Scholar Strike Canada’s action to teach anti-Black racism

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Canadian educators are joining the fight against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Wednesday morning kicked off Scholar Strike Canada, a two day event in which professors will press pause on their everyday teaching and administrative duties to host digital teach-ins on police brutality and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence across the country.

Min Sook Lee, an assistant professor at OCAD University who co-organized Scholar Strike Canada, called education the pathway for addressing the critical issues of our times adding it’s high time to “ove the education from the brain to the muscle. An uprising is in many ways a reckoning of anti-Black violence and anti-Indigenous violence and how our institutions are violent to too many of us. This is a moment of great change and our students need to be part of it, not bystanders or witnesses.

On its website, Scholar Strike Canada demanded educators support defunding police, removing police from school campuses, and support redistributing the funds to Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer and trans communities. The labour action also urged schools to address historic and current underrepresentation of Black and Indigenous faculty (full and part-time) in all Canadian institutions,” stressing the need to prioritize diverse faculty hires. Several activists and educators will be leading the event, including Desmond Cole, Susan M. Hill and Eve Tuck.

While Lee and her co-organizer, University of Toronto professor Beverly Bain, were assembling educators to garner support, Lee said it was important to them that they feature the voices of leading public intellectuals, activists, scholars, critical thinkers and artists who were engaging in current events. The role of education is to get to make democracy robust. That’s our job, to question power and question how institutions reproduce power and ideologies that are violent and anti-Black, anti-Indigenous and violent towards poorer people, queer people, trans and racialised communities.

The digital teach-ins will be livestreamed online. Many tackle topics such as violence against Black people and police brutality. One teach-in, which will be taught by Saskatoon community organizer Erica Violet Lee and co-founder of the Black Power Hour El Jones, is called Gender, Colonialism and Anti-Black Police Racist Violence,’ which will focus on resisting oppression.

During another, entitled Indigenous Responses to Black Resistance, York University professor Bonita Lawrence will look at the “commonalities between Indigenous peoples and Black people” and discuss Indigenous support for Black Lives Matter protests.

Min Sook Lee claimed there was a misconception of Canada the Good which she described as a cultural amnesia that leads Canadians media and elected officials to deny systemic racism throughout the country. All of our institutions in many ways have been inherited through a colonial legacy. Are we simply going to protect and reinforce those systems, or do we ask ourselves: how could we build our intellectual creative resources? How could we use them to do a society that cares for each other, that prioritizes human life, Black lives, Indigenous lives, queer lives, trans lives?. I hoped the strike will influence and inform other actions that people engage in. Change is not given to you. It’s not gifted to you. You fight for it. You make it happen. It’s very much an opportunity for our students to understand how we make history in the moment.