The City of Toronto is voting to move forward with a plan to rename city streets and properties named after Henry Dundas, a key obstructionist in Toronto’s early quest to abolish slavery. The move was triggered by a petition that has netted nearly 15,000 signatures, and if approved by the city council, it would begin as soon as 2023. It is estimated to cost as much as C$6.3 million to not only rename the street, but also three parks, two subway stations, a library and over 1,000 signs bearing the Dundas name.
Among the equity impacts listed in the proposal: “Build the foundation for a stronger, more inclusive and accessible City through an intentional, equitable and community-centered approach to consultation, naming and commemorative processes.”
For some, this may be seen as progressive. However, this gesture falls into accordance with what many cities, organizations and brands have done amid the racial justice protests that occurred over the last year. The renamings seem to index that the city is “listening” — Toronto has long branded itself as multicultural and diverse, and this is the projection that exists in the international imagination. It is only true insofar as it describes the multiplicity of identities that occupy the city. But branding is intentional. It’s an insidious means to contour and maintain an idea of a nation, or in this case a city, and its corresponding optics.
That branding is actually the work of myth-making: creating a narrative around geographical existence and the active shaping of how the city is perceived. Myth-making also does the work of inducing a sense of doubt when people call attention to how that branding is superficial and operates outside of their lived realities.
The $6.3 million that the City of Toronto is preparing to set aside would be much better spent improving the lives of its Black residents in material ways. Currently, Black Canadians have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. Outside of the pandemic, they’ve also had to navigate the adverse realities of medical racism, such as the lack of culturally-responsive care options or stereotypes about the threshold of pain that Black people are able to manage. Gentrification, under the guise of “revitalization” and “urbanization,” has had a storied history of pushing out Black people from the communities they’ve found homes in — most notably Regent Park, just east of Toronto's downtown core, and Little Jamaica, in the city’s West End.
As far as housing discrimination and experiences of homelessness, Black people are overrepresented — a 2018 report indicated 31% of the city’s documented homeless people were Black, even though Black people only make up 7.5% of Toronto’s total population. And sadly there was harrowing confirmation that Black people are and have been disproportionately arrested, charged and subjected to violence by Toronto police, in a 2020 Ontario Human Rights Commission report.
What does it mean to change the name of a street if oppression, racism and the remnants of colonialism still have a home?
While renaming and muralizing are important, residents of Black Toronto are no stranger to how they’ve been used as tools to exclusively quell concerns with no action afterwards. In April, Little Jamaica was granted Heritage Conservation District status, in response to years of community initiatives and grassroots organizations’ advocacy. This meant that Little Jamaica would have been legally protected by the Ontario Heritage Act, which protects areas “considered to be historically or culturally significant and require special care and attention in the planning process to ensure that they are conserved,” according to Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Services. However, as reported by Toronto Star journalist Danica Samuels, months later, Little Jamaica was instead designated as the city’s inaugural “cultural district,” with little clarity about what this designation means or how it corresponds with heritage conservation district status.
Of course, there can be a transformative element to renamings. In May, the students of the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research center, wrote an open letter calling on their host school to change its name from Ryerson University to X University. The students rightfully asserted that “the university has denied Indigenous people the right to determine what reconciliation means.”
Egerton Ryerson, the school’s namesake, was an architect of Canada’s residential schools. These schools were sponsored by the state and supervised by the Catholic Church; they aimed to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society, often through violent means. The administration convened a task force to address the history of Ryerson, in response to years of advocacy work. But according to the students, the task force’s missions were purely academic, with much of the conversations focusing on a since-toppled statue rather than directly addressing the harm caused by Ryerson.
As such, the students demanded the name change to push the institution to go beyond conversations — an apt and poignant insistence considering the recent and devastating uncovering of a combined 966 unmarked graves on the sites of two former residential schools.
But cosmetic changes can also ring hollow. Across the U.S. and Canada, murals that read “Black Lives Matter” and other pieces of art that possess similar sentiments have been commissioned by elected officials to gesture to the public’s changing awareness of anti-Black racism in its many forms. However, co-opting the language and public art expressions of anti-oppression grassroots organizations is deceptive, as it only acknowledges that racism exists, but does little to change or eradicate Black people’s experiences with it. City forces plastering artwork across the same roads and streets Black people continue to fight on, continue to bleed on, continue to protest on and continue to die on seems to only traffic a cruel irony.
Particularly for a city like Toronto, which touts its multiculturalism and diversity laurels, the journey of renaming has to be coupled with actions that are directly in service of improving the conditions and quality of life of its Black residents. Before renaming the street comes, making housing and health care accessible, abolishing the police and making the streets safe for Black people must come first.
The streets are an important site for Black people. It’s where we celebrate, congregate and exercise resistance. They both hold our histories and become the literal pathways towards our liberation. So again: What does it mean to change the name of a street if oppression, racism and the remnants of colonialism still have a home?
It only has meaning if we’re vacating their current tenants.
Sharine Taylor is an award-winning music and culture writer, and a filmmaker.