Background

In The Face of Racism, a Love Story

If my parents had not stood up to racism almost 60 years ago, I would not exist…

My mother emigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s. She had come from a life of privilege, well educated and untouched by prejudice. In the early 1960s, when she was ready to buy her first new home, she met my father, George Hubbs, who was the real estate agent for the builder and possibly the whitest man in Canada.

My mother chose a home to purchase and signed a full-price offer. My father presented the offer to the builder, telling him the buyer was a well-qualified Jamaican nurse. The builder told my father that he would not sell to a Person of Colour, Black, Jamaican … you get the picture.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. My father, outraged, went back to my mother and told her exactly what the builder had said. My mother decided to take the builder to the Human Rights Commission, and my father testified for her. She got her house. He got fired from the building site, losing his job. They started dating, got married, and in 1965, I was born.

This wasn’t my mother’s first challenge finding housing as a Black woman in Canada. Before buying her home, many an apartment that was available when she phoned was suddenly gone when she got to the door. However, I grew up oblivious to any of this. My mother didn’t tell me anything about the racism she’d encountered until I was in my 20s and able to handle it. I grew up hearing only that I had “the best of both worlds.”

Read the full article published in On The Bay Magazine Fall 2021