Speaking truth to the system is never easy when it’s done from the inside. And if, like Kike Ojo, you insist child protection in Ontario is systemically racist, some colleagues will assume you have completely lost your mind.

“There are people who think I am as rogue as they come, and as dangerous,” Ojo says. “What that’s a testament to is that the people who work in this sector are conservative. They think I’m on fire and just gone mad.”

Ojo’s sector is primarily made up of the Ministry of Children and Youth Services and Ontario’s 47 privately run children’s aid societies. Her work has reminded her there are some things the system doesn’t want to hear.

“Sometimes I’ll say things in a meeting and I will literally feel shaky until the next day,” says Ojo, 40, who spent a decade in charge of “diversity and anti-oppression” at the Peel Children’s Aid Society until a recent secondment. “I feel mind-numbing fear.”

But child protection is in the throes of transformation, much of it coinciding with anongoing Star investigation of an unaccountable system where, in Toronto, 42 per cent of children in care have at least one black parent — more than five times the proportion of children and teens in the city who identify as black in census data.

That revelation prompted the ministry and the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies to finally address years of complaints from black communities. They launched a project to reform practices — from the way society workers investigate parents suspected of abuse or neglect to the kind of parenting provided in foster care and group homes.

In a sign of changing times, Ojo was appointed to head the project, whose goal is to reduce the number of black kids in care. The project includes a steering committee made up of academics and community agencies, such as the Jamaican Canadian Association.

“Ten years ago,” Ojo says, “we would not be having a project that ultimately boils down to a look at how anti-black racism plays out in child welfare. There’s no way.”

Sophia Brown Ramsay, a manager at Peel’s Black Community Action Network, describes Ojo as the perfect choice for the job.

“She is someone who says what she means,” says Brown Ramsay, who sits on the project steering committee. “She is not going to let the powers that be forget that there is a real problem.

“There’s a saying in the black community,” she adds, “that when you make it, always reach back and give a hand up. This is who Kike is.”

Nicole Bonnie, senior manager of community engagement at Peel children’s aid, adds that “Kike is a passionate advocate for marginalized communities,” noting her society was the first in Ontario to establish the kind of anti-oppression job Ojo held.

Ojo, who spent her childhood in Scarborough and her teens in Mississauga, has led 15 community consultation sessions in nine cities as part of the anti-racism project. Her interim report, to be presented to the ministry in April, will include the main themes heard in the sessions.

The struggles of recent immigrants rang out loud and clear. The Canadian government encourages the best and brightest to come, only to have them face accreditation barriers that force professionals to end up driving cabs. Mothers must get jobs, many for the first time, to make ends meet, and family cohesion frays.

Another strong consensus is that black communities are under greater scrutiny from children’s aid societies and the services that report kids to them, including police and schools. And the judgments these services make are steeped in white middle-class assumptions.

“When a kid says to a teacher, ‘My mother’s going to kill me if I bring home this B-minus,’ that should not be taken literally,” Ojo says, noting the type of misunderstanding that leads to complaints from parents with Caribbean backgrounds.

Especially jarring is when a child or teen is taken temporarily into care while children’s aid works to improve family life with services to the parents. The youth is suddenly free to date, stay out unsupervised until curfews as late as 11 p.m., and to wear different clothing; some Muslim girls find they can even remove their hijabs.

“Some kids will say, ‘Yeah, it was cool. I was free,’” says Ojo, whose final report is expected in December.

But parents are in a bind when their child is returned and continues behaviours adopted while in care.

“The parents are like, ‘What do we do?’” Ojo says. “They don’t want to touch the situation because they know the child has access to child welfare and they could lose the child again.” She notes tensions often arise between parents on the course of action to take. “It was painful to hear people talk about it.”

Ojo says children’s aid societies should direct resources “in a more proportional way” toward communities with a high number of children in care.

Another obvious solution, she says, is for societies to set up practices for workers and caregivers that reflect the identity of the children they deal with. That starts with the collection of data on the race and ethnic background of kids in care, something Children and Youth Services Minister Tracy MacCharles has so far balked at directing societies to do.

The myth, fully embraced by social workers, of a colour-blind Canadian society explains part of the system-wide reluctance, Ojo argues. There is also fear the public will interpret the data as the outcome of a racist system. For Ojo, that’s precisely the point that needs to be made.

“We should presume our systems are racist, or have racist outcomes, because that’s the way you begin to mitigate it,” she says.

But Ojo is hopeful.

“I have pushed the envelope a lot and I’m still here,” she says. “I think that’s a testament to the potential for change. So I guess I’m a bit of an optimist.”

An education in activism

Childhood for Kike Ojo seemed a magical experience. She grew up in Scarborough’s Malvern neighbourhood, where multiculturalism was a state of being and her friends its joyful embodiment.

“It felt like a mythical land of Toronto’s best hopes,” Ojo says.

It all changed abruptly in 1987, when 12-year-old Kike moved with her family to Streetsville in Mississauga. Walking home from school one day she saw a boy, maybe 5, on a bike; he shouted the N-word at her as he rode by.

“I thought, ‘What on Earth?’” she says. “I just hadn’t experienced stuff like this before.”

At school, Ojo was the only black kid in her classes.

“I had classmates drawing pictures — caricatures with extreme, supposedly black features; basketball players with afros — and saying, ‘Is this what your dad looks like?’ And I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ It just seemed so bizarre to me.”

As the daughter of a Trinidadian mother, Maureen, and a Nigerian father, Gregory, Ojo also experienced “internalized racism,” which she describes as a byproduct of colonialism. Anti-African sentiment within the Caribbean community was a constant presence, including suggestions that the sometimes lighter colour of blacks from the islands was preferable to any shade of black from Africa.

For a girl with dark skin and an African name, those attitudes made for a sometimes strained sense of identity.

“I had a (Trinidadian) grandmother who I don’t think was ever comfortable, until the day she passed, with the fact that my father was African,” says Ojo. “And when I was exposed to other Caribbean homes through sleepovers or babysitting or whatever, I heard a lot of shadism and saw a lot of it play out.”

Her parents divorced when she was 4. Two years later, her mother married a Trinidadian. But her biological father, a biochemist, continued Ojo’s African education, from anti-apartheid activism to the Kwanzaa celebration of African heritage.

From all sides of the family Ojo got the conviction to stand up for her rights. In junior high, she brought in a recording of a TVO documentary on racism and convinced the teacher to show it in class. She wrote articles about discrimination for the school paper. Her activism was rewarded: she gave the valedictorian speech at graduation.

In high school, she created a regular lunchtime discussion on diversity for students, lobbied the principal on diversity issues and became the first black president of the student council. In 2000, she received the Lincoln M. Alexander Award for youth who show leadership in eliminating racial discrimination in Ontario.

“This is how I come to do what I do now,” Ojo says. “I learned that it’s allowed, it’s safe — you get rewarded for doing this stuff.”

Confronting anti-African sentiment within the Caribbean community was trickier.

In 1998, Ojo entered the Miss Trinidad and Tobago Canada Pageant and used the experience to write a master’s thesis about “the identity making process of young Black women in Canada.”

She noted the other contestants, all from Trinidadian parents, were busy during rehearsals asking each other what racial mix they had in their ancestry. No one asked Ojo, who assumed her darker skin was all the information anyone needed. “I was struggling to feel accepted by the other contestants,” she wrote.

A year later, she graduated with a master’s degree in sociology and equity studies at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

She landed a job as a social studies teacher at a Peel Region high school, and chaired the human rights committee of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. One day, a supply teacher from Nigeria ended any lingering identity conflict by reminding her of the Yoruba meaning of her full given name — Kikelomo.

“It means cherished ones,” says Ojo, who is single. “It is the name you only give to the first-born of the family. It is a big, big deal.”

The memory leaves Ojo fighting back tears and confessing she had at times considered her Nigerian name “a bit of a pain.”

“My dad was so intentional in giving me that name,” she says. “It’s an honour, and I get emotional because it’s almost a sense of shame of how troublesome I found it.”

In 2004, Ojo moved to Atlanta to become that city’s manager of projects for environmental justice, which included work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two years later, the Peel CAS advertised a job for a diversity manager who does “anti-oppression” work. “I thought, that’s the job for me,” Ojo says.

She hopes for the day when black communities in Canada unify under the label African-Canadian. But when she used the term to publicize provincewide community consultations on the high number of black kids in care, she noticed some Caribbean groups stayed away, thinking the sessions were not for them.

“What we had to do a lot of was start by saying, ‘This is who we are talking about: If you look like this …”

Words of inspiration: What’s on Kike Ojo’s bookshelf

• Five books by bell hooks, the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, American scholar and social activist:

“She helped me understand how I was being constructed as a black woman,” Ojo says. “When you look at black women, especially in the media, it’s either you’re hypersexualized or you’re the asexual mammy … bell hooks reminds me that I’m a whole person.”

• Mandela: The Authorized Portrait

“The anti-apartheid movement was part of my coming to awareness of what was happening on a global scale to people who look like me,” Ojo says. “Mandela’s story reminds me there are some things you have to do in the face of major fear. I draw strength from him.”

• The Heart of a Woman, an autobiography by American writer Maya Angelou:

“I read this book several times,” Ojo says. “What I love about it is that it speaks to her humanity. Here’s this woman who was perfect in her image as a freedom fighter, a social activist and in her craft, yet she presented her errors and imperfections. I can relate to that.”

• Half a Yellow Sun, a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that takes place during Nigeria’s civil war:

“The book depicted this place that I’m going to see one day, and I just could not get enough,” Ojo says, referring to the country of her father’s birth. “I just ate it up. It’s very rare to see in print a version of reality that was so resonant for me.”

• Dreams From my Father, by Barack Obama:

“I was so fascinated to see how his East African father and family were so similar to my West African father and family in terms of values and woes and complaints,” Ojo says. “And of course you have the fact that this black man became president; for me it was confirmation that anything is possible.”

• The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, a German-born spiritual teacher living in Vancouver:

“It represents my personal journey around self-actualization and peace and joy,” Ojo says. “Strategizing around racism and oppression every single day for a living is a challenge. You have to dig deep to find energy and strength and peace and joy.”

• The Third Life of Grange Copeland, a novel by Alice Walker:

“This book reflects the beginning of the civil rights era, a time after slavery but before any form of liberation,” Ojo says. “It was gut-wrenching, but I couldn’t put it down. I must have read it five times.”

Source: Toronto Star