TANEIA brings Black Lives Matter to school

This is a CBC Podcast. This is Mike Drop. It's about us. Teens in our stories and what we've been through. What we are still going through without any adult interruptions. Testing. Testing. Mike will drop in five, four, three, two, drop the mic. I've never held a mic before and this feels good, actually. The kids at school, they don't understand that it's not cool to really use the n-word, because I've seen a couple cases where they've used it before and they think it's cool to just slang or something. Like, maybe if we have more black kids, we would be able to teach them a lesson. Not violence, I'm saying like, we could talk to them more, tell them that's not cool. I'm Tanae, T-A-N-E-I-A, and I am in grade five. I'm black and I'm proud. I'm very outgoing, friendly, and yeah, pretty much me. My real hair is puffy, but I really love wearing brids. Going to a all-white school, a lot of the kids they try and touch my hair. And I really don't like it because I don't like people touching my hair. Like, it's my hair, man. Leave it alone. I'm guessing my friends touch my hair because I'm pretty sure it's nothing like they've seen before. Because we live in like an all-white neighborhood. They don't have many black friends, I'm probably their only black friend. So yeah, they're really not used to it. What it feels like for me, my neighborhood and my school. I feel kind of left out in a sense, not left out. I just feel lonely because I don't have any black friends really. Last year I had this white teacher, right? And she didn't know anything about black history month herself. She didn't know anything about black history. So she would turn to me when she's trying to teach the class. She would turn to me and ask if that's okay. And she's saying it, right? Because she really didn't know herself. I was like, wow. I thought you were supposed to teach me. Why am I teaching you? That doesn't make any sense. It's definitely one of the things that made me want to make a different type of my school. I went to go talk to my French teacher about this situation. And I chose to talk to her because she's black. So I assumed she would understand why I wouldn't want to help more this year. Why I care so much about black history. A couple years ago my dad showed me this documentary of slavery. And I saw how the white people were treating the black people on it really made me sad. So from that day forward I wanted to show everybody. Look how far we came in like I wanted to show them. Look how amazing black people are. Look who we went through. Because a lot of my friends at school, they don't know anything about black history. They just think, oh, we appeared. Like, nothing happened to us. Like, we didn't fight for our rights or something. I was noticing at my school every year that we didn't do anything for black history month. It was all about Valentine's Day and birthdays. Nobody cared and it really hurt me to see that. So I really wanted to show my school. Hey, look at this. This is the book I showed in my teacher. It's called "Big Dreamers," the Canadian black history activity books for kids. I told her that there's a lot of black people in it. Black history and a lot of stuff. And I told her we could maybe do projects off of it. I'll read you a bit from the book. One of my favorite people in here is Anne Claire Coles. Ground Baker and Claire Coles came to Canada in 1957 and attended McGill University. She was a strong student leader seeking equality. After moving to Toronto, she found in one of the first shelters to support women, children and families. In 1984, she became the first black senator in Canada. As well as the first black female senator in North America. I did the best I could. And when I encountered opposition and adversity, I sought to face it, confront it, and defeat it using reasoned argument and rational debate in the name of righteousness and justice itself. Senator Coles retired in 2018 at the time, was the longest serving member of the Senate. When I showed her the book, she was impressed that I really cared so much and she really loved the book. I'm from there, she wanted to get some for the whole class. So the board got some for the whole class. And yeah, then we started to do a little bit of drawing in there and kind of learned about a lot of more black people. We even did posters and stuff. For the posters, we had some people from the book, but we also had a lot of people outside of the book like Barack Obama. Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, young, old, gay, straight, men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance under the same proud flag to this big, bold country that we love. That's what I see. That's the America I know. It was very diverse in a way like we had more people than who were inside of the books. And I was really happy to see that because she was doing her research herself. And I'm happy that she's trying to find out more herself, do more for the class. And I'm really happy to see that. I started to notice that my peers started to respect me more because they saw where I came from and how much I've been through. Well, not me in general, it's just all black people. My peers started to interact with me more. It's not that like they don't interact me enough. I'm a very outgoing person. It's just like they tried to talk to me way more. They really saw who I am, where I came from, and it made me feel really special. Black history month is important to me because I find black people don't get the recognition that they deserve. We've done so many great things and not a lot of people have noticed them. And we do the same things as white people and white people get praised more than us. I was really happy to see that I made such a big change in my school because it felt like I was getting recognized and it felt like I did something for the community. This year with the George Floyd incident, it made me think about more racism than black history. I found it messed up that that could have happened. There are growing calls for police accountability and charges in Minneapolis. It's been sparked by the death of a black man named George Floyd. After at least eight minutes with the officer's knee on his neck, paramedics arrived. He died later on hospital. Minneapolis today, with its charred remnants of last night's rioting, the fury evident at every corner. It made me scared for my family because it could have been anyone who could imagine it was my dad or my grandfather or my uncles. We need to protect our family and it's really sad that stuff like this is happening. And the George Floyd incident really opened my eyes. I knew there was racism, but to that extent where an officer has his knee on a black man's neck, he didn't even have any weapons on him. And he's just sitting there on top of him with his knee on his neck. It's very heartbreaking and Breonna Taylor and like there's so many other black people who have died from police brutality. George Floyd made me want to make sure everybody learns about black history and racism all year round. This year at school I wanted to do things differently. I think I'm going to contact my principal about it and ask if I can go in front of the whole school during assembly and talk about this stuff. Because a lot of the kids at my school don't understand what's happening outside the school doors. It's important to me because I want my fellow classmates to understand what's happening in the real world. I want my whole school to understand what's happening, like what my people go through. Now that I know that I could have such an impact with my little voice, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be more open to the idea of speaking to my white teachers about it. Mike Drop is produced in Montreal by Carrie Haver and Chiro Cache for CBC podcast and Parac extracts. The associate producer is Ellen Payne Smith. Drop us a line on Instagram at CBC Mike Drop. Or take a moment to review us on Apple Podcast so more people can find out what that's. It really makes a difference. Thanks for sticking with us. Bye for now. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.