The New Apartheid

 

Shadd as she appears on Mackenzie House.

Shadd as she appeared in life.

A new mural has blossomed on the side of historical Mackenzie House in Toronto. It is a portrait of Mary Ann Shadd, the publisher of the Provincial Freeman newspaper (1853 – 1857 or so).

She is being honoured for being black and a woman—the Provincial Freeman was not an early newspaper, but the first in Canada to be published by a black woman. 

This in itself seems discriminatory. We should not honour people simply for being the first of their sex or ethnicity to do a thing. That is a textbook case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But the way she is portrayed is more troubling—dolled up like a cartoon African Queen. Shadd was a proper Victorian Quaker lady, who dressed accordingly. The three commitments in the banner of her paper were to “anti-slavery, temperance, and general literature.” Temperance at that time did not just mean abstinence from alcohol, but sobriety and moderation in all things—including in personal adornment. 

The agenda of the Provincial Freeman was to promote integration and to “develop in Canada a society to deny all assertions regarding the Negro's inability to live with others in civilized society.” This was a major issue of the day, even among strident abolitionists: should all the blacks, if freed, be shipped back to Africa, to Liberia and Sierra Leone, or could they adapt to live among civilized people? 

Shadd had previously run a school. She lost her funding because of her adamant insistence on integration, rather than running it, as other prominent blacks preferred, as black-only.

The portrait, in visual terms, takes the side in direct opposition to Shadd, saying she was inalienably alien, and could never fit in.

Next, I expect to see portraits appear of Martin Luther King wearing a leopard skin, carrying an assegai, and with a bone through his nose. Well done, regressives.