Ariah Clarke was tired and angry. It was about 2 a.m. on June 2, 2020, not long after Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous-Ukrainian-Black Canadian woman, had died in Toronto after an encounter with police and George Floyd had died in Minneapolis after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Both incidents had set off protests across Canada and the United States calling for justice and police accountability. In response, the University of Windsor, where Clarke was a third-year criminology and political-science student, released a statement expressing “shock and overwhelming concern following the heartbreaking events that led to the tragic and violent death of George Floyd.” It stated a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion and promised to do better on issues of equality and human rights.
But, for Clarke, the statement fell short: she didn’t believe it spoke to the experiences of Black students on the university’s own campus — experiences that are collected on the #ExposeUWindsor website and that another Windsor student, Kevin Limbombe, describes as ranging from microaggressions to “the worst type of anti-Black racism to the point where you think it's written in a script in a movie.”
So she drafted an email to two department heads, expressing her frustration. “First and foremost, a few words to describe how I have been feeling the past few days are: sad, exhausted, angry and defeated,” Clarke wrote. “As a Black student, supported and seen are the last things I feel after reading that statement.”
Ariah Clarke studied criminology and political science at the University of Windsor. (Courtesy of Ariah Clarke)
Clarke sent the email early that morning, and the response was swift. The Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology, she says, thanked her for sharing her thoughts, posted her letter on its website, and invited her to join a multidisciplinary equity, diversity, and inclusion committee (which she later did). The political-science department responded with an email thanking her and reiterating its goal to create a department that is open to everyone and provides a safe space to examine the issues she raised.
Clarke says she had no specific goal or response in mind when she sent the email — and that it was mainly about speaking out on what she and many other Black students at UWindsor were feeling: “That was the basis of my email where I kept saying, I have to wake up and face this every day. And just thinking about that. It's a really heavy burden to carry.”
Windsor isn’t the only school where Black students have spoken out about racism on campus, and it isn’t the only one making a commitment to address it. In November 2021, more than 50 post-secondary institutions in Canada — 24 of them in Ontario — signed the Scarborough Charter, a national action plan to tackle anti-Black racism in higher education.
Momentum for change has grown over the past few years, as a series of incidents sparked widespread media attention. In June 2020, a TikTok video posted by a University of Guelph student had referred to a Black person as "monkey.” That same month, Fabion Foote, a defensive lineman for the Toronto Argonauts, shared on Twitter that, during his time as a McMaster University student, he’d faced racism from coaching staff. (The university later released a report acknowledging the persistence of systemic anti-Black racism in the athletics department.)
In December 2020, Ena Chadha, who at the time served as the commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Council, wrote a letter condemning a reported spate of racist incidents across Ontario. In it, she called for colleges and universities to “take action to create and sustain equitable and inclusive education environments.”
Protesters take a knee at Queen's Park on June 6, 2020. (michael_swan/Flickr)
According to Wisdom Tettey, who serves as the charter-committee chair and is the vice-president and principal of the University of Toronto Scarborough, the charter came out of the 2020 National Dialogue and Action for Inclusive Higher Education and Communities, which focused on anti-Black racism and Black inclusion in Canadian higher education: “One of the things that participants committed to was a charter that comes out of that process, providing a guiding post, if you will, for institutions to help frame their own individual efforts addressing anti-Black racism and Black inclusion.”
The charter lists four main principles: Black flourishing, inclusive excellence, mutuality, and accountability. Each has an action plan that focuses on four areas: governance, research, teaching and learning, and community engagement. Items include forming task forces to conduct independent studies of the histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice, collecting data on under-representation, recruiting and supporting Black faculty, “encouraging the emergence of Black and Black Canadian studies programs,” and developing outreach programs for students in grade schools and up.
While the charter provides a unified vision, Tettey notes that all institutions are autonomous bodies with different modes of operating — and that means institutions can decide how to approach the commitments in the charter: “You may be a small school and what you're able to do is limited, but you and your community can decide on what is meaningful within the confines of your particular institution, and then deliver on that and hold yourself accountable to that.”
Scarborough Charter virtual signing event and launch, November 18, 2021 (University of Toronto)
“There are specific challenges that we have,” says Stephanie Simpson, associate vice-
principal of human rights, equity, and inclusion at Queen’s University. Patrick Deane, Principal and Vice-Chancellor at Queen’s, says publicized incidents of racism at the university’s business school served as a wakeup call for the institution. In 2020, Smith School of Business student Kelly Weiling Zou created an Instagram page where BIPOC students can share personal experiences of racism and discrimination.
“I think that there's a way in which this discourse around the whiteness of Queen’s and the whiteness of the Kingston community serves to obscure the realities of the communities that are actually here,” says Simpson. According to data from Queen’s, in 2020, 25.7 per cent of students self-identified as visible minorities. Within that category, only 10.7 per cent identified as Black. According to the 2016 census, Kingston’s Black population is 1.6 per cent.
“How do we create a climate here in which people feel like they can thrive and in which they are valued and respected?” says Simpson. The university is working to assemble an advisory group to consider the charter’s recommendations and expects to announce the members next week.
For the charter to achieve its goals, experts, including Tettey, say there must be buy-in from the highest level of the institution, a systemic look at anti-Black racism on campus, financial and other forms of support — and accountability.
“What we are hoping is that we have upward and downward accountability within these institutions,” says Tettey. The charter suggests that institutions create senior offices tasked with addressing racism and collect and share data pertaining to their specific goals to enable comparisons over time. According to Tettey, the signatories are working with Statistics Canada on a partnership that will facilitate data collection and sharing and support its effective implementation. In addition, Tettey says, various institutions have committed to a publicly available website to update their communities on progress related to the charter and recommendations from their individual anti-Black-racism task forces. In late spring, partner institutions will hold their first meeting to discuss progress made since the charter was signed.
Tettey notes that accountability could also come from outside institutions — perhaps via
Kevin Limbombe is a student at the University of Windsor and a member of the anti-Black-racism task force. (Courtesy of Kevin Limbombe)
ranking them according to their inclusiveness. “I'm hoping that the cost of exclusion will become so high that institutions will be forced to do the right thing,” he says. “But I'm also hoping that we don't get there.”
Students and student associations should also play a role in holding their individual institutions to their promises, says Christian Fotang, board chair of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations: “It's also making sure there's a lot of follow-up, so it's not like we've signed a nice charter and we made ourselves look good, but there's zero follow-up and there's zero discussion.”
And then there’s government: Kitchener Centre MPP Laura Mae Lindo, formerly the director of the Equity and Diversity Office at Wilfrid Laurier University, says that it could support colleges and universities and hold them accountable by, for example, including anti-racism language in legislation and increasing funding for anti-racism work. “The government provides operational funding, which has been insufficient for decades,” Lindo says. “If and when the government decides to increase that funding, which is something that as the critic for colleges and universities I’m always advocating for, we've got to make sure that some of it is going to anti-racist work.”
The Ministry of Colleges and Universities told TVO.org via email that “the safety and well-being of everyone on university and college campuses is a critical responsibility of colleges and universities in Ontario. Postsecondary institutions have a responsibility to provide a safe and supportive learning environment and must adopt appropriate measures to address issues of racism and discrimination at their institutions.”
In fall 2021, the University of Windsor’s anti-Black-racism task force issued a set of recommendations: “The task force calls on the University of Windsor as a signatory to the Charter, to uphold these principles and commitments for improving the campus experiences of Black faculty and librarians, staff, and students,” it wrote. “The Charter is a commitment to doing better. Simply signing it as a performative gesture is not an option. We must commit as an institution to act consistent with the Charter and take leadership.”
Agenda segment, February 4, 2022: Making Black history month meaningful
The university recently accepted the 41 recommendations made by the task force and has said it is putting together an implementation team
Clinton Beckford, the university’s acting vice-president of equity, diversity, and inclusion, says the charter serves as a push for institutions, like his, that are already making efforts to address anti-Black racism on their campuses: “It puts pressure on us to follow through and to go beyond just talk. Our university committee has been clamouring for action. And I think that's what this Scarborough Charter is. It's a call to action.”
Clarke has completed her studies at Windsor, but the impetus for her email, she says, wasn’t just about her own time at the school: “I couldn't just sit there and not try to do something to make my experience better — and make the experience better for my classmates and future students.”
Ontario Hubs are made possible by the Barry and Laurie Green Family Charitable Trust & Goldie Feldman