When most people look at me, they see a six-foot-one, lean and dark-skinned Black man with curly Black hair and light brown eyes. They make all kinds of assumptions. I'm presumed to be some kind of criminal simply because I am Black and male. I'm also presumed to be a potential threat to national and even global security because I come from a Muslim background. Oh, and I'm supposed to be an oppressor of women. Wow. People and their ideas, eh? The name is Washim Mohammed, and I'm a Black man of Somali descent living in the City of Calgary, province of Alberta. I grew up in poverty in Somalia, but God's mercy and my parents quick-thinking allowed us to start a new life in Western Canada. I love Canada, it's my home and I will defend it against anyone, man or woman, no matter their race, religion or nationality. Believe that. My family almost got killed by another clan of Somalis because of who we were, I feared my own people from an early age, and with good reason.
It's sad that no matter where you look, from Somalia to Nigeria, from Ethiopia to Jamaica, from Eritrea to Haiti, from Dominica to South Africa, in most Black nations, it's us killing our own people. From the Caribbean to Latin America, from continental Africa to the West Indies, Black men and Black women need to stop persecuting their own over questions of ethnicity, religion, politics and of course, the fight for territory and natural resources. When I moved to Canada, I embraced the new nation in which I found myself, but I never forgot where I came from. My parents, Saif and Khadija, made sure of it. My father worked as a cab driver and my mother cleaned houses while I was growing up in Calgary. Back in Somalia, dad was a university professor and mom was a nurse. They left their good jobs in Somalia because our nation was going through hell with the inter-clan wars and general strife that plagued us.
I have always been quite gifted academically, so when I graduated high school in 2004, I won myself an academic scholarship to the University of Calgary. I didn't get it because I was Black, or an immigrant. I won this national merit scholarship because of my brains, nothing more and nothing less. I studied business administration and got my bachelor's degree in 2008. By 2010, I had my MBA from the University of Calgary and felt ready to tackle the working world. I had a university degree, a clean record, and I spoke English and French fluently, having attended one of the few bilingual schools in the province of Alberta. Black men with college and university degrees are seen as upsetting the order of things both in America and Canada. If you're educated, healthy, have a clean record and you want to get a good job, White people will fear and hate you. They'll deny you at every turn. The one thing a racist White person fears the most is the educated Black man who knows who he is, where he came from and where he wants to go. They don't fear thugs, jocks, rappers and hustlers. They fear the Black college man, that's why they put so many hurdles in his path. I began looking for a job and eight months after graduation, I got one. I started working for the Canadian Revenue Agency. Thank God for all those accounting classes I took as electives back at the University of Calgary!
I was a Somali male with a Canadian university degree, and a good job. Statistically, I was beyond rare. I'm the kind of brother that most Somali sisters don't believe exists, hence why a lot of them are turning their eyes to Arab males and Black Muslim men from other nations. It saddens me that they're starting to abandon us, but what can I do? The first thing I did with my newfound good fortune was help my parents. For most of our lives in Canada, my parents and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a seedy neighborhood of metropolitan Calgary. As a new auditor with the Canadian Revenue Agency branch in downtown Calgary, I had a salary of sixty eight thousand dollars a year after taxes.
Since I was lucky enough to win scholarship after scholarship while in university, I didn't have any student loans to pay back. So I got my parents a nice place in one of Calgary's nicer neighborhood. My mother always dreamed of going back to school. Nursing is her passion, cleaning houses was something she did just to help our family. I knew how much going back into her old career meant to her. I paid for her to study nursing at Robertson College, a career institution with many locations throughout Western Canada. As for my dad, he assured me that he was doing okay. I still helped him buy a new car. Like most old-school Somali men, my dad is a proud guy and doesn't believe in asking for help. As a good son, it's up to me to help him. He'll never ask, and he shouldn't have to. Hey, I believe in taking care of my family, my friend. Don't believe all the stereotypes you hear about all those criminally inclined, woman-hating and hyper-violent Somali males. We're not all like that. There are many good men in the Somali community, and we are the ones you never hear about.
I loved my new job at the Canadian Revenue Agency, but it isn't always a smooth path. The Black man is the last hired and first fired, always. I was one of eight Black males working at entry-level positions in the company when I started. The highest-ranking Black person in the company was this Jamaican woman named Isabel Thompson, and this broad was mean as hell. She was a manager within the auditors division, my department. Everyone thought she was unpleasant, especially the other Black employees at the company. At an office party, I soon discovered why Isabel Thompson was so damn mean. She was married to this White guy named Mark something or other, and had a daughter by him. Good for her, I guess, but why the hate toward us brothers?
It's an open secret at the downtown Calgary branch of the Canadian Revenue Agency that Isabel Thompson displays a lot of hostility toward the other Black workers at the company, especially the men. It seems that a lot of Black women with White boyfriends/husbands have a strong antipathy toward Black men. Why is that? I'm a Black man and I don't get mad when I see a White man with a Black woman. It's none of my business, who a Black woman chooses to date, marry or sleep with. I mean, Isabel is Jamaican, she isn't one of my Somali sisters, hell, she isn't even Muslim. Why did she think I even noticed her very existence? The one person she hated the most at our office was the only non-Somali guy I've ever called 'my brother'. I'm referring of course to Jean-Michel Seraphin.
I met Jean-Michel Seraphin during my first week at the Canadian Revenue Agency. The big and tall, dark-skinned brother in the sharp suit was hard to miss. Jean was born in the City of Montreal, Quebec, to immigrant parents from the island of Haiti. He earned his bachelor's degree in business from the University of Montreal and later got himself a master's degree in accounting from McGill University. Even in redneck Alberta, McGill University is respected as the top school in all of Canada. Jean was good-looking, smart and definitely going places. He was married to this tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Caucasian lady named Madeline Tremblay, and they had two sons together, Joseph and James. The brother was doing good and everyone seemed to know it.