By Charles Agard

For Black and Indo Caribbean youth in Canada, questions of belonging increasingly intersect with education, employment and the search for meaningful representation. Research and personal accounts suggest that while young people have strong ambitions, the path toward achieving them can be complicated by racial barriers, limited representation and uncertainty over identity.

For Black youth, education remains a major area of concern. Statistics Canada reports that 94 per cent of Black youth aspire to obtain a university degree or higher, compared with 82 per cent of non Black youth. Yet only 60 per cent believe they can achieve that goal, compared with 79 per cent of their non Black peers. Researchers say this gap between ambition and expectations reflects the effects of stereotypes and limited representation.

The experience can begin inside classrooms. Research on Black youth in Waterloo Region found concerns about anti Black racism, culturally irrelevant curricula and a shortage of Black teachers. At a 2024 conference for more than 200 Black high school students, Grade 11 student Tara described the importance of seeing people who shared her background pursuing higher education.

“Seeing Black people here today, talking about their post secondary journeys and how non linear they were, makes me feel less pressured to be linear in my journey,” Tara said. “It makes me feel less isolated.”

Employment presents another hurdle. Statistics Canada reported that 19.8 per cent of Black youth aged 20 to 29 were not in employment, education or training during the 2023/2024 academic year, compared with 12.8 per cent of non racialized, non Indigenous youth. The Black youth rate had risen 3.9 percentage points from the previous academic year.

For Indo Caribbean youth, identity can involve negotiating several cultural worlds at once. Shalana Deonarain, a University of Toronto alumna who grew up in Ajax, recalled feeling disconnected from her Indo Caribbean heritage while attending school in a predominantly white community.

“I don’t know what it means to be Caribbean,” Deonarain recalled. She said she experienced an “identity crisis” because she identified with Indian culture while struggling to see people who looked like her.

Academic research describes Indo Caribbean identity as fluid, shaped by family, community and the surrounding social environment.

Representation also remains central to political and public life. Carleton University research identified more than 380 Black Canadians who had run for or served in elected office over two decades, while noting that their contributions have often been overlooked.

For young Canadians, greater representation is therefore about more than visibility. It can influence whether education and careers seem attainable and whether young people feel their identities belong in the institutions shaping their futures.

#BlackYouth #IndoCaribbean #CaribbeanYouth #BlackCanadians #IndoCaribbeanYouth #RepresentationMatters #BlackEducation #CaribbeanCanadians #YouthVoices #BlackExcellence #Canada