From Tori:

Welcome, students! My name is Tori, and I am a student like you; at the time of writing this, I am months away from my graduation at University of Windsor with a Bachelor of Human Kinetics (Honours Kinesiology) with a Movement Science major with a minor in Psychology. I’ve been privileged to work as a part of the  team that has built this very course.

I am a biracial, straight, cis woman – half Black on my father’s side who emigrated from Jamaica in the early 1970s, and half white on my mother’s side, whose maternal grandparents emigrated from Italy in the late 1920s. I confess, as a Toronto-born kid, I had always felt like a cultural concoction of sorts, but at my Catholic, High Park school, it felt like everyone was. Every person seemed to be a blend of colours and cultures to be celebrated, and that was my normal.

But as my family moved from the diverse metropolis of Toronto to the small Northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie, race suddenly became apparent to me. I was told by a classmate in the third grade that “Black people are stupid” and became a hypersexualized body alongside my best friend, who was Indigenous, by our eighth-grade classmates. As race took center stage during my adolescence, my ethnic and cultural grounding faded into the background. Suddenly, I became Black at white schools and didn’t know what that meant.

In high school, I got good grades and was a star athlete. Even so, being one of the few Black people in school meant I’d receive ignorant comments from boys who oversexualized my features and experience racial bias from referees who told me that I “should handle it” when I’d get fouled. Times like those made me feel different – a new normal. I had many non-Black friends who loved me, although, they weren’t necessarily fierce allies, and I was lonely, depressed, and angry in school with no Black people to relate to. My high school was homogenous; everything, from social media posts to house parties were white coded. I didn’t feel authentic, I didn’t feel seen.

Fortunately, I was saved – not by a white saviour (thank goodness!) – but by my university community. Playing basketball for UWindsor meant I’d found teammates (now sisters <3) who were Black, while clubs on campus like CAOS (Caribbean-African Organization of Students) provided companionship. And thanks to the friends I made in res (s/o to Cartier Hall, the best residence on UWindsor campus – I don’t make the rules), I had finally found a community of Black people with varying interests and lived experiences. I immediately flourished. Within weeks of becoming a Lancer, I’d straightened my hair for the last time, bonded over Jamaican fathers with a new best friend, went to a Black nightclub, Imperial, and danced to soca and dancehall. For the first time, I had a group of Black friends, and they spanned from Arizona to Scarborough to Ottawa. School had been isolating, but surely, I’ve emerged a complex individual. A new normal. A lightskin woman who is celebrated for her wit, her ethnic heritage, her life as a Black person, and so much more. I dedicate this course to all of those who are also on a journey to their new normal. I see you. We are in this together.

From Olamide:

I am the child of Nigerian immigrants who wanted to have a better life for their children.  It might seem obvious but of course, race has played a huge role throughout my life as a Black woman. From before the time I was even alive, the colour of my skin had already determined the way that I was to be treated by the world. At my birth doctor’s had sent my mother home several times even though she presented with immense amounts of pain each time, she was not believed and told to just keep waiting. This went on for three days until she finally had to have an emergency C-section for me to be born. It turns out that she would’ve never been able to give birth have me naturally, but doctors missed it from the constant refusal to assess the situation.

As the child of immigrants, race was not something that was ever explicitly talked about, but something my dad always said was “you need to work twice as hard just to get half of what others get”. Although I had an I that he was talking about race, it was always something that I wouldn’t appreciate until later in life. In the second grade I moved to Brampton, and it is where I had spent I spent most of my life. It was a beautifully diverse city with kids from all walks of life. But for some reason, I was always the one that was somewhat different from all the other black girls. I was the only dark skin girl who did not have a perm in their hair, and worst of all I was African. I got made fun of because of my name, so I began going by my middle name. Other kids would put pencils and other things in my hair too many times to count, so I begged my mom to let me perm my hair ( which she ultimately refused). I was bullied and called a man because I was “stronger” than all the other girls in my grade, so I worked hard at softening myself to avoid the name-calling ( to no benefit).

As my parents began to establish themselves we eventually moved up the social ladder and with that came another move, this time to a city a lot less diverse. I can remember my first day of 8th grade and being able to count the number of black students in my grade with one hand. It was one of the first times that I was uncomfortable as a black girl in a space, surrounded by people who looked nothing like me. I was now on display for these white kids to consume, my body sexualized in a way that I had never experienced before. The micro-aggression like “I bet you can twerk better than everyone else, show us” or  “ your bum is huge, you’re so lucky to be black” was an everyday occurrence. All I could do was laugh them off. All I wanted was to be seen as everyone else, so I started straightening my hair every day, I even began to partake in my own degradation to be liked by others and it worked. I was the funny black girl that everyone was able to just joke around with and I played that role until high school.

By the 10th grade, I was tired of putting myself on display for white people. I was fed up with having to put my blackness on the back burner to fit in with other people. I had finally begun to realize how problematic the way I had been acting the last few years was and no longer wanted to be at the mercy of whiteness anymore. I was able to understand the anti-blackness that was central to all these experiences in my younger years. I found a group of black girls that shared much of the same experiences as me and who I could be authentically me with. I was able to be bold, be African and exist outside these narrow margins that whiteness had confined me to. I was finally free and seen for who I really was and have never looked back. I have been radically me. Unapologetically.