“Because it’s different when you cross that border” : examining Black Canadian maleness in the era of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought greater salience to the conceptualization of Black maleness and inspired a broader rethinking of Black maleness in relation to the North American society in general. Discussions regarding Canadian Blackness are often hampered by the country’s proximity to and influence from the United States, often neglectful in acknowledging the specific components of each country that make their respective cultures unique. Ethnographic research on a cross-section of Canadian Black men explores the manner with which race and gender intersect and illuminate the contradictions of social progress while also revealing the marked disconnection between the constructs of masculinity imposed upon these men externally by the wider white-majority society and their own individual interpretations of masculinity. This fresh consideration of the longstanding issue that is the representation, understanding, and treatment of Black men albeit in a Canadian milieu unearths the need to cultivate a new Black masculinity, one that allows Black men to be the architects of their identities as opposed to inhabitants of a social structure and is responsive to what it means to be a Black male in Canada.