Via CBC Radio's Day 6: Four decades on, a book about B.C.'s centuries-old Black history is updated for the 21st century. Click or tap through to hear the interview this report is based on. Excerpt:
Crawford Kilian admits that the first edition of his book, Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, feels outdated.
"I cringe a little bit because I was quoting some pretty crude language verbatim in that text that I didn't need to," the Vancouver-based author and former educator told Day 6 host Brent Bambury. "It was archaic and beside the point."
In the new third edition, Kilian says "I worked very hard to make the language respectful to all concerned."
Go Do Some Great Thing chronicles the stories of B.C.'s Black pioneers, a group of migrants who left their homes in San Francisco and nearby communities in 1858, for the promise of Vancouver Island.
Fleeing legislated racism, the threat of slavery and dwindling prospects in California, the Black pioneers settled in what was then the colony of British Columbia.
Forty-two years since it first hit bookshelves, the book — which is considered a foundational text on B.C.'s Black history — has been re-edited and re-released complete with a foreword by Adam Rudder, a Black activist and instructor at the University of British Columbia. The crude language written in the first edition has now been changed or removed.
In his foreword, Rudder reckons with the language used in Kilian's original version. While he understands why some may be offended by the terms used more than a century ago, they didn't come as a shock to him.
"It was refreshing to have someone reveal this history in the form that it was actually in, and to just confront it and to challenge it," he said.
"To expect people to be different, or to somehow come up with language that's appropriate from today, is an unreasonable expectation, I think."
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