Black & White

My race duality has given me a unique perspective on both the Black and white experience in Canada..... What became most evident to me – most universal – was an important need for building bridges of understanding between Black and white Canadians. A need to inform and educate so that hopefully, in due time, we can achieve real change. As a bilingual, biracial man, straddling Black and white, English and French Canada, Stephen Dorsey lives in a world of dualities. In his deeply personal and insightful debut, he offers readers intimate and unfiltered access to his lived experience of anti-Black racism around the world, including Canada, the United States, and Europe, focusing on his formative years growing up in 1970s Montreal as a Black child in a white family headed by a racist stepfather, and details his personal awakening inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. A powerful blend of autobiography and social analysis, Black & White is an intimate excavation of systemic racism in North America — from our health-care and education systems, to policing and law, to a deep analysis of the uniquely intersectional discrimination faced by minorities in Dorsey's home province of Quebec. With an inclusive and accessible approach, aimed at community connection and education, Dorsey delves deep into Canada's history of racial discrimination and, by contrasting it with that of our American neighbours, debunks our nation's mythological narrative, providing necessary context on white privilege, which he calls "white advantage", and offers concrete pathways to lasting societal change. Holding readers gently to account, Black & White is the book for the ally in all of us.