and most of the students in that class look like her child. The children in the above two stories are both five years old. Or we could simply begin by reflecting on what it means to be a parent of Black children in North America, what it means to watch them grow into an understanding of themselves as part Caribbean – as affirmation to be sure, but also as the expression of a tentative relation to a place where they were born and raised and schooled. School (noun). A space where Black parents are acutely aware that our children spend most of their waking weekdays. Where big pieces of them are (de)formed. A space of damage. Where we are yet to understand the spiritual and psychic costs, even as we know that racism and Foreword: The Long Game