Welcome to SpeakUP! International with Rita Burke and Elton Brown!
We have been so fortunate on SpeakUP! International to have the best of the best, the greatest people from our community talking with us and sharing their life experiences with us. This evening is no exception. We have with us Ms. Valerie Steele! Now Valerie has lived and worked in Canada for over 50 years. Her range of experience includes financial, government, self-employment, and community activities.
She has been working in the black community for more than 50 years, and her advocacy began in the schools where Miss. Steele helps parents to navigate their way through the system that was stacked against them and their children. This problem, this burden was affecting them in a variety of ways. Valerie didn't have children herself at that time, which she kept on plugging along once she became a parent.
She says she became more involved with the school and with the school boards in order to ensure that the school had black teachers that reflected the population of their respective schools. Valerie became this chair of. School council for many years and had resounding success. That was very helpful to the community and school community. That training ground prepared Ms. Valerie Steele for the activism work that she does in the larger community.
One last important point I want to make about Valerie's Steele is that she became the president of the Jamaican Canadian Association, and it was during that time that the turbulence of racial profiling raised its ugly head, and the spinoff of that was carding. Two our listeners. I introduce no other person than activists Miss Valerie Steele!
Thank you so much for that warm welcome, Rita and Elton, I thank you so much. It is amazing how the years have passed quickly and it's hard to believe that I have lived in Canada longer than I have lived in my country of birth. It's just mind boggling to me that I have lasted this long, but I am grateful that life and its twists and turns have still been very kind to me.
So your twists, then your turns that you've experienced in life., I'm sure it has taken a toll, and I say that in quotes. So what do you like to do when you're not twisting and turning? What do you like to do that relaxes you?
I am an avid gardener. I have done that as long as I have been doing activism. I just find being close to dirt and plants and shrubs and trees. If you visit my home, there's a tremendously large tree on my lawn, and that was planted by my husband and I because we country people, we just love trees and bush and shrubs and flowers and that's what I do and my garden is my psychiatrist.
Could you introduce me to him or to her? Anytime. Just come on up, Rita. It's amazing.
You and Rita has something in common, and that is dirt. Both of you love to have your fingers in it.
Thank you so very much. Yes, I do enjoy gardening. Immensely as well. And when I don't get out there at least for half an hour every day I'm missing something. So perhaps you've worded it well, maybe my gardening has become my psychiatrist and I wasn't even aware of that. So thanks for telling me that, Valerie!
You're welcome!
So you said at the beginning that. You have been in this country for longer than you've spent in your birth country. So I wanna know a little bit about your first job when you arrived here in Canada.
The first job I had when I arrived in Canada was with a small firm that had they, their job was historical restoration. I can't even recall the name of the place, but it was situated. It was situated at John and King. So for my entire working life, I have worked on King Street, either at King and Bay, or King and John, where I was for about three years. So that was my first kick at the camp.
Why did you come to Canada? What motivated you to come here to live?
I had no motivation. My husband came in 1970 and I came in 1971. That's it. I came the very last day before the Visa expired. So it wasn't to say I was planning anything grand. It had nothing to do with that. That's why I just simply say to my friends when they asked the question, I said, I followed the man that was in my heart.
So why didn't you want to come to Canada? Obviously there must have been some aversion or something that made you go, yuck. I just can't stand the thought of living there.!
The funny part about it is that I am from a really nice family and I love my family. We get along so well and I really didn't want to leave to this day. My brother, there are three of us, and we get together sometimes in America, sometimes here, sometimes in Jamaica, just to fellowship the way we grew up. So I really missed them, and none of my siblings are surprised that I would have done the things that I do here because I've always been outspoken.
I speak my mind and I have never been afraid of upsetting anyone because I only speak my mind when I don't feel that what is happening to me is correct, and if it offends you when I speak, then you are my problem.
Really? If it offends me when you speak, then I become your problem. I like that. I'm gonna hold onto that so we can talk about it a little later. You talk a lot about advocating on behalf of underrepresented people who need your support. Describe for us, please, what advocacy looks and feels and sounds like to you.
What advocacy is for me is when I am sitting down and an individual or a group of people are telling me things that are happening to them that just makes no sense. The question at the back of my mind has always been why would you put up with that? Why would you put up with that? Because if it doesn't make sense to me, I have to question it. I have to question it. And anybody who is giving me bitter medicine, you have to explain to me why you're giving me the bitter medicine.
If you can't, I'm all over you. I need to know I can't rest unless I know that. It is that restlessness that makes me speak my mind, because unless I do, I'm going to be going home restless and my home is my sanctuary. I'm not supposed to be restless in my home. So it's not rocket science, just simple. I'm not, I don't feel comfortable with it. Don't give it to me. I'm not taking it simple.
Yes. The way you explained it, yes. It's, it appears to be very simple. Can you give us an example where you felt that you were put in a, in this unwanted situation, and what did you do to get out of it?
Oh my goodness. Do you have all night?
I don't think I have that much hard drive free!
When I started to advocate for my friends in the schools who had children, One of my friends to this day, we are friends, was telling me that a teacher told her that she shouldn't get her son to do route learning, which is, we're coming from the Caribbean to ones to four and so on, to into four makes two. And she's telling her that she shouldn't do that. And I thought, that's nonsense. And I said, what do you mean by it doesn't matter? How he learns as long as he learns.
So if doing his timetables, we'll give him a heads up on division addition, subtraction. That's what he's supposed to do. Because you know we, I am from the Caribbean. When on the exercise book we had timed times, tables. 30 days out, September, April, June and November, all the rest us, stuff like that.
So we did route learning and it didn't hurt and I went back to work and I set out to write timetables up to 13 times and I walked down to our mail room and I got it laminated, got them to copy it for me and laminated and brought it home. To the young man to do his timetable. He was like seven, eight, struggling with addition and stuff like that because he never had the great route learning that we had in the Caribbean.
So I was just passing on some of my knowledge to him to see if it would make his life a little better cuz these kids were born here. They weren't Jamaicans like we were coming up and experiencing the early the basic school. Curriculum. So that's all I was doing. And I told my friend that I would go with her to the meeting and if that woman tells me what she's telling her, then you know we are going to have a real good conversation. Real good conversation.
I went, and the stupidness, she was telling my friend, she didn't tell it to me. Because I arrived in my suit and my briefcase, and she figured more or less that I had a little bit more sense that she couldn't tell me all the nonsense she was telling my friends. And each friend tells another friend and they talk to me about, their experience in the school. I was flabbergasted because I couldn't believe that.
People you leave your best product with people who would go out of their way to sabotage them. So that was alien to me. And I just thought to myself, we should resist anything we get that we do not want. So we got out of that. That young man is an engineer today!
That was gonna be my next question to you. What was the ultimate outcome of that situation? But thanks for sharing that with us. So you contributed to that child's life, who's now a young man? Yes. And on his behalf, I will say thank you thank you.
You're welcome. When you see the thing about it is this, that because a teacher says, so it's not gospel. That's how I look at it, because for me it's not even mathematics, it's arithmetic. That's what we call it in the good old days. So if you can't divide and add and subtract, in my mind, you need timetables because if you help you to do all of that, so you do it, and it worked.
You bet.
It worked
well, Valerie, the term representation has become very popular, the word, and we know that it's absolutely important for people, adults to see themselves represented, but more so for children to see themselves represented in schools. Talk a little bit about your influence on that in the school system.
Well, I. In this seventies, late seventies, eighties, when there was a whole lot of black children in this neck of the woods. We had schools like Rollinson, Jr. Wilcox, places like that, and. You would go on the night when they introduced the teachers. Remember, I had no children then I did. I had my daughter in 1982.
So when I was doing that, I was just doing that with solid Caribbean people who were my family, my adopted family here and we shared a lot of joy and when I saw them sad, it didn't make me happy. So I would go with them and I would go and I would be standing in the school gym and I would see a crowd of 80 to 85% black children and a solid 100% white teachers. I. I knew lots of black teachers who were unemployed that the board wouldn't employ.
And in those days we had the old City of York and I thought to myself this doesn't feel right. This doesn't look right because you're telling me of all the bright black people we have, we can't find a black teacher for our schools.
And I. I just thought that I was going to set out to do that, and they were willing parents that we formed alliances, even white parents, even white parents because they knew it was wrong, that we didn't have any representation and it has always been my view since I came to Canada, that you cannot aspire to be whom you've never seen.
Coming from Jamaica where I have seen doctors, lawyers, everybody, we know that our people are part of all kinds of professional institutions to tell me that it's not possible. You are really not talking to me, you're talking to a door, because I won't believe that, because I have seen it. The children here never had that opportunity. So we have to pass on what we have seen and let them know that it is really essential to look forward to being the best that you can be.
And I set out you, I've always believed that you can't. Break the rules or you can't play the game unless you know what the rules are, what frame under which they were going to place you and. There was a time when I was always at the old City of York board doing Deputations, and all the time they would want you to write out what you were going to say, and I would do that. And when I they wanted to know what I was going to say and I handed them that, or I would, in those days you faxed.
And I would send it in. But when I went to do my dissertation, I spoke extemporaneously because I'm really good at that and I appealed to their better judgment and asked them how they would feel if there was a gym full of black children almost. And you had no representation.
So how did that help you improve representation of black teachers in the schools?
At the time I knew a lot of teachers that were unemployed and I couldn't understand why they were unemployed. So what I would do is I would find out if they are fully qualified, and I also learned that they interviewed you and put you in a pool, and that's where they drew from.
So for the few black principals that were around, or the favorable white ones, I would encourage them to go and get interviewed for the pool, and then I would go with their names and their resumes to every principal I know! I would be a good CIA and that's what we did. Eventually, When I was leaving my school at Rollinson, when my kids were moving on to middle school, we had a black principal. We had a black principal. Was that Belin Johnson? That's right. Belin Johnson.
Yes. Whom I knew well as well. Yes, that's right, Bev. Because when Bev came first, they made her surplus. And sent her over to Cedarville and I went to the board and I raised eternal hell and they transferred them to JR Wilcox as a vice principal. And then the next year that she was at Rawlinson as our principal. Wonderful lady.
She was an exceptional educator. She cared about the students and she cared about moving them forward. She was truly amazing.
But what bothered me with Bev is that by profession, Bev is an accountant, a chartered accountant. So I knew the j, I knew the history of her coming here because she was in Houston. And they brought her here and gave her to Zena and then they made her surplus. Once all the people realized that here is a woman that is, would be a fabulous math teacher, and I went to the board and I said, listen, you are taking away our brightest from us as if our brightest shouldn't be with us.
How do you think that makes us feel? But just had a conversation. They had my written stuff, but I was talking to them about something that was egregious to me. And I just believe that you should always say something, and that's the song that Bob Marley sings that I, that is my favorite. He says, say something, you shouldn't just take everything. Because changes are made when people know of your discomfort
and you don't mind, you don't mind sharing your discomfort. I really admire that aspect of how you behave in our community. Valerie, so I speak international. We seek to inform, to educate and to inspire. And what you're telling us, I'm sure will resonate. With our listeners today. But I wanna go back to a that, to something that you raised and something that this particular interview revolves around and it's your ability to advocate on the behalf, on behalf of other people.
So where does one learn how to become an advocate? Ms. Valerie's Steele?
I don't think it's something that anybody can teach you. I really don't think so, because there are some of us that are partially comatose and no matter what people do to you, you take it and there are some of us who won't take anything, and I'm one of them because I believe from the core of my being, That when you are finished dealing with anyone, you should still leave their dignity intact.
And for us as black people, most of the time when people deal with us, they tend to chip away at our dignity, away at our confidence. It is my job to make sure I maintain my dignity and define myself. No one defines me. I define me and make sure that when I am finished, my confidence is still intact, my dignity is still intact, and you are not going away celebrating that you have destroyed me. You will never do that with my cooperation. I believe advocacy comes from the soul.
When Dudley Laws started to advocate for us, because Dudley lived in England he knew what racism looked like, felt like, and he came here and he just did it. And I didn't come to Canada to be an activist. It's just that the things that I saw were wrong. And I just spoke about that, and I'll have to tell you that sometimes people will say, eh, what? Does that bother you? I'll give you a little example.
I went to a church service, and when I went to the church service, I'm sitting there and I'm looking up on a mural, and the mural just had white people. And everybody in the church were black people. There was not a single living white person in the church. And I turned to my friend, I said, how can you leave this place looking at all these white people who give you such a hard time when you are at work, bring you to tears, and you come on a Sunday and you look at that mural?
And you worship and praise the Lord and go home feeling well. I said, I'm never coming back to your church. And the next time they, she invited me to her church and insisted that I came the, there was a pair of black praying hands replacing that mural. Because this is a woman that sits down with me and tells me of all her adversities at work, and then you tell me on a Sunday morning, you you see I have to bother everything that bothers me. So I guess that's where activism comes outta.
It's just resisting what is un palatable. Not all of us can do it. You have to have a concrete stomach. Because some people are so busy, making sure that everybody is comfortable. I have no interest in your comfort. When you make me uncomfortable, you're going to be uncomfortable with me just to say I'll insist on that. And that makes me an activist, I guess I am.
So what were the main challenges you faced in your efforts to address racial profiling and carding in the community?
Institutions that accommodate, I call it the disadvantaging. Of a group of people ought to be challenged, but I also know that when you raise your head to fight, there are people there who are going to push back at you. So you have to decide whether you are going to run away or you are going to fight until. Whether you win or not is not the issue. The issue is I have raised it with you and you know I don't like it, and I am promising that I will fight you.
And we used to go to police headquarters and do deputations around things that weren't very good, and there were times when. The same things we're talking to them about, they end up doing it anyways because that was what they had decided that they were going to do. And I'm talking about policing now. We went, we talked, we advocated on behalf of our community and so on, and we got pushed back. But the thing about it, I always say to. The people I'm with, we are not fighting in the cemetery.
We are fighting live people. They're going to fight back. You just have to concretize your view that you're not going to stop until you get what you want. If you want to fight without resistance going, the cemetery all dead and quiet. But if sometimes we have lots of laughs about these things because people say, oh, nobody can't do that. They're going to be upset.
Do I care if you're upset when I am telling you about the pangs of hell that I am going through, I'm going to think about your comfort? The last thing on my list is your comfort!
So I'm hearing you say, I'm hearing you say Ms. Valerie still. That you don't give up. You keep on fighting until you get what you want.
Absolutely.
Let's go back to representation in the school system. Are you happy with the progress we've made along those lines?
No I am not happy. I am not happy because one in the winter of my years, I can say what I really wanted to say for a long time. Politicians are our biggest problem. And until people realize that they are the ones who do make the bad laws and accommodate the injustices and I'm talking about, for example, the T D S B. What a horrible place! What a horrible place you are telling me that I have had to fight through it. And then I have children who now have children and they're fighting through it.
So you have us on a hamster wheel and there are people in our community who will tell you, oh, I can't fight because it's going, there'll be repercussions on my children. Try me. I just believe that collectively we should resist a lot more because when, for those of us who know our history or some of it, the board of Education won't even teach black history, get black historians to teach black history in the school.
It should be a part of the curriculum, and it is my view that the only reason why they don't do that is because they don't want their descendants to know how wicked they've been, and they don't want them to know that they have in invented a damn thing. But people won't say that because, oh, I can't upset this one. Oh, I can't upset. I don't care who I upset when I tell you how I feel.
Because what I am saying to you is that what you are doing is unpalatable to me, and I'm not swallowing it without, I'm not swallowing it at all, but I'm going to fight back so that, without any ambiguities what I mean. So
You are definitely a fighter. There's no doubt about it and when people like you fight, there is a time and a place for appreciation when people appreciate you. So can you provide us any information about the awards you have received for your work?
I have had so many awards. I have had the City of Toronto Award for the 75 women. That makes Toronto a better place to be. That was when I was president of the J. C. A. I have had the Prime Minister's medal for from Jamaica for service to Jamaicans in Canada. I have had the Queens Diamond Jubilee. I have had the Bob Marley award. You know the 6th of February I've had that. I have had international women's achievers. I have had the Nigerian mothers.
I have had things from the J. C. A. I'm sure there's more, but I've had so many, and sometimes I say, people may think that I'm important, but I don't do. Things for my community for rewards or awards because I'm not paid to do that. But for me, arriving here in 1971 with just a handful of us where if I saw you on the street, Elton and Rita, I would say hello. I don't have to know you.
I would just say hello and embrace you and I still have friends from those days, from every Caribbean island I can visit and stay with friends that I have made in Canada. So for me, just seeing my people. I just love my people. I love everybody else but my people. There's something about being with my people that elevates me to a new level of decency and resilience and forthrightness and resourcefulness, and the spirit of teamwork, because without that, No one person achieves everything.
There's always a team of people behind you, beside you, in front of you, on top of you, underneath you helping you to be the best that you can be.
No question about that. No question.
I had that in this community.
There's the saying that there's no I in the word team.
Exactly. There's no I
You really believe that? I really believe that.
No. That's true
and also there is an African proverb that says you have to put several matchsticks together and you can't break it. So there's precise that it's called Unity. So Miss Valerie Steele, is there anyone in our community past and present that you'd like to give a shout out to for their contributions?
Dudley Laws. I think that guy and Charlie Roach. Don't get the accolades that they should get from our communities because Rita, as there was a time people would phone the radio station and they would say, Dudley Laws does not speak for me. Dudley has always spoken for me because in the midst of all of that, my husband couldn't drive his car in Toronto. Without being stopped a gazillion times and asked where he got the money to buy it and if he had stolen it and so on.
All of those things are happening and people are talking about their experiences. There wasn't a black hole in the city that didn't experience something that had to do with putting us in our places and or making sure we wouldn't have roots. So for those of us who have achieved anything there, but for the grace of God, And our strength, because we are strong. We're not weak. People are fools if they think we're weak, we're not. We're not we're not weak at all.
It's simply amazing though, Valerie, that we have asked this question of many of the people we've interviewed and guess whose name always will come up Dudley Laws, so he's probably smiling down at us.
Yes,
Because people will always hear Dudley laws always in the work he's done.
Yes. Awesome work because I know. I am the kind of person that does a lot of reflection, always. I'm always thinking about something. When I look through my life, the people that have been the worst to us is the institution of justice and education, and this seem to have no generational termination. It's just a constant and what I say to particularly black people is that this is an endless journey and as long as you live here, you must fight back. You must resist.
You should never accept anything. That you find unpalatable and you shouldn't be afraid because that doesn't mean you're not going to be injured, but you are injuring me knowing fully well that I'm going to get you cuz I'm not going to stop until. Everyone knows what you've done to me, and everyone knows that what we are experiencing is the indignity of you viewing me as subhuman. So I have to always be alert and alive. To all of these things because we face it. We face it.
Everybody dislikes us. And if you ask them why, they can't even explain to you why. But I was watching a WhatsApp, somebody sent to me the other day and talked about us as a people having nine strands of DNA. And everybody else having six, and I have sent that to a few people and recently I wanted to send it to a friend of mine in Europe and I couldn't find it on YouTube because they took it down. We black folks have nine series of DNA,
Valerie, the same people that we opened the doors for. Are not liking us. The same people that we got in that we helped because of our activism, their ones tutored are not liking us. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't that interesting?
I have always said that the on graciousness with which you treat people, it comes back to you tenfold. That is why I do no harm. I do no harm and I accept no harm. I am not, I'm not accepting it, and I believe, especially for the younger generation, they're so happy having a good time. And they, and I don't envy them for being happy, having a good time, because we have worked assiduously to make sure that their lives are better than ours. So I don't envy them for that.
But what I want them to know is that racists never take a holiday and neither should we because it's racist.
I must say, you definitely are an individual that keeps your finger on the pulse of what's happening in the black community, good or bad.
Yep.
And for what it's worth, you are definitely an advocate. It has been such a pleasure talking to you this evening. We learned so much about you! All I see now is a picture of you with a pair of boxing gloves in the in the background that defines you, not the gloves themselves, but what they stand for, which is a fighter. And I'm just hoping that members of the black community, when they listen to this podcast, that they walk away.
Feeling inspired to, wanna do something besides being, how did you put it? Partially comatose.
Yes.
Which I thought that was I thought that was very good. That made me, I had to laugh for like several minutes there. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for, thank you. Thank you for having me. Joining Rita and I, and. Let's do it again. Yes. Thank you again.
You let us know when you, let us know when you're ready.
Okay. I'm inspired by you too. And thank you for doing this because really and truly we cannot afford to fall asleep. We have to be alert. god. Bless you. One, love back to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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