Habiba Diallo’s experience as a Black high schooler in Halifax left a mark on her. She remembers, one November day in 2012, watching police arrest a fellow Black student on school property and hearing an onlooker say, “he knows the drill.” She recalls the classmate who would admonish others for wasting food, “because there are starving children in Africa.” There was the white valedictorian who took pride in being from a “diverse” school—but Diallo’s lived reality that any of the school’s efforts to address those “diverse” students and their concerns ended at Black History Month posters.
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Nearly a decade removed from high school, it felt familiar to the world around her.
“This is the issue I’m seeing with a lot of schools, companies,” she told The Coast in 2021. “I don’t know that they really want to do [pursue change]. They say they want to, but they don’t believe they want to. They’ve been saying they want to for a long time and still nothing is happening.”
On Wednesday, Sept. 20, Diallo will read from her memoir #BlackInSchool at the Halifax Central Library. The book draws from her journal entries during her years as an International Baccalaureate student in Halifax—and touches on both overt and systemic racism, erasure and Black resilience. Diallo—a finalist for the 2020 Bristol Short Story Prize—will be joined by African Nova Scotian author, activist and academic Lynn Jones for a conversation after the reading about “anti-racism in education and how we can take steps towards creating a society that is inclusive for all.”
Diallo’s reading starts at 7pm at the library’s Paul O’Regan Hall (5440 Spring Garden Road) and runs until 8:30pm. Admission is free, and tea and coffee will be served.
—With files from Chris Stoodley.
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2023.