My post How Blackademics and Blacktivists can support each other said producing research Blacktivists can use for advocacy is one of the main ways Blackademics can help Blacktivists. Another way Blackademics can help is by holding conferences to share that research.
Last week I attended a conference on the theme of Mental Health of Black Communities: Overcoming Obstacles, Bridging the Gaps where mental health Blackademics, mostly from North America, shared their research.
The lead organizer of the conference was Dr. Jude Mary Cénat, an Associate Professor in the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Black Health. Cénat is Director of the Vulnerability, Trauma, Resilience & Culture (V-TRaC) Research Laboratory, and holds the Research Chair on Black Health at the University of Ottawa.
There were sessions on the problems with “color blind” approaches to mental health, the social determinants and racial issues affecting Black folks’ mental health, anti-Black racism in the child welfare system and lots more. (For more sessions, see the full conference program.)
As a full time Blacktivist, my goal in attending the conference was to get direction on where to most effectively advocate to help improve Black folks’ mental health across Canada – and it didn’t take long to get what I came for! In his opening Wednesday keynote address, Achieving Black Mental Health Equity, Dr. Kwame McKenzie called for the creation of a federal Black Equity Act that would make Black equity a federally legal requirement. The call for such an act supports Blacktivists’ existing demand for the federal government to appoint a Black Equity Commissioner similar to the ones it announced for antisemitism and Islamophobia in the 2022 federal Budget.
On Day 2, in her session Promoting Health Equity: Mental Health of Black Canadians. Mobilizing, Partnerships: Taking Steps Together for Supported Reintegration, Dr. Barbara-Ann Hamilton-Hench said Black communities need to challenge the federal Tri-Council to remove barriers to funding high quality research about and by Black people, and to fund Black researchers. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) make up the Tri-Council funding agencies. They are the primary mechanism through which the Government of Canada supports research and training at post-secondary institutions and are supposed to support and promote high-quality research in a wide variety of disciplines and areas. This supports the work the 613-819 Black Hub had already begun regarding SSHRC.
In 2021, we discovered the Ottawa Police Service attempting to continue to try to deploy more cops in the community under the guise of the Neighborhood Resource Team program, which is their latest name for “community policing”. The OPS NRT program had ballooned from $2.5 million and 18 officers in 2019 to over $11 million and 89 officers in 2021. And the OPS was leading an evaluation of the program that was pretty much guaranteed to conclude that the program was great and should be further expanded. The project started in fall 2019 when the OPS hired Carleton professor Linda Duxbury to lead it. After we found out about the project, we met with Duxbury and asked her why no Black groups were included in the project description for her project on the SSHRC website (SSHRC gave her almost $200,000 for the project). She said she had included Indigenous groups. As Duxbury had done a very flawed study of the Peel Regional Police’s School Resource Officer program, we brought that to the attention of the Ottawa police, who said the report was one of the reasons they hired Duxbury. We then filed a complaint with Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board who found no issues with Duxbury. Finally, we filed a complaint with SSHRC who also backed Duxbury. However, after we continued to press Duxbury to do proper research by including the voices of Black and Indigenous people in her NRT report, she and the OPS, instead, canceled the 3-year, $260,000 project. We then took a look at SSHRC’s website and found it appeared to have no research on defunding or abolishing the police but several problematic studies related to police reform. Professor Hamilton-Hinch’s call has reinforced our commitment to challenging SSHRC on these issues.
One problem frequently raised at the conference, but for which few solutions were offered, was the lack of Black mental health professionals. (There was a session called Innovative Training Programmes for Mental Health Professionals on Issues Related to Cultural Safety and Addressing Experiences of Racism, by Ribbon Rouge Foundation Programs Director Dr. Selina Kunadu-Yiadom which may have covered this but I didn’t attend it.) In one session, they did show a CBC article titled Black psychologists say there are too few of them in Canada — and that’s a problem featuring photos of Ottawa-based psychotherapists Helen Ofosu and Kafui Sawyer. However, they didn’t share the main point of the article which was Black mental health care professionals highlighting problems in the accreditation process for psychological professionals as a key barrier to getting more Black ones. The article cited how, to become an accredited psychologist in Canada, students need to be accepted into a graduate program at a post-secondary institution or an internship program. Getting into a program depends on having a faculty member agree to be their supervisor but Ottawa-based psychotherapist Kafui Sawyer pointed out that the faculties are predominantly white and the students they’re recruiting or the students they have in [their] program are also predominantly white. Ofosu and Sawyer have formed a Black psychology section of the Canadian Psychology Association, which will advocate for more diversity in the profession.
Another area where Black students may be facing systemic barriers is getting scholarships. I recently acted as an assessor for the Loran Scholarship. The $100,000 award has existed since 1988 but no one I recently asked had heard of it. I only found out about it last year when our son applied for it – and didn’t make it past the first step, so wasn’t interviewed. One of Loran’s managers asked me to be an assessor to diversify their assessor pool and the training session I participated in showed why. Out of about 60 people, I was the only Black man (there were two Black women) and there was no one who identified as Indigenous. In the question period, I asked what percentage of assessors were Black or Indigenous men. The Loran exec leading the session said she didn’t know but would get me the info. I assessed 37 applications, none of which identified as Black or Indigenous men. The Loran application doesn’t have a self-identification option so you must infer who’s Black or Indigenous from what they write. We need to share info about such scholarships to get more Black students to apply – and more Black assessors.
But Black students will only encounter scholarship or accreditation issues if – and it’s a big if – they manage to make it through a systemically anti-Black education system – and avoid being caught in the systemically anti-Black “justice” system.
On that note, two of the most glaring omissions at the conference were any mention of the impact of policing on Black mental health or the role – and responsibilities – of the Ontario government in addressing the issues raised.
Considering health is largely provincial jurisdiction, this omission was notable. As a full time activist, I came away with little direction on where to advocate, and what to advocate for, at the provincial level. The Ontario government recently created a new Black Equity Branch and hired a director so we plan to work with that person to identify and address the changes needed at the provincial level.
As for policing, the word “police” wasn’t mentioned once in the conference program and there was only one session focussed on justice, called Justice and Mental Health. The 90 minute breakout session had four presentations only two of which were actually about justice: one on restorative justice and one on criminalization of Black refugees.
Having a conference on Black mental health without a strong focus on the impact of policing is like having a conference on Black physical health without a strong focus on poverty. Canadian police, including in Ottawa where I live and lead the 613-819 Black Hub, continue to kill, or be involved in the deaths of, Black people experiencing mental crises. People who aren’t in crisis – yet – continue to have their mental health negatively impacted by sometimes violent interactions with police. Young Black and Indigenous Ottawa activists are still dealing with the mental impact of the Ottawa police arresting them after they blocked an intersection in November 2020 to protest the acquittal of Ottawa police constable Daniel Montsion in the 2016 beating death of Abdirahman Abdi (the police charged 12 of the about 30 protesters – then “stayed” the charges for one year, which meant that if any of the young people caused any “trouble”, the charges could be immediately reinstated.)
Next conference it would be good to see some research on things like the impact of layered policing on Black mental health. In his March 2021 Spring Magazine article Layered policing’ expands police amid calls to defund, Jeff Shantz describes layered policing as, “In response to community calls to defund police and fund necessary social resources, cities across the country have instituted “layered policing.” From Lethbridge to Saskatoon to Kitchener-Waterloo, these moves would actually deploy more police throughout the community, and embed policing in everyday social life.”
In January 2021, in response to community calls for the police to get out of mental health crisis response, the Ottawa Police Service presented the Ottawa Police Services Board with its initiative to create an alternative mental health crisis response system. The OPS said they had brought together a group of partner organizations to lead the initiative called the Guiding Council. The only problem was, they hadn’t told some of the partner organizations, including the Ottawa Black Mental Health Coalition of which the 613-819 Black Hub was a member.
After yet another public outcry at the OPS leading such an initiative, the OPS agreed to have it moved under the management of the City. However, instead of removing themselves from any leadership role in the initiative, as the public demanded, they did exactly the opposite and joined the Guiding Council which they weren’t on when they first created it. We later learned that the Guiding Council would, in consultation with the City, decide which community groups get $2 million dollars of the $3 million cut from the OPS’ requested $14 million dollar 2022 budget increase.
The Guiding Council is yet another place where the OPS appears to be pushing for a mental health crisis response system that still has lots of police involvement and zero impact on their annual multi-million dollar budget increases. The OPS’ influence is already clear in the Guiding Council’s terms of reference which aims for a system that still sends cops, “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity”. Wouldn’t that include a situation like Abdirahman Abdi who people called the cops on because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop? And wouldn’t that still include a situation like Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man who people called the cops on because they said they saw a man with a knife that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk? Yes it would. Abdi and Greg would likely end up just as dead under the system currently being proposed by the Guiding Council.
The OPS influence is also clear by the lack of any mention in the Guiding Council’s terms of reference of either the 613-819 Black Hub’s alternative non-police mental health crisis response report or Toronto’s non-police mental health crisis response teams it launched in March 2022.
The recently released report, Troubling Encounters: Ottawa Residents’ Experience of Policing, confirmed that racialized and low income Ottawa residents have extremely low levels of trust in the Ottawa police. In fact, the report states, “In short, for many people in this city, police do not contribute to individual or community safety, in fact, they appear to do the very opposite.” Allowing the police to remain on the Guiding Council will further erode what little trust there is – and further erode Black Ottawa residents’ mental health.
For the next Black mental health conference Blackademics should engage Blacktivists in the early planning stages so the conference deals more fully with the impact of carceral systems like policing, courts and jails – and has concrete suggestions for where activists should focus their advocacy.