Reimagining Black Livability: Exploring Black Aliveness in Toronto’s Racialized Neighborhoods

Black Creek, dubbed as Toronto’s least livable neighbourhood (McKnight, 2014), Flemingdon Park, charged as containing one of Toronto’s most violent high schools (Laczko, 2014), Glenfield-Jane Heights, home to Jane and Finch, Toronto’s most dangerous place to be a kid (Pagliaro, 2013), and Regent Park, notorious for bedbugs and crime that badly needed intervention (Hayes, 2016), have two things apparently in-common – firstly, they are negatively coded in the public imagination as ‘Black neighbourhoods’, and secondly, they are generally discussed as in need of interventionist strategies. Racialized neighbourhood narratives present Black residents as objects to be either feared or targets of rescue. With hopes of strengthening the social, economic, and physical conditions of these neighbourhoods, through narratives of crisis, interventionist action plans and state funding investments developed to target communities labelled “the poorest neighbourhoods” reinscribe territorial stigmatization. Yet, within discussions of Black well-being, scant attention has been given to how Black residents respond to the racialization of their geographies, how racialization impacts Black residents’ sense of self and the strategies for reclaiming Black life in their racialized neighbourhoods. And so, this research project asks, what are the possibilities of Black aliveness in racialized neighbourhoods? What are the strategies, agentic efforts and pathways of resistance or non-resistance adopted by Black residents held intheir neighbourhoods? Drawing on Kevin Quashie’s (2012) notion of “the quiet”, a concept elucidating the constraints of Blackness as a public discourse that privileges defiance as the prevailing framework, offers a different kind of expressiveness—a sensibility of being that is concerned with the inner life of Black existence. As a methodological tool to make legible the material reality of Black life, “in the midst of so much death”, this session seeks to provide a window into the interiority of Black livability that makes possible pathways through racialized neighbourhoods (Sharpe, 2016).