In March 2026, Now Magazine reported that a mother, Nicola, discovered her nine-year-old son had found his name on a “kill list” along with names of two other students circulating in his classroom in Tottenham, Ont.
The mother said she has faced backlash from her community after exposing the incident, and that she filed a human rights complaint after criticizing the school’s 10-day suspension of the student who wrote the list.
This news is harrowing in light of the recent school shootings we are seeing in Canada.
There is a longstanding body of research documenting the persistence of anti-Black racism targeting our children, as well as mounds of disturbing anecdotal incidents Black mothers must carry.
Carrying this weight exacts a cumulative toll, evident in the exhausting labour of repeatedly mobilizing time, energy and emotional reserves to advocate for our children.
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9 ways racism impacts maternal health
Reading the archive as a Black mother
I wrote my doctoral exams on Black motherhood in the 19th century where questions animating my research — at the intersection of Black Canadian history and Black feminist theory — were entangled with my own experiences of early parenthood. As an elementary school teacher and mother of similarly aged children, my awareness of how easily Black motherhood could be interrupted became acute.
The historical records I was exporing are full of unspeakable violence. Yet through it all, Black women do whatever is needed to ensure their children and their community thrive. Some of these women that I have met in the archives refuse to succumb to the violence of these systems and some, remarkably, prevail.
I write toward making legible not just the vulnerabilities Black mothers carry, but also the tradition of refusal and “livingness” we Black mothers inherit and still practise.
Not isolated incidents
Saidiya Hartman, English and comparative literature professor at Columbia University and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, coined the “afterlife of slavery” to describe how racial arrangements forged under enslavement continue to structure life.
This framework helps me understand anti-Black racism in schools as part of a longer history in which Black children are marked as suspects even as they enter the school system. They are denied the innocence often assumed of white children.
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Black History: How racism in Ontario schools today is connected to a history of segregation
In the Wake by Christina Sharpe, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, adds another layer by drawing on the multiple meanings of “wake” — as the trail left behind a ship, and the practice of remaining awake, alert and watchful, to examine what it means to live inside that ongoing history.
While Hartman helps us see the structure, Sharpe helps us feel what that structure demands in daily life. I extend Sharpe’s concept to Black mothers specifically, who perform a kind of radical care that ensures their children flourish even within “the wake” of slavery and anti-Black racism.
(Guallendra/Wikimedia)
Long historical precedent
There is a long historical precedent to this. We know of the horrific decision that American mother Mamie Till-Mobley had to make in 1955 when, in the midst of unbearable grief following her son Emmett Till’s murder, she chose to publicly exhibit her son’s mutilated corpse so the world could see what racism does.
Or Margaret Garner, who in 1856 killed her own child while facing recapture into slavery in Kentucky because she believed death was preferable to enslavement.
Closer to home, in modern-day Québec, 18-year-old Bett escaped captivity in 1787 while heavily pregnant to protect her unborn child from the brutality of slavery, the only documented female to have attempted a winter escape. She was tried for the murder of her child, who did not survive the attempted escape.
Read more:
Ancestry ad gets it wrong: Canada was never slave-free
More recently, there are countless stories and disturbing allegations of anti-Black racism in Ontario school communities.
In 2016, a school in Peel called the police on a six-year-old girl. Police handcuffed her wrists and ankles, placed her face on the ground with her hands behind her back for 28 minutes.
The girl’s mother took the case to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, which ruled the officers used “racially discriminatory” force against the girl. After years of difficult litigation, the family was awarded $35,000 in damages.
In 2021, a four-year-old was taken away by police from a Waterloo school ostensibly for rambunctious behaviour.
The child’s mother filed a civil lawsuit against the board alleging staff and administrators failed to properly care for her son and discriminated against him.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
The pattern is repeated where incidents occur, and when Black mothers push back, the harm is either minimized or accountability is deferred or both. The result? The burden shifts onto Black mothers to keep pushing back. Often, they remove their children from harm — as if their children caused the harm in the first place.
These incidents circulate with devastating familiarity.
Self-care as survival
All parents oscillate between the ecstasy of bringing children into the world and worrying about their well-being. For us Black women, that worry includes the weight of knowing our children could be killed, criminalized or taken from us for reasons that are mundane or entirely unjustifiable.
Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian poet who originally theorized the term “self-care” to mean survival for those carrying the crushing weight of oppressive systems, named differences in white and Black mothers’ realities:
“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street …”
I am also reminded of literary scholar Hortense Spillers, who in her analysis of Black womanhood, argued that the legacies of slavery meant Black women could never fully occupy the socially protected role of motherhood, because they themselves were treated as property, and so were their children.
Spillers describes Black life as existing in an “enforced state of breach,” where Black motherhood “can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment.”
Black mothering as future making
Ontario’s Dreams Delayed report makes it clear that anti-Black racism in Ontario’s schools is not about isolated incidents but about a system that consistently fails to respond when Black students are harmed. The report laid out 29 concrete calls to action.
Meanwhile, the Ontario government has moved forward Bill 33, legislation that expands police presence in schools and funnels resources toward the very approach the report identified as part of the problem.
What kind of mothering is this, that Black mothers navigate motherhood under the constant possibility of interruption, violence, surveillance or loss? That we always carry the knowledge that it could all end at any moment for unjustifiable reasons. And yet we insist, with grit and love, on ensuring our children reach the futures they deserve.
