So when I moved to Vancouver from the New York area, the thing that struck me was – where are all the black people (same thought when we moved to Mountain View, CA by the way)? You go to Seattle and you see black people, but for some reason the black population here is super small. It’s not like it’s lily white here either. There are loads of other ethnicities – Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian. And pretty much everyone gets along really well and everyone celebrates each others’ holidays – as long as it involves food. So it might be a surprise to some that Vancouver does have a black history and should talk more about it.
Brendon’s reading Vancouver Special by Charles Demers and reading out the interesting and funny bits to me as he gets to them. (It makes for a lot of interruption because there’s so much good stuff in it.) According to Charles, there’s a hidden black history in Vancouver and no real reason why it’s not talked about. Did you know that Joe Fortes was a black Barbadan? Or that Jimmy Hendricks’ family lived in the West End? It makes me wonder just how much more of Vancouver’s black history is hidden. Do they talk about it each February in school and I don’t know about it since I didn’t go to school here? (February is Black History Month in the U.S. case you didn’t know.)
I have some reading to do…
