Colour Matters

Based on research conducted throughout Black communities, along with over thirty years of teaching experience, Colour Matters is a collection of essays that engages educators, youth workers, and policymakers to think about the discursive ways in which race shapes the education and community-based aspirations of African Canadians. Informed by the current socio-political Canadian landscape, Colour Matters covers topics relating to the lives of Black youth, with a particular, though not exclusive, examination of Black young men in the Greater Toronto Area.
           The essays reflect the issues and concerns of the past thirty years, and question what has changed and what has remained the same, in the lives of Black youth. Each essay is accompanied by an insightful response from a scholar engaging with topics, ranging from immigration, schooling, to athletics, mentorship, and police surveillance. With the perspectives of scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, Colour Matters provides provocative narratives of Black gendered experiences that, by comparison, alert us to what more might be said, or said differently, about the social, cultural, educational, political, and occupational worlds of Black youth in Toronto. This book probes the ongoing need to understand, in nuanced and complex ways, the marginalization and racialization of Black youth in a time of growing demands for a societal response to anti-Black racism.

CARL JAMES is the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora in the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto where he is also Senior Advisor in Equity and Representation to the V.P Equity. He holds cross-appointments in the Graduate Programs in Sociology, and Social & Political Thought