I offer you this testimony from a “Facebook friend” published on her wall on July 8th. Social media is not only a space for exchange and encounters for me, it is also a field of research and observation. In her post, she shared a video link to the song “Fight the Power” by the legendary rap group Public Enemy, released in 1989:

“For me, dance is life. It’s my antidepressant. My oxygen. It’s what moves me and keeps me alive. Dance for me is always healing. But today, I experienced a special moment: I danced to “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy in my childhood bedroom. It took me back to 1989, when I was a teenager listening to that same music in that same bedroom.” At the time, I was fighting alone against my mother’s extreme internalized racism, my father’s colonial racism, and the widespread xenophobic racism of Quebec society. Public Enemy came into my life in 1987 and gave me the strength, the knowledge, and the energy to keep fighting, and even to fight harder and harder. This group saved my life. It helped me understand my history, our history. It gave me the courage to resist, the words to do so. It brought me out of my isolation and joined a centuries-old resistance movement. At the time, I didn’t know my mother was Haitian, so my reference point was African Americans, whom I still consider my brothers and sisters today, in struggle, in heart, and in blood.

I remember listening to this music so loudly in my room, making my house shake, to bury my parents’ racism. It was war! My parents forbade me from listening to this “monkey” music, and I would turn the volume up to the max in my blasted ghetto, brandishing pictures of Nelson Mandela.
Unfortunately, today, I only have a Sony Bluetooth speaker, which doesn’t even shake the furniture it’s on. But in my heart and head, these words resonate like incessantly rumbling thunder.

Today, I dance to this triumphant music: I am proud, I own who I am, I live in the very neighborhood where I was beaten and called a nigger every day by other kids, and today, I fully take my place here. And I even showcase this former village, which is now a borough of Montreal, in my local agricultural business. I am a functioning, independent, victorious adult, proudly bizardian, proudly Québécoise, Haitian, and German. I have managed to overcome and rise above everything that held me back. Although I still have a lot of pain within me, scars that are still raw, when I dance, I am far above them, in the eternity of my atoms and the universe, which have no use for human vileness.

My only regret is not having been able to save my mother. I’ve been listening to Public Enemy for 38 years and I’ll listen to this music until I die. »

The psychological impact of racism is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers and practitioners in both the United States and Canada. Several studies link experiences of racial discrimination to depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation among young people of African descent (Jeslmas et al., 2022; Polos et al., 2022). A recent study by Jude Mary Cénat (2025) highlights the link between racial discrimination experienced by young people in the Canadian education system and their levels of anxiety. The researchers thus developed the theory of Complex Racial Trauma (CoRT), which posits that repeated and cumulative experiences of racial discrimination generate significant stress and tension, which can lead to the development of complex racial trauma.