“Working in BCSEs allowed me to sniff out the subtle things that the school system chose not to see. “

-Bradley

Having worked extensively in the school system as a teacher and administrator, as well as having occupied leadership roles in multiple BCSEs, Bradley has been involved in numerous educational initiatives for several decades.  Bradley recalls that BCSEs started offering tutoring in the early 1970s to help Caribbean and African students, who had been mislabeled as low achieving, to access higher education in Quebec.  Bradley recalls numerous incidents from his teaching career where non-Black teachers failed to provide adequate support to Black students, and Bradley links this to racist assumptions about the career options suitable to Black people in Canadian society. As a school administrator, Bradley worked with representatives from other cultural groups to push for the hiring of more diverse school staff and the implementation of multicultural policies. However, Bradley laments that many of these initiatives have failed to address the systemic issues at the root of the problem, and in fact, the structure of some multicultural initiatives has created greater tension and competition between marginalized cultural groups. Bradley also discusses the de facto segregation of Montreal schools, pointing to contemporary examples of what can be labelled “all-white schools” and “Black schools”. Bradley expresses frustration that the Black community continues to face many of the same issues it faced when he started his teaching career decades ago.