White Advantage,
Systemic Inequality,
and the Paths to Change
Stephen Dorsey delves deeper into racial discourse through conversations with insightful guests who have their own take on what’s at play. Because it’s time to Be Better, Do Better, Live Better, Together. Presented by Flatiron Wealth Management.
Jeff Cooper
| S:2 E:6On this episode of Black & White, we welcome Jeff Cooper, founder of the Mixd Project, a collection of photographs and narratives of Black folks of mixed race that seeks to examine ideas of race through the lens of those who fit outside of its traditional constructs. Stephen and Jeff's discussion touches on social programming around race, living in a white world, Jeff's work on the Mixd Project, and more.
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Stephen:
Hello, welcome back to Black and White, a rallying place where we come together to learn and hold everyone gently to account. A podcast for the ally in all of us. I'm your host, Stephen Dorsey. Black and White is recorded in Toronto, Canada, on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples. And now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples. My guest today is Jeff Cooper, a documentary filmmaker who's currently working on The Mixd Project. Jeffrey is crisscrossing Canada, interviewing biracial Black Canadians, investigating their own experience and challenges with identity, something Jeff knows about firsthand. We'll talk to him about that, his life growing up in British Columbia, his multifaceted career and of course we'll get into many topics related to the global reckoning on race that has impacted all of us. Welcome to Black and White, Jeff.
Jeff:
Thank you. Thank you, Stephen, so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
Stephen:
Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks for making the time. So just for our audience, so Jeff and I met in Montreal last month at August, and he had reached out and asked if I would be interested in participating in The Mixd Project, which we'll talk about. Read up on it, and I said, "Yes, of course." And so it just so happened that we both were be in Montreal at the same time and he set up a space actually at the Mordecai-Richler Library in Montreal, which is amazing. It's actually, you know what's interesting, it's an old Anglican church in traditionally the Jewish neighborhood, one of the Jewish neighborhoods of Montreal. And of course, Mordecai Richler is a very famous Canadian writer, he was of Jewish cultural ancestry. So I loved all the juxtapositions that was going on there.
Jeff:
All the identities, all the different layers to it, it very much fit the theme of a mix, of Mixd Project.
Stephen:
So amazing. And it's also just a beautiful library and the people there were amazing. And I really enjoyed our time together, we spent almost three hours, so thank you for coming.
Jeff:
My pleasure. I'm very excited to get into it. Yes.
Stephen:
So Jeff, I want to read a quote that I found out there in the internet and I thought it might be a good way for us to start. So you said, "It was a quiet upbringing in a suburb that was boring, in the same gnawing way that most suburbs are. You grew up being desperate to leave. Growing up Black and mixed in a city with so few Black people created an isolating experience." I think I know what you mean because I had the same feeling, but please share with us kind of your experience. Tell us a little bit more about that feeling.
Jeff:
That feeling. Yeah, that feeling of isolation. I think that a lot of Black people in Vancouver, myself included, we describe being Black in Vancouver as a very isolating experience. There's a lot of people who are doing fantastic work to try and change that, to try and build more community, people who I am thankfully friends with. But when I grew up in Surrey, specifically in the '90s, there was very, very, very few Black people. So few in fact, that you would just go weeks without seeing another Black person, period. And it was also sort of this cookie cutter suburb, right? There was a great mix of social economic standing, it varied quite a bit, but nonetheless, especially where I was living, where our family moved in, in 1993, it was this very cookie cutter suburb, with in many ways, very little personality. And here I was, this Black person, this mixed race Black person, in not only a city that had very few Black people, but a community, this new suburban community that had even fewer.
And I think that it was very, very difficult to figure out my identity and my place in all of that. When I think about it now, I was surrounded by a lot of families for whom suburbs are designed. Suburbs are designed for typically white middle class families, especially back in the '90s, white middle class families, working professional parents, two children, et cetera. And most of the people around me, most of the families accept that, but there was something very different about our family. And that was the fact that my father was this Black man from the Caribbean and there were these two Afro haired Black children, me and my sister sort of running around. And it took me a very long time. When you're young, you don't sort of realize to what complexities, what depth you're being exposed to sort these experiences and how it's sort of forming your sense of self. But I think that over time it started to really, really build and get to a place where it became very complicated for me.
Stephen:
When I was a kid, I didn't go, oh, I'm Stephen the Black kid. I was just Stephen and it's others who reminded me of my Blackness. Right? Either in the schoolyard, in the street, the name calling, 'cause you just said, when I look back at it now, but obviously you were darker, your father was a Black man, your mother was white. On your every day as a kid growing up there in the suburbs, was it something that you, oh, I'm different and I got to act different or I have to try to integrate, without being an adult, but being the little Jeffrey at the time?
Jeff:
Yeah. No, I mean, I can give you a really specific example. In 1996, all of our TVs went from sort the basic cable, plug it into the wall, to that box. If you remember in the mid '90s, all of a sudden everyone got that cable box with the remote with like 27, no, 50 different buttons on it and the whole thing. That swept across our neighborhood, it must have been over the course of just a few months, boom, everyone had it. And with it came about 200 channels. And one of those channels was BET, Black Entertainment Television. And it was really exciting.
Stephen:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff:
'Cause this is a time like 1996, this was like Puff Daddy & The Family, Notorious BIG had just passed away, but he'd released this really big album prior to his death. Who else? There was all this stuff coming from the southern United States, people like Lil Wayne and Juvenile and Baby.
Stephen:
I mean, hip hop was everywhere.
Jeff:
It took over the white suburb. BET had not only the music videos and the music, but it had Comic View, which was a comedy, kind of like a Def Jam comedy style show where there were Black comics going up and doing their set. There was what else? There was maybe the beginnings of some reality TV, the fashion, everything. So it was everywhere and the kids were absolutely eating it up. And as I talked about in previous articles, all of a sudden kids started coming to school and trying on these different personalities, these different sort of Black, African American aspects in their voices, in their style of dress, referring to each other as their boo, "My boo, what's up?" It's really hard to overstate how much of an impact it had on us. But of course there were no Black people around. There was no one around except for me and my sister, maybe like one other.
So these kids who were going home and consuming all of this media would come to school the next day and look to me as some sort of a physical reference to project all of this onto. And what they wanted from me was a performance. They wanted to have what they saw on TV, actualized in real life and perform in front of them in real life, in the classroom and on the playground. Now for me, I'm 11 years old at the time, I grew up in the same communities as these other people did. I have my Black family, my aunts and my cousins and whatnot in Vancouver, but beyond that, that's the only Black people that I know. I'm also coming to terms with my sexuality and realizing that there's this really big thing that I'm hiding, my queer identity. And if it's revealed it's going to absolutely kill me socially. Social suicide. Pardon the term. So let me take this opportunity to really get up there and dance and show these kids that I am as cool as the stuff they're seeing in the evenings at their homes.
Stephen:
You're not from there. You didn't grow up in the hood. You are not a rapper. Hip hop music and culture is foreign to you, right? Just because you're a brown person, you have no affiliation, there's no tie to you except maybe the fact that you like the music.
Jeff:
And my physical presentation, the fact that I'm a Black person with Afro hair and brown skin. 'Cause Stephen, you couldn't tell me any different. I bought the track pants and I hyped them up with bandanas. I made my poor mother go to the mall and spend hundreds of dollars on FUBU, ECHO, Sean John, Phat Farm, all the different labels. And I played it up as much as I possibly could, and I think that for a lot of kids, for a lot of young people, we're all trying on different hats. We do that for most of our youth. So what's different about my experience is the way that it was racialized. 'Cause you have white kids who are trying on the skater thing. We have other kids who are trying on maybe the goth.
But for me, there was this added layer of racialization and complicated feelings about my Black identity and figuring out what even is this. And yeah, it pushed me into... I think what happened is that my external presentation outside in the school yard and at the school dances and everything was one thing, but at home by myself, there was something much more painful and much more difficult going on, that I was experiencing really by myself in my room at home.
Stephen:
In a way you're performing to be part of.
Jeff:
Absolutely.
Stephen:
There's an expectation that your performative hip hop persona is making you kind of cool and bouncing off any potential systemic racism, or racism that would've come at you with Black was not cool, or hip hop was not cool.
Jeff:
That's just it. Yeah.
Stephen:
I talk about this in my book where my friend Collin and I, who's Black as well, and we remember watching the riots on TV. I remember turning to him, I go, "Wow, those Black people really have a bad down there." I looked at him and he looked at me and I go, "Collin, we're like Black." Right? It's like, weird. And he started to laugh and I said, it was the first time I actually said it out loud and I was already in my twenties.
Jeff:
So that's us. Like Rodney King, you're probably talking about Rodney King.
Stephen:
Yes, of course. Of course.
Jeff:
And I remember OJ Simpson. Oh, Rodney King, I was a bit too young for that, but I remember OJ Simpson and how racialized that experience was in the mid '90s. And the kids in class calling me OJ Simpson, because... I look nothing like OJ Simpson, to anyone who wants to Google my face, I don't resemble the man at all.
Stephen:
No. No.
Jeff:
But because I was Black, I was called OJ Simpson. But those moments like that remind us and sometimes we're in isolating places here in Canada, but yeah, that's also us. Right?
Stephen:
Yeah. Okay, you're coming to your own now and obviously you went to university. And I know Vancouver, trust me, I've had great times there, I have great friends, family, in Victoria as well. But Vancouver itself, it's very different than Toronto in the fact that Toronto is an amalgamation of neighborhoods that are multicultural, but they all kind of function together. And I would say that since the '90s, Vancouver is more of these little segregated communities. When you think of West Vancouver, it's like they don't need to go anywhere else but West Vancouver. And primarily Asian community of Richmond, British Columbia, people that live there and they find community, which is an amazing community, but they really don't need to go, if they don't choose to go, anywhere else. I find people don't mix as much in that city. And of course there isn't a Black community. How do you make that your home? How do you find your place within that?
Jeff:
I mean, I think it's really difficult. I think that Black people in Vancouver are actively trying to build community. And I think that it took me a long time to understand the need for that. Because I think that when you grow up in a place like Vancouver, like I'm describing, you try to convince yourself that you don't need Black community. I think a lot of Black people in Vancouver growing up around the same time as me, have that same idea. And I think that being mixed and having a white mother adds to that, it further creates this sort of belief that you can distance yourself from physical Black community, that you don't need it as much. But I think that I've learned the very hard way that I do need that community. And it's something we're still trying to build. I think a really early sign of me needing that Black community and trying to find some way to find it is that I went to a Catholic high school, half the population is Filipino because the predominant religion of Filipinos is Catholic.
So Filipino immigrants who came to Surrey where I grew up would often send their kids to the Catholic school. And Filipinos, there's this long history of Filipinos being actually very involved in hip-hop music, whether it was with Genesis in New York, it's promoting its popularity on the West Coast. So a lot of Filipinos were involved with the hip-hop scene in the '80s in San Francisco and then Los Angeles. So Filipino people in Surrey at the time, and still today, were very, very interested in hip-hop and in Black culture, and they were people of color. So there was something there, even though I wasn't, myself, Filipino. So I found myself really making a lot of friends of that descent and in that community. And I spent, I say a lot of my late teens and my early twenties, moving through the city in these squads of Filipino and Asian folks as well.
A lot of folks, Vietnamese folks, Chinese folks, Korean folks, so with other people of color. And I'm so thankful that I had that, it created really this opportunity to, at the very least, sort of avoid a lot of those microaggressions. Although there were some microaggressions that came with that as well, 'cause I still was the only Black person in the group, but I'm thankful that I had that experience. But underneath all of that was this desire actually to build Black community. And like I've said, sorry, in Vancouver, it's still very, very difficult. We'll get into some, I'm sure, later, on my travels across the country. Going to places like Montreal, for example, where there are specifically Black communities, Black neighborhoods I should say, was very, very exciting for me to see.
Stephen:
I can imagine. So you and I obviously are both half Black and half white. I find it's interesting that like you I've lived in many places, but I've lived in Europe and in Spain, I've lived in Australia, I've lived in United States, across Canada. And it's so interesting how as much as I am half white, I have been either considered a Brown person or a Black person. What's been your experience dealing with this dual identity, being biracial, and how have you navigated that?
Jeff:
I mean, it's such an interesting question. I mean, I'll start by saying that white identity is something that I've never been able to claim or been interested in claiming. There are some Black folks of mixed race who have a white parent who are so light passing, white passing, pardon me, and so light skinned that they're able to claim white identity. And for different reasons, complicated reasons, they either claim it or they just don't talk about it and they then move through the world as white passing. That's never been something that I've been able to do and that's perfectly fine with me. What I'd also say though is that dealing with my biracial identity and being half white and half Black, it started out as a situation where I did feel quite sorry for myself. And that's changed. And even if I talk about it, I'm trying to sort of...
I always want to hold space for people who I'll interview in the future who will maybe hear this and be like, "Oh, well I can't come to Jeff with my complaints about being half Black, half white because of how he feels about the subject." But that's not it. I started out this project in 2019 still with a lot of sympathy and pity almost for myself. And I think that that's okay to start at that place. I started in a place where I felt like that trope of I wasn't white enough for the white kids and I wasn't Black enough for the Black kids. I surely wasn't Black enough for the Black kids because of where I was raised and the environment I just talked about. I carried that idea with me for the first iteration of the project all the way to New York. I did most of my interviews in the project for the first iteration of it in Vancouver, and then I moved to New York City for a month. It's a place where I'd lived in the past and I had some connections there and I interviewed some folks.
And I sat down and I spoke with this one guy named Zach. Zach [inaudible 00:16:06] you can go and listen to his episode. Fantastic artist, queer artist, half Black, half white like me and you, from San Francisco, now lives in New York. And he said to me that, and he got this from I think another podcast he listened to, that the idea of I'm not white enough for the white folks, Black enough for the Black folks, is a popular narrative because it's a very comfortable one. It actually allows us to sit in the place of pity, feel bad for ourselves, and not make any efforts to connect with the Black community.
Stephen:
Interesting.
Jeff:
Yeah. Yeah. When you think about it, if I have a white mother, if I'm half white and I have a tether to that community, and if whiteness is power, then if I'm afraid of losing some of that power, the more and more I associate with Black people. How much of this narrative that centers me as a victim, allows me in fact to retain the white privilege and the white power that I have. And for me, it was a mind blowing experience, sort of a really aha awakening moment for Zach. And hearing him say it to me, it was a really mind blowing moment for me as well, because I had to admit that change now, but especially when I was younger, there was this discomfort with associating with more Black people. It was one thing to wear the clothes and to be around white folks and wear the clothes, but to start to build community with Black people, there was this bit of anxiety.
And to understand that anxiety, the best way to put it is that I have to think about my experiences when I'm out socializing and spending time with predominantly white friends or non-Black friends, which was what my life mostly was in Vancouver, still kind of... It's changing now, but was for a long time in Vancouver, versus the far less frequent times when I am out in public with just Black people, the friends that I've made. The experience of othering that I feel, right? Because suddenly I go from being the token Black, light-skinned guy with all the white friends and no one's really worried about us, to suddenly I'm with a bunch of other Black folks and I'm just like everyone, I'm just like all of them.
And the way that the public responds, the way that servers at restaurants respond, the way that transit police on the sky train and on the bus respond is very, very different. So my experience going from this sort of centering me as a victim, I'm not white enough for the white folks, not Black enough for the Black folks, has been now changed, and is challenging myself and challenging that narrative. And it's gone from this sort of idea of it being an external problem, of it being this external problem about people around me not accepting me, to being actually quite internal.
Stephen:
Interesting. I hear what you're saying. It's interesting. I literally always navigated in a white world. In a white house, in a white neighborhood, in white schools, in white cities. Yes, I had some Black friends and stuff, but I'm talking about community. And I talk about this a little bit in my book and now that I'm speaking, is that I'm actually at a place now, I'm in my fifties where I have the opportunity to actually get to know the Black community. I went to a festival in Little Jamaica a few weeks ago to meet my friends from the Black Business Professional Association.
And I got to tell you, it was one of the first times where I'm walking around and I felt like I was a little bit part of the community. Right? And it felt kind of good. And I actually said, "I have to make more Black friends." I'm almost like discovering Black community and introducing myself to Black community and all that. But I got to say, on the flip side of that is I felt it, that some in the Black community don't think I'm Black enough. I know it for a fact.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Stephen:
It's quite an interesting thing. I don't want it to sound negative, but it's like a feeling that you get. I've worked all over the world, I've walked into many rooms, I've met hundreds of thousands of people now in my life. You know when you're feeling like you're other.
Jeff:
Yeah. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I've lived with that feeling. I still live with that feeling of sometimes being gate kept by Black folks who don't want me to enter the community because of my mixed race identity, because of sometimes the very white ways that I code socially, the way that I speak sometimes, and maybe sometimes the way that I dress, my interests, whatever, all the different sort of reasons why they want to gate keep me. In moments like that, the knee jerk reaction is to get angry and to say, "How dare you." And I'm not saying that we can never do that, but I think what we need to realize, what's happening there is that they are identifying a privilege that we have.
They're not identifying necessarily a negative characteristic. You'd have to have negative feelings towards white people and white identity. What they're really identifying is that I have to tether to the privileged community, the privileged class, and also frankly, the people who have been oppressors for 400 years against Black people. So I try and show a lot of grace in moments like that and I try not to personalize it.
Stephen:
We're going to take a little break and come back and we're going to go a little deeper on identity, because there's a lot of intersectionality in your life and I'm super interested to hear more about how that came into play and how that's made you the person you are today. So we'll be right back with Jeff Cooper.
Hello, welcome back to Black and White. I'm your host Stephen Dorsey. I'm here with my guest Jeff Cooper. We were just left off, we're talking about identity and of course Black and white. You're this 11-year-old little mixed race kid growing up in Surrey trying to figure it out. You've got this hip-hop persona that you've decided you're going to hold onto because it's helping you socialize and maybe even somewhat protecting you. Tell us about that and what it's like growing up Black and white, and then figuring out that your sexual identity is something that can be very scary.
Jeff:
Can be very scary. And I think, I like the way that you said that, that image, the image of this hip-hop version of myself allowed me a certain level of protection. And it was very much that, it was very much protection, not only against what could have been maybe more brutal forms of racism, but also helping me hide the fact that I was gay, that I was this little queer kid at 11, 12 years old. And very aware of it as well, by the time I was 12 years old, I was very aware of who I was and what it was and had a name for it and everything. I think that when it comes to being biracial and being queer, the way that it operates is that when we talk about the racializing of queer identities, we often assume that a queer person, a gay person, a gay male for example, let's just talk about my identity.
A gay, cisgendered male is a white man. This is sort of the image that pops up in our mind, especially in the '90s when I was growing up, and it's changing now, but this assumption that to be queer meant to be white. And we see that with not only gay men, we see it with lesbians, we see it with non-binary folks. There's a lot of non-binary folks who are talking about how the non-binary identity is being, in some ways, gate kept by white folks by the way that it's represented and presented in the media and online. So for me, the idea of being Black and gay, that was oil and water, that was impossible. The two things didn't mix. I couldn't imagine how I could be both Black and gay. And the persona that I was giving people throughout my teenage years of this hip-hop version of myself was completely antithetical to the queerness in me. And I say that because Black men in the media and in society in general, hyper-masculize.
Stephen:
Yes, yes.
Jeff:
The value is placed on our physical prowess, value is placed on our bodies, et cetera, et cetera. And specifically our relationship with women.
Stephen:
Which in that genre of hip-hop, especially at that time, was highly sexualized, sexualizing women, right? Objectified, right? In the music videos. So I hear what you're saying about the Black masculinity. So tell us more about, you're playing into that, but really you're playing against type internally.
Jeff:
I'm playing against who I truly am and I think that it gave me, without sort of a complex and a dynamic idea of what a Black community looks like, without actually interacting with a Black community, understanding that there are queer people there and that not all people look like the people you're seeing on TV. And that, that's very much being filtered through a big sort of commercialized industry looking to make money. I assumed that my Black identity and that my queerness were at odds with each other.
Stephen:
Interesting.
Jeff:
And I see a lot of people do this, not just folks who are mixed, not just queer Black folks who are mixed, but just Black folks who don't identify as mixed and who aren't what we consider mixed. And I think a lot of Black people in Canada, with a few exceptions, are raised in predominantly non-Black environments. We find ourselves gravitating towards particularly white environments because we associate white environments with being safer for queer people. And of course the results of that is you end up dealing with all of this sort of the racisms, whether micro or macro, that you have to deal with in the white community, as you're trying to escape what you perceive as this intense homophobia in the Black community.
So again, you end up sort of going back and forth. For me, being queer was another obstacle to assuming my Black identity. It was another thing that pushed me in towards my white social settings and white coding and white behavior, if you will, social behavior. And it took a while, it took a lot of work, a lot of work of other people as well. Other queer Black people who got vocal about it and about the right to have our place in the queer community and showing examples of what it looks like to be Black and to be queer and to be beautiful. Half of it was my work and half of it was work that people did for me and me being able to watch it online or on TV or in real life and be like, "Yes, okay good. This is something that I can work with."
Stephen:
And so when did that moment, for lack of better, when did you come out of the closet, as they say? But when did you comfortably assume your entirety of your identity?
Jeff:
I think I was 17 or something. I have a gay cousin in Ontario, shout out to him if he's listening. He came out to me, I came out to him like 17. And then I spent a summer in Ottawa. When I was 18, I went to Ottawa for the summer and I was a tour guy at Parliament Hill for a summer. And that was really sort of my coming out summer, was me 18, with a fake ID, running around to all the different bars, including the gay bars. And that's sort of where I did my coming out. But coming out is this constant process and there's been different iterations of coming out, because when I came out at 18, I still didn't fully know myself and I still wasn't really comfortable or centered in my racial identity.
That was still sort of a confusing thing for me. And I was still playing up stereotypes, because you can take that hyper-masculine Black stereotype and you can bring it into the queer community and you can play it if you want. That's a type that you can play. And that's not to discredit people who were authentically that, but I'm saying that for me, I didn't completely leave it behind when I came out of the closet.
Stephen:
Interesting.
Jeff:
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen:
So I tell you, as someone listening to your story, it sounds like a lot of work, Jeff.
Jeff:
It's not easy being me, Steve.
Stephen:
No, no. But I'm just saying I know how much work I've put into trying to get to, for lack of a better word, okay, with all the trauma that I had as a child and the challenges that everyone has as adults and dealing with all the other stuff around race and systemic inequality and all of that stuff. And you had this other layer and here you are-
Jeff:
Here I am.
Stephen:
... thriving. So thanks for sharing. So when I met you last month, we're talking and you say, "Well, my day job's actually, I work for the federal government in procurement." I'm going, "What are you talking about? How did you get to that?" So maybe tell us a little bit about that and this idea for The Mixd Project, how did it come to you, and how did you apply? So tell us about this last little journey and then we'll talk about The Mixd Project.
Jeff:
Yeah, for sure. I think that when it comes to procurement, it's just about moving the dial forward. I think that someone gave me a really good piece of advice once, they said that, "Even in moments where you're unsure what to do and what decision to make, try to always keep the dial moving forward, moving forward and moving forward," which is what I did with my position with the federal government. I think one of the best things about working for the federal government is that when you apply for a grant with the Canada Council for the Arts and they give it to you and you take six months off work, it's in your collective agreement that you can go ahead and do that. Right? And there's a lot of very supportive people at PSPC who've allowed me to go and do that right now.
Stephen:
This is what I was saying, it's like if you wanted to do this creative project, The Mixd Project, and you were at another job it wouldn't have probably worked. You would've had to make a choice. Right?
Jeff:
Exactly.
Stephen:
Here it actually worked out because there was some symbiotic relationship between your employer and the government. So we've talked obviously about being Black and white and your identity and your experiences, and really I think The Mixd Project came about, and I think you shared this with me, of the sense that there's many Black people who are biracial out in Canada with different stories, especially in a country like Canada where it's so different from Vancouver to Toronto and to Montreal and to Halifax. And of course you've gone to New York as well and into the US. So tell us about, you landed on this idea, you applied for a grant, and tell us a little bit more about the foundations of the project and what you've been doing the last six months.
Jeff:
So I mean The Mixd Project, sort of the tagline is it's a collection of photographs and narratives of Black folks of mixed race. So what that means is that I interview folks who were Black and mixed like me, and that can be any sort of mixing, that can be someone who's Black and white, Black and Asian, Black and indigenous. I've interviewed Afro Latinx folks. I've interviewed folks who both parents identify as Black, but where there's some great uncle somewhere who was German. And we talk about how the injection of white ancestry into your genealogy and into your family lineage can have an impact. So it's a very broad definition of mix. And my sister and I started it out together. We were interested also in space and place because, and it goes back to this idea of being Black and mixed and Vancouver being this very isolating experience.
We were always sort of curious to know what was it like for kids like us, going back to our childhood, kids like us in other parts of the world, wherever we popped up? So from the very beginning of the project I was interested in making it a traveling project that looked at how space and place interacts with mixed race identity. So the first iteration, like I sort of mentioned, most of the interviews were in Vancouver. I went to New York for that month. I did one in Los Angeles and I did one in Seattle. And at that point the pandemic hit, and I also looked at how much money I was spending doing this project and saying, let me see if I could get some funding for this. The experience of applying for funding, it's funny, it reminds me kind of applying to work at the UN, it felt very much like a shot in the dark.
But thankfully the Canada Council for the Arts has an emerging artist program. So for folks who don't have a ton of formal training, you can apply through a stream. Their requirements are I guess a bit more flexible. And sure enough, in February of 2022, I got the news that I'd received the grant. And with the grant, what I wrote in it was that this was going to be a traveling project. I wanted to have funding so I could travel from Vancouver all the way across the country, interview Black folks of mixed race and try and understand our experiences on a national scale from place to place. What's going on in Newfoundland, what's going on in Quebec, what's going on in the prairies with racial identity. And that's, as you're catching me today in September, beginning of September, I am right smack dab in the middle of doing the work. I was currently sitting in Halifax after having spent the last few months in the prairies and in Quebec.
Stephen:
And of course Halifax is, as I've come to better understand just by the research and the writing of my book over the last couple years, is really a central place for Black history in Canada. That is one of the cradles of the Black community in this country.
Jeff:
And I didn't realize, and this sort of shows the importance of education and Black folks also being connected across this country. I didn't realize until shortly before I got here and now that I'm here, how incredibly organized and mobilized Black folks in Halifax are. I don't know, I'll hopefully get answers to this soon, and to people who are listening and sort of screaming at their phones or in their headphones that they have the answers for this, I'll have figured it out by the time you hear this, but I don't know if it's because it is very much the oldest Black population in Canada.
I don't think there's another population that can rival its dates and its ancestry. I don't know if that's why they're so organized. I'm not sure what it is, because I think that the level of organization that I'm seeing here certainly surpasses Vancouver and it certainly surpasses even what I saw in Montreal where it's much more community based. Whereas here in Halifax it seems like there really are a lot of positions in the public sector, in the actual government level, advocating for African services and services of African people.
Stephen:
There's been a critical mass of Black people in Nova Scotia under siege for hundreds of years. But from slaves to loyalists who fought for the British against the Americans, to farming communities, Africville that you're obviously going to hear about there, one of the first Black battalions that fought in World War I. And again, as I say, I'm sounding like the guy that knows a lot, but I didn't know anything about this until recently. I didn't learn about this in school. I interviewed, actually Senator Don Oliver was one of my guests last season on my podcast and he's the first Black man to be appointed to the Canadian Senate.
I barely ever heard of him. And this man was the first of many, I believe the first Black lawyer in Nova Scotia appointed to the bar. So you're going to have quite an experience there, I'm sure. So what's one of the learnings that you've gathered from, so far, from these interviews from Black people in Alberta and British Columbia and the prairies and Montreal? And is there something, a thread there that's connecting everything?
Jeff:
I think what I've learned is that at the end of the day, Black people are the products of their environments. That's what's really interesting. My focus is of course on mixed race identity, but I'm also speaking to and consulting and even interviewing folks who are Black but not mixed to try and get an understanding of like the lay of the land and almost the ecosystem within Black folks and mixed race are operating in. And what I'm surprised to see, shouldn't be surprised really, is how Black people in each area are such a product of their environment. Black folks in Alberta for example, they're dealing with one of the most conservative parts of the country and they're dealing with a very strong... They have to be very careful about being deemed PC, politically correct.
Stephen:
Interesting.
Jeff:
Or about being problem starters or about bringing critical race theory into the conversation. And there are also a significant amount of Black people in Alberta who are conservative, who are just absolutely capital C, Canadian conservative people. And they're far less interested in having these conversations with me than the people that I'm speaking to and that I've spoken to in BC or the people that I spoke to in Quebec. And that for me is somebody who grew up, nonetheless, in what we consider, and is a fairly progressive part of the country. Really shocking to meet so many Black conservatives who were at odds sometimes with the things that I wanted to say.
And then their children or the young people that I interview who are Black and mixed, they have to contend with not always being able to find allies within their own community at a much greater rate than you would see probably, I'm going to assume, in Vancouver or in Toronto or in Montreal. So that was a little bit heartbreaking, I'll be honest, but also inspiring to see these people trying, in spite of having to contend with conservatism within Black organizations and within Black families.
Stephen:
Yes.
Jeff:
What I also notice is the rural urban divide. So for Black folks and for mixed Black folks, the experience in rural Canada versus urban Canada is as strong, if not almost more important and impactful, than what province you live in or what city or what town you live in. The experiences of somebody in rural Alberta or in rural Saskatchewan and the experiences of somebody in say rural Ontario or rural Quebec, they have much more in common than those people in those rural communities and the nearby big city. Small town Alberta and someone from Edmonton or Calgary, there's really a rural urban divide that's happening across all of North America, I can say for sure and we see that in election results.
So when I speak to Black folks in Quebec, I spent a lot of time in smaller towns and sometimes very small towns speaking to Black folks. These small towns are actually really beautiful. It's interesting, I went in trying to not have too many preconceived ideas about what a small town in Canada would be like for a racialized person. And every time I was surprised at how happy these Black people and these mixed folks were in these small towns and in Canada, which shows my own ignorance and I'm actually, that's one of the biggest lessons is learning that. But the existence is very, very different.
Stephen:
Why do you think they're happy?
Jeff:
I think that, the word that I kept encountering over and over again, especially in small town Quebec, was mixed folks and Black folks saying that they are often met with curiosity from the local white population.
Stephen:
Interesting.
Jeff:
And that, that curiosity translates into invitations to come over for dinner. It translates into wanting to include them in community organizations and community events, wanting their kids to play with them. I mean there's also instances of abject racism and I documented that as well, but everyone was really fascinated by them. Now for me personally, that would be too much, to be an object of fascination. But that's my experience, I'm not everyone else. So these people that I spoke to, a lot of them were very happy in these small towns and didn't seem to mind the attention as much as I expected them to. And that could change, I'm only halfway through my project, but that's where it lands right now.
Stephen:
So maybe human beings are very interesting. It's like, curiosity for the white people of these small towns is seen and accepted by those that you've talked to perhaps as an opportunity for integration into the community. Right?
Jeff:
How can I put this? There's two things happening. I think that people of color have always been a fascination in small town Canada, in small town majority white Canada, whether that's a good type of fascination or a bad one. But I think that education has reached a point where a lot of people are aware of some of the conversations that are happening, whether with Black Lives Matter or with the rest of it. So when they see a Black person in their community, they may be eager to prove to themselves or to that person that they're not the stereotype. We often assume that people who live in these highly stereotyped environments are not aware of what people say about them, but they are, they're very aware. And they're often eager to combat it.
Stephen:
Yes.
Jeff:
And sometimes they're eager to combat it and they don't always have the tools to do so. Sometimes they do, sometimes they're learning and that's what it is. And I think that in Quebec, I saw a lot of that of folks being really eager to try and be inclusive and maybe sometimes being a little bit awkward at times. But yeah, it was interesting. It's interesting to see.
Stephen:
Well it sounds fascinating and I look forward to when you bring it all together for everyone. So what's next for you in terms of finishing off the project, getting editing and getting it out to the public? What are we looking at?
Jeff:
I'm in The Maritimes here for the next two months and then after that I still have a lot of country to cover. What I'll say to people who have a desire to be an artist and who maybe get an opportunity like I have, things are not going to go the way that you anticipated. What you wrote so beautifully in your proposal that you submitted for your grant, when you actually have to do it, it's going to be very different. And I think that the true test will be how well you can pivot. So I'm here in The Maritimes for the next two months. I'm excited to learn here and then after that I'll be doing more of the country, Ontario, and going back to the prairies, because I have more work to do there. And in 2023 is when all you folks will be able to start consuming some of the content that I put out.
Stephen:
I just want to say thank you again for having invited me to be one of the subjects of The Mixd Project. I really enjoyed our talk in Montreal. I've enjoyed our conversation today. I wish you continued good travels and amazing conversations in Nova Scotia and then on your way back across the country. And I know everyone will be looking for 2023 to be able to really get hold of your film, documentary, whichever way you bring it to market.
Jeff:
Yes, we'll see.
Stephen:
And congratulations and I wish you continued success.
Jeff:
Thank you so very much. Thank you for having me. This has been so fun. I was really excited to be on this end of the microphone answering the questions instead of posing them, so I'm very happy to have been here today. Thank you.
Stephen:
Until next time. Thanks everyone for listening to Black and White. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and take the time to rate our show. Black and White is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to my producer, sound designer and engineer Noah Foutz and our executive producer David Allen Moss. A reminder that my book Black and White, An Intimate Multicultural Perspective on White Advantage and the Paths to Change is available at your favorite bookstores across the US and Canada and online at Amazon and Indigo Chapters. I'm Stephen Dorsey reminding all of us that we can all be better, do better, so that eventually we can all live better together.
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