#blackinschool

“#BlackInSchool”
by Habiba Cooper Diallo
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.95 ISBN 9780889778184

Young Halifax writer Habiba Cooper Diallo has much to say about being a Black student at a Halifax high school that prides itself on being the “most diverse school east of Montreal”. #BlackInSchool is her non-fiction account of the International Baccalaureate student’s frequent experience with racism, and it clearly airs her frustrations with the “complete absence of cultural competency on the part of staff/administrators and many students,” and with the school’s curriculum itself.

The writer decries the “graphic whitewashing of school through posters;” says “Africa, the hashtag, [is] inserted like a punctuation mark wherever empathy is needed;” and disparages “the Eurocentric approach to learning”. She writes letters to politicians and administrators, and creates a petition re: equity for Black students at Dalhousie University.

Interestingly, this unsettling story’s told via journal entries Cooper Diallo wrote in Grades 11 and 12 (2011-2014). The author’s articulate and mature, but some of her activities (ie: “chatting for hours in the mall’s food court” with friends) are also youthful, and she adopts the Twitter-world’s # (hashtag) in her title—a symbol rarely used in formal writing—and throughout the book to reiterate her major issues. The hashtag’s effect is not unlike a fist being pumped in the air. Quotes proliferate, with sources ranging from Canada’s former Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, to the Mandelas.

As Dr. Awad Ibrahim attests in his eloquent Foreword, this book “opens cracks through which we hear a voice of a young person who is grounded in the real, has a deep understanding of the world around her in a way that is beyond her age, and who knows what it means and how to become fully human”. Cooper Diallo’s Introduction reminds readers that she was “going through a difficult few years” as she was writing these entries, but rather than simply accept the micro and macro-aggressions she experienced during high school, she chose “to document, process, and resist the constant abrasions of systemic racism as they rasped against her young body”. She clarifies that her use of the term “body” also entails Black students’ “mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies, all of which coalesce to make us human”.

Cooper Diallo comes by her activism honestly. Her mother’s photo’s on a poster in the school’s library “for her groundbreaking work on slavery in Canada”. In the chapter #Legacies, Cooper Diallo says she attended an “Underground Railroad conference in Detroit” with her mother, and later considered how though “plantation slavery in the Americas” has ended, when the writer sees “exploit[ive] images of young children purportedly from Ethiopia or Mali walking three miles to get water with flies on their faces as a strategy to capitalize on donor spending from guilt-ridden child sponsors” who “pay themselves large sums in administrative overhead fees,” she’s “reminded that [Blacks’] physical autonomy … is compromised” and “at the disposal of ‘well-intentioned’ white people”.

It seems Cooper Diallo’s taken Rosa Park’s assertion—“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it’s right”—to heart. Cooper Diallo:

#smartyoungblackwomanusingherpowerfulvoiceforchange.

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