87. Races: the Trials & Triumphs of Canada's Fastest Family by Valerie Jerome

Harry Jerome was Canada's fastest man and an early international sports celebrity for Canada.  There is a statue of him in Stanley Park, though I fear that many younger people do not know about him and his contributions.  I have a tangential connection to the family and it was my aunt who is good friends with Valerie who passed me on this book.  It's really more of a family history.  Though the narrative is anchored around Harry Jerome's life and sporting career, you can't understand him without understanding his family and the world they grew up in.  Even without the focus on a famous person, the book is a fascinating and often infuriating personal history of what it was like to grow up black in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century.

Canada is a great country in many ways, but I am not one of those who is under the illusion we are somehow morally superior to the United States when it comes to social issues.  I grew up in a small town in Vancouver Island and the racism there was blatant.  It was particularly directed against the First Nations but also Indian, Chines and Vietnamese immigrants.  There would have been a lot more racism against Black people but there simply weren't any.  Still, reading this book was pretty painful. The shit was way worse if you actually were black.  So I wasn't surprised by any of it, but it hurts nonetheless to read about the hateful behaviour of so many people in Canada towards the Jerome family.  It goes from the bottom with school kids throwing rocks at them on their first day in North Vancouver to the top, with national sports journalists constantly attacking Harry Jerome for his supposed arrogance and aloofness, calling him a quitter when he didn't finish a race because he snapped his hamstring.

It's really the sports journalists that anger me the most.  This shit still goes on today, it's just much much subtler because there are now so many Black athletes and their power has grown.  But the double standard is still there.  It's especially ire-inducing in Canada when we have so few good athletes that stand out on the world stage and when one does, who really is a testament to Canada's freedom (though much of Jerome's success was also done despite a lot of racist blockages put in his way), the press just tear him down.  In this case, it was primarily fueled by classic racism but also exacerbated by Canada's pathetic self-loathing and petty envy where we have no pride and can't value our own.  

I'm ranting. The book itself is written in a very straightforward manner.  The racism that they suffered externally was even worse inside the family, as their mother who passed for white (or tried) was extremely abusive. I wish there had been more analysis of her character but possibly those wounds were already difficult for the author to want to dig any deeper.  She not only abused them physically but seemed to hate and resent any success they had.  The father was very loving but worked as a porter (also super racist as these were the few jobs that black men could have in Canada and he was constantly getting punished for speaking out against injustice on the job) so was away for weeks at a time.  Harry's response to the racism and abuse in and out of his house was to close himself down, turn the other cheek and just work.  I think this is part of the reason we don't ever get a rich picture of his personality; much of it was suppressed out of self-protection.

The story itself is so interesting and their challenges so rough that I am glad I read the book and would hope it gets read by many younger Canadians.  I was left wanting a bit more depth as to who the family members were as people to be around, but the story stands up on its own and gives you enough to understand why those things might be hard to dig into.  Even though Canada has grown a lot, we still have a lot of work to do and the backbone of this country is still run by east coast white male elites.  It trickles down to the culture and allows us to keep being blind and stubborn.