Standing on Their Shoulders, Building Our Own Wing: The Imperative of Black Canadian Creative and Economic Sovereignty

To enter the white, mainstream institutional spaces of Canadian academia, media, or publishing as a black person is to be immediately (re)oriented, stigmatized, and often tokenized because of your racial identity. As someone who has studied race and representation, and the enduring tragic aftermath of Transatlantic Slavery for decades, I am intimately acquainted with Canada’s deep historical roots of structural racism.

But living it in real-time—navigating spaces where Black Excellence is routinely shut out, gaslit, patronized, undercut, or subjected to passive-aggressive and outright aggressive bullying—is a stark reminder of why assimilation is a dead-end street.

As black Canadians, we are constantly expected to translate African American content into a black Canadian reality just to see glimpses of ourselves. Canadian mainstream platforms—coded white—continue to treat our histories with a lazy, colourblind neglect or flatly refuse to acknowledge our presence. This institutional resistance is precisely why we cannot simply beg for a seat at their table.

We must build our own castles. And today, with Black Maple Magazine Publishing, we are officially building an entirely new wing.

In doing so, I step forward with a heart full of profound gratitude for the pathbreaking black women who came before me and cleared the immense obstacles so that an institution like ours could even exist. I place our work squarely within the radical lineage of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who in 1853 shattered every barrier to become the first black woman newspaper publisher in North America right in Ontario, printing The Provincial Freeman to demand absolute black autonomy. I am galvanized by the intrepid African-Canadian entrepreneur Viola Desmond, who established her multi-province beauty culture empire consisting of salons, schools, and products for black women in Jim Crow-era, 1940s Nova Scotia. I stand on the shoulders of visionaries like Makeda Silvera, who in 1985 co-founded Sister Vision Press in Toronto—Canada’s very first black feminist publishing house—refusing to let our multi-dimensional stories be erased by a white-dominated trade industry.

Yet, while we inherit their fierce commitment to rigorous social uplift, cultural assertion, and historical reclamation, Black Maple Magazine Publishing is marking out a distinct, fiercely commercial footprint. Where our ancestors focused on foundational survival, cultural uplift, and radical grassroots literature, we are, in addition to our academic and children’s literature, unapologetically establishing our presence at the very centre of the massive, multi-billion-dollar commercial market.

Our global launch of visionary novelist Andrea Ramirez’s debut romance novel, Blood and Water: A Love Story, represents a massive disruption: a luxury, contemporary, intellectually rigorous romance that completely centres affluent black Canadian characters, Caribbean-Canadian culture, and celebrates black beauty, family, and music. We are proving that black love and intimacy are worthy of sweeping, elite cinematic storytelling. If you are inclined to dismiss the value and power of the $1.4 billion USD romance industry (with the Canadian market alone estimated at a staggering $435,000,000 CAD), read my insightful The Scholar’s Couch interview with Ramirez. Together, we explore the high stakes of colourblindness and interracial relations, unmasking how the romance industry has shaped limiting, mainstreamed notions of beauty and dictated exactly who has been deemed worthy of intimacy, love, and protection in the long wake of slavery.

But let me be completely honest about the terrain. Black entrepreneurship in Canada is an exercise in overcoming calculated and historically antagonistic systemic friction. In his 2023 article on wealth creation, my late father, Maxwell Barrington Nelson, dissected the specific, cold economic realities facing black business owners in Canada. Mainstream structural racism ensures that black entrepreneurs are routinely starved of capital, shut out from elite mentorship networks, and denied commercial lines of credit by risk-aversive banking systems and the racist white banking professionals who control the purse strings.

Because the structures that govern access to capital are systemically biased, they are, at their core, designed and managed to strategically choke our enterprises before they can scale (or even achieve lift-off). We must therefore adapt with ironclad intentionality.

As my father perfectly articulated, true wealth building requires us to master specific behavioural disciplines:

• We must refuse over-diversification and instead own tightly-defined, professionally-designed, high-growth entities.
• We must do the grueling work to truly understand our client base.
• We must outline clear business plans with specific goals.
• We must fiercely prioritize each other’s business ecosystems, stopping the immediate external leakage of our funds by forcing our community capital to circulate multiple times at home before it ever leaves our borders.