Black History / Black Futures Month Statement
2025 marks 30 years since, following a motion by the Honourable Jean Augustine, the first Black woman elected to Canada’s parliament, the House of Commons recognized Black History Month in Canada. Yet it’s only been 17 years since the Senate, too, recognized Black History Month, making the motion official in Parliament of a month dedicated to the histories, futurisms, teachings, labour, and imaginings of, by, from, for, and to Black people.
We enter 2025 having had to fight battles already won by previous generations: curricula around racial history are being pulled from schools or whitewashed, and Critical Race Theory has been made a dirty word by conservatives; in popular culture, decrying “wokeness” is an easy ticket for those seeking political office; legal and carceral harassment dogs the heels of community leaders like Taylor McNallie and Adora Nwofor in Moh’kinstiss, colonially known as Calgary. (Support #StopTheStack here.)
This Black History/Black Futures Month, Room Magazine, in our capacity as culture-maker and bridge between artists, renews our vow to witness and keep record of the ongoing struggle and successes against anti-Blackness; to set aside tokenism in favour of systemic and grassroots-centred change; to #CiteBlackWomen and encourage others to do the same; and, crucially, to grow with humility and grace.
We urge the brilliant, passionate community that pours into Room to turn its collective attention to justice-seeking actions wherever they may live, whenever possible, in support of the rights, safety, dignity, artistry, happiness, material and mutual aid, and scholarship of Black people—especially trans, disabled, poor, and female Black communities and individuals—across Turtle Island, Sudan, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, and worldwide. While Black History/Black Futures Month is a fine time to honor and redouble our efforts, we will not let it be the only portion of the year allotted to centring racial justice: anti-racism must flower in all seasons.
Black History / Black Futures Month Reading List
As literature is the blueprint for change, we turn to the words of Black scholars, teachers, writers, theorists, and revolutionaries to guide us this month, and every month. In the next few weeks, we’re also re-publishing interviews with and writing by Black organizers and writers from past Room issues so that they may live on our site in perpetuity.
“Love,” by Assata Shakur, from Assata Shakur: An Autobiography
Love is contraband in Hell,
cause love is an acid
that eats away bars.
But you, me, and tomorrow
hold hands and make vows
that struggle will multiply.
The hacksaw has two blades.
The shotgun has two barrels.
We are pregnant with freedom.
We are a conspiracy.
“A Litany for Survival,” by Audre Lorde via Get Lit Anthology
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
Claudia Rankine in “On the Path to Understanding? A Conversation with Claudia Rankine,” via Literary Hub
For me, to reimagine agency might be to enter the liminal space without a destination. It might be to open out lines of inquiry into the moment with a challenge to expectations of repetition. I think the pathways of white power and white patriarchy are so determined that the thought of a woman president, for example is difficult to imagine, even for women. I think sometimes the arts need to enter a place before the society can. The fiction creates the fact, in a sense. Maybe that’s why incumbent presidents have such an advantage. People need to see another way but sometimes you have to make a thing in the dawn, having reimagined in the twilight.
Mouth Full of Blood, by Toni Morrison
Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.
“Where Is the Love?” by June Jordan, edited version of opening address delivered on May 4, 1978, as part of the panel on Black Women Writers and Feminism at the National Black Writers’ Conference held at Howard University, Washington D.C.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black. It means that I must undertake to love myself and respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means that I must seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and contempt that surround and permeate my identity as a woman and as a Black human being in this world. It means that the achievement of self-love and self-respect will require hourly vigilance. It means that I am entering my soul in a struggle that will most certainly transform all the peoples of the earth: the movement into self-love, self-respect and self-determination is the movement now galvanizing the true majority of human beings everywhere.
“Reading Black Resistance through Afrofuturism: Notes on Post-Apocalyptic Blackness and Black Rebel Cyborgs in Canada” in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, special issue “Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures”, Spring, 39, via Robyn Maynard’s website:
While the black experience itself has been described as cyborgian, being positioned outside of humanity allows us the possibility of becoming what Joy James and João Costa Vargas call “black rebel cyborgs,” who demand not only nominal moves toward inclusion but a radical transformation of a world socially, politically, economically and psychologically premised upon dehumanizing those who have been designated black (2012, 201). Proximity to death, and expulsion from modern conceptions of humanity itself, grants a particular knowledge, if we avail ourselves of it—in short, that no small-scale reforms alone will change the very condition of black life, since black subjection is structured into the very basis of society (201).
Excerpted from “Interview with an Empire” from Blank: Essays and Interviews, by M. NourbeSe Philip:
“History was not dead for me, as the postmodernists urge. I wanted a chance to rewrite it. According to my dictates–my memories. You may say this was presumptuous of me, but no more presumptuous than those who had written my history according to their dictates. And if the reader stumbled, stopped and started again, if s/he choked, and gagged on the words, then it was successful.”
What actions will you take in solidarity today?
