Beyond Tokenisms: The Role of Non-Profit Leaders, Social Work Educators and Frontline Youth Workers in Combating Anti-Black Racism in Policies and Praxis

Educational institutions and social service organizations that work with Black Canadian 1 youth and their families struggle to combat challenges posed by anti-Black racism (ABR). These challenges stem from lack of knowledge about ABR and the refusal or reluctance by leaders and educators to accept that ABR exists at work and in the community. Workplaces that accept that ABR exists may still struggle accepting that it has harmful effects on Black youth. Scholars have shown, and our qualitative results in this paper also support this, that rationalizing youth experiences, histories and voices from a monocultural, Eurocentric perspective, has a lot to do with this denial. In this qualitative paper, we present, according to the participants, some of the ways agency leaders may ensure that anti-Black racism (ABR) mitigation policies lead to long-term transformative change in the Ontario youth sector and in the community. Through an Afrocentric framework and data obtained from Y-X’s 2 Project , we highlight educational, leadership and administrative impediments to ABR mitigation as raised by the participants, culturally relevant best practices and supportive policies being used by frontline workers and agency leaders, and how these results may help leaders support ABR mitigating initiatives that operationalize policies and practices beyond administrative and educational tokenisms.