Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.“I can’t believe what you say because I can see what you do.”— James BaldwinOTTAWA—One fine morning in the mid-1960s, Donald Edward Sharpe, a Black undergraduate student at Oxford University, was walking to his church, where he taught Sunday school. He passed a house where a little white girl sat on the steps in front of her home. He said hello and walked on.Common courtesy, or crime?Soon after, a group of white men surrounded him and almost beat him to death.That incident was a nasty jolt for the man who in hopes of escaping racism, set his sights on the other side of the Atlantic. America was glowing from its recently passed Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination based on race. But he saw Canada, specifically Ontario, where the last racially segregated school had just closed, as an ideal place to settle with his wife. Donald Sharpe was likely unaware of Canada’s own history of slavery and certainly unaware that Indigenous children were being scooped from their homes and fostered or adopted out to mainly white families, or that they had been dying in abusive residential schools estimated to be in the thousands. He would soon find out, though, that desegregation was not the same as integration.The couple settled in London, Ont., and a year later bore their first of six children, a son, Richard. Richard Sharpe, now in his 50s, sits in an Ottawa café as he tells of his family’s experiences. What they had to contend with is part of a broader pattern that establishes how anti-Blackness is deeply entrenched in Ontario school practices. Sharpe has vivid memories of the first day of Grade 1 at Lord Nelson Public School in London in ...
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