Our last 613-819 Black Hub Freedom School class was about hero building, sparked by the debate over what to do with statues of people who did really nasty things in the past.
One of our main goals was to come up with a recommendation on what position the Hub should take on whether to take such statues down. Ottawa mayor, Jim Watson, was recently quoted as saying he was against taking down statues of Sir John A. MacDonald because “he was the first leader of our country – warts and all.” Some citizens had been calling for MacDonald’s statues to be removed due to his documented racist views and actions against Indigenous people.
We didn’t decide on a position, as there’s still more discussion needed, but we gained some valuable insights into how societies create heroes, how that impacts our daily lives – and what we should do about.
We talked about how we learn about heroes from an early age, one of the first ways being from fairy tales. As Black kids, we were exposed to lots of heroes that didn’t look like us. They were in books, on TV, in movies, on cereal boxes – even on our clothing. If your parents did the extra work you might also have been exposed to heroes like Anansi the Spider – but only in books.
We talked about how the heroe-building machine works so well that characters like Robin Hood are known globally. I pointed out that, no matter where I have travelled, people make the same joke when they learn my name: “Like Robin Hood!” (“Like Batman and Robin!” is a distant second.) This happened even in West Africa.
We talked about Canadian national heroes and who has the power to create them. The ones that came immediately to mind were people like Sir John A. MacDonald and Terry Fox. Although we could have mentioned Viola Desmond, Donovan Bailey or any of the championship Toronto Raptors – no one did. We did spend a lot of time talking about sports heroes, however, when we moved from talking about make believe heroes to real ones.
The first thing we discussed was that sports heroes, like all real life heroes, aren’t actually “real” as their hero image is carefully crafted to leave out the bad stuff – unless the bad stuff is central to their image like Michael Jordan’s former Chicago Bulls team mate, Dennis Rodman. Sports heroes are made by the marketing machine of those that own the teams they play on. In the stadium, they model physical excellence, team work, competitive spirit and tenacity. Outside the stadium, some of them model community service. However, unlike fairy tale princes or super heroes, sports heroes don’t confront the powerful – especially the powers that control their sports. What happened to kneeling quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, is an example of what awaits Black athletes who break that rule (in contrast, American soccer star, Megan Rapinoe, is still playing despite having kneeled in solidarity with Kaeperinick in 2016).
Looking at Black sports heroes and Viola Desmond, the rules would appear to be that Black sports stars can be made heroes if they shut up and play and others can become heroes if they take an individual, non-violent stand against injustice. Black folks who aren’t playing with someone else’s balls and are challenging the system now, aren’t heroes – they’re trouble makers. And things get really bad when those trouble makers run into some other heroes: the police.
We’re taught from an early age that cops are good. We see them helping old ladies in children’s books, talking with Mr. Rogers and as pieces to add to our happy Lego cities. We see them in kids movies and TV shows usually coming to arrest the bad guys. But, just like sports heroes, these images of cops aren’t real. They omit the bad stuff and that means that folks that don’t have bad experiences with cops (i.e. most white people) grow up thinking cops are all good. The problem with that is, when a cop beats up or kills a Black person, most white people’s first thought is, “Well, cops are good so the Black person must have done something wrong.”
This is why Canada needs more Black heroes: so everyone gets brought up learning about a lot more Black folks who are all good too. (They need to learn about real, complex Black folks too but, hey, baby steps.)
We need more Canadian Black Panther/T’Challas, more Black teachers kids can look up to and more Canadian Zumbis. Who is Zumbi you ask?
In 2016, my family and I went to the Rio Olympics in Brazil. We spent the first part of our trip in Rio and the second part in the former colonial capital, Salvador. One day, while walking near Salvador’s town square, we came upon this statue:
It’s of Zumbi Dos Palmares who, according to Wikipedia, “was a Brazilian of Kongo origin and one of the pioneers of resistance to slavery of Africans by the Portuguese in Brazil. He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who had liberated themselves from enslavement in that same settlement, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. Zumbi today is revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a powerful symbol of resistance against the enslavement of Africans in the colony of Brazil.”
Zumbi has his own national day of celebration and an international airport named after him:
This would be like having a international airport named after Louis Riel in Canada or Nat Turner in the US. (I can see Nat Turner International Airport having signs up saying, “If you see something you don’t like, please revolt.”)
My position on the statues is leave them up but put up plaques telling their whole story – warts and all. And put up statues of folks like Rocky Jones and Rosemary Brown.
As for sport heroes, if we don’t like the fact that they’re told to shut and play, maybe we should speak up and stop paying to see games until the athletes are allowed to speak up too.