Elton Brown: 0:01

Welcome to Speak Up International with Rita Burke and Elton Brown.

Rita Burke: 0:07

Now, almost everyone that we have spoken with on Speak Up International have mentioned this guest name. As a matter of fact, they have all suggested that we invite you to chat with us on Speak Up International. I know for a fact that those people recognize, much like I do, the value that you have added and continue to add to our community and, ultimately, to the Canada and the world. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Dr Akua Benjamin. Dr Akua Benjamin is definitely a community builder and a long time activist. She was an educator and administrator at the Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr Benjamin has also been a social worker her whole life, in both formal and informal capacities. Dr Benjamin, it is certainly a pleasure to have you on Speak Up International.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 1:18

I thank you very much, first of all, for the work, rita and Elton, that you're doing in the community, because there are not many people who are doing this work, who are capturing the struggles, the history, the background and what.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 1:37

As we all know, what tends to happen there is sometimes, when we do this work, it's because something has happened.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 1:45

They normally and it's not a good thing that has happened like there is a shooting, there is something terrible that has happened, and then we get highlighted on in that context as a black community, and then reporters come in, we have people who want to take our history, we're engaged with government, so the profile gets raised and then there is a response, usually by the powers that be, and then everything gets silent again.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 2:16

A lot of people are still doing the work, but it seems as though the work has died. So the work that you both have undertaken to arrest that kind of process is really important to capture, not just from me but from others who've been engaged in the work of struggling against racism, inequities, discrimination, and that's a history that didn't begin recently, that from the time I always say from the time the slaves landed on the shores of North America, they have been resisted resistance. But capturing some of that from people like me I think should be and I know you will put it in that context of the continuation of the voices of resistance or the work of resistance that you are both undertaking.

Elton Brown: 3:10

We are so excited to have you here with us and a pleasure meeting you, and we want to have a conversation with you, dr Benjamin, about your career views on social work and your role as a leader in this field. What inspired you to pursue a career in social work and how did your interest in community development and human rights play a role?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 3:37

Okay, let me. I want you, when I get to verbose, to really cut me off or to tell me that's enough. Tell me, because once you asked me that question about what drew you into social work, for instance, I go right back to my history. I go back to my grandparents, back to. I go back to particularly my mother and my parents came. Both of them came from Little Island Poland, tiga, in the Caribbean, and they're coming out of colonialism and all of that.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 4:12

My grandfather used to burn coals for a living and my mother used to have to take the bundle of coals hot coals and they wrapped in what we call then a crocus bag a burlap bag, you would say and she'd had to walk from four miles from where they lived to the market for them to sell.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 4:32

And one of the days that she was walking with this bag of coals, the coals were still lit and so the bag burst into flames. On her head, carrying this whole bag of coals, people behind her started to yell Teres, her name was Teresa, teres, they call it Teres, your head is on fire. She takes this bag of coal and she throws it into a cane field, goes the story. And the cane field is dry. It lights up and the cane is owned by some colonial somebody, some white colonial man, and it burns the man's fields down and he comes to my grandfather, of course, for compensation for his field. Well, I don't know that part of the story, what he actually did, but the name of my mother and I like to draw attention. They call her Teres. Her name was Teresa Adora Teresa, but they call her Teres and from then on they called her Teres burned down, because she burned down this master's cane field.

Rita Burke: 5:42

So her story is etched in the history of your country.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 5:48

And I like to begin when people ask me the question where did you get social work? How did you come? In that colonial period? Not only in terms of the burning is symbolic, but what is important in that period and throughout my life growing up is that there's always a community of people behind you shouting out behind you your head is on fire, our head is on fire Right.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 6:17

And then the act of throwing that bundle into the cane field is an act for me of not just the cane field, but I take it this is an act of resistance against her having to carry this bundle of cane, of course, to the market and behind her, if you could picture this, I picture this all the time the people who are saying carried it and then it comes out of that. They name her Teres, teresa, teresa moves from Teresa to Teres, teres, bundled. I like to stop when you ask me where did I cut my social work? I grew up with this woman, my mother, a resistance from small, from young, and also teaching us the importance of if you see something, your head is a light on fire. You know, you throw it off. You throw it off, you don't keep it, you don't keep that fire burning on your head. You throw it off and there are people behind you who are going to be supportive about you.

Rita Burke: 7:19

Okay, and throwing that burning pile off of your head in itself is resistance. That's right, that's right. And some degree on Speak Up International. We seek to inspire, to inform, to educate but, believe it or not, it's resistance. We're telling our stories we're telling how we build our community. And that takes me now to your involvement in our community. Talk to us about your involvement in community development generally.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 7:53

Okay. So if I would again, if I were to just locate it in, say, in Toronto, I would say that community development begins as I come to Toronto. I came here in 1969, not aware of the history of blacks in Canada or much about the blacks in the United States, but very quickly that you came here, the impact of racism, in terms of access to housing, particularly, or jobs, hits you across your pay and you're at sea, not knowing what is this. Why can't I get like, why can't I do as other people? I go looking for a house, an apartment, and the person says, yes, come, I have a room. And when you get to the door you see the people, somebody looks through and then they never open the door and you can't make sense of why this is happening. Why, what is this? And then you join with other black people who have been there before, particularly African Canadians, who belong to the UNIA at the time, united Negro Improvement Association. I think that's the first organization I joined and you've had again women like my mother who are the backbone of this organization, the men in the forefront, and they now begin the education. Oh, this is what this means. You didn't get that apartment, you didn't get that particular thing. They have a longer history of living in Canada and understand this issue called racism. Right, I come. Yes, not that it didn't exist in my country, but the ways existing there is very different from the blatant interface racism that you get.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 9:31

You go looking for an apartment and peep through the hole and you don't get it. You want to move up to in the job that you're doing. I got a job within it and I realize immediately that any promotion here I'm there they're just about four black women in a seal and we can't get to move up. And at the time you are understanding this but you're not verbose enough or bold enough to speak out against it. And the way that you begin I begin to take this on is then I got to get a higher education. I got to go back to school. So I start going to York University. I first went to George Brown College and I did a two-year course in drug addiction counseling and through that, from that and again I give credence to one of the instructors there, a guy by the name of Bill Vine, who said to me you should go to university. He said you should go and so off I went. I know.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 10:30

I then, side by side with going to university, I meet now a whole group of people from all over black people from Africa, from the Caribbean, different countries, from the US.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 10:44

We have a black students organization and the consciousness then begins to this is what it is. You don't understand racism, you don't know what this is, and we learn about three, have leaders who begin to really teach us. And this is happening right in the midst of what we call that colonial struggle, anti-colonial struggle in the Caribbean and in Africa in particular. So we are joined to a pan-Africanist movement. If you will, from Toronto we are now with an organization tied to an organization in the United States, the African Liberation Support Committee, if you never heard of it and that was a movement where you had Amiri Baraka, for instance is a leader, was a leader in that. We're all part of that, supporting the struggles against colonialism in Africa and particularly the anti-apartheid struggle. So, from Toronto, we have a movement here. We're linked to the Caribbean and we're linked to the United States and we have a pan-Africanist view of change.

Elton Brown: 11:56

Networking is a powerful thing. It creates movements. I want to go back to something that your friend said to you, which was education, and I want you to describe some of the courses that you taught at Ryerson University and why were these courses so important to social work education.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 12:23

Yeah, now remember that this is a profession, this is social work is a North American profession, not that it doesn't exist all over the world, it does. But here the curriculum that we have is grounded in social work theories, social work practices, and this is very much coming out of colonialism in, say, coming from England, coming from the United States, coming from here. And so this is the core of the curriculum is to teach the helping profession, how to help individuals, groups, families that's social work and how, by virtue of that help, then you expand it to changing structures and so on in the society. So when I started to do social work or teach social work, it is from those particular texts. The curriculum is passed by the Canadian Associations of Schools and Social Work and it also is in line with the International Associations of Schools and Social Work.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 13:25

Now what is interesting about these four organizations is if trying to insert, for instance, an anti-racism focus to the curriculum took a lot of struggle, took a lot of struggle not begun by me but began by other black individuals.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 13:45

And I wish I could remember the woman who was again from the United States, who was she taught at McGill and she was always trying to fight to make the curriculum broaden its scope from a Eurocentric or Canadian or American focus to be embracing of other countries. And to some extent she won at a cost to herself, because today when I asked about her, nobody seems to know where she's gone to. But, like that, in every area that I have been, whether it is in the social work field or whether it is working in government doing clerical work, whether it is trying to make changes in the school system broadly for black students, everything for us, always for me, has been a struggle. It's never just an easy kind of, and it could be easy if you just accept, if you accept the curriculum, if you accept the process, if you can accept the outcome, then what we're doing is really accepting that we are marginal.

Rita Burke: 14:53

Accepting status quo. We are not a people.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 14:56

So the struggle has been, in any institution that we are interacting with, this struggle for change, this struggle to say why do we want this change? Because we are excluded. And why are we excluded? If not, it's because we do not fit the stereotype, we do not fit the norm. We fit a stereotype but we don't normally fit the norm. So there, any institution for me, working in government, in the school system, teaching and the school system, let me tell you, is a hard one to deal with because I'm a single parent and having to deal with the school system with my son was an uphill kind of client. Quite a challenge, yes, and it's not just me. So we have a number of parent organization and they're like OPPC organizational parents of black children, led by Started by Karen Braytree.

Rita Burke: 15:50

Started by Karen Braytree.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 15:52

The organizations in. They're the backbone, they have to be the backbone of any kind of institutional change that you want in a society, that where race is so indelible, it's so deep, and if you walk in, I walk in and I look around and I say, and after a while we are not represented, something is a miss, something is a miss.

Rita Burke: 16:14

Yes, something is a miss. Dr Benjamin, you've alluded to anti-racist approach in education in the curriculum. Now, people are beginning now to become familiar with the concept of equity and anti-oppression. What was the climate like when you started this kind of work and let me be correct here.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 16:40

There hasn't been a time in the history of blacks in this country, at no time, from the time that they landed here, from the time that they came through the underground railroad, from the time that they came from, there has not been a time. Two institutions that we pay attention to One is education, the other one is religion. They have always had their own churches. They have always specified in, particularly in those churches, a way of bringing community and building community. But the other thing that I noticed too there has been not a time in any community here where a focus has not been on our children and the educational systems that really channel our children, in particular wittingly or unwittingly channeling our children, particularly in the. The jails are full. For instance, we had a program that would go to West Detention Center, east Detention Center, and you go and it's the young men that you see in large numbers. I tell the story about an older Jamaican man who ran a program here. Daddy Lu ran a program here for young men off the streets and they would come and we would teach reading and all of those basic kinds of skills, help them to get a job. And then one year I noticed that wait a minute, the numbers have fallen off significantly and they're not attending. And then we had a program out in one of the detention centers in Ontario and we would go, the Dudley Laws headed up that program and we would go to do a visitation program at the Decentral Center and, lo and behold, when I went to that I was amazed the majority of young black males that are in the detention centers and that's been a pattern up to today, right? So when we talk about looking at the issue of race, for me it's not simply what a co-avagement focus on or did or what have you, because my point is there has not been a time in this country when you cannot find a black organization talking about these issues education in particularly, the incarceration, the marginalization, the lack of access sometimes to quality housing. Now for young, the large numbers of blacks that we see as homeless people in this country. You don't have to just talk to me, just scan and you will find that there is an organization trying to make change and that's the thing that you know.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 19:17

Like I talk about, conceptually, resistances in our DNA, I go to that point. I say biologically I can't prove it, but biologically I argue that resistance is. You would not be. And I like to tell my students, whether they're white or black, when your parents, your grandparents landed here in Canada, remember a lot whites came here.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 19:41

This is Aboriginal territory that we are. When they came here, how did they survive? And a lot of times how they survived was because of resistance to the call to what happened. But they were assisted in large measure by Aboriginal communities. They were assisted In the black community in Toronto. We have also worked with Aboriginal communities Flynn Harper, one of the leaders in the Aboriginal community, to join with us in marches and we would join with them. Wondering spirit survival school. We were there in terms of so that the struggle that we see for equity, equality, change, against racism. We've always extended it, not simply from an anti-black racism perspective, but looking generally at how this issue, this ideology, these practices, how they include some and they marginalize others and the others. Quote unquote the black community, in its organizing efforts, has always reached out to those that we see as well as their part and parcel of our struggle.

Elton Brown: 20:50

We talked about the power of networking. Then you have social work, which adds to that power. How do you see those two pieces working together in order to alleviate some of the challenges, etches and concerns that you have described?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 21:10

Now I also. You hear me talk about resistance and I say it's in our DNA. I say every human being has that and that you have to resist the conditions of oppression or climatic conditions or what. But you have that in you, it's how you use it right. But the other thing, the other concept that I use I want people to understand, is the dialectics. It comes from an old Marxist understanding and what it means is the unity and struggle of opposites, the unity and struggle of opposites. So at one point that dialectic says we conform, we build laws, we support, and the other side of that dialectic is the struggle. And you can't do one without the other. At some point you cannot just say I will follow the laws, I will follow the rules, you have to do that. But on the other side, those laws and rules and what have you need changing in an equitable, balanced way so that everybody moves forward, not some move forward and some move backward, and some fill the jails and some fill the universities. No, we're seeing too much of that now. We're seeing too much marginalization of black youth, particularly young black male, in those prisons. It's not balanced right.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 22:28

So I teach in social work. I didn't. This is an old Marxist concept that I learned from some of the Marxists who were ahead of me. One of them, I understand, has just passed. He taught me a particular John Smalls, john Saul, who supported the struggles in Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and those places and brought that into the classroom so that my understanding of struggle was not simply what was happening here in Toronto or in Canada or in the States, but to look at it in a dialectical way, to see how these struggles, how they built and how they were in the times. John Saul, take my head off them. I understand he just passed. I wanna pay tribute to him because he was majoring in my understanding. The community members here, the black community members I really wanna pay attention to them as well, pay tribute because they taught me what it meant to live in Canada. Black women, mrs Sears, mrs Bratswede, all of those women who have since long gone. They taught me that, yes, you have to work, you have to do, but there's a struggle that you have to engage in all the time and that's something I wanna pass on.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 23:46

In my teachings and in my writings I write about anti-black racism. Anti-black racism is what I didn't make up that there was a writer in the States who I think also wrote on this, used the concept. So I draw from those, but I wrote it in my thesis anti-black racism and I'm really happy to hear when people say that they use that concept because they're bringing that whole struggle, that history, that resistance right in the forefront of whatever it is that they're doing. That's what anti-black racism should mean that there is a resistance. There is a resistance. Yes, we look for the resilience, but what you shouldn't know is that we do not move forward in no epoch, in no era without resistance, and that you can't be quiet, you can't afford to, just not say anything, as you were mentioning the community leaders whose shoulders we are standing on.

Rita Burke: 24:50

I was thinking of the statement or the story you told about your mother, and you said there's always a community of people shouting that your head is on fire, and I will never forget that. That will be indelibly marked in my mind Now. You were the director of the School of Social Work at the post-secondary institution. What was that experience like for you?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 25:18

Like again, I take a dialectical approach to talking about this, right, Because when the faculty said to me, no-transcript, you should be our next director. I said no, I declined, I wanna do this. And then again I go back to. I dreamt and I don't normally dream that I was walking over a bridge. I'll tell you the story, because I'm walking over a bridge and when I got to the middle of the bridge there was water below me and somebody said to me you gotta jump, you gotta take the plunge. And I said I can't swim, you know. And they said it's okay, I will be with you. And I dove into the water and I started swimming. And who do you think was next to me swimming? Your mother, my mother, who was swimming next to me. And when we reached a particular point, she said there was a row of lights ahead, says look, there are lights up ahead.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 26:12

I don't dream a lot and I don't dream often, but that one. I woke up the next day and I said if I didn't get a message before, let me tell you. I got a clear one. I call my sister, who is a pastor, minister, and she teaches theology in the States at a university. And I said Jen, guess what I dreamt? She said you got a message, you gotta take the plunge and the lights are ahead of you. And we call my mother, mommy, and she says mommy is right there with you going. She says you gotta take the plunge.

Rita Burke: 26:45

You were braveer than me because I was offered a similar position as nursing in. Peebur and I was too scared to take it on. I thought they're not gonna support me in that role and I ran to Toronto and I had let me tell you, I had faculty who supported me, who urged me on.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 27:03

I'll never forget them because without them it would have made my life much more difficult than it was. I did have opposition, and everybody gets that, but I had a wonderful set of people who won, faculty member from India in particular. She said I'm gonna be your assistant, I'll come, she took on the role, took on that role and the previous director also stood with me. So I had support. I had opposition, as everybody would, but I think I came into the school as a director with a tremendous amount of support. The person who brought me into social work, moving me from I used to work at the hospital and he said to me after I would take the students on and I would teach students in the hospital about social work. He said to me why don't you teach? Why don't you come and teach? And I said, no, I don't wanna teach.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 27:59

I was resistant and again, every time that I'm resistant to something, I don't like to dream. But up comes somebody in my dream to tell me yeah, you need to do this. And I could count on one hand maybe the number of times, because I hate to dream, because when you dream you're not sleep. They say you remember your dream. You dream every night, but if you remember the dream, it means you're not sleeping. So I don't really like to dream, but when I do attend, sometimes it is so significant right. What I'm saying to you is my journey here. I've always been accompanied, if not physically, by community members. I'm not, if always, with community members. I also have this background of these dreams or these people who show up, like some relatives, show up to tell me this is the path that you should take. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Elton Brown: 28:52

You talk about support and I'm wondering is that support multiracial?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 28:58

Yes, that's what I'm saying. For instance, the person who led me to say go to university Bill Vine was his name, white man who taught I would say I had the support from him. I have. I've been part of a feminist movement, a multi-generational or multi-ethnic, multiracial, and I still have people from that movement who are close and close with. I've worked with people like Judy Rebek and others, Winnie, inge, we've been in all kinds of, so I'm an activist at heart. I'm an activist at heart, always seeking supporting social justice issues, even when I don't show up like Aboriginal.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 29:42

I talk about a friend who was close Aboriginal and she would try me out. She would tell me oh, like you are party to my oppression, and I would. How could I be party to your oppression? We face colonialism and hardships and whatever, just like Aboriginal people. And then she pointed out to me she said, yeah, but you came to this country and you could find a job. You found a job, any of us Aboriginal folks who are here who can't find no job. And this is our country, this is our. So I had to listen to those voices, I had to learn those things.

Elton Brown: 30:15

How many ethnic groups have you come across that have similar struggles?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 30:21

If you didn't have. There isn't an ethnic group that came to this country that did not have a struggle, unless you were part of the upper class, right. But if you go back and you look at the people who came from Ireland, okay, they're struggling. Where they landed, the people who came across the Atlantic from all kinds of different backgrounds. When they came, where did they settle? You name it, you trace that. There's no history of imperialism anywhere around the world where you will not find populations of people who are in the forefront of, who have struggled, and that is part of who we are as human beings. This is why I say resistance is in our DNA. This is why I tell my students in the classroom do you know anything about your history? The Portuguese when they came here, do you know anything about that? Do you know anything about the Italians? You're the Italian background and it seems everything is wonderful. And do you know anything about your history? Because the teaching of struggle is not simply to recall the past. It is to really cement for you that you have a role in pushing forward your society in a way that is equitable, that is clear, that is inclusive.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 31:33

I belong to an organization which was the Coalition of Visible Minority Women. They were about, we meant from about 11 different countries, or 12 different countries who made up that organization. They came from all over the world. And what did we want as a Coalition of Visible Minority? We call ourselves as a minority. What did we want as a coalition? We wanted access, equity, equality, fair treatment not simply because we're new immigrants and women from all over the world. The Coalition of Visible Minority women we made petitions to governments about our children, about communities, about racism, about sexism, about the need always to carry the banner of equity, not just equality. We said Equity is to take into consideration our differences, but the outcome has to be when you look at the outcome of all of these groups in our society, we must see okay, there is equitable treatment for all and at some, and not filling the jails. Aboriginal people are still the largest numbers of people in these incarceration.

Rita Burke: 32:37

Why the struggle continues.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 32:40

Yes, it's the Mora-Michelle statement a looter continuum. The struggle continues.

Rita Burke: 32:46

The struggle continues. So on speak of international. We strive to inspire, educated and informed. There's no question today, dr Kua Benjamin, that you're helping us to do those things with your responses. I need to know from you was there ever a time in your life that you had to say enough?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 33:09

Oh, many times, many times. So you'd like to think that it took a while for me to realize that what we were experiencing was racism, right, Because you came, although you know it, but you didn't have a name for it, Like why didn't I get that job or that apartment or why wasn't I given the information, and there are too many examples, right, and you could live your life just wailing about the examples of exclusion and difference. And, yes, you have to point that out, but that's not where it begins and ends. That's not like when I see us marching in the streets waving banners, talking about that. We got to a point in our struggle of saying now we got it, now it exploded. It's always been there, but now we have to make it more public.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 33:56

But the day-to-day denial of access, of equitable treatment, of watching that you're why didn't your son go into this classroom? Instead of that, I remember going to a school. I would go to social work students in practice, so you have to supervise them and you meet with the student and you met with whoever was helping working with the student in the practice. And when I would go to many of the schools. Here is, in the outside of the principal's office a lineup of young black boys. They couldn't be more than 12, 14 years of age. I went to one school and I was distressed why all these black boys standing outside of the principal's office? What does this mean? This is the beginning of their way out the door of education. It is those systems of practice.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 34:45

And now the principals will say that there was a behavioral issue here or didn't do the work or what have you. But is this the? Is this outside the principal's office? Is this gonna help? No, those principals then have to work with community agencies black community agencies, with parents, with other teachers, to say how do we address this issue?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 35:06

And the point is, sometimes we wait until there is a crisis, there is an issue that hits the newspaper, and then everybody moves. No, you can't wait for that. You gotta know that. Yes, in our systems, what we have is that systems which people will say they weren't designed in that way, but that's been the impact of the outcome, when you have some groups of people who are moving forward and then you watch others who are not. They ask the fundamental systemic question. Right, when I see who comes to social work, for instance, I ask the systemic questions, At least in the short term? That was asked. Why is it that we have people who are coming from particular groups coming into social work in larger numbers and the engineering students look differently, the students who are going into the technology field that we have such tiny numbers of students, black students, those?

Elton Brown: 36:01

are the. So how can we use social work to drive away racism? How?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 36:06

can that be? Yeah, and see, it's my thing. I tell social workers I say that work the social, you gotta work it. You can't just say social work, you gotta work the social, meaning that when a parent shows up in front of you or somebody who comes to you in an agency, remember there's a systemic issue why that person showed up. That person doesn't go to Mr Trudeau or whoever is the leader, the political leaders. They come to you, but when they come to you they come with a history, a background of lack of access, of lack of care, of inequitable treatment, and then you, the social worker, are supposed to answer not only the individual problem. Remember that it's a systemic root to this problem. So I don't want you just to be thinking which is what social work does most of the time I've got to help the poor, I've got to help the homeless, you have to do those things. But if your work isn't tied to changing some system that reduces the homeless and the poor, then what we call in trend that spinning top in mud.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 37:23

A top was a plaything that we had and you pull a string and then it would spin. Right Now, if you threw that in mud, the top couldn't spin. The top would not spin. You have to throw it on level ground, you know the fittest. So what you're doing? I go back to Alistair and that idioms I say that you spin in top in mud, it's going nowhere. The poor top cannot spin. I don't know if you know this toy. It's a toy that we had that you pull a string and, yes, I'm very familiar with it. So I'm sorry, I come from that background of being very anecdotal. And if not anecdotal, I go back to where does all this come from, these idioms and these parables and these stories that I can? Where they come from each one of us who come out of a history of slavery. You have it in you.

Rita Burke: 38:12

Dr Akua Benjamin, the woman who is an educator, the woman who's a social activist, the woman who's a community builder, the woman who was an administrator at a post-secondary education how do you maintain your well-being?

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 38:30

I can't maintain it by myself. I didn't come here by myself. I don't maintain my life by myself. Okay, my community, or communities, are very important to me, very important. So I'm always, even if I'm not on the street anymore, I'm attached to some organizations, some group of women, some group of black activists doing, trying to do something to widen our understanding. Now that I'm retired, I'm less active in that sense. I belong to, for instance, the Caribbean Association of Black Educators. I belong to that cave at one point, the Congress of Black Women. I belong to that organization for many years, the Coalition of Visible Minority Women, the one that people look at in bad scenes, black Action Defense Committee. I was key in that organization.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 39:25

These days I'm not as active, but at no time have I been without the support, the guidance, the history, learning all the time about from others how to see a struggle, how to deal with a particular kind of issue, how to be inclusive, how to be always to be inclusive, always to be respectful of other people's history and their struggles and as well, and how to conjoin those. Sometimes we need to go it alone, but a lot of times we can't make it alone. We have to always. We always have to see how does my struggle? Because sometimes when you take a position on one thing, it could be at the detriment of another group, and so one always has to. You know, in this society, or in many societies, how do we be as inclusive and as respectful as we possibly can? So my door is always. I'm always learning, I'm always willing to hear another group, its stories, its history, its struggles, and to see oh, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's an individual who takes a stance that is in support of moving a struggle forward.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 40:37

But you can't live in, you can't live in these societies without knowing it. Maybe it's human society, so that we move from primitive communalism where we began, right up to the most advanced societies in the world. How did that come about? How did you have hunters and gatherers moving through building pyramids and building societies to what we have today? So the struggle is never just, it broadens, it widens. But I really want you to, I really want us to be careful and I want people to understand the unity and struggle of opposites, that dialectic at one point you are for something, another moment it changes on you and you're against it. That's unity and struggle of opposites and that you expect that. You expect that the struggle goes up, it comes down, it goes sideways, but it keeps moving, continues to be a struggle. Dynamic, yes, and the struggle continues.

Elton Brown: 41:38

Dr Benjamin, this conversation has been very stimulating and you have definitely broadened my perspectives in terms of it takes more than one group of individuals to make change, and sometimes the necessary groups have to come together and do a push in order to get something ahead. So I've learned a lot about social workers, social programs and how you use them in order to fight racism, and I want to thank you so much for the opportunity of being able to talk to you today, and I am definitely looking forward to talking to you in the future.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 42:25

Thank you, thank you, brother Brown, thank you, brother Elton.

Rita Burke: 42:28

If you'd like to come back, just send me an email or a text and I would be more than delighted, because I know we haven't scratched the sand on half of what you could talk about, so I really appreciate your generosity.

Dr. Akua Benjamin: 42:45

Thank you for this work that you're doing. Keep a lute conteneur. Samora Masha's words the struggle continues.

Speaker 4: 42:54

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