The combination of growing Black studies programs and support systems reflect a long-term effort to bring Black histories, experiences and knowledge to campus
Mitchell Fox | Dec. 9, 2025
Faith Ogunkoya hasn’t seen many students or professors who look like her during her education.
In her Master’s in Education program at Brock University, she recalls maybe two or three Black classmates and one Black professor. Three semesters into her Doctorate in Education at Western University, she has not been taught by a Black professor.
For Ogunkoya and others in Black education, this reflects a Canadian education system that has not valued Black perspectives. Not only are Black students and professors underrepresented within university classrooms, but curriculum does not tend to represent their histories, cultures, presents and futures.
“It’s supposed to be tossed aside and forgotten, and that’s really damaging,” she said. “Then most people struggle to do their best in those spaces.”
Nevertheless, she sees a path forward. Ogunkoya is the manager of the Black Student Success Centre at McMaster University, where she organizes wellness, mentorship and career programming for students of Black and African descent. With growing curriculums and support services, she says universities are taking meaningful steps toward decolonizing the education system, though there is a long way to go.
“We are changing and disrupting because that is what’s going to improve all of the challenges that Black students have been talking about forever,” she said.
Three years after the Scarborough Charter was co-signed by universities across Canada, new and expanding Black Studies programs are one piece in the puzzle of building meaningful Black education in Ontario. For Black educators, enabling Black students to flourish requires a combination of efforts—from high school to post-secondary, they need to see themselves not only in lecture materials, but within classrooms and campuses.
“Curriculum alone won’t be able to do it,” Ogunkoya said. “[With] Black students building these communities and socializing, being seen and supported in their education within the curriculum, but throughout the institution as well within these support mechanisms, I think we’re heading in such a powerful direction.”
Western University is the latest Ontario University to announce an advancement in Black Studies course material, with a new major in Black Studies available as of September. The school previously offered only a minor.
Western’s progress has been a long time coming. In 2019, a professor used a racial slur in an English class, earning response from students and resulting in an apology. In 2020, a report by the university’s Anti-Racism Working Group detailed a “deeply entrenched anti-Black legacy that remains pervasive.” The working group also found Western to be behind other Canadian schools in anti-racism initiatives and laid out 23 recommendations, including creating more courses focused on Black studies and other racialized groups.
In 2022, another professor used a racial slur during a law lecture.
Professor Erica Lawson, who teaches the Introduction to Black Studies course at Western and was involved in creating the major, said the 2019 incident combined with the murder of George Floyd by police led to “soul searching” in the institution. She said the Black Studies minor emerged around the same time, but emphasizes the program is not meaningful only as a response to anti-Black racism but has its own value.
In her classes, Lawson focuses on drawing on the people and histories that connect to modern experiences.
“The courses that we teach in Black studies are not abstract. They are connected to real lives and real histories,” she said. “It’s about connecting the courses to community, and connecting theory and praxis, showing that theory is something living and tangible.”
For Lawson, it is important to emphasize that Black Studies are for everyone, as all histories and experiences are connected. For example, she says, the Haitian Revolution is not taught equally to the French Revolution or the American Revolution but is part of the same picture.
“I think that Black people need to say that ‘We’re here, and we’ve made enormous contributions to human life across the globe,’” she added.
Her hope, then, is for expanding Black studies to transcend programs or courses and be integrated into any course, whether in sociology, literature, economics or beyond.
“I think that it should intervene in all disciplines and all of the ways that we look at the world,” she said.
Western’s program is one of many across the country. In 2016, Dalhousie University kickstarted its Black and African Diaspora Studies program, which is now available as a major, honours degree or minor. York University’s Black Canadian Studies certificate entered the fold in 2018, while Queen’s University, Concordia University and Toronto Metropolitan University launched Black studies programs in 2021 and 2022. The University of Toronto, Carleton University and Brock University are among others with programs in African Studies.
Lawson said universities that see themselves as forward-looking need to consider Black studies, as well as related programs such as Indigenous studies or queer studies, as crucial to understanding the lives of people around them.
“If we think about learning as an inter-group activity or inter-group experience, we have to know and appreciate each other’s history and contemporary experiences,” she said.
Matching curriculum with support systems
McMaster’s Black Student Success Centre opened its doors in 2022. Ogunkoya said they saw instant demand for their programming, with enrolments filling up from day one.
During the 2024-25 school year, they saw 4,210 appointment attendees, 7,400 registrants for events and workshops and 3,150 visits to their lounge. They also had about 90 representatives out during McMaster’s Welcome Week.
Ogunkoya said students who have accessed the BSSC have described feeling less socially isolated.
“You might be the only one in your program, or there are just a handful of you, but if you’re in the centre, you could literally walk in and see 70 students, or 100 students during an event. That visibility has been pretty powerful,” she said.
McMaster’s centre was the first of its kind in Ontario, though they modelled after Dalhousie’s Black Student Advising Centre. Since then, other schools have followed suit with their own spaces, including both Brock and TMU in 2023.
Brock and McMaster specifically cited their lounge as being rooted in the Scarborough Charter, a commitment to addressing anti-Black racism and promoting inclusion in Canadian higher education co-signed in 2021. The Charter had been signed by 59 post-secondary institutions across the country as of 2024.
The first action goal in the Charter states that Canadian universities and colleges “commit to promoting intersectional Black flourishing.” To Lawson, the expansion of Black Studies programs fits “very well” within the Charter’s intentions—which include realizing human potential through the removal of barriers, recognition of identities and advancing the dissemination of knowledge.
Western and McMaster are both signatories of the Charter. Lawson said Western has made progress toward its pledge.
“They’ve kind of committed themselves or said that ‘We’re ready to do this and to make this happen.’ And to some degree, they have,” she said.
For Lawson, the Charter is about a vision for Black life in Canadian institutions, comprised of bringing in more Black students and Black knowledge and history.
“It is really about not just building courses, but changing the institutions in many different kinds of ways and from many different directions,” she summarized.
That is where Ogunkoya sees McMaster as fulfilling their commitment so far too. She says there has been “tremendous progress” over just a few years since former McMaster student-athlete Fabion Foote spoke out about his experience with systemic racism at the university in 2020.
“We’ve had to go from there being no Black student success centre or Black student success strategy at McMaster to where we are now,” she said.
A stepping stone beyond universities
The need and desire for Black representation and Black studies curriculum also goes beyond higher education to the public school system.
Deborah Buchanan-Walford, a high school English teacher and the president of the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators (ONABSE), says there is also a gap to be filled in acknowledging how anti-Black racism has shaped Canada, at all levels.
“Within the K-12 system, we’re still just on the cusp of that conversation. We’re still only talking about Viola Desmond and the fact that we have a Black History Month, and that’s it,” she said. “Contributions and advancements that were brought to Canada by Black people, by Black Canadians, are also not taught about in science, in art, in all disciplines.”
In ONABSE’s November 2024 report on anti-Black racism in Ontario school boards, they found school boards lacked specific policies addressing anti-Black racism and there was no unifying vision for addressing Black representation in classrooms or curriculum.
A key factor in Buchanan-Walford’s mind is a lack of Black teachers and administrators. The Ontario government enacted a policy in October 2020 to ensure “teacher hiring in Ontario will be dictated by merit, diversity, and the unique needs of schools and communities,” but she said school boards do not have adapted hiring policies to enhance diversity.
As far as expanding Black Studies programs, Buchanan-Walford sees increasing Black knowledge and supports for Black students in universities as stepping stones. After all, post-secondary schools are often where Black teachers learn to teach.
“It’s definitely a part of the solution, to incorporate it in higher-ed and to have more teachers actually trained to do this before they get into the classroom,” she said.
Buchanan-Walford says post-secondary is the natural place for Black studies to grow as it leads to more acceptance of the content, while being the level with the best resources for making the learning meaningful.
“It gives [Black studies] more access to people that would not have had it in other periods of their educational journey, in a place where it is more expected for you to challenge topics, to engage in a more nuanced discussion than you’d be able to in elementary or high school,” she said.
She also sees potential for Black studies at the post-secondary level to trickle its way down to the K-12 level.
“If you have this in universities, you’re going to have to have prerequisite courses and knowledge coming from secondary education to feed into that,” she said.
The McMaster BSSC also supports high school students with tutoring, mentorship and Black student outreach, which Ogunkoya refers to as part of building a pipeline. With Black students making up just six per cent of Canadian university students in 2022-23, she said teachers applying decolonial frameworks at K-12 could lead to more students thriving.
“If you fix that pipeline, you could argue they should get into university, and then you’ll increase the number here who possibly then become teachers—they go back into that system and fix the pipeline—or become professors and we’d have more Black faculty at the university level,” she said.
Just the beginning
Lawson said she is mindful that universities’ priorities change and expanding Black studies programming could fall by the wayside. With STEM becoming a priority and governments across the continent banning topics like Critical Race Theory in schools, drawing students to the courses and emphasizing their significance beyond the classroom is key.
“There’s always this fight to keep these courses on the radar and to insist that they are important, especially because we’re being told more and more that the arts and humanities or certain kinds of courses don’t matter anymore,” she said.
Lawson said it is important to recognize no curriculum is apolitical, as they are built on perspectives and leave others out. Leaving race out, and thus leaving Black Studies out, is not an option for her as it helps create a national understanding of locatedness.
“It can’t be just European history and perspectives that shows up in the classroom. It just can’t be. The world is far more complicated than that. People are more complicated than that,” she said. “We have to talk about people’s lives and how they’re interconnected. That’s not possible unless you’re talking about Black life in all of its complexities.”
So, she hopes Western’s early commitment to Black Studies major is “just a start.”
“I hope that the program continues and grows long after I’ve left Western. That, to me, would be amazing,” she said.
Buchanan-Walford said every university should have mandatory foundational courses that address how race affects everyone, beginning with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, but also the construct of whiteness.
For her, the growth of Black Studies programs and Black supports one step on a path toward decolonization. But there is a long way to go.
“It’s a start, and hopefully more institutions follow suit and we can get to a point where we don’t have to talk about this in this novel way anymore, it’s just standard. And all kids in the country, in the province, just know what it means to be anti-racist,” she said.
Ultimately for Ogunkoya, the goal is expansion—she wonders what an African research and knowledge institute might look like.
“What does it look like for McMaster or other institutions to have a whole department that centres Black studies, that centres African knowledge and African histories? I think those are the big, bold ideas that people are thinking about,” she said.
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