Black Like Who By Rinaldo Walcott Summary

In Black Like Who?, Rinaldo Walcott addresses the erasure of the Black body in national historical narratives to the extent that “many people continue to believe that any black presence in Canada is a recent and urban one spawned by black Caribbean, and now continental African, migration (43).” As a matter of fact, as exemplified by Myriam Chancy, Canada is widely considered as a harbor, as a place of tolerance and diversity for people seeking refuge “differentiating it from the United States and other leading First World countries as a place where true demography has taken root and flourished (Chancy, 80).
In The Hanging of Angelique, Afua Cooper investigates the secret of slavery in Canada. She points out that this “lurid” image is ingrained in the national psyche and is a part or their national identity (page). For her, this idealistic image of Canada as a land of refuge takes its origins between 1830 and 1860, the period known as the Underground Railroad when “thousands of American runaway slaves escaped to and found refuge in the British territories to the north” (Cooper, 69). As a consequence, this part of Canadian history is written out of books. Afua Cooper states that it is difficult to find scholarly or popular accounts and depiction of slave life at the time
Eight one years later, Louis XIV officially allowed slavery in New France to meet labour shortage and the demands of the colonists who wanted Black slaves to compensate for the extermination of the Native populations (through genocide, the harsh conditions of slavery and the arrival of the new diseases) (Cooper, page?). Black slaves were then brought from New York, New England, the Carolinas and other American colonies, but also from the West Indies, Africa and Europe