'Where are you from?' can be a loaded question

"Where are you from?"

My brown skin and curly hair was signalling something to the person standing in front of me.

I sighed and got ready to answer. My mind drifted to the inevitable follow-up to my mundane answer, "The west end."

"But where are you REALLY from?"

This question, when asked inside my community, is often a way to relate to each other. In this case, there was something more insidious about it. Something that sounded like, "You are visibly an outsider."

I grew up in the west end of Edmonton andwent to a school that was mostly white at a time when "Edmontonian" meant someone who didn't look like me, even though I somehow check all of the other boxes.

I was born at the Misericordia. My father worked in Fort McMurray. Mymother was a nurse who went back to school to become a nursing instructor. We went to church on Sunday and had a piano in our house. We were a typical Canadian family.

Watch: Robert Tyndale and Nigel Williams talk about their experiences in Edmonton.

Being black in Edmonton

5 years ago

Duration 3:14

Robert Tyndale and Nigel Williams discuss the challenges they face in their city.

But early on my parents let me know that I had to work twice as hard to be treated like an equal. Growing up in a black church made me very aware that I had to code-switch to behave one way around my white friends at school and another way around my black friends at church.

Growing up, I would see people enjoying black culture, singing songs like Ginuwine's Pony and Tupac's California Love.My peers in school wore all the styles and listened to the music coming from the black community.

As I grew, the challenge was to shed the stereotypes that came from those same hip-hop songs and movies like Dead Presidents or He Got Game, and be looked at as something other than a gangster or an athlete.

To this day, there are people who are very familiar with an African-American version of blackness that does not match the lived experiences of black Canadians and black Canadian immigrants.

My parents were immigrants who did a lot to make sure we not only fit into Canadian life but also maintained our Caribbean culture.

I am raising my family and I am building my community but I realize not everyone sees me in those roles.

I am cognizant of how other people view me and my family when we undertake the most mundane tasks of daily life. I must be vigilant in ensuring my children are safe in the environments they navigate. In particular, I advocate for my children by helping ensure their schools are safe from ignorance and assumptions.

I don't want my sons to know what it's like to walk onto an LRTtrain and see someone clutch their purse closer.I want my children to know what it's like to be Canadian, no hyphen because you can't hyphenate my humanity, and being Canadian is not about being white.

The reality of having to work harder to tell my own story in my own words is the one I inherited with my skin. It is also the one thing that drove me to advocate for people who look like me.

Feeling like I was not represented made me want to work harder to show positive images of black people, both to my community because positive representation is tied to confidence and overall performance and to those outside of my community, so my humanity can be seen and understood.

That simple question, "Where are you from?" made me bond with the people who looked like me and who came from other places to build this community through hard work.

Blackness is not a monolith. Seeing experiences that were so different and also so similar to mine made me a part of a community that builds together, learns together and ultimately grows what it means to be Canadian.

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