Goodbye 2025: Our Look Back at What Made Us Recoil, Rant, and Rejoice
1. Victoria Mboko Breaks through on the International Tennis Stage
This year proved career-defining for black Canadian athletes whose breakthroughs came on the basketball court, on the baseball diamond, and on the tennis court. Eighteen-year-old Victoria Mboko was ranked #85 in the world when she won the 2025 National Bank Open in August. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina to proud Congolese parents, the family relocated to Toronto where Victoria received training near Burlington, Ontario. Overcoming knee injuries to battle back to health, Victoria entered the tournament as a wild card to handle Marie Bouzkova (#39), Coco Gauf (#2), Jessica Bouzas (# 51), Elena Rybakina (#12), and ultimately Naomi Osaka (#49) in front of a roaring home crowd in Montreal!
Victoria Mboko in action at the National Bank Open in Montreal (2025)
2. The End of the Movie Theatre?
This year Hollywood, well (how do we put this nicely), sucked at the summer (and arguably, the all-year) box office. People voted with their wallets and stayed home instead of venturing out to see the usual crop of superhero, action, and thriller movies on the big screen. Between May and Labour Day of 2025, the domestic (USA) box office made about $3.67 billion USD, almost exactly the same sum from 2024 ($3.64 billion). In comparison, the pre-pandemic 2019 figure was $4.38 billion USD!
But the question for the studios now is, to what do they attribute the dramatic drop in big screen revenue? Is it because we are all so in love with watching our screens (TVs, tablets, computers, and phones) in the privacy of our own homes (and in our PJs) or is the bigger issue that we were not inspired by the lineup that Hollywood offered?
Standout movies that didn’t produce what studios expected were James Gunn’s Superman (2025) that cost $350 million USD and grossed $615 million USD, the dramatic thriller After the Hunt (2005) starting Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, and Andrew Garfield which cost between $70 million and $80 million USD and grossed $9.1 million USD worldwide, or Jennifer Lopez’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) that reportedly cost $30 million USD and grossed under $2 million USD. But we can add to these disappointing results the Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattison film Die My Love (2025) which reportedly cost $25 Million USD and earned $2.8 million USD, and Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s The Smashing Machine (2025) which supposedly cost $50 million USD and earned only $20 Million USD.
The other factor, of course, is the cost of a night out at the theatre which for two people in Canada typically runs from $40 to $60 CAD, with standard tickets ranging anywhere between $12 to $17 CAD. In the USA, the price is $40 to $50 USD with average ticket prices hovering at $16.08 USD.
Another factor will be (or depending on who you speak to, is already) the dramatic change that AI will surely bring and that means to the movie making process, to distribution, and to viewing as devices, locations, and timing. As for the making, we are already in a place where the actor as we know it could be rendered obsolete by realistically human-like animations or renderings which will (and already do) allow for whole sectors of Hollywood labour, like stunt people, to be replaced. But what if people in the grip of AI, post singularity, decide that human actors and celebrity culture are no longer what we want. Is a day coming, quickly, when the only gigs for human thespians will be on the theatre stage?
Are the best days of movie theatres behind us?
3. Political Violence Continues to Rock our Southern Neighbours
Have America and Canada ever not been places of political violence? Of course not. But somehow Canada emerged in the twentieth century and beyond as a nation with a reputation for peacekeeping more than warmongering. Meanwhile, our southern neighbours, not so much! A part of this national ethos that welcomes, celebrates, or justifies certain kinds of violence (while denying other kinds, especially racial and sexual) is certainly about nations built through colonialism and imperialism which gave citizenship status only to white men while enslaving and stealing the labour, profits, and land of black and indigenous people. But in the USA, this is also a product of their constitution and Second Amendment which enshrined “a right to keep and bear arms” in an eighteenth-century revolutionary context that looks nothing like our 2025 moment. That our American cousins have never revisited and revised this amendment speaks volumes to their commitment to the potential for personal violence and the extent to which they refuse to remove money and lobbying from their politics.
But we continue to see the outcome of their mindless grip on weapons (only fit for the military or action movies) this year in the 150 politically motivated attacks through the first half of 2025 and the 209 school shootings as of December 12th, 2025. (Quite literally, that number rose to 210 with the shooting on Brown University campus in Providence, R.I., while we were writing this article!) But sadly, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy clearly illustrate what Americans, and their dire rhetoric of supposedly global exceptionalism, actually creates.
Political motivated attacks and school shootings continue to rock the USA
4. Black Canadian Men Shine in the NBA Finals
You know we love our Toronto Raptors, but we also love an underdog, which is how we came to root for the Indiana Pacers in their bid to raise the Larry O’Brien trophy in the NBA championship series against the Oklahoma City Thunder. But the match up brought us a handful of mighty Canadian men to root for including Andrew Nembhard (with his dazzling D) and Benedict Mathurin who teamed up with the acrobatic, once-Raptor Pascal Siakam (aka “Spicy P”) and the incredible Tyrese Haliburton to launch a tenacious bid for the championship. However, the never say die “Yes ‘Cers” Pacers fell short in game seven to a defiant Thunder including black Canadian Luguentz Dort and fellow Canuck S.G.A. (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) who joined James, Johnson, and Jordan in an elite group to become the first Canadian to win both the league and finals M.V.P!
Luguentz Dort, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (S.G.A), Benedict Mathurin, and Andrew Nembhard in action
5. Black Excellence Under Attack in the USA
If you’re old enough to have tried and failed at different careers, you’ve probably been fired a time or two. Put nicely, that’s “let go”. But whatever you call it, in many if not most cases, the bosses or higher-ups tried, or were compelled by HR protocols, to state a verifiable reason for the termination. From tardiness, to laziness, to that failed policy, the horrible product rollout or the drunken episode at the office party, most of us have been given the benefit (in hindsight) of knowing exactly why and how we supposedly didn’t measure up. Not so for top black officials in the era of Trump 2.0.
Clearly and across multiple examples, Trump and his largely unqualified and vengeful group of white political sycophants have openly demonstrated their hatred for blackness as rigorous national history and as successful, top of their class, indisputably stellar, pathbreaking leaders. Among these black trailblazers who were unceremoniously fired were General Charles Q. Brown Jr., only the second black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dr. Carla Hayden the first black person to serve as the Librarian of Congress, Alvin Brown and Robert Primus the only two black members of the National Transportation Safety Board and the US Surface Transportation Board, and Gwynne Wilcox the first black woman to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. Trump has also openly targeted Lisa Cook the first black woman to serve as a governor on the Federal Reserve Board. So we can now add “Working while Black,” to the long list of daily life activities for which black people are constantly racially profiled, harmed, or worse, that already includes, “Driving while Black,” “Walking while Black,” “Shopping while Black,” “Dining while Black,” and “Birdwatching while Black”.
An open racist assault against the most talented black trailblazers
6. Black Maple Magazine Publishes Innovative Children’s Books about Slavery
The first children’s books were published in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Three hundred years earlier, the New England Puritan John Cotton published Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1656). From those humble beginnings, children’s books now generate $3.3 billion USD a year in the USA (2024). In Canada, the sales total was $226.33 million USD in 2024 for children’s picture books. Children’s literature came to combine entertainment and education. But not all children’s books are about play and fun. The American Anti-Slavery Society’s The Slave’s Friend (1836-1838) featured woodblock prints depicting shackles, beseeching enslaved people, slave auctions, and white children teaching black enslaved children how to read. Children’s books have long since become a vehicle to introduce difficult themes and complex histories to young people.
But how do you represent the genocidal histories of Transatlantic Slavery for children without traumatizing young readers? A part of the challenge of writing about slavery for a child audience is presenting factual and accurate information in ways that are engaging, digestible, and suitable for different age ranges, while still maintaining historical rigour. While there is no shortage of children’s literature on tropical plantation regions, the missing piece in academic and children’s literature is books that unearth the cultures and histories of temperate-climate, slave minority regions.
Scholarship on Canadian and US North Slavery lags behind research on tropical planation sites in both quantity and scope. But because enslavers documented their property (tragically, including human beings), the issue is not the archive. Instead, there are far fewer scholars studying slavery in these cold-climate regions. Thus, far fewer students learn about the distinctiveness of slavery in Canada and the US North, and far fewer children’s book authors have risen to the challenge of representing these understudied regions.
These books and the accompanying exhibition, Sowing History, Reaping Justice, began in our fearless leader, Prof. Charmaine A. Nelson’s Spring 2025 UMass Amherst Art History course, The Visual Culture of Slavery, when she tasked her students with creating original illustrated children’s books that illuminated the lives and experiences of enslaved black people in Canada and the US North. The result is that these books, eighteen in total, edited by Charmaine, touch upon one or more of the following four themes which arose from the students’ brilliant research: (1) The Journey from Africa, (2) Enslaved Biography, (3) Enslaved Children, and (4) Slave Resistance. These digitized, open access books now constitute a powerful, groundbreaking educational resource which can be used to teach small children and adolescents about these complex and horrible histories. At a time when various forces conspire to sanitize these histories or to ensure that they are not taught at all, this work is more important than ever!
Interior image from Ellie Kinsman’s “The Sky between Us” (2025)
7. Losing our Humanness
With the advent of AI and the quest for universal deregulation south of the border, those who are keeping up on the news can be forgiven for feeling more than a little anxious about what tech experts agree is an imminent “singularity”. But while we wait, some of the social ills of a world where technological innovation supplants human interaction and community are already glaringly apparent. In a world where podcasters and YouTubers often wall themselves off in one political camp or another, the rise of the so-called manosphere has been aligned with the dominance of social media as the place where young people mistakenly think they are getting their “news”. This means that boys and young men especially are at risk of being target-fed hateful misogynistic content which amplifies calls for the tradwife, women’s lack of control over their bodies, and celebrates alleged rapists and sex traffickers.
At the same time these young Canadian and American men are struggling to keep pace with their female peers in higher education (undergraduate, MA, and PhD), employment, and socialization, friendships, and community building. Tragically then, where they are outpacing females is in suicide rates!
But as thought leader, professor, entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author of Notes on Being a Man (2025) Scott Galloway argues, social media and AI are at the heart of the problem, stealing our youths’ attention and sequestering them in their homes (think mom’s basements) where they create and live in unfulfilling virtual worlds taken over by gaming and pornography, the latter of which creates completely unrealistic attitudes about women’s bodies and desires, while producing epidemics of loneliness and addiction.
Combine this with women who are gravitating towards AI boyfriends (yes, my friends, that’s cell phone apps that are curated to voice the perfect heterosexual man who’s always ready with a compliment and a sympathetic ear because, well, he’s not a real man!) and we are moving more and more towards a world where certain humans may opt out of human-to-human relationships altogether, one devoid of human necessities like community, connection, and touch. Globally, statistics show that people are finding it more and more difficult to do everything from holding hands, to hugging, to having sex. But what does it mean to forgo these primal human needs. Well, nothing good, think anxiety, depression, and immune system disorders!
Put simply, many of our children and youth no longer know how to hold eye contact, make conversation, take risks, and suffer rejection. They lack the resilience that comes from trying and failing in the arena of human interactions and realizing that failure is only a way to gather information and succeed in the next go round.
What becomes of our humanity when we retreat from primal human needs like touch?
8. We say Good-bye to Black Trailblazers from Canada and the Diaspora
This year we said good-bye to some remarkably talented trailblazers from Canada and other parts of the Black Diaspora.
Juliette Powell
Born in NYC to a French-Canadian mother and African American father, Juliette Powell, moved to Canada at the age of eight, eventually having dual American and Canadian citizenship. Representing the Laurentian Region, her 1989 Miss Canada win – the first time the honour was bestowed on a black woman – was a breakthrough moment in a nation that had a limited Eurocentric notion of Canadian identity and beauty. Powell went on to become a successful MuchMusic and MusiquePlus VJ hosting shows like Electric Circus and French Kiss. But Powell’s most impressive accomplishments arguably came long after she left the realms of beauty and hosting. Highly educated, Powell received a BA in Sociology at Columbia University in NYC and studied Finance and Business at McGill University in Montreal and Economics at the University of Toronto. She went on to build a successful career as a media expert and a business advisor who authored books about the various dimensions of social media and AI and ethics which demonstrated her visionary understanding of its potential power and inevitable problems decades ahead of the curve! Her dream was to provide ethical technology education to women of colour. Powell died unexpectedly in NYC at the age of 54 on June 3rd, 2025, from complications of acute bacterial meningitis.
Juliette Powell
Malcolm Jamal-Warner
On July 20th, 2025, we also lost the multi-talented Malcolm Jamal-Warner who died from asphyxiation from drowning while on vacation in Costa Rica with his family. Ushered into our living rooms in the 1980s as the lovable Theodore (Theo) Huxtable on the #1 NBC family sitcom The Cosby Show, Jamal-Warner played the only son of Cliff and Clair Huxtable, in a sea of four daughters. Memorably, Jamal-Warner depicted Theo’s struggles with dyslexia with tenderness and optimism while refuting stereotypes of black masculinity to show us Theo’s vulnerability. He went on to star in his own sit coms and in impactful roles on dramas like Suits (2011-19; 2024). But he was also a Grammy-award-winning spoken word poet, podcast host, and most importantly, a devoted family man.
Malcolm Jamal-Warner
Roberta Flack
In 2025 we said farewell to some music greats. Roberta Flack was a classically trained pianist who became a high school teacher before finding her way back to music. Diagnosed with ALS in 2022, she died in NYC of cardiac arrest on February 24th, 2025. Flack mastered a quiet, pensive, sophisticated, almost melancholy R & B, pop sound which produced love songs like The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1972) and Killing me Softly with his Song (1973). She also teamed up with Donny Hathaway and Peabo Bryson on songs like Where is the Love (1972), The Closer I get to You (1978), and Tonight I Celebrate my Love (1983). Flack earned four Grammy awards, a string of chart-topping hits, and generations of loyal fans, among them, musicians like The Fugees who covered her songs like Killing me Softly with his Song (1996).
Roberta Cleopatra Flack
Sam Moore
Sam and Dave take us back even further in the pantheon of African American R & B and soul superstar hit makers. The duo was composed of the tenor Sam Moore and the baritone Dave Prater. While Prater died tragically in 1988 in a fatal car accident in Sycamore, Georgia, Moore passed away on January 10th, 2025, at the age of 89 after surgery in Florida. This dynamic duo gave us fiery, pulse pounding, gritty, gotta move, soulful hits like Hold on I’m Coming (1966) and Soul Man (1967) complete with horn sections.
Sam Moore and Dave Prater (left to right)
Jimmy Cliff
We also lost a veritable legend of music this year, Jamaican singer, songwriter, and actor Jimmy Cliff. Cliff died in Kingston, Jamica on November 24th, 2025, at the age of 81 from a complication following a seizure which led to pneumonia. Born James Chambers in 1944, Cliff became an international ambassador for reggae music (even before Bob Marley) bringing the distinctive culture and rhythms of Jamaica to international audiences from the 1960s. Cliff broke through with hits like Wonderful World, Beautiful People (1969), The Harder they Come (1972), I Can See Clearly Now (1993), and Many Rivers to Cross (1969), this last celebrated and covered by other artists like Cher, Joe Cocker, Percy Sledge, and UB40. The Harder They Come (1972) was also the name of the Perry Henzell cult classic movie in which Cliff was cast in the leading role as Ivanhoe “Ivan” Martin. Cliff’s trailblazing contributions can’t be pigeonholed. His genre-crossing music mixed reggae, rocksteady, ska, gospel, soul, and pop. Meanwhile, his songwriting resonated profoundly both inside and outside of Jamaica, with his unique way of blending universal themes with a Jamaican perspective.
Jimmy Cliff (James Chambers)
D’Angelo
Do you know Michael Eugene Archer? Likely not, unless that is, we mention his stage name, D’Angelo! D’Angelo died in NYC of pancreatic cancer at the age of 51 on October 14th, 2025. D’Angelo’s big break was not with a song that he sang, but one that he co-wrote for Black Men United for the soundtrack of the movie Jason’s Lyric (1994). The motivational R & B anthem U Will Know (1993) featured musical superstars like Tevin Campbell, Usher, Boyz II Men, Brian McKnight, and Gerald Levert. D’Angelo soon got his moment in the spotlight, when in 1995, he broke through with his own album, Brown Sugar (1995), featuring smooth and sensual R & B, (Neo)Soul grooves like Lady(1995). How to describe this gorgeous jam? Well, it’s a song where the guiding, grinding, pulsating rhythm of the bass guitar – bum, ba-bum, bum – is crying out for love making. Add to that, D’Angelo himself on the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the song goes to a different level with his sultry, raspy, sensual baritone and unique falsetto. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that D’Angelo made some of the most love-makable (if that isn’t a word, it is now!) R & B, Neo-Soul songs of the 90s and 2000s! Take his Untitled (How does it Feel) [2000]. It’s a raw, sensual, vulnerable soulful, R & B ballad that builds to a stunning, passionate climax and we’re not even talking about the can’t take-your-eyes-away video which was “simply” a milk chocolate D’Angelo, ripped and naked from the waist up, hair in pristine cornrows, spinning slowly to show every angel of his heavenly body. D’Angelo also innovated with his unique look that blended the baggy jeans and Timberland boots of hip hop with the precision of stunning black cornrows instead of high tops and fades. But hold up. D’Angelo was much, much more than a pretty face and gorgeous body, he was a generational song writing and musical talent who played the piano, keyboards, bass guitar, guitar, and drums and wrote, played, and produced his own music! His music is luscious, sensual, soul-exciting, and yes, love-makable! We are grateful that D’Angelo, who frequently (and wisely) retreated from the public eye kept making music into the twenty-first century, with Voodoo (2000) and Black Messiah (2014).
D’Angelo (Michael Eugene Archer)
9. US Tariff Uncertainty Spawns Canadian Pride and Patriotism
One day it’s on, the other off, one day it’s 25% then it’s 50%. No, we’re not talking about our weight, we’re talking about Trump’s current cudgel of choice, tariffs. For decades and generations Canadians could count on reciprocal trade deals which benefited our southern neighbours and us, in a longstanding relationship that sees an estimated $3.6 billion USD of goods and services traded across the 49th parallel on a daily basis! Well, surprise, but that goodwill and certainty is no more, thanks to Trump 2.0!
To be fair, Trump has done this to everyone, targeting American “friends” in the European Union, Britain, African nations, the Caribbean, Mexico, China, Brazil, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, creating chaos for these nations and for American businesspeople across sectors. From soybean farmers to shoe manufactures, toy makers, to the auto industry, America businesses have been reeling due to the knock-on effects of higher material costs or the loss of foreign markets resulting from Trump’s tariff rollercoaster.
But another unexpected side effect of this disturbing and self-destructive policy of “America First” is the rise of a previously unheard-of patriotism in Canada. Once reticent about “tooting our own horn,” Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast are buying Canadian (and strategically not buying and actively boycotting American foods and companies), singing the national anthem proudly and loudly, rebranding products as Canadian, choosing domestic tourism over trips south of the border, and buying and flying the Canadian flag. This is a consequence of someone calling us the fifty-first state!
Can you imagine what Canadians will do when our national teams win FIFA and the WBC, when a Canadian NHL team reclaims the Stanley Cup, when the Raptors lift the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, or the Blue Jays bring home the Commissioner’s Trophy?
One word, M-A-D-N-E-S-S!
Canadian patriotism on the rise
10. Toronto Blue Jays Thrill a Nation with their 2025 MLB Championship Run
Finally, who could forget, that after a thirty-two-year drought, our national baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays, headed back to the World Series in 2025. To get there, they first won their division on September 28th, forcing a wildcard showdown between the third place Boston Red Sox and second place New York Yankees. When the Yankees emerged triumphant, the Jays sent the Bronx Bombers packing on October 8th.
Franchise player, Vladimir (Vladdy) Guerrero Jr. celebrates winning ALCS MVP
Next came the Seattle Mariners and the Jays victory in seven games to win the ALCS (Vladdy won MVP), after dropping the first two games at home in the Rogers Centre.
Blue Jays celebrate ALCS championship
Then came the championship. But alas, those pesky LA Dodgers (including former Jay, Téoscar Hernández) had other plans and instead of raising the Commissioner’s Trophy, we were forced to hang up our beloved Barrio Jacket for the season! This Jays team is more than representatives of a city or a nation, with a worldwide fan base they inspired an international movement with adoring fans that were drawn to their heart, camaraderie, and brotherhood! But here’s hoping that with added pitching depth (like newly acquired ace Dylan Cease and reliever Tyler Rogers), impact players like Daulton Varsho and Alejandro Kirk (now signed to a 5-year $58 million contract), and superstars like “Vladdy” (Vladimir) Guerrero Jr. and George Springer, we’ll be back again next year. Count on it!
Veteran George Springer celebrates as he runs the bases