August 7, 2012. It had been a year since I got dumped unceremoniously by Diana Jones and experienced a life-altering change in the way I looked both at the world and at myself. Everything that happens in this life is a teaching moment, to quote the recently re-elected United States President Barack Obama. I've changed a lot since those days. For starters, I graduated from the Sprott MBA program at Carleton University. Yay for me, I guess. That was a major step. Tonight, my new lady love Brittany Lansbury and I are meeting my folks for their thirtieth wedding anniversary at a quaint little Caribbean restaurant in the west end of the Canadian capital.
My parents, Leonard and Mariel Sebastien moved to the City of Ottawa, Province of Ontario, from their hometown of Cap-Haitien in the island of Haiti in the summer of 1985. I was born two years later. As Canadian as maple syrup, but decidedly Haitian flavoured. That's me in a nutshell. The name is Eric Sebastien. I've often been told that I was different, whatever that means. I stand six feet two inches tall, big and dark-skinned, with curly hair and light brown eyes. I'm built like a college or professional football player, but I couldn't throw a ball to save my life. I've always had a head for numbers, though. At Saint Augustine Academy, I was President of the Math team, even though everybody from the principal to the athletic director begged me to try out for the varsity football team. Sorry to disappoint you guys, but I missed the sport gene.
Not every big and tall Black male you run into is good at sports. We can do more than that, you know. People often speak of the Black male's physical prowess in matters of contact sports and sex. What about the Black man's brain? How come nobody ever mentions it? This makes me shake my head in disgust. Anyhow, growing up I was used to the other Blacks at my old high school accusing me of acting White simply because I wasn't into sports or skipping school but I rather enjoyed academia. On Friday nights you'd catch me playing chess with friends in a quiet corner of the academy library. Yeah, I was never mister excitement, let's leave it at that. I was simply me. A hard-working, church-going, friendly and easygoing Black male who didn't butcher the English language with every syllable coming out of my mouth. No sir, I believed in using proper diction and all that. Where did I learn that from? I got it from my parents. My dad studied civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, before moving to Ontario, Canada. He came to Canada as a Haitian national with an American university degree. Something which amazed the authorities when he first came as a landed immigrant, dad told me.
Education is the Black man's way of reaching higher, that's what my father told me. He urged me to always strive to be the best. And I always listened to my dad. When I enrolled at Carleton University in Ottawa, I was surrounded by a diverse group of students for the first time. Canada's capital university has many students from places like Africa, the Middle East, China, India and Latin America. That was way more diversity than I was used to at the private Christian school which I attended a while back. There were only twenty five Black students among the eleven hundred person study body at Saint Augustine Academy and nineteen of them were female. I guess you could say that I wasn't used to being around Black guys...and I'm a Black man! I grew up in a White neighborhood, my friends were White and everything was okay, I guess.
I knew that the world saw me as a Black man and I embraced it. I have never been ashamed of being Black, even though I've often been accused of acting White. I just didn't like them trying to define who and what I am simply because of my skin colour. Being Black and male shouldn't just mean being good at sports and a sexual hound. Black men can follow intellectual pursuits too. We can be lawyers, doctors, engineers, chess players, writers, artists and lawmakers instead of just athletes and thugs. I've struggled my whole life with this, and it is still a struggle. Too many young Black men grow up thinking that being smart isn't cool, so they act dumb and look where it leads them.
When I arrived at Carleton University, I sought others like myself. Surely among these sons and daughters of the African and Afro-Caribbean Diaspora there must be some pretty intelligent and ambitious people. I always wanted to join a club filled with positive, smart Black folks who would uplift the Black community with our good deeds. We often hear about the Black male who's a deadbeat dad or the one who robs the liquor store. Why don't we hear about the one who's a rising executive in a big company, a hard-working policeman in a tough precinct, or a dedicated fireman? Black men can be more than athletes and thugs. That's what I believed. Fortunately at Carleton University, I learned that I wasn't alone in my belief.
