This book is another account of how the Africentric Alternative School came to be, and an account of how policy, race and multicultural cities are enmeshed. There are several published public and academic accounts of how the school came to be. In fact, the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School was one of the most mediatised events in Canadian history. Mainstream media interviewed hundreds of people about the possibility of establishing the school. Online and print media reported on several community and school district meetings on whether or not the school should become. Numerous debates were televised about Black-focused schooling in general, and the emergence of the school in particular. International media produced a constant stream of moralising editorials about the possibility of the school. Comments in the blogosphere, supporting and opposing the school, were virtually impossible to count due to the sheer volume of thoughts about something not quite arrived.

A few published accounts of the school's becoming exist in academia – a book and journal article here, a graduate thesis there. At least two documentary movies were made on how the school came to be. Additionally, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) possessed reams of published material – organised and sanitised as the official record and available online as minutes – on how the school became. Accounts of the school's creation were informally discussed around dinner tables, demanded through megaphones on city streets, whispered in the hallways of the school district. These unpublished accounts, these anecdotes that reinforced that something was happening, would sometimes find their way into published accounts; but, more often than not, these unpublished accounts would evaporate like the morning mist above one of the great lakes adjoining the fourth largest school district in North America. Among all these accounts, this book is one more about how the school came to be, but it is a book that is interested in policy, racial biopolitics and the city specifically. It is this that sets it apart from other accounts.

There are several reasons for the numerous public accounts of the school's becoming. Some reasons are obvious; for instance, the fact that Toronto is a heavily mediatised city.