Black students involved in 'ridiculous' flap over Fête nationale parade stand by their coach
Sterve Lubin offered to quit as coach after video which led to cries of racism went viral
Student athletes who pushed floats in last month's Fête nationale parade are standing by the coach who arranged to have them participate in the event, calling the controversy over their role "ridiculous."
Sterve Lubin, a coach at École Louis-Joseph-Papineau in the Montreal borough of Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension, had accepted an offer from parade organizers to have his athletes push floats in the June 24 parade in exchange for a donation to their school's athletics department.
But as images of the black teens in tan garb pushing a float carrying only white people spread online, Lubin and parade organizers found themselves vilified.
Lubin tried to resign from his coaching job in the aftermath.
"At the end of the parade we were all happy. [Then] we saw the video and controversy," she said.
Another student who is on the school's football team but was not pushing the float at the centre of the controversy, Jefferson Suarez, said he, too, saw no problem with the volunteer effort, which will help the teams.
"The school wants to develop sports but is restricted in its financing," said Jefferson Suarez.
"There aren't people who are going to finance us when it comes to buying shoes, clothes."
Suarez said it's true, however, that organizers could have included people from a greater diversity of ethnic backgrounds in a variety of roles in the parade to avoid the appearance of racism.
"They could have put all [kinds of] people pushing the floats and put more diversity in the group of people walking in white [around the floats]," he said.
Coach tried to mitigate controversy
Lubin said the impression people got from the parade hurt the students involved.
"They didn't understand the negative, they were having fun," the coach said.
He anticipated parents from the school would be furious and expected they would demand he be fired for his role in the controversy.
He said he handed in his resignation because he didn't want the students to be negatively affected any further. The school, however, would not accept it, he said.
Coach, students, organizers come together
The video has been viewed more than two million times on Facebook in the two weeks since it was posted.
The debate it sparked about institutional racism in Quebec reached beyond the province and even the country, as news outlets around the world picked up the story.
The coach and students met at the community centre for Montreal's Haitian community, Maison d'Haïti, on Saturday to discuss what happened.
The centre's director, Marjorie Villefranche, said she thought it was important to show support for the teenagers.
"It's necessary to hug them a little bit and show them that we are with them," Villefranche said.
The head of the organizing committee for the Montreal Fête nationale celebration, Maxime Laporte, was invited to attend the community event.
Laporte said afterward that he was there to support the teenagers and reiterate how sorry the organizing committee is for the image that so many people have seen and shared.
"Quebec includes people of all origins, and that's what we want to say on the national day, and we're terribly sorry about what happened," Laporte said.
In the end, the students who attended Saturday's event said they hope everyone can learn from the experience.
"Now it's time to move on," Rivera said.
With files from CBC's Jaela Bernstien