BLACK PROTEST BLACK LIVES
AND THE UNIVERSITY
A
Transnational Conversation with
Verene Shepherd (Jamaica)
Asanda Ngoasheng
(South Africa)
Moderated by Océane Jasor
Monday February 22, 10:30am-noon (EST)
Zoom Registration: http://bit.ly/3tKqzMQ
︎
Recent protests across the
Black diaspora as well as critical challenges to the university as a colonial
structure have been underpinned by a philosophical grounding in the discourse
and demands of reparations. This conversation will take up questions of
reparatory justice in relation to Black protest and the university. Our
contributors will draw on their respective leadership in the Reparations Movement spearheaded by the
University of the West Indies and the #FeesMustFall,#RhodesMustFall, and #DecolonisingTheCurriculum movements
emerging from South Africa. We will explore the challenges, provocations
as well as the transformative possibilities of these movements to right
historical injustices on both sides of the Atlantic.
︎
Verene A.
Shepherd, graduate of the University of the West
Indies (UWI) and the University of Cambridge, is Professor Emerita of Social
History at The UWI, is Director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the
UWI, a published author of 7 books, a radio host and scholar activist,
especially in the areas of women’s rights, human rights and reparatory justice.
As a UN expert she has played a role in drafting the programme for the Decade
for people of African descent and in the adoption of CERD General Recommendation
36 – “Preventing and Combatting Racial Profiling by Law Enforcement Officials.
She has received several awards for her work in History, Human Rights and
Gender. Her work around collective memorials for historical tragedies is
well-known.
Asanda
Ngoasheng is a racial and gender justice activist. She
is a research associate at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Rights and
Justice. As a scholar -activist she has
written journal articles and opinion pieces on the role of social justice in
education. She has taught at the University of Witwatersrand and Cape Peninsula
University of Technology (CPUT), both in South Africa. She is a conflict
transformation practitioner who runs transformative workshops using
storytelling to heal and affirm marginalised people in South Africa and beyond.
Ngoasheng holds a Master’s in international Relations from the University of
Witwatersrand.
Océane Jasor is a graduate of Florida International University and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. Prior to joining academia, she worked in development agencies broadly concerned with women’s empowerment and gender justice. Her research explores non-western and gendered responses to developmentalist discourses and global processes. Her current research investigates present-day feminist movements and discourses in South Africa, the African continent, and the African diaspora. Her work was published in Gender, Place & Culture, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council (SSHRC) Insight Development grant and a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship to foster academic collaboration between Canada and West Africa.
With the support of ACCUTE (Association
of Canadian College and University Teachers of English)
︎
PROTESTS AND PEDAGOGY
STILL
DEMANDING
JUSTICE
We are once again in a season of protest.
In 1969 students at Concordia protested anti-Black racism by occupying the university’s computer centre for two weeks. Outside, others carried signs which marked their connections to a worldwide struggle for Black rights.
On the 14th day of their occupation a fire was lit. It caused nearly 2 million dollars in damage and imperiled their lives, forcing the protestors to hack their way out of the computer centre with an emergency axe.
The police -- called by the university’s administration -- assaulted and arrested nearly 100 people fleeing the fire. Some of those same students were jailed anywhere from 6-16 months, threatened with deportation, and Trinidad and Tobago (which had only gained Independence 7 years earlier) bailed out ten of their nationals due to bails set extraordinarily high (ranging from $1,000-$15,000).
In remembering this event today we ask what duty of justice do we owe the past and what are the connections to the present? Should the Trinidad government be repaid the bail money? Was 1960s Canada really any less racist than the segregated US? Why in a nation of apologies has there been no apology issued for this event?
In this moment, institutions around the world are grappling with the legacies of slavery, anti-Black racism, and police brutality. Protests and Pedagogy convened this conversation as part of a two week programme in February 2019, meant to remember and reflect on the 1969 protests. We shared these videos with Concordia to re-ground the issue of reparative justice. Such a lens moves beyond the corporate discourse of equity and inclusion which dominates universities’ “diversity management” policies.
In the US, Ivy League schools such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia are questioning the symbolic and material afterlife of slave ownership found in the source of endowments. In South Africa, a movement to decolonize universities by challenging white curricula, and removing imperial statues had ripple effects. Oxford University debated its imperial ties and Glasgow University has become the first British university to admit it benefitted from slavery, and is seeking to make amends. In Canada, prominent universities like Dalhousie and McGill also had founders who were pro-slavery/slave-owners respectively.
In the world-wide context of universities beginning to address their relationship to slavery and anti-Black racism, does Concordia carry any responsibility here? And what is that responsibility? Is it financial responsibility and/or a responsibility to seek truth and to reconcile with those original protestors and the communities to which they now belong, and for whom the events still emphasize a legacy of discrimination and enforced inequality? After all, those students were among the most talented from their Caribbean islands, their aim was to enter medical school, and many of their lives, although still remarkably successful, were transformed by these events. Canada in the 1960s distanced itself from racist practices in the US, as it does now, through the image of a polite, harmonious nation, but should the politics of an apology extend to the Black community as a whole in Canada?
A starting point for Concordia would be an institutional apology for calling the police on Black students in 1969, but also attention to the further demands the students made in 1969 including their call for Black Studies at what was then Sir George Williams University, now Concordia.
PROTESTS AND
PEDAGOGY
A conference and event series commemorating the 50th Anniversary
of
the Sir George Williams University Computer Center Occupation, Montréal,Québec.
*Image Source: Concordia University Records Management and Archive (1074-02-037).
︎
G R O U N D I N G S
“Something happened here in Montreal on February 11th, 1969, which for different reasons neither Blacks nor Whites will ever forget." - Dennis Forsythe
In 1969, West Indian students at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) occupied the university’s computer centre from January 29th to Feb 11th as part of one of the most significant student protests in Canadian history.
The student occupation was in response to discriminatory pedagogical practices and the university’s failure to effectively address the students’ complaints.
The protest culminated with a now iconic and widely circulated image of computer punch cards being thrown out the window of the 9th floor by students. The end of the protest was also marked by varying accounts of police brutality, racist epithets, and a mysterious arson which forced the students’ evacuation. In the aftermath, nearly 100 people were arrested. The impact of this event was felt acutely in Montreal, but followed closely by national media in Canada, with ripple effects across the Caribbean, impacting Caribbean-Canadian relations and resulting in Caribbean-based student protests, which pushed governments to demand justice for their nationals.
This conference commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Sir George Williams “affair” as a lens to reflect upon the unfinished business of decolonization and its relationship to questions of pedagogy, institutional life and culture and ongoing discussions about race and racism. We seek to remember this historical moment and its questions of decolonization and pedagogy as ones which remain urgent in higher education around the world. We also acknowledge the long history of student protests in various institutions across the Third World and the Global North, but in particular we draw connections between this event, and the “Rodney Riots” in Jamaica, 1968 and Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution in 1970.
In locating the students who were part of the Sir George Williams “affair” as part of this wider trajectory, we further ask what is the decolonizing role of the student intellectual both historically and in our current global moment? What are the unfinished legacies of this moment in the Canadian context and beyond? How is it remembered, forgotten or contested in different spaces? How did it connect or contribute to wider circuits of activism, protest and resistance? How is blackness included or occluded in decolonizing dialogues (particularly relating to curriculum and pedagogy)? What are the lessons of the occupation of the computer centre to current forms of resistance, such as Black Lives Matter or Rhodes Must Fall?
The protest culminated with a now iconic and widely circulated image of computer punch cards being thrown out the window of the 9th floor by students. The end of the protest was also marked by varying accounts of police brutality, racist epithets, and a mysterious arson which forced the students’ evacuation. In the aftermath, nearly 100 people were arrested. The impact of this event was felt acutely in Montreal, but followed closely by national media in Canada, with ripple effects across the Caribbean, impacting Caribbean-Canadian relations and resulting in Caribbean-based student protests, which pushed governments to demand justice for their nationals.
This conference commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Sir George Williams “affair” as a lens to reflect upon the unfinished business of decolonization and its relationship to questions of pedagogy, institutional life and culture and ongoing discussions about race and racism. We seek to remember this historical moment and its questions of decolonization and pedagogy as ones which remain urgent in higher education around the world. We also acknowledge the long history of student protests in various institutions across the Third World and the Global North, but in particular we draw connections between this event, and the “Rodney Riots” in Jamaica, 1968 and Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution in 1970.
In locating the students who were part of the Sir George Williams “affair” as part of this wider trajectory, we further ask what is the decolonizing role of the student intellectual both historically and in our current global moment? What are the unfinished legacies of this moment in the Canadian context and beyond? How is it remembered, forgotten or contested in different spaces? How did it connect or contribute to wider circuits of activism, protest and resistance? How is blackness included or occluded in decolonizing dialogues (particularly relating to curriculum and pedagogy)? What are the lessons of the occupation of the computer centre to current forms of resistance, such as Black Lives Matter or Rhodes Must Fall?
Image Source: Concordia University Records Management and Archive (1074-02-150)
C A L E N D A R
January 29th-February 11th, 2019
All events at 4th SPACE, main floor, J.W. McConnell Building (LB),
1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W, unless otherwise noted. Click dates for details.
Tuesday January 29th
Launch Event
Archival Exhibit Opening
Wednesday January 30th
Ninth Floor - Screening with Cinema Politica
Black Montréal Round Table
BLACKOUT - Tableau D’Hôte Theater - Opening
Thursday January 31st
Oral History: Workshop with Stéphane Martelly and Stephen High
Black Canadian Education Tools: Workshop with Dorothy Williams
An(other) Antilles - Screening with Cinema Politica
Friday February 1st
Black History Month Launch at City Hall
Printmaking Workshop
A Visual Record of Events Unfolding: Artist Talk with Charmaine Lurch
Saturday February 2nd
Black Experience in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Invitation only)
Sugar Cane Alley - Screening with Cinema Politica
Sunday February 3rd
9th Floor Walk Through
Policing Round Table
Monday February 4th
’70: Remembering a Revolution - Screening with Cinema Politica
Protest and Gender Activism
Tuesday February 5th
The Congress of Black Writers and Sir George at 50: A Talk
Multidimensionality of Black Experiences: Round Table
Wednesday February 6th
Congress of Black Writers Conference at McGill University
Telling Stories: Black Montréal Oral History Course
Beading Workshp with Pascale C. Annoual
Film and Community, Massimadi Montréal
Thursday February 7th
Decolonizing Knowledge Across the English and French Caribbean
Crisis at Sir George - Screening with Cinema Politica
Friday February 8th
Protests and Pedagogy Conference Day 1
Champaint: Race and Pedagogy
Saturday February 9th
Protests and Pedagogy Conference Day 2
Champaint: Race and Pedagogy
Sunday February 10th
REDE Protocol
Commemoration - Maison d'Haïti
Riots Reframed - Screening with Cinema Politica
Monday February 11th
Groundings: The Way Forward, Towards a Reparative Framework
Everything Must Fall - Screening with Cinema Politica
Closing
*Image Source: Concordia University Records Management and Archive (1074-02-117).