Welcome to SpeakUP! International with Rita Burke and Elton Brown!
Good evening to you. Arnold Minors, as you know on SpeakUP! International. We shine the light on who we refer to as gentle giants in our community and the purpose of SpeakUP! International. We hope to inspire, to educate and to inform through your story. And as we ask the questions, we will hear a story about Arnold Minors evolving. So let me tell our audience a little bit about Arnold Minors. It can only be a little bit because his bio is longer than my two arms together.
But Arnold Minors is the coordinating associate of Arnold Minors and Associates, which is a 35 year old consulting firm. Arnold is the only Canadian ever elected to the board of trustees of OD Network. This is a US based organization of change management professionals. He was consultant at the city of Toronto and at Imperial Oil Limited. He is currently serving as executive director of the Black Legal Action Center.
Arnold is the first person of African heritage appointed to the Toronto Board of Health. He was a funding director of the first chair of the board of the African Canadian Legal Clinic. Arnold was born in Bermuda and came to Canada in 1964. He has a B S C and an M B O. Welcome to SpeakUP! International Arnold Minors!
Thank you! It's good to be here. I'm pleased to have been invited.
The sentiment is the same coming from Rita and myself. Your organization is everywhere! Notice that you are in so many different organizations, and I'm wondering what type of organizations does your counseling firm provide services to?
We work with not-for-profit organizations and public sector organizations, municipalities, the provincial government, federal government, not-for-profit agencies of all kinds. I've worked in the United States, in Bermuda and in Canada across the country. We provide services in strategic thinking as well as, Anti-racism, organizational effectiveness, looking at anti-racism as a contributor to success of organizations
That is truly amazing and fantastic and something flew outed me as you were responding to Elton's question and that is the term anti-racism. Now, how would you say does anti-racist practice contribute to organizational effectiveness and health?
As what happens in most organizations still, they are predominantly white led and research and common sense tell us that if we were to diversify our thinking, diversify the people. The more diverse and organization, the more effective it is. Creativity is everywhere and if there are barriers to success, barriers to health, Because of racism, then organizational health and wealth are decreased.
So how does a racist practice contribute to the organizational effectiveness and health?
I'm sorry. Ask that question again, please.
Okay. I'll we'll rephrase it. So how does Antiracism that practice contribute to the mental health and effectiveness of an organization?
Okay. Let's give an example. In a number of organizations in which I've worked we'll, think of a school board, for example. I can think of a black principal who was beaten by a student in the head and she wound up with serious head trauma, though she had been very effective. Up until that time, she'd won awards all over the place and the organization, instead of finding a way to accommodate her, they essentially wound up, forcing her to retire. This black woman skills, expertise, experience.
Were lost to the organization. The organization was less effective.
I like a term that you use. You said that diversity leads to effectiveness and obviously growth of the organization and prosperity of the organization. How do you get these companies to buy into the idea of diversity?
That's a really interesting question! Nancy Sims, who previously worked at Hum College, had an idea about getting some people together who do work in, equity, diversity, and inclusion to identify what some of the barriers are to, to success of equity, diversity, and inclusion. It was based on her knowledge of this work in several organizations where people had been doing this work for, in some cases, for years, decades. Fundamentally nothing has changed.
One of the, one of the conclusions that we came to, Is that we need to find a way to do two things. One, influence leaders at in labor organizations and governments in corporations. We need to influence them to understand the value of equity, diversity, inclusion. There's an old consulting expression. People do what the boss pays attention to. The other issue is really, people having a vision of what equity, diversity, and inclusion looks like. There's I used to go to this Pentecostal church.
Actually used to go to three churches. My mother said my sister and I, we had to go to church. She didn't care where we went as long as we went to one. So I went to three. And in the Pentecostal Church, which is a fundamentalist church, I got to read the Bible three times by the time I was 12. I still remember, I think it's in. Leviticus without a vision, the people perish and one of the things that we talked about is a vision of decentering whiteness, which is a huge task.
What it means is not eliminating whiteness, but recognizing that it's not the only value for organizations, for societies, and finding ways to introduce other values, other perspectives, other people, other ways of thinking. And that's a huge task because whiteness is built into the DNA of Settler Invader Canada. It's built into the treatment of indigenous people and black people who were enslaved.
And when we see the statistics that we do today of black and indigenous people, Being at the bottom, consistently at the bottom in education, in health, in social services, in in stops by police, in incarceration, in all errors of human activity. It's a demonstration that a whiteness is centered, and b, Indi indigeneity and blackness are deliberately excluded. Essentially what we need is a revolution.
It doesn't mean necessarily a re revolution with weapons, but what we need is a revolution in thinking.
Has it started, Arnold, that revolution? Has it started? Are we moving in that direction?
Yeah. There are some indications. There have been some indications for a long time. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was one of those, the Black Lives Matter, movement, which got a huge boost when St. George laid down his life for us in Minneapolis. There have been, there has been movement. There are more people thinking about it. I suspect it has also to do with a number of people being aware that the earth is in trouble. Mother Earth is in trouble.
And that if we don't do something different in the environment, if we don't do something different in our societies and in our organizations, we are doomed.
That is true. I agree with you 100%. If we do not take care of the land will not be able to take care of us. One of the things that I know that we have in common with every race, particularly black and brown. People's is mental health issues. You work with a clinic called Oolagen and they have a walk-in clinic. So how does this walk-in clinic offered by Oolagen benefit young people and their families who are expensive experiencing mental health issues?
Which clinic was that?
Oolagen.
Oh, Oolagen.
Sorry.
Oolagen is a children's service agency, a mental health agency for children. A better example is the board that I was on at Across Boundaries, which was set up as a mental health center for people of color and the recognition is that, discrimination on the basis of race has profound effects, intergen, intergenerationally, as well as ongoing effects in the present.
To the extent that, the people at across boundaries, for example, understood that it meant that the kind of service that they provided explicitly addressed racism as a factor in people's mental health. I was appointed to the mental health, implementation committee for Appeal and Toronto. Some years ago, and my significant contribution to that report, which was an excellent report, which as usual went nowhere, but my big contribution was to write the following sentence into it.
Racism literally makes people crazy.
I like that statement. I understand that statement. That statement certainly resonates with me. Expand on it a little bit for us, please. Racism makes people crazy. Just expand a little bit on it for me, please.
There's a woman, whose name I'm not remembering. She wrote about 30 years ago, an article. She's a white woman, Massachusetts, and her name may come to me. She wrote an article called Unpacking the Invisible Nap Sack of White Privilege and she had a really simple notion and she said that and she used black and white as her examples, but it could apply to any racialized folk.
She said that when, you're standing at a bus stop and the bus driver leaves for black people, they don't know if he left because he didn't see them, or he left because they're black. White people generally don't have to think about those kinds of things. It's a kind of societal gaslighting, gaslighting is a thing intended to make people crazy. People talk about going black, people talk about going into stores. I have a story.
When I was on the police services board, there's a story about some kids in Region Park. There were about five of them, and three of them were white and two of them were black, and they'd go in convenience stores and the store storekeeper would follow the black kids around and the white kids would essentially rob the shelves blind, and then they'd all leave and share in the spoils.
That's an example of allyship where people recognize that they can contribute to other people and that the stereotypes that engage for examples, convenience store owners That kind of thing does make people crazy because they don't know if the storekeeper is following them because they're black. Because the storekeeper is following them because he's had, she's had all kinds of incidents and follows everybody.
If you multiply those kinds of things by the thousands, I hate the term microaggressions but if you multiply those incidents by the thousands, what you have is people dying by a thousand tiny bites. A thousand tiny cuts.
That is absolutely true because when I go out and I happen to be in a mixed. Culture, I'll put it like that, and something happens. That little thing in the back of my head triggers instantly because I instantly think, okay, is it because I'm black that I find myself. In the second half of the situation as opposed to being in the first, and that happens so many times till, I don't even know sometimes when that is triggered.
And I think it's because of the fact that we've lived with this weight for so long till we don't even realize when this thing engages so my question to you is, what can we do as black individuals to reverse this feeling of a micro regression?
Reparations takes two forms. One of them is the one that people typically talk about, but the other one is about healing ourselves. What we need to do, I think, as a community or communities is to. Recognize our strength and recognize the world that we live in and do what so many of us have done. Say, this is the world we live in. It's awful, but I'm gonna find ways of dealing with it. What we need to do, I think, is, particularly with young people, I think we've done a very bad job.
In the last two generations of having children, especially those who, whose parents were born in the Caribbean or in Somali or Nigeria but who have been born here and grew up here, and many of those kids think that. There is no racism that they're just like everybody else, and we've done a terrible job of having many of our children understand that they're not like everybody else and what happens all too often.
Is some of these kids wind up getting stopped by police or put in a closet in a school or, and all of a sudden recognizing that, they're not like everybody else. We, we, we must do a better job of doing intergenerational learning. Us learning from young people. Young people learning from us, and teaching each other ways of survival for our own health.
So who taught you how to survive? Because you're surviving.
Who does what? I'm sorry?
Who taught you to survive because you are surviving.
As I said, I was born in Bermuda, as you said in the introduction, I was born in Bermuda. When the thing, little kids supposed to be seen and not heard. My godmother and my mother and my sister's godfather would be in the kitchen talking and usually because when big people were talking, it was really boring. And so I would go outside and play. I don't remember why I was inside. I was in the kitchen and I was sitting on the floor.
I was maybe eight and As they were talking I was literally bored, but I understood what they were saying. And then my godmother used the expression of nature's passport. I said, what's nature's passport? And so all three of them looked like I'd grown another head, and my godmother looked at me and she laughed. She said, I guess it's my fault because she said, I taught this child from when he was a baby.
If he didn't understand something to ask, it didn't matter who it was, who big people, little people to ask. And so she said, let me explain. What she explained was that nature's passport was white skin. She used the example of my father who was a driver for Pan-American, the airline that existed at that time. And the guy who was the station manager who was a white guy, they were the same age. Everybody agreed that my father was smarter, but my father was the driver and he ran the place.
That was my first. Introduction to critical race theory. And then my godmother, she said, Arnold, you're a smart colored boy, as we called ourselves and other people called us back then. And it's your job to do whatever you can to make it so that when you die, You have made Bermuda a better place for colored people, and she said, it's gonna be hard work. People are gonna criticize you. People are going to say unfair things. Do unfair things.
And she said, I'm sorry, I'm putting it on you, but that's your job.
It is important that we as a people, make sure that we educate. our youth. In fact, I think that there has to be a cross cultural education that has to be done as you answered asked the question about nature's passport. It's so funny to ask that question because if I was the kid sitting on the floor and I asked that question, I would've been popped in the mouth because, I'm not to be heard. Yes, it probably would've been a revolution it would've been my mom smacking me on the behind.
How do we go about educating our youth? For me I see that a lot of them are not interested in education. They want to hang out with their friends, and I've seen it where they are, they hang out with many cultures and they seem to be doing just fine and dandy. But they are resting on sand. They don't have a solid foundation. So how do we go about creating a platform for cross cultural education?
Cross cultural I, I have this pretty simple minded notion that cross-cultural education. Is useful only when it is a conversation that leads to strategies for Decentering whiteness. Otherwise, it becomes a distraction. It means that black folk and South Asians and indigenous people and maybe white people too, wind up having conversations and the longer those conversations go, the less likely it is that people will pay attention to the vision and to doing things that will cause the revolution.
One of the things that I talk about is in, in, in making change, what we need are several simultaneous sustained strategies for ess. And what that means is cross-cultural education, for example, if necessary, but not necessarily cross-cultural education. Only if it advances the vision.
Only if it advance, if it advances our vision.
Yeah.
I hear you. I hear you loud and clear. I hear you loud and clear.
Justice, our vision of justice for all.
SpeakUP! International, as you're aware, speaks to educate, inform, and inspire, and there's no question that you're helping us to do those things today. So far I've heard without wisdom, the people perish. Racism makes people crazy. Nature's passport, reparations and critical race theory. All fascinating concepts and ideas. Now, most of us, including you, we are aware that the black community in Ontario, let's say in Canada, Has made strides. I know that we probably haven't moved far enough.
We've made strides. Who would you name someone from our community that you see that's made a huge contribution to our progress, quote unquote?
That's an interesting question. The people who I think. Have made the biggest contribution are not the people who we know about. They are the mothers who are on low income and they do whatever they need to survive and to help their children thrive. And not withstanding the stereotypes there's lots of families like that.
Mothers and fathers, single mothers, there's a lot of that and one of the things that I hope, one of the things that I would like is for example, Harry Jerome awards to add an award for that ordinary person who does extraordinary things with limited resources. And those are the people. One of the people who I want to mention, however, I have two comments. The first comment I wanna make is about making strides, and it's true that.
We are not slaves anymore, enslaved anymore, at least not officially, but the incarceration rates of black people, of young, black people suggest to me that maybe this is just slavery in another form, and when people will talk about strives, especially. White people say, you people have made some strides. You've got this person like Mark Saunders and all skin folk and kin folk.
As police chief, I remember Malcolm X once said, if you stick a knife in a man's back eight inches and pull it out, don't expect him to be grateful. To say that it's an advance, it's an improvement. The person who I want to name and mention is Juanita Westmoreland Tray by becoming the first black dean of a faculty of the law.
In Windsor by becoming the first, and as it turned out, only Employment Equity Commissioner in Ontario by being appointed a provincial judge in Quebec, although maybe some other time it'll tell the story about why she wasn't appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. It's a quite nasty story, but. One of the things that she did, which was quite effective years ago in 1969 so George Williams affair, I'm hoping that both of you have know about that. This is, when
Are you talking about a Quebec situation?
I'm talking about a number of Caribbean students, occupied. The I wanna say ninth floor at George Williams University and
In Quebec?
And they had said that there was a professor who was giving them consistently lower marks and it was called the, so George Williams Affair. It was called the computer affair because they threw computers out the window. In any event Several of them were arrested. Some of the people who were in that group were what's her name? She's the senator.
She's Anne Ku. Anne. Ku Ann was one of those people. And I think Rosemary Brown was one of those people.
I don't think Rosemary was. But. No, but the students were called nasty names. They there was in the media all kinds of stories about these are the kinds of people who should stay in their own country and not come to ours and upset the nice life that we have. No lawyer would take their case except this young woman who had just been called to the bar.
Her name was Juanita Westmoreland and she took their case and by taking their case, what she did was in a small way, To switch some people's thinking about the issue of racism in the university and that it needed to be addressed. And it wasn't these awful West Indians, but there, these were people who had a legitimate grievance.
And the other thing I want to talk about her, Is that, I think it's last year, she and Justice Harry La Forne, who's an indigenous justice, were commissioned by the Attorney General to produce a report on a commission to address, the wrongfully accused. It's a wonderful report and it's sitting on the shelf, but at some point, It's going to come out and that commission is going to make a huge difference.
As you probably know, black people are disproportionately in the numbers of wrongfully accused, so it'll make a difference.
I agree with you about the number of black people. In jail versus any other race. There is no comparison to that number. I do believe that something has to be done in order to balance that type of incarceration. Most of it I feel to be minor, but yet, and still we find ourselves. Locked in these cells for years. I wanna change to a different topic and the topic happens to be you, Arnold, I'd like to know, what do you do to have fun? What do you do to relax?
What I do to relax is work. The other thing that I do to relax, I have a five year old friend, five years old going on 50 and I spend lots of time with him. He and I learn from each other. We have joy with each other. He calls me uncle two clear syllables and I haven't seen him for a week or so, the last few weeks I was spending almost four days a week with him. And we have a wonderful time and It helps me relax, except when he makes me crazy.
I told him, Hey, I really like you, but sometimes you make me crazy. And he laughed and he said, I make you crazy and laughed again.
He probably wa he probably wanted to say that. You make him crazy too.
Yes. No question. He's told me that.
I am so happy. I'm thrilled to bits that you raised the situation about the university with those students that had come from the Caribbean. That's so important and believe you me, many people don't know that story. It's really important for us to know that story because those are the people I would say that. Started the movement to some degree for us. So thank you for raising that story and for talking about Juanita Westmoreland. I've met her several times too. I didn't know where she was.
I lost touch with her. So thanks for doing that. Arnold, are one of those trailblazers. I know that you probably want to be humble and you don't want to big yourself up, but I know that you've done a great deal for our community and you are continuing to do that. So is there a book in the works?
There are a couple, one. I've written but not published. It's called Black Humor, A Recipe for Health. And black humor is a play on words. The second book, which I haven't finished, but I started, when I sued the Sun and lost, I sued the Sun saying that they had defamed me. And I lost. And we appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, neither of which court, took up my case. So I decided out of revenge to write this book.
But over time, this book which is now called Letters to Sheika, is the short version of my goddaughter's name, Nika. Remember Lolita Phillips, she worked at Human Rights Commission years ago. Maybe you don't a, anyway she is Nika's Godmother, a grandmother. And Lolita had heard me talk about my godmother so much that she told her daughter when her daughter got pregnant, that she had to have me be the godfather of this child.
So this book is called Letters to Sheika, and it's a collection of stories of people and awful experiences in the justice system. What I want through this book are stories about what we can do to make a difference.
More. More of what we could do to make a difference. Truly amazing. It seems to me as if children bring joy to your life. You've mentioned about three children, so it seems to me as if they put a huge smile on your face. Am I right?
Yes. There are several children who over the years have adopted me. And stayed in each other's lives, and they do bring joy to me, and apparently I bring some joy to them.
Obviously, because every time we mention or you mention one of these small giants, It brings a huge smile to your face. I can see it even from the angle that we are positioned and I think it's important that we find ways in order to smile, in this trouble world or we will go mad.
I really wanna thank you, Arnold, for joining us and having this discussion with us, yes, this happens to be one of those topics or topics that were discussed that will make all of us go away and ponder and to think about what was said and how we can embrace these things that we've heard in order to make this world better. I hope we have this conversation again on SpeakUP! International and have a wonderful evening.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
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