'Life outside of blackness': Montreal family reflects on race, identity

Real Talk on Raceis CBC Montreal's special series exploring personal conversations and experiences around race in the city.

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But the experience of being black differs from grandmotherto motherto daughter.

Three generations of the Eyob familyshared their experiences with CBC Montreal, as part of our Real Talk on Race series.

Malefiya Zeleke: 'Number oneis my religion'

Every Friday,MalefiyaZeleke'schildren and grandchildren gather at her home inCte-des-Neiges.

"This is our tradition," saidZeleke. "We're sitting together. We talk [about]the whole week we've passed."

As an Ethiopian-Jewish family, observingShabbatis important, she said.

"Number oneis my religion," she said. "As Jewish -- it's my religion. And Ethiopian Jewish: It's my identity. I am black and a Jew. This is my identity."

It was 1984 when Malefiya Zeleke packed up her family and left Ethiopia for Canada. Her home country at the time was under communist military rule. Herfamily members would often hide the fact they were Jewish, for fear of discrimination from others.

"We don't want to talk too much about Jewish religion.Most of the time they don't understand about us, and they give us bad names, like hyena."

But Zelekedoesn't feel that she's been discriminated against because of her race.

"My blackness? No," she said. "It never affected me."

"God protects all colours,"she said.

Hirut Eyob: 'Blackness is very much a political identity'

"The idea of blackness, I learned that by coming to Canada at the age of seven," said Hirut Eyob, Zeleke's daughter. "So the first seven years of my life in Ethiopia, I was allowed to just be myself."

Eyobsaid it was through conversations with Caribbean and other black Canadian classmates that she was first told she was black.

"I didn't understand what they were talking about. I was just like, 'I'm brown,'because I looked exactly like my friend who is from Sri Lanka."

Eyob, who works as a doulaand lactation consultant, says she's become more rooted in her Ethiopian-Jewish identity since she's had children.

"Myidentity has been very muchwhat message I want to pass on, andwhat are the identities that are relevant to them?"

But because the Ethiopian-Jewish diaspora in Canada is small, Eyob said she has gravitated towards other black Montrealersin order to find community.

She's a co-founder of the Third Eye Collective, an organization that addresses issues of violence andsexual violence targeting black women.

"It's over time that I learned that blackness is very much a political identity. It's a survival identity. It's not necessarily how I identify, but it's how I'm perceived."

Mshama Eyob-Austin: 'Blackness is beautiful'

As the daughter of an Ethiopian-Jewish mother and a Jamaican father, 13-year-old Mshama Eyob-Austin has invented a word for who she is.

"I consider myself, what I call, Ethio-Jamaican-Canadian," she said, laughing.

But from an early age, she realized that some peopleonly sawher as black.

"My first encounter with racism was maybe grade oneor two. There was this girl.She was white. And she was always telling me I looked like poo."

"That's when I knew,I am different than everybody here. And people are going to point it out to me."

Mshama Eyob-Austin on being black

9 years ago

Duration 0:32

Jewish-Ethiopian-Jamaican Montrealer Mshama Eyob-Austin describes her love-hate relationship with her dreadlocks as a child.

Mshamaalso faced schoolyard taunts about her hair, which she used to wear in dreadlocks. By the third grade, that experiencehadtaken itstoll.

"Ijust started cutting them," she said."My parents would find dreads around the house. And I would try to hide them away so they wouldn't see them."

"Eventually they started noticing... 'Mshama, is that your dread on the balcony? Is that your dread on the floor?'And they were just like, 'We need to talk.'"

She feels her mother's experience with race is different fromher own.

"My mom has told me this so many times:'I wish I could have been able to have you in Ethiopia, where you could know what it was like to not be black.'"

"The first time she told me that, I was offended," Mshama said."I was like, 'What's wrong with being black?'"

"Going to the mall for me is all about blackness," she said."I can't go to the mall without someone following me around. I can't see the police without feeling something inside."

Still, she can't imagine life with a different identity.

"I don't even know if I would want to try that," she said.

"Because as many issues as there [are]with being black ... and how people treat you based on the colour of your skin ... blackness is beautiful."