Participant ID: P08
Pseudonym: Marcus
Age: 38
Gender: Man
Occupation: Senior policy analyst, provincial government
Living situation: Lives with partner (woman, white) in a condo in downtown Vancouver
Relevant context: Black man born in Halifax to Jamaican parents; moved to Vancouver for work in 2019; one of very few Black professionals in his office
Interview date: 2025-11-14
Interview length: 49 minutes
Interviewer: R2
Location: Coffee shop, downtown Vancouver

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I: Thanks for meeting up, Marcus. Tell me a bit about yourself.

P: Yeah, no problem. So I'm 38, I'm a policy analyst with the province, I work on housing affordability files mostly. I've been in Vancouver six years now. My partner and I live downtown. I'm originally from Halifax. My parents came from Jamaica in the seventies. So I grew up in one of the small Black communities in Halifax — Africville is gone but there's still — there's still a community there. And then I came here for work and my Black community is, um, smaller. That's relevant to what you're asking about, I think.

I: When you hear the word loneliness, what comes to mind for you?

P: [pause] Being the only Black person in the room. Repeatedly. Day after day, year after year. And the small accumulation that does to you. That's loneliness for me, in this city. It's not — it's not the only kind of loneliness, but it's the one that's most specific to my life here.

I: Can you say more about that?

P: Yeah. So at work — I'm in a department of maybe eighty people. There are three Black staff. One of us is in my unit. So most days, in every meeting, I'm the only Black person. And it's not — most of the time it's not hostile, I want to be clear about that. People are friendly. But the kind of cultural shorthand you have with people who share your background — the references, the jokes, the way you don't have to explain yourself — that doesn't happen in my work life. Ever. So I'm code-switching for ten hours a day. And then I come home and I'm tired in a way that's hard to explain to my partner, because she doesn't have to do it.

I: How does it feel in your body?

P: It's a tightness. Like, I hold myself differently in public spaces than I do at home with my parents in Halifax or with my brother. There's a way of being that I can only be in certain rooms. The rest of the time I'm performing a version of myself that is more — I don't know — more measured, more careful, more disarming. By the end of the day my jaw is sore from how I've been holding it. I've started grinding my teeth at night. I think it's connected.

I: Is this different from being alone?

P: Very different. I'm rarely alone. I have a partner who I love, I have colleagues, I have my partner's family who are wonderful, my partner's friends are great. I have lots of relationships. But I'm — culturally — there's a particular kind of absence in my daily life that I don't think people who aren't racial minorities really understand. People who look like me, who grew up like me. They're not here in any concentration. So I'm in a relational landscape that's full but lacking a specific texture.

I: Tell me about a recent time you felt lonely.

P: Last month. There was a — I won't get into the details, but there was an incident at work where a colleague said something pretty messed up about a policy file involving Indigenous and Black communities. It was — it was bad. And I had to decide in the moment whether to challenge it, document it, escalate it, or let it go. And I was the only Black person in the room. And I called my brother that night and we talked for an hour. He's also a Black professional, he works in finance in Toronto. And just being able to say to him "this happened today" and have him just go "mhm, yeah, I had a version of that this week too" — that helped me. But the loneliness was that I had to phone my brother in another city to find someone who got it. There was nobody in my building, my neighbourhood, my actual physical life who could.

I: Have you found things that help?

P: A few. So I joined the Black Professionals Network here a couple years ago. We meet monthly. It is — it has saved me. It's just a couple of hours where I'm not the only one. I also go back to Halifax twice a year minimum and that's not negotiable. My partner knows that's part of the deal. And I — I read. A lot. I've gotten into Black thinkers, Caribbean thinkers, writers I didn't have time for in school. That has felt like community of a kind, even though it's a one-way community.

I: Anything that didn't work?

P: Trying to find a Black church here. There isn't really one near me. I grew up in the church in Halifax. The church was where Black people were in concentration. Here, the closest thing I found felt off — wrong music, wrong rhythm, wrong everything. I appreciated the effort but it wasn't home. I stopped going.

I: Have you talked to a therapist?

P: Yes. Actually, finding a Black therapist in Vancouver was — that was a project. There are like five of us trying to see the same three people. But I have one now. She's Black, she's from Toronto originally, she gets it. I see her once a month. The fact that I don't have to explain race to her every session, the fact that I can just talk about whatever the issue is and the racial context is just understood — that's, you know. That's the value.

I: What is your loneliness telling you?

P: That I made a choice when I took this job that has costs I'm still calculating. The salary is good. The work is meaningful. My partner and I built a life here. But I think every Black person who leaves a Black community for a less-Black place is making a trade, and the trade is real. I don't know if I would tell my younger self not to take this job. But I want to be honest that the cost is real.

I: Do you think of yourself as a lonely person?

P: I would not have used the word before this conversation. I think of myself as a person with a particular structural loneliness that comes from where I am located in Canadian society. But I have a rich life. I'm not unhappy. The loneliness is — it's a current under the surface. Not the whole river.

I: Anything that helped that surprised you?

P: My downstairs neighbour. He's Senegalese, immigrated in the nineties. We bump into each other in the lobby. We've started having coffees occasionally. He's like sixty, we have nothing else in common, but the racial recognition between us — he sees me, I see him — is its own thing. I look forward to running into him in a way I don't with my actual friends sometimes.

I: If you could change one thing about how society handles loneliness?

P: I think racial loneliness should be in the public conversation. We talk about loneliness as a public health crisis but the way it's described, it's deracialised. It's "old people are lonely" or "young people are lonely". The specific loneliness of being a minority in a majority space — that's not in the discourse. And it should be. Because the solutions are different. You can't fix racial loneliness with a community centre and a knitting club. You need actual concentrations of community.

I: Anything I haven't asked about?

P: My partner. Just — I want to say, my partner has been incredibly thoughtful about this. She has done her own work to understand what she can't fully understand. And that helps. A partner who is not from your community but who takes the work seriously — that goes a long way. So I want to credit her. It doesn't fix the structural thing but it makes the daily thing easier.
