ABOUT THE BLACK PERSPECTIVES OFFICE
The BPO supports all Black students, staff, and faculty at Concordia University by collaborating with institutional partners to develop practical, community-driven solutions that recognize, resist, and dismantle anti-Black racism to help build a more just, inclusive, and equitable university environment.
Our work and values
- We work from an anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-oppressive framework.
- We are committed to our ever-growing practice of being inclusive and accessible to all, and we actively aim to oppose all forms of discrimination and oppression.
- We work to develop resources that educate and empower our community with the knowledge and tools needed to recognize, resist, and dismantle anti-Black racism within the university context.
- We work to implement the final recommendations from the President's Task Force on Anti-Black Racism to address anti-Black systemic racism and ensure an inclusive university.
- We collaborate with internal Concordia units to design and pilot initiatives that can be adopted both institutionally and at the unit level, in order to support and champion the perspectives, success, and well-being of Black communities across the university.
- We actively build and nurture working relationships with local Black communities and universities, grounded in mutual respect, collaboration, and shared commitment to Black excellence.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge systemic racism
- We acknowledge that systemic racism exists within Canadian academia and in the broader society.
- We recognize the legacy of systemic racism that led to the 1969 Sir George Williams University student protest.
- We commit to confronting and denouncing anti-Black racism within Concordia University.
- We commit to educating our students, faculty, and staff about the enduring legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, anti-Black violence, and the structural inequities that have shaped, and continue to shape, Canadian universities.
- We honour and continue the work of Black students, faculty and staff who have been, and remain, at the forefront of the struggle for racial justice at Concordia University.
We support the movement for Black lives
The Black Perspectives Office, located on unceded and traditional Kanien’kehá:ka Nation Territory, stands in solidarity with, and will always be informed by, Black communities and activists in Canada and around the world who continuously fight against anti-Black interpersonal and systemic racism, violence, and oppression. We honour and stand with the Movement for Black Lives in the fight for Black liberation and justice.
Honouring Our Ancestors
We call upon our ancestors, remembering all who came before us. We honour you, our African ancestors, who paved the way for us in the diaspora and in the Mother Land, cradle of civilization, Mother Africa. Your bodies, blood, flesh and bones, then and now, nourish the earth and colour great and small, fresh and salted waters. African, Caribbean and Black people, no matter where in the world we are, share a common bond of courage, determination, indomitable spirit and greatness, and we acknowledge our differences and similarities embedded in the bloodlines of kings and queens, inventors, warriors and philosophers. Some of you endured the brutality of transatlantic enslavement, forced to give free labour, built nation states worldwide in bare backs and still manage to be victorious in achievements. We honour you today and call upon your wounded and triumphant spirits to share this space and bask in our glory of you — all our fore mothers, fathers, parents and relations.
We know that you fought alongside Indigenous peoples yesteryear for freedom, so we know that our liberation is tied to the liberation of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the world. We cannot ever be liberated if our Indigenous relations remain in bondage under the tyranny of historical and modern colonialism. We will not let your toil and service to humanity and to Black peoples go in vain, so we carry on in your footsteps, reaching for higher heights, creating memories and deeper prints for those of us here now and babes unfertilized yet to come.
Written by Dr. Delores V. Mullings. Offered to the Inaugural Inter-Institutional Forum of the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education, May 2022, Vancouver, Canada
