New series The Porter highlights the importance of showcasing Black Canadian history

Junior Massey is smoking nervously in a downtown Chicago back alley, leaning against a truck containing about 50 bottles of whisky. It's 1921 — early days of Prohibition — and Massey has used his job as a railway porter to smuggle those bottles down from Montreal.

Junior, a Black man, is there to offload that liquor to a white gangster, who quickly tries to lowball him — offering him 50 per cent less than what they had previously agreed to. Both know that if he's forced to keep the bottles, he'll either have to smuggle them back into Canada, or be arrested. 

Junior (played by I May Destroy You and Sense8's Aml Ameen) smiles. He picks up a bottle, and smashes it to the ground. Then another. And another. Junior continues to destroy his own product, until the other man backs down and agrees to pay full price for what's left. 

"You're a real cocky coon aren't you?" he asks, counting out the bills. "I hope it was worth it."

"It was worth every penny," Junior responds, before defiantly adding: "Crackerjack."

In many ways, that interaction does more to explain the new CBC and BET show The Porter (premiering Feb. 21) than nearly any synopsis could — but it did not come from the writer's room. Instead, it sprang from Ameen's head in the moment — an improvised rejoinder based out of his character's refusal to be disrespected in a society that refuses to respect him. 

"That's something I just said, because that's something I just felt," Ameen explained in an interview with CBC News.

"I felt that Junior wouldn't allow somebody to get away with something like that."

In focusing those experiences, those little large moments drawn from the real lives of Black Canadians, The Porter's cast is hoping to undo a problem at the core of Canadian culture. Though Black Canadians helped shape this country, their history and place in it is rarely shown. That's contributed to a blind spot around much of Black Canadian history, and a general invisibility of Black Canadians as a unique cultural group in the first place.

North America's first Black labour union

At its core, the series follows the history of sleeping car porters. They were a largely Black working force who tended to railway passengers' luggage, as well as generally attending to those — largely white — passengers' needs. 

Unveiling that history is what inspired creator and star Arnold Pinnock to craft the story in the first place. 

"Once someone bought a ticket, it was almost like, 'OK, I get to be on these palaces on wheels and I get to have my own slave,' Pinnock said.

"And to showcase it from the porter's perspective, you know, from their viewpoint, I couldn't be any more prouder."

As the show details, those porters went on to create North America's first Black labour union, helping to both kick off the civil rights movement and create a Black middle class. 

But despite the importance of what they accomplished, almost none of the Black Canadian actors on the show knew of the story before getting involved in the project. 

That's because — as writer and producer Annmarie Morais explained — while it was a hugely influential event, you wouldn't know that from the shows normally produced in Canada.

"We are telling a story that reflects Black Canadian history that is not taught, spoken of or [that] really has its rightful due in our country's acknowledgement of our historical achievements," Morais said. 

And while Black history has slowly started to make its way into the education system, both the cast of The Porter and historians argue the entertainment industry (and cultural consciousness) has not come close to catching up. 

Dr. Charmaine Nelson, Canada research chair and professor of art history with a focus on Black Canadian contribution, said that without substantial representation, the recognition of Black Canadians is largely pushed to the side. 

"If you look at the world of filmmaking, whether it be narrative or nonfiction — and TV and streaming now — we're just not there. We're absent," she said. 

Recognition of Black Canadian history 

Even when Black people and their stories are shown as an integral part of Canada, Nelson said, it is almost in the context of slavery and the Underground Railroad. And while even that period of Canadian history is grossly underrepresented in media, focusing on the brief 31 years when Canada was a place of refuge for escaped slaves, instead of the centuries when slavery was also practiced here, means we haven't even"scratched the surface of telling the story of Canadian slavery."

Meanwhile, that hyper-focus and otherwise ignorance has a real-world consequence.

"People who don't know us, who are not us — mainly white Canadians, in this context — fall back on stereotypes that they learn through the media they do consume," Nelson said. "Which is typically actually about stereotypes of Black Americans."

Without cultural content that tells the true story of Black people as an integral part of the country, the idea that Black Canadians are neither "really Black" or "really Canadian" is reinforced. Ideas of authentic Blackness are tied up with depictions of Black people from specific regions — largely in the United States — while both the validity and history of Black Canadians is ignored. 

Toronto filmmaker Sudz Sutherland says that's an issue he's more than familiar with. Many young Black people feel as if they're "not a part of the Canadian story," because they are not shown to be. 

Black involvement in the War of 1812, the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, the fact that many of the first non-Native settlers of Vancouver Island were Black — and were largely the reason the area wasn't annexed to the United States — are all largely unknown. 

To help fix that, he's made a new docuseries, BLK: An Origin Story, that looks at the "deep historic impact of Black presence in Canada." Premiering Feb. 26, it's part of a raft of new productions coming in 2022 that try to reverse a trend older even than the country itself. 

"Once we show and have conversations about what truly happened here," Sutherland said, "then people will understand and say, 'Oh, well, I am a part of this. I am a part of building this land.'"

And while The Porter is fictional, Arnold Pinnock says he hopes after audiences watch, they will be inspired to help reverse the trend.

"So I hope after they are entertained and the popcorn is finished out of the bowl that people go online, go buy books, go read news clippings, whatever it may be to to understand more about the backstory of our show."

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.