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The term Black Canadian refers to black Canadian citizens whose ancestors were indigenous to sub-saharan Africa; for the most part they have recent origins in the Caribbean, but others trace their lineage through the United States, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Black and other Canadians often draw a distinction between those of Caribbean ancestry and those of different descent. Some black Canadians, such as the large community in Nova Scotia, trace their ancestry to freed American slaves who fled to Canada seeking refuge.
According to the 2001 census, 593,335 Canadians* identified themselves as black (in addition to 70,000 who claimed to be both black with European ancestry), approximately two per cent of the entire Canadian population (Statistics Canada). The majority of black Canadians live in five major Canadian cities. As of 2001, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Halifax were home to approximately 78.4 percent of all black Canadians.
Many black Canadians still face challenges. According to the Ethnic Diversity Survey released in September 2003, nearly one-third (32%) of blacks said that they had experienced some form of racial discrimination or unfair treatment sometimes or often in the five years prior to 2003.
Terminology
One of the ongoing controversies in the black Canadian community revolves around appropriate terminologies. Some may refer to black Canadians as Afro-Canadian or African-Canadian, although this term is not as prevalent as African American in the United States. Caribbean-Canadian is often used to refer to black Canadians of Caribbean birth, although this usage can also be controversial as the Caribbean is not only populated with people of African origin. (The Caribbean includes large groups of Indo-Caribbeans, Chinese Caribbeans, European-Caribbeans, Syrian or Lebanese-Caribbeans and Amerindians. The same is also true of Africa, although this is far less frequently cited as an argument against the use of "African-Canadian".) The term Afro-Caribbean-Canadian is occasionally used in response to this controversy, although as of 2006 this term is still fairly rare.
Blacks of Caribbean origin form a much larger proportion of the black community in Canada than in the United States and even the UK — in fact, around half of Canada's black population is of Jamaican origin alone. Many Canadians of Afro-Caribbean origin strongly object to "African-Canadian" as obscuring their own culture and history, which partially accounts for the term's less prevalent use in Canada.
More specific national terms such as Jamaican-Canadian, Haitian-Canadian or Nigerian-Canadian may also be used.
To date, however, there is no widely-used alternative to "black Canadian" which is accepted by both the African-Canadian and Afro-Caribbean-Canadian communities as an umbrella term for the group as a whole. It is incorrect to refer to a black Canadian as "African-American".
Black immigration
Black people arrived in Canada in several waves of immigration. The first of these came alongside French colonists as slaves and later African slaves were brought by White American loyalists to the British colonies of Canada.Freed Black American loyalists and Jamaican Maroons settled in Nova Scotia and later departed for Sierra Leone. Black American slaves later arrived in Nova Scotia through the Underground Railroad where a large community predominatly descended from them still reside. The very first known Black person to live in Canada was an African slave boy named Olivier Le Jeune from Madagascar. Portuguese explorer Mathieu De Costa is the first known Black person to ever set foot on Canadian soil.
Canada was not suited to the large-scale plantation agriculture practiced in the southern United States, and slavery became increasingly rare. In 1793, in one of the first acts of the new Upper Canada colonial parliament, slavery was abolished. It was all but abolished throughout the other British North American colonies by 1800, and was illegal throughout the British Empire after 1834. This made Canada an attractive destination for those, like Nova Scotia minister Boston King, fleeing slavery in the United States. From the late 1820s until the American Civil War began in 1861, the Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of fleeing slaves to Canada. While many of these returned to the United States after emancipation, a significant population remained, largely in Southern Ontario but were widely scattered in both rural and urban locations, inclduing Chatham, Windsor, London, Hamilton, Collingwood and Toronto.
In the late nineteenth century there was an unofficial policy of restricting blacks from immigration, and in the 1920s formal racially-based immigration standards, which excluded blacks, were developed. Thus the huge influx of immigrants from Europe and the United States in the period before World War I included only very small numbers of black arrivals. These restrictions on immigration remained until 1962 when racial rules were eliminated from the immigration laws. This coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in the Caribbean, and over the next decades several hundred thousand blacks came from that region to Canada.
In the last couple of decades an increasing number of immigrants from Africa have been coming to Canada, as is also the case in the United States and Europe. This includes large numbers of refugees, but also many skilled workers pursuing better economic conditions. Today's black Canadians are largely of Caribbean origin with some of recent African origin and smaller numbers from Latin American countries, but a sizable number of black Canadians descended from freed American slaves can still be found in the province of Nova Scotia and parts of Southwestern Ontario. However, some descendants of the freed American black slaves have mixed into the white Canadian community and are viewed by some more recent immigrants as having lost their ethnic identity.
Statistics
- Seventy per cent of all Blacks in Canada immigrated from the Caribbean and Bermuda.
- Sixty four per cent of all Blacks (two out of three) are under the age of 35.
- Close to 90 per cent of Canada's Blacks were not in the country 25 years ago.
- There are 20,000 more Black women than Black men in Canada.
- Seventy percent of all Blacks live in Toronto and Montreal (The number of Blacks in Montreal was tagged at 101,390 and in Toronto at 240,940.)
See also
References
- Ethnic Diversity Survey
- Black Canadian Studies
- Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher, eighteenth-century autobiography of Black Loyalist and Nova Scotia minister Boston King
- "Is it racist to speak of a 'black community' in Canada?", Toronto Star, February 26, 2006
- Alvin McCurdy - online exhibit at the Archives of Ontario
"Black Canadian"