Category: Anti-Black racism

October 2026: Black is a modifier that changes everything

This month (and next month) blogs will be hosted by Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University and Lead, Black Health Education Collaborative 

OmiSoore Dryden

This blog post grew from an invitation from Dr. Delia Douglas to speak about my book, Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation, in February 2026. I thank Dr. Douglas for the invitation, the conversation, and the thoughtful prompts that encouraged me to return to some of the questions that have shaped this work.

Blood-donation systems do not simply identify pre-existing risk. They produce risk through practices of classification shaped by colonialism, racial science, white supremacy and sexual governance. Beginning from Black Studies and BlaQueer thought changes what can be known about donor eligibility, safety, science and belonging.

I have been thinking and writing about blood donation for more than twenty-five years, and one of the things this work has taught me is that blood is never only blood. Blood is biological; it circulates through our bodies and sustains life. But blood is also language. We speak of bloodlines, blood relatives, blood ties, bad blood, and pure blood because blood has long been made to tell us something about ancestry, kinship, inheritance, race, nation, purity, contamination and belonging.

Those meanings are not incidental to the history of blood donation. They were shaped through colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, racial science, medicine, and the making of white nations. Colonialism produced race as part of an ordering of humanity that made conquest, enslavement, dispossession and extraction governable. The trans-Atlantic slave trade transformed political, economic, social, scientific and cultural life across the globe, including law, medicine, sexuality, kinship, citizenship and ideas about what it meant to be human. Anti-Blackness was produced through this colonial ordering rather than existing as a separate structure alongside it.

This is the history I carry into my analysis of blood donation.

Black is a modifier that changes everything.

Blood, Colonialism, And the Making of Risk

Long before a needle enters a donor’s arm, the blood system has already established which information about a person will matter. Donor questionnaires ask about sexual practices, travel, residence, medical histories and other experiences deemed relevant to blood safety. The significance of these questions lies not only in what they ask, but in the prior decisions that make certain behaviours, geographies and histories legible as risk.

The questionnaire does not discover risk. It claims to identify risk while participating in its production. Through the relationships it establishes among people, sexuality, behaviour, geography and disease, it produces the terms through which one person can be recognized as a safe donor while another person’s blood is rendered suspect.

The questionnaire does not discover risk. It participates in producing the terms through which risk becomes knowable.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s account of race as a “metalanguage” is useful here because race does more than describe populations; it organizes meaning (Higginbotham, 1992). It shapes how people, behaviours, places and differences become intelligible. Africa appearing within histories of donor screening therefore cannot be treated as neutral geography. The colonial production of Africa as primitive, diseased, sexually excessive and dangerous precedes contemporary epidemiological categories. When Africa enters donor screening through HIV, malaria, travel or residence, those questions enter a much longer history in which Africa and Blackness have been made especially available to narratives of disease and danger.

Avery Gordon’s description of “endings that are not over” helps explain why these histories remain present even when policies change (Gordon, 1997). A question can disappear from a questionnaire. A deferral can appear to be shortened. An identity-based restriction can appear to be replaced by behavioural screening. Such changes may alter who is formally eligible to donate without dismantling the assumptions and classificatory logics through which particular people, sexualities and geographies were constituted as risk in the first place.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade depended upon the production of supposed truths about Black people and Black people’s bodies. Black people were represented as naturally suited to enslavement and forced labour, less susceptible to pain, sexually excessive, biologically different and outside the boundaries of full humanity. Medicine and science helped produce and authorize these claims. Their afterlives remain visible whenever institutions claim particular authority to tell the truth about Black people through our bodies while Black people have far less authority over the questions being asked, the categories being used, the meaning assigned to evidence and the decisions that follow.

History is therefore not background to the blood system. It is present in the categories through which people are made knowable.

Black Changes The Story Of Progress

Mari Matsuda’s injunction to “ask the other question” has been an important methodological practice for me (Matsuda, 1991). It requires us to examine how relations of power are constituted through one another, including those that disappear when one form of oppression is treated as self-contained. When I encounter discourses of homophobia, I begin from the understanding that they are already structured through white supremacy, racial science and the colonial production of race. The question is how those histories organize what homophobia means, who is made legible through it and whose experiences come to stand for the injury.

That framing changes the familiar history of blood-donation activism.

Restrictions affecting gay and bisexual men generated important activism and policy change. Yet “gay men” has never been a racially neutral category. Allan Bérubé’s question about how gay stays white and what kind of white it stays remains incisive because whiteness is repeatedly positioned as the normative centre of political categories presented as universal (Bérubé, 2001). When blood-donation discrimination is narrated simply as something that happened to gay men, white gay men become the representative subjects of the injustice, while Black gay and bisexual men are displaced from the centre of the story.

Black gay and bisexual men have never entered the blood system through sexuality alone. Blackness carries histories of colonial medicine, racial science, HIV/AIDS, Africa, malaria, infectious-disease surveillance, migration and the sexualization of Black people. Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination asks us to understand such relations of power as interlocking rather than additive (Collins, 1990). The colonial production of anti-Blackness was always gendered and sexualized; heteropatriarchy and homophobia are constituted through racial orders as well.

This is why I use anti-Black homophobia. I draw here on Himani Bannerji’s formulation of “racist sexism,” developed in conversation with Pratibha Parmar’s “sexist racism,” to name relations of power that are mutually constituted rather than additive (Bannerji, 1995, p. 128). In the same way, anti-Black homophobia names what homophobia becomes when its subject is Black and how anti-Blackness itself is constituted through sexuality, gender, reproduction, and ideas about the human. Black does not simply describe the person experiencing homophobia. Black modifies the homophobia itself.

That also changes how I understand progress. Experiencing homophobia does not place white gay people outside the racial order, nor does it prevent gay politics from reproducing anti-Blackness. Cathy Cohen reminds us that shared experiences of marginalization do not erase differences in power and that identity-based political formations are not inherently solidaristic or transformative (Cohen, 1997). A movement can successfully challenge one form of exclusion while leaving the racial organization of its own politics largely intact.

This is why declarations of progress require scrutiny. Whose exclusion defined the problem? Whose experience became politically legible? Whose evidence carried authority? Whose inclusion came to signify that the injustice had been addressed? Progress for some can coexist with the continued displacement of Black queer people from the story.

Being newly admitted into an institution tells us very little about transformation if the institution retains the power to determine the terms on which belonging is granted.

To be continued…

Works cited

Bannerji, Himani. “In the Matter of ‘X’: Building ‘Race’ into Sexual Harassment.” Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism, Women’s Press, 1995, pp. 121-158.

Bérubé, Allan. “How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays.” The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, Duke UP, 2001, pp. 234-265.

Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437-465.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Dryden, OmiSoore H. Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation. Fernwood Publishing, 2024.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 1992, pp. 251-274.

Matsuda, Mari J. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, July 1991, pp. 1183-1192.

February 2026: Freedom dreams: A meditation on Black life and loss, and ‘endings that are not over’

Delia

“In the diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.”

Dionne Brand, 2001, A map to the door of no return, p. 29.

We inherit the legacies of that which has come before.

My last name, Douglas, is Scottish.

It is the name of a plantation owner.

As a descendant of the enslaved, I am part of the Black diaspora that is the result of the trans-Atlantic Slave trade that kidnapped, exiled, and relocated peoples of African descent to stolen Indigenous lands across the Americas.

I am here because of my ancestors’ fierceness, courage, determination, and sacrifices.

I strive to honour their rebellious lives and embody their wildest dreams.

In thinking about the link between past injustices and present violences and inequities, I am thinking about how history is alive, and that forgetting, and remembering, are ongoing racial gender sexual projects.

In thinking through the relationship between our racial past and present, I have found sociologist Avery Gordon’s notion of “haunting,” very helpful. Gordon uses the term to establish a link to the “living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with, the endings that are not over” (p. 195). 

Black life in the diaspora is inextricably linked to the ever-evolving reverberations of Atlantic chattel enslavement, and its inimitable scale of amassing persons, and the inordinate violence and death involved to generate wealth (Hartman).

This month I have been reflecting on our inheritance in the context of a past that is in fact not past, to consider what remains in an era that Saidiya Hartman has brilliantly described as the “afterlife of slavery.”

According to Hartman, the afterlife of slavery refers to the fact that “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (p. 6).

Black folx carry the imprint of the commodity – the difficulty of breath, gratuitous violence, denial of our personhood, and lack of bodily autonomy (including but not limited to autonomy from state violence, and autonomy regarding sexuality, gender identity, and expression).

In particular, the presence of people of African descent throughout the Americas what Bonita Lawrence and Zeinab Amadahy describe as “stolen people on stolen land” (p. 125).

For peoples of African descent, a sense of belonging remains a contested and ongoing site of struggle.

Returning to Dionne Brand, we remain affected by the unrelenting threat of captivity via the myriad restraints and constraints that seek to confine and/or exclude us from society.

In addition to mortality, there is the loss of jobs, of opportunity, of safety and stability, of home, of homelands, of misrecognition, the denial of dignity, of our humanness.

All told, the losses are innumerable and ever present, existing along a scale that cannot be easily conveyed owing to the various conditions and identities that structure the diverse experiences of Black folx.

Given our distinct relationship to property and its consequences, we are summoned to different things, and the exigency is uneven.

Alongside inconceivable registers of loss and grief and the most recent iteration of the movement for Black lives…

What remains is love, hope, freedom dreams, and refusal.

Hope and love underwrite our determined efforts, to imagine, dream, and build a world that “might be otherwise.”

We are because of our ancestors, known and unknown.

We have never stopped resisting.

We have never accepted our abjection.

In the spaces through which we travel, we continue to ‘make ourselves known’ (Fanon).

We live

We love

            We dance

                        We laugh

We refuse

We rise….

Resources

Amadahy, Zeinab, & Lawrence, Bonita. (2009). Indigenous peoples and Black people in Canada: Settlers or allies? In A. Kempf (Ed.), Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada (pp. 105-136.). New York: Springer.

Brand, Dionne (2001). A map to the door of no return. Toronto, ON: Doubleday Canada.

Fanon, Franz. (1967). Black skin, white masks. (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.

Gordon, Avery (1998). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hartman, Saidiya V. (2007). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

May 2025: The Universe is on the Side of Justice: Remaining Steadfast in our Commitments

Marcia

This time five years ago was filled with pain. We met this pain with commitments to work in solidarity in the pursuit of justice. As we watch what is happening south of the border and across Canada it’s important that the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences community know this: we remain steadfast in our commitments to racial justice, social justice and human rights. I have a firm belief in Martin Luther King Junior’s teaching that “the universe is on the side of justice.” Progress is not linear or always forward moving. We are in a time where the context is changing dramatically. Our education and strategies may need to change too, but our end goal remains the same. In our spaces, in the services we provide and in the health professionals and researchers we train we fully respect the human rights of each individual and community we serve. We are not done our work until each person has achieved the equal opportunity to the highest attainable standard of health, and there is equality of opportunity, access and participation in the Faculty and broader health care workforce.

Delia

May 25 of this month will mark 5 years since the murder of Mr. George Floyd.

Following Mr. Floyd’s death, tens of thousands marched across the United States, in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and inspired global protests against police brutality, anti-Black racism, and racial injustice. Across Canada people organized and gathered to stand in solidarity with George Floyd’s family and the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing attention to racialized police violence, systemic racism, and inequality. In Winnipeg, thousands attended the Justice 4 Black Lives rally and called for justice for Black people and an end to state violence and racial injustice. These demonstrations represented a stand against racial terror and a rejection of the status quo. The demonstrations, led by Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority folx were an affirmation of our humanness, and our commitment to social justice and anti-racism.

That year we also bore witness to the uncovering of the remains of Indigenous children at former Residential School sites. We witnessed a number of fatal encounters involving police and Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority peoples, as well as a rise in antisemitism through the targeting of synagogues, Jewish cultural centres, and schools. There was also an increase in an increase in Islamophobia by the targeting of mosques, the deliberate killing of members of the Afzaal family, in London, Ontario, and acts of violence directed at Black hijabi Muslim women in Alberta and Manitoba.

In 2020 many institutions, including Canadian universities, made stated commitments to addressing anti-Black racism in particular, and systemic racism(s) more broadly.

Unsurprisingly over the same period the pushback and resistance to anti-racism, DEI/EAP, critical race theory, and social justice has risen across North America.

The volume and pace of this opposition has increased exponentially in Canada in concert with decisions and actions south of the border.

Consider the following:

At the start of the year the University of Alberta has moved away from DEI to a framework titled access, community, and belonging.

McGill University is closing its DEI office in the Faculty of Medicine, replacing its 3 racially marginalized staff with a Vice Dean of Education and Community Engagement, with this position being held by a white woman.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers recently issued a warning to Canadian academics, advising them against travel to the US

Canadian researchers who receive funding from US government sources are being questioned about the nature of their work in the event that it deemed contrary to the government’s stance on the climate, gender, and racism. Correspondingly Canadian academics are being advised to reconsider their plans, as they may not be granted entry, or they could be detained at the border, owing to their areas of expertise and interest.

The struggle is real.

We are being challenged on multiple fronts at once.

Despite this, and even because of this, we remain committed to disrupting and dismantling all forms of racism(s), and systemic inequities.

We cannot eradicate racial inequality and injustice unless we recognize the interconnectedness of systems of domination and challenge the divisiveness of hierarchies of oppression.

As Ijeoma Oluo (2018) eloquently states,

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself, and it’s the only way forward.” So you want to talk about race.

We hope that you will continue with us in working towards more just futures.

A Reminder of Anti-Racism Resources Available

Rady specific materials

The anti-racism and social justice toolkit (available on the intranet): some of its contents include, an anti-racism strategy template, anti-racism and social justice syllabus statement, updated anti-racism and EAP indicators for performance conversation reviews.

Modules

Giga Mino Manawenimaag Anishinaabeg – “We will take good care of the people”- is an innovative training program designed to advance Indigenous Cultural Safety in health care. Organized through the Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing, the program consists of Ten online lessons.

Visit the “We will take good care of the people” webpage.

Primary contact: culturalsafety@umanitoba.ca

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba (CPSM) recently approved the Standard of Practice – Practicing Medicine to Eliminate Anti-Indigenous Racism.

In addition, the Council passed a motion regarding mandatory education for all registrants with the College. The Indigenous Cultural Safety Program is one of the four that has been identified as part of the mandatory education by CPSM.

Foundations of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism Module – this module is both a standalone and part of the Indigenous Cultural Safety Program (available through UM Learn).

The Black Health Primer is is an 8 module online, self-paced, and asynchronous course, designed for learners from across health disciplines, professions, organizations and communities. The Primer describes the historical context of racial oppression, explains how anti-Black racism influences the social determinants of health, and acts as a barrier to health equity. Participants will gain knowledge and promote dialogue about anti-Black racism and Black health.

This 1-credit-per-hour Self Learning program has been certified by the College Family Physicians of Canada for up to 6.5 Mainpro+® credits.

View more information about the Primer.

If you are a member of the Rady Faculty and are interested in registering, please contact me directly.

Resources

October 2024: Reflections on the CMA Apology to Indigenous Peoples

Marcia

On September 18, 2024 I was on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Xwsepsum Nations to stand with my Indigenous physician colleagues (who are more rightly called my relatives) as the Canadian Medical Association delivered its apology to Indigenous Peoples for the role of the medical profession and the organization itself in systemic racism in health care.

As a Cree-Anishinaabe woman who has experienced significant racism throughout my medical education and career as well as in receiving health care for myself and my family, my reactions are complicated and layered.

I honour the labour of my Indigenous physician colleagues, the Indigenous community members and Knowledge Keepers who advocated for and guided the CMA on this work. None of my reactions diminish the gratitude and respect I have for them.

I think of my friends and colleagues who have experienced harms from the medical profession rooted in anti-Black racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ethnoreligious discrimination and other intersecting systems of oppression who may be wondering when their apology will come. I see you and honour your right to apologies, reparations and more just futures.

September 18th was not the first time I stood with my Indigenous physician family to witness such a collective apology. In June 2008 we were on the beautiful island of Kauai for a gathering of the Pacific Region Indigenous Doctors Congress. With our relatives from Hawaii, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Taiwan, and from across Turtle Island we watched as then Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for trying to “kill the Indian in the child.” We cried, and along with many others hoped that this was a signal that a new day had arrived. That new day remains a long time coming. Reactions from other Canadians ranged from complete ignorance, to shared humility and a desire to do better, to resistance and ongoing residential school denialism. The progress on reparations and reconciliation has not been linear or consistently forward moving.

I travelled to Victoria so that I could again stand with my Indigenous physician family as we witnessed this collective apology. The truth is I have experienced a lot of hurt from anti-Indigenous racism in my different workplaces since the 2008 apology, so I listened to this one with a little more doubt about the power of a collective apology. I know now that I/ we cannot expect quick or consistent change.

That day in our conversations and in an interview, my very wise colleague Dr. Nel Wieman said that it’s not the words spoken that day that mattered, it’s the actions that come afterwards. In the days following the apology I was reading the book This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley. I happened to be on Chapter 11, entitled “Repair” which is all about apologies. She writes:

“Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone- which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed- will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled.”

So to the Indigenous faculty, staff and students one of the things I want to say to you is that it is okay to wait and see what happens next before deciding how you feel about this apology. There’s no rush to accept it or to believe that it means things will be truly different. We have done and are doing our share of the work. We can hold back and see how the non-Indigenous individuals (recognizing that within what we might term “non-Indigenous” are folks with a range of privileges and/ or harms they experience themselves due to white supremacy and the cis-heteropatriarchy) around us personalize the collective apology. We can wait to see if those who have personally harmed us make their own apologies. We can hold off on taking more steps together until we see evidence of unlearning and new learning. We can let trust be earned or be re-established by witnessing our non-Indigenous peers take on the work of intervening and disrupting acts of white supremacy and Indigenous-specific racism.

On the day of the apology one of the Elders who spoke talked about how a bridge has to be built from both sides and meet in the middle. The Elder acknowledged that we as Indigenous people have built our side of the bridge and it’s up to non-Indigenous people to build their side and meet us in the middle. Some of the communities we work with in consensual solidarity have led the way in this work of building bridges towards us. This solidarity work involves navigating complex histories and realities of harm, marginalization and exclusion while avoiding competition or undermining these complex histories and realities.

In addition to this solidarity work, there are people and departments in our Faculty who have committed to and started this bridge building work. These people are leading examples of what it means and what it takes to make an apology more than words. I am really grateful for these people, because they are part of why I have hope that in our Faculty we have actually started a meaningful reconciliation journey and that we are creating a different future. These are people I trust to walk alongside. I wonder what conversations they are having with their peers about this CMA apology and how they might help guide, encourage, and hold folks accountable to it as we move forward.

Note: Thank you to Dr. Delia Douglas for providing critical feedback and insights in thinking through the many different experiences people relate to this apology from and how we continue to work in solidarity.

Resources

Canadian Medical Association’s apology to Indigenous Peoples

September 2024: Working towards more just futures

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have”

(James Baldwin, 1972, p. 149). No name in the street. New York: The Dial Press.

Marcia

Welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year. I’m really proud of the work across Indigenous health, social justice and anti-racism, and the ongoing efforts to contribute to more culturally safe and racially just outcomes. Dr. Douglas continues to provide leadership in developing new educational initiatives to enhance the racial literacy of the Rady community.

Working with the Offices of Equity, Access and Participation, and Community Engagement and Social Accountability, the new dialogue series will align with the Faculty strategic priority of reciprocal  community engagement and build from passive receipt of knowledge to active dialogue. These offices provide excellent educational resources to our community, but it is up to each of us to apply that knowledge in our work and learning environments.

This year I encourage you to reflect regularly on how you can take the new things you learn, and apply this new knowledge in meaningful ways that result in more culturally safe and anti-racist environments for our increasingly diverse community. It is through your individual and collective actions that positive change will happen.

Delia

September greetings! A new academic year is upon us and as part of our commitment in working towards more just futures we will be launching a number of initiatives that we want to tell you about.

Here Come the Modules:

Foundations of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism

This online module is one mechanism that builds on the Disruption of All Forms of Racism Policy by providing people with a resource to cultivate their racial literacy.

I understand that people come to this material from different vantage points. This module is an opportunity to expand our understanding of the meaning and significance of race and the persistence of racism because to combat racism in its various forms, we must first understand it.

You cannot get to anti-racism without reckoning with racism, so this course is an opportunity for folx to enhance their racial literacy by providing them with a vocabulary for identifying and speaking to each other across our differences in the service of social justice.

Some of the topics covered include:

  • Why race matters
  • What is race?
  • White matters: The social construction of whiteness
  • Racisms and their impact
  • What is racism?
  • Impacts of racism
  • Continuing your journey: Next steps

The Black Health Primer

The Black Health Primer officially launched on March 21, 2024, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The Primer is an 8 module online, self-paced, and asynchronous course, comprised of quizzes, case studies, reflections, and multimedia. Designed for learners from across health disciplines, professions, organizations and communities, the Primer was created in response to gaps in education and training on Black health and anti-Black racism in medicine and public health in Canada.

The Primer describes the historical context of racial oppression, explains how anti-Black racism influences the social determinants of health, and acts as a barrier to health equity. Participants will gain knowledge about anti-Black racism and Black health and this knowledge will improve the racial literacy of health care practitioners. This will enrich the health of Black communities, as well as the health of all patients. Enhanced racial literacy is imperative, as it is integral to the delivery of anti-racist care.

Dialogues of Disruption

The third initiative is a collaborative effort by all the offices that fall under the portfolio of Dr. Marcia Anderson, Vice Dean of Indigenous Health, Social Justice and Anti-Racism. This includes the Offices of Anti-Racism, Equity, Access and Participation, and Community Engagement and Social Accountability. 

In the upcoming academic year, we will be hosting a series of events in the upcoming academic year under the title: Dialogues of disruption: An invitation to work towards more just futures.

These monthly events will address a variety of themes that correspond to our areas of work, some of which include disability justice; connections, coalitions and false equivalencies: the indivisible connections between racial, gender, and lgbtqia+ justice; and anti-racism and engagement with newcomer, refugee and immigrant communities.

We wanted to draw attention to under-served and under-represented communities, along with local organizations, exploring areas of silence, marginalization, and invisibility by providing a meeting ground to collaborate in our work towards more just futures. In this spirit we will be inviting members from some of these communities to provide their indispensable input about the needs and priorities in their communities so that we may engage with them in ways that are appropriate and meaningful. It is our hope that disrupting dialogues will offer guidance in the journey of un-learning and learning, while encouraging and inspiring change and possibility.

The first event will be an introduction to each of the Offices mentioned above and an opportunity to speak to our distinct and shared work with a Q & A at the end.

Dialogues of Disruption: Upcoming Event

This event will be held on September 24, 12 to 1:00 pm. It will be a hybrid event taking place in Basic Medical Sciences Theatre-B and online. For more information or to register, visit our event page.

We all have a role to play. We look forward to working towards more just futures with you.

Resources

Black Health Education Collaborative: bhec.ca

Knowledge One Interview Foundations of race, racism, and anti-racism: https://knowledgeone.ca/interview-foundations-of-race-racism-and-anti-racism-online-course/

June 2024: Bodies in motion, bodies at play: What’s race got to do with it?

“Everyone I see playing basketball is black. Everyone playing basketball must be black. If I am not black, I can’t play basketball; if you are black, you must be a basketball player”

Patricia J. Williams, 1997, p. 51. (Seeing a Color Blind Future. New York, NY: Noonday Press).

Marcia

I love to watch the Olympics, and I’m looking forward to the Summer Games this year. As I watch events this year, I’ll be holding questions from the blog Dr. Douglas has written below. Sport- like in some arenas of medicine- has some deeply engrained biologic assumptions about race. I wonder how these seep into my consciousness when I think about who is on the podium at what events, what this means about my assumptions about muscle mass and how this might infiltrate my thinking then when I’m in clinical spaces. This year, and with the very helpful critical reflections below, I’ll be challenging myself to see where I still carry assumptions about “natural ability” and push myself to see the hard work, persistence, and discipline of the athletes.  I’ll ask myself the challenging questions about how income and opportunity gaps that do occur by race are impacting who we see represented in what events, in the results, and in the media coverage.

Delia

Continuing the conversation about sport matters, this month’s blog takes up the question of race, sex, gender, and embodiment….

The WNBA (Coming to Toronto in 2026!), NBA, PWHL, NHL, soccer, tennis, pickleball, track and field… oh yeah, and golf …

Although sport is a key part of North American culture, we tend to underestimate its cultural and political significance: it is a place where different histories, traditions, and myths meet and intersect, creating cultural meanings and identities which travel across different mediums, national borders and commercial markets. It is a place where major cultural and political debates about identity, community and politics are staged and performed.

Sport is a visual and a visible field. It is a place where social dramas play out between different groups – historically and in the present.  Recall Jesse Owen’s victories at the Berlin Olympics, Althea Gibson breaking the colour bar at Wimbledon, Jackie Robinson’s trailblazing in MLB, Taffy Abel and Willie O’Ree’s groundbreaking presence in the NHL, Evonne Goolagong’s victory at the French Open, Cathy Freeman’s run to gold at the Sydney Olympic Games, and South Carolina vs Iowa in the NCAA women’s basketball final (I gotta give Coach Staley and co their flowers).

Because sport (and physical activity) are bodily practices, they enable the continued observation and discussion of sex, gender identity and expression, and racial difference in analyses of performance. In this context, the preponderance of certain groups in particular physical activities, coupled with their absence in others, has been readily interpreted as evidence of the natural differences in the ability and potential of different social groups. These patterns of participation are significant precisely because their visibility/visual logic conveys power and privilege; over time what we see becomes what we recognize and believe. potent cultural narratives about different groups are produced and normalized. In turn, because we have been socialized to be unaware of the ways in which power and privilege work in these settings, customary patterns of perception regarding sex, gender, racial, and sexual differences are perpetuated.

Sport studies scholars CL Cole and Susan Birrell explore how sport is a difference and power producing system” (1990, p. 18): it “works to differentiate winners from losers, the men from the boys, and the men from the women” (p. 18). I would add that sport also works to differentiate different racialized, engendered (gender identity and expression) and embodied groups. Simply put sport constructs and normalizes a binary logic of separation – this either/or framing does not allow for nuance, diversity, or complexity.

Think of it like this – putting a basketball in a hoop and explosive speed are actions that are seen, rather than interpreted. This is one of the key elements of the power of sport; namely, it is an area of life that seems to exist in the realm of the natural and is therefore not seen as requiring interpretation (Willis, 1982).

However, things are not so simple. We are socialized to be unaware of how the “seeing” of race and other social differences are in fact an interpretation rather than an objective account of what is ‘there.’ For example, the hypervisibility of some groups and the exclusion of others tends to bolster prevailing beliefs about racial difference that rely on biology to explain performance and participation rates.

For example, the fact that the times for the men’s 100 metres, the distance thrown for the shot put, etc. are different from those for women have been used as a way of reinforcing prevailing gender ideologies about a clear binary, one that confirms the so-called superiority of “men” over “women” (Willis, 1982). In the same way the success of Black athletes in basketball and sprint events, reinforces longstanding beliefs about the presumed natural athleticism of Black athletes. FYI – in the 1970s and 80s the sprint events were dominated by athletes from central and eastern Europe; in the 1960s 20% of the NBA consisted of Black players, currently over 70%, and the NHL is 97% white). Correspondingly, this presumed athletic superiority is believed to indicate bodily prowess over powers of the mind.

But ask yourself this: why isn’t the visibility and success of white Europeans in winter sports not read as evidence of innate athletic superiority and the absence of intellectual ability, but instead as confirmation of discipline and mental application? This typical “reading” of difference in athletic performance between different groups illustrates how the meaning and import of athletic performance and sporting events hold a cultural and political significance that extends well beyond the fields of play.

Sport is a complex and contradictory space, for it is a place where the presence and success of 1 or 2 Black, Indigenous, or racialized minority athletes is seen as evidence of equality – or of the absence of racism – rather than exceptions to systemic racial exclusion and racial tension.

Sport is a crucial locus of social justice struggles. It not only teaches us to “see” difference, sport teaches us to regard some differences as more important than others, amplifies them, and then uses them to support beliefs about sex, race, and gender inferiority and superiority – beliefs which uphold social inequality (Willis, 1982).

We will be going on summer hiatus: the blog will return in September.

Resources

Birrell, S., & Cole, CL. (1990).Double fault: Renee Richards, and the construction and naturalization of difference, Sociology of Sport Journal, 7(1), 1-21.

Douglas, D. D. (2018). Disqualified! Serena Williams and Brittney Griner: Black female athletes and the politics of the im/possible. In K. Farquharson, K. Pillay, P. Essed, and E. White (Eds.), Relating worlds, of racism: Dehumanization, belonging and the normativity of whiteness (pp. 329-355). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hartmann, D. (2002). Sport as Contested Terrain. In D. T. Goldberg & J. Solomos (Eds.), A companion to race and ethnic studies (pp. 405-415). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

King, C.R. (2007). Staging the Winter white Olympics: Or, why sport matters to white power. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31(1), 89-94.

Willis, P. (1982). Women in sport in ideology. In J. Hargreaves (Ed.), Sport, culture and ideology (pp. 117-135). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

February 2024: Black life matters

“Anti-blackness in Canada often goes unspoken. When acknowledged, it is assumed to exist, perhaps, but in another time (centuries ago), or in another place (the United States)” (Robyn Maynard, 2017, p. 3.) Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present.

Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing.

Marcia

As Black History Month starts, I’m reflecting on what I was taught about Canada’s history with enslavement in school: that we were the utopian endpoint of the Underground Railroad. It wasn’t until much later in life that my unlearning and relearning happened, often at the expense of the labour of Black friends and scholars like Drs. Delia Douglas, Onye Nnorom, and OmiSoore Dryden. Dr. Douglas is the Director of the Office of Anti-Racism, and Drs. Nnorom and Dryden visited our faculty in 2022, providing education on Anti-Black racism, including the social and physiological health impacts of injustice.

I think about the weight of this labour as Black History Month begins, and knowing how that weight is amplified by ongoing experiences of Anti-Black racism and violence, and the recent tragic killing of Afolabi Stephen Opaso. I am reminded that our collective responsibilities to address Anti-Black racism and enlarge and protect space for Black flourishing last all year long and offer a return to our January blog on rest for those who need a pause from their labour.

Delia

Breathing while Black: Bearing witness

It is Black History Month (BHM) – I regard this month’s blog as an opportunity to have a conversation that needs and deserves space… breathing space – the space that recognition of our humanness demands.

Black History Month 2024 takes place amid the tragic death of Afolabi Stephen Opaso, a 19-year-old student from Nigeria who had been attending the University of Manitoba. Mr.  Opaso had been experiencing a mental health crisis on December 31, 2023, when he was fatally shot by a member of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS).

Machuar Madut’s family continues to wait for an inquest, five years after Mr. Madut, originally from South Sudan, was fatally shot by a member of the WPS on Feb. 23, 2019. Mr. Madut, aged 43 at the time of his death, had been struggling with mental issues. In 2020 the officer involved was cleared of any wrongdoing. In its final report into Madut’s death, the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba said it found the use of lethal force by the officer was “reasonable, necessary, justified and unavoidable.”

According to a WPS spokesperson use of lethal force is justified when the life of an officer or other person is in immediate danger, or the police member or another person is in immediate danger of grievous bodily harm.

Keep in mind that Black folx are overrepresented in use of force, fatal shootings, and enforcement arrests, and charge rates in Canada.

In 2016 a UN Report from the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Canada expressed their trepidation about police involved deaths of at-risk peoples of African descent who were experiencing a mental health crisis.

Breathing is necessary to life.

Anti-Black racism(s) is part of local/regional/national/global political landscapes.

In enslavement’s afterlife Black folx continue to struggle to breathe. Is it any wonder that Black people cannot live, owing to white supremacy and anti-Black racism given that breath is required for life?

2020 was both a moment and a movement. Following George Floyd’s murder, tens of thousands marched across the United States, in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and inspired global protests against police brutality, anti-Black racism, and racial injustice. Across Canada people organized and gathered to stand in solidarity with Mr. Floyd’s family and the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing attention to racialized police violence, systemic racism, and inequality. In Winnipeg, Justice 4 Black Lives organized a rally called for justice an end to state violence and racial injustice which thousands attended. 

Reflecting B(l)ack

Black status and identity in Canada are linked to the country’s history of enslavement – of state sanctioned authorization and use of anti-Black racial violence.

The Atlantic slave trade involved the forced removal of millions of Africans which created a diaspora. The trade was fundamental to the economic and industrial development of Europe and North America, and the simultaneous under-development of Africa. Canada benefitted from the enslavement of Africans through profits accrued by the Hudson’s Bay trading company and the fur trade, and by the British Empire through traders of sugar, cotton, and the wealth generated by the colonies throughout the Americas. Settler colonial dispossession of the ancestral and traditional lands of Indigenous peoples was funded in part through the labour of enslaved peoples of African descent. The end of enslavement was followed by other manifestations of anti-Black racism such as racial segregation in schools, housing, and employment, the desecration of slave cemeteries in Ontario and Québec, and cross burnings on the property of Black families in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and New Brunswick.

B(l)ack to the future: Moving forward

We inherit the legacy of that which has come before.

Knowing our racial past helps us to understand our racial present. It also encourages us to imagine/dream/desire and build our futures ….

I stand on the shoulders of many who have gone before – known and unknown. My father, the late Dr. Lawrence F. Douglas, is one person whose shoulders helped lift me to where I am today.

My father was a single parent and the most influential person in my life.

He was also the first Black faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the U of M, and one of its four founding members. He retired in 1989 after 22 years of teaching. The Department would not hire another tenure track Black faculty member, for 32 years: Dr. Joseph Asomah.

Representation matters.

Fast forward: of the nearly 50 000 faculty that work across the 40 post-secondary institutions in Canada, there are approximately 900 Black faculty @ 300 of which are Black women…Black – and Indigenous peoples – are the most underrepresented Faculty in Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Racial equity matters.

In 2021 UM Law alumnus, David Sowemimo, established the David Sowemimo Law Entrance Scholarship awarded annually to Black undergraduate students enrolled full-time in the juris doctor program in UM’s Faculty of Law. It was the first scholarship of its kind at U of M.

Over the course of the past year, I have been working with Ekong Udobang in Donor Relations, to create a Fellowship in perpetuity for Black graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. The Dr. Lawrence F. Douglas Fellowship will be awarded for the first time in 2024-2025 academic year.

The Fellowship is a way for me to honour my father, and it is also an opportunity to pay it forward, to offer dedicated support to Black graduate students in their academic journey.

Where is the love?

The project of anti-racism is incomplete without addressing anti-Black racism(s). Nearly 4 years have passed since the events of 2020 – in many ways it seems like a lifetime ago. To paraphrase Janet Jackson – what have you done… lately? Or, more to the point, what will you do?

Breathing is necessary to life.

I can’t breathe

Is a proclamation…
A declaration…
A metaphor for the wounds/harms/effects of racism.
I can’t breathe is also
A protest statement,
and
A call to action…

         If not now, then when?

Resources

Dunn, T. (5 April, 2018). In deadly encounters with Toronto police more than a third of victims are Black. CBC. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/police-deaths-blacks-data-1.4599215.

Olynick, H. (2021). UM Today. Alumnus creates scholarship for Black students. Available at https://news.umanitoba.ca/alumnus-creates-scholarship-for-black-law-students/.

Petz, S. 2024. (24, January). Nearly 5 years after fatal Winnipeg police shooting, Machuar Madut’s family still waiting for inquest. CBC News. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/machuar-madut-family-speaks-inquest-delays-1.7092571.

United Nations report of the working group of experts on people of African descent on its mission to Canada. Available at https://ansa.novascotia.ca/sites/default/files/files/report-of-the-working-group-of-experts-on-people-of-african-descent-on-its-mission-to-canada.pdf.

“We do not accept your apology.” (16 June, 2022). CBC. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-race-based-data-use-force-strip-searches-1.6489151.

January 2024: Self-care and self-preservation: Rest as radical resistance

Marcia

In 2022 it became too obvious to me that I was not going to be able to continue doing all of the work that I was doing in all the places that I was doing it. I was experiencing worsening mental health and symptoms of burnout- like over 50% of physicians who participated in the 2021 National Physician Health Survey. As noted in the Health Workforce Assessment by the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in addition to burnout and moral distress, I was experiencing workplace violence and discrimination and that created an intention for me to partially leave the health workforce. Other research papers and reports document how often Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized individuals experience racism in the workplace or academy, and how that increases the risk for burnout and other negative impacts to mental health. I knew that I needed to decrease the arenas in which I both experienced racial violence and was also expected to lead systemic change. I left my public health job, increased my time at the university and took July off to rest. In rest came more clarity and creativity in how I approach my work in Indigenous health, social justice, and anti-racism.

I had a head start, maybe, from having worked with a coach since 2007, being a Certified Executive Coach, and coaching others over the past year on rest and joy while doing social justice work. What has become increasingly clear to me is:

  • Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized folks need to center rest and joy in their lives in order to be most effective at anti-racism and social justice work. This includes by honouring our own humanity, and thus creating the example and expectation for others to do the same.
  • Our burnout will not be the thing that ends or fixes racism.
  • We cannot get out of the health workforce crisis or address racism in health care without healthy, rested, well-supported Black, Indigenous, and racially marginalized folks leading the multiple forms of anti-racism work that needs to happen.
  • White people also have roles to play in anti-racism that require personal decolonization work- rest will also be a foundation for this challenging work.

Delia

“I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

(Audre Lorde, 1988, p. 125)

Audre Lorde wrote this essay in 1988 while she was fighting cancer. She died from the disease in November 1992. She was 58 years old.

In addition to Audre Lorde, writer/activist/scholars Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Bebe Moore Campbell, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Anzaldua, Claudia Tate, Beverly Robinson, Ruth Frankenberg, and Patricia Monture (to name but a few) all died from cancer. Erica Garner. bell hooks.

We persist.

Freedom struggles continue, as self-determination and emancipation remain unfinished projects.

There is no place to stand outside of racism, of white supremacy, of heteropatriarchy, of ableism.

There is a tendency to underestimate both the impact of everyday injustices and systemic discrimination and the impact of the fight against oppression.

The effects are cumulative and multidimensional. They are embodied, emotional, and psychological. They are matters of life and death.

We know racism is a public health issue and a key determinant of wellness, well-being, and health.

Fighting racism is also a public health issue and a key determinant of wellness, well-being, and health.

There is a cost for those who decide to name both the particularities of one’s oppression. There is a cost to fighting racial oppression – to fighting all manifestations of oppression.

The cost is not shared equitably.

In the university Black, Indigenous, and racialized staff and faculty have consistently had to bear the added weight of expectations, responsibilities, and burdens associated with addressing issues related to diversity and racial inequality, however, these forms of identity taxation or racialized equity labour work have become more onerous and more urgent owing to the perilous conditions borne of the pandemics of COVID 19 and racism.

We bear the brunt of racism, and we disproportionately bear the weight of addressing it.

Racism dehumanizes, rendering Black, Indigenous and racialized minority peoples as disposable.

Rest is recognition of our humanness. Rest is affirmation of our right to be…

I am mindful of Audre Lorde’s distinction between overextending versus stretching. I interpret overextending as going too far, beyond one’s capacity, to one’s detriment, while stretching involves growth and expansion, a broadening of perspectives, an unfolding of possibilities. I interpret stretching as the opposite of contracting or diminishing. Stretching is integral to the processes of learning and unlearning.

Rest, self-care, and self-preservation offer different paths forward – one that involves reflection, restoration, rejuvenation, reconnection to the many parts of ourselves that we suppress, ignore, silence.

Self-care is self-preservation.

Self-care is resistance.

            And so much more…

As Tricia Hersey explains in her book Rest is Resistance: “Rest is care. Rest is radical” (p. 12).

Here’s to a year of rest, radical care, hope, and resistance.

Resources

Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2023). Canada’s health workforce: An overview. Available at: https://cahs-acss.ca/assessment-on-health-human-resources-hhr/.

Canadian Medical Association (2022). National Physician Health Survey. Available at: https://www.cma.ca/sites/default/files/2022-08/NPHS_final_report_EN.pdf

Fuller, Kandace. (n.d.) The heart of Erica Garner: The cost of fighting back against racial inequality. Matters of the Heart, Issue 2. Available at

https://www.womanlymag.com/matters-of-the-hearts/articles/the-heart-of-erica-garner

Hersey, Tricia. (2022). Rest is resistance. New York, NY: Little Brown Spark.

Lorde, Audre. (1988). A burst of light and other essays. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand books.

August 2023: Unspeakable: The violence(s) of disavowal

“…how people get mad, how that escalation from prejudice, to hate, to violence occurs, what and who is hated, and how it is expressed, is not unrelated to the world around us.”

Ursula Franklin, 1991, p. 9. 

Delia

Where we live now: Racial realities

On June 9 2023, we learned of that a young female employee at the Olive Garden restaurant in Transcona, MB was stabbed multiple times by a customer – a young white male. The Winnipeg police subsequently described the attack as “random” and “unprovoked.” Police Chief Danny Smyth later stated that the use of the word random was meant to indicate that the perpetrator did not know his target.

The attack was not random for the victim.

Far from it.

6 weeks later we learned the identity of the target of the attack – an 18 year-old Black Muslim woman – she was wearing an hijab. We learned of her identity because members of the Muslim community challenged police claims of the random nature of the attack. They called for an investigation into the stabbing – they wanted to know why it had not been identified as a hate crime, and why the perpetrator was charged with aggravated assault, and not attempted murder.

According to Police Chief Smyth, “There is no evidence that supports it being motivated by a hate crime…. That being said, this is a very serious crime, the individual was charged with aggravated assault, which is a very serious charge. People go to jail for that kind of thing.”

The charges were laid prior to the victim issuing a statement.

No evidence to support the motivation of hate….

So, what would evidence of a hate crime look like?

Correspondingly what exactly counts as evidence? And…Who is qualified to make that determination?

The victim, a young Somali woman, does not wish to be identified.  

When she was able to speak, she explained that she was the only racialized minority person in the restaurant, and the only person wearing an hijab. She described how the perpetrator watched her for 30 minutes before the attack. In her words: “He didn’t go on a random stabbing spree. He went straight for me. I know I could have died.”

She understood and experienced her attack as an expression of anti-Black gendered Islamophobia.

A Black Muslim woman, in defense of herself.

It takes courage to speak publicly about experiences of violence. It is another form of trauma.

Intentional erasures and purposeful interventions

Whose view counts?

Naming is a mechanism of control.

If it isn’t named, then it doesn’t exist…it is not in the realm of possibility.

This is where the guiding principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are indispensable. To recap, CRT is a framework that recognizes that racism is pervasive and not an aberration. It is a lens that recognizes that the violence is already here.

In a Canadian context CRT allows us to critically assess how the historical construction of Canada as a white settler colonial society has been, and continues to be, protected and sustained. CRT recognizes that current inequalities, institutional arrangements, and practices are tied to past and present systems of racial exclusion, hostility, and violence such as dispossession, genocide, enslavement, settler colonial projects, and immigration laws. It is a lens that sees link between racism(s) and mass incarceration, housing education, health, and income inequalities.

CRT is a framework whose guiding principles are integrative, recognizing that other forms of inequality intersect and animate each other. It positions the elimination of racial oppression as part of the broader project of eliminating all manifestations of oppression.

And crucially, CRT recognizes the experiential knowledge of Indigenous, Black, and racialized minority peoples and communities.

When and where race enters conversations of justice matters.

Efforts to deny, obscure downplay the relevance of race are productive; they facilitate the conditions which preclude the likelihood/probability of racism, as well as the contemplation of the existence of racism, in Canada’s multicultural, multiracial society.

Racism is (re)produced through silence, invisibility, and exclusion, as well as through covert, entrenched, and cumulative actions.

Disavowal is violence.

Nothing can be changed unless it is acknowledged…

Indeed. The very definition of racism remains a site of struggle. As Dr. Wahneema Lubiano (1997) asserts, “central to the existence of racism, is the politics of its denial” (p. viii).

The ‘disappearing’ of racism is an all too familiar tactic. Racism persists alongside its denial…

And so it goes…. Anything. But. Racism.

The rejection of racism – of anti-Black gendered Islamophobia – to be precise, is significant because it obscures the unmarked white Western settler colonial arrangements, relationships, and practices that pervade all of our systems, while simultaneously reinforcing the national narrative that manifestations of racism in Canada are unusual. These disavowals do not exist in isolation, they are part of social relations, organizational cultures and institutional structures that work to maintain the status quo of inequality and the normalization of racism.

How we respond to violence has an impact on an individual’s health and well-being.

…the “escalation from prejudice, to hate, to violence” – “who is hated and how it is expressed” is inextricably linked to the legacies of violence to legacies which shape where we live now…. (Franklin).

Racial matters

As long as the reality and character of racism(s) are defined by the dominant, members of Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority communities will continue to suffer trauma and harm in a host of ways, some of which will include death.

Anti-racism work involves the active process of acting to challenge not only one’s own biases and prejudices, this work also involves the dismantling of the policies/social relations/attitudes/practices that promote and/or sustain racial inequality and racial oppression.

Bold solidarity and courageous collaboration are acts of radical resistance –creating spaces that recognize the humanity, diversity, and complexity of Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority folx.

Listen to the targets of violence…

As bell hooks (1996) reminds us: “The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance” (p. 146).

We need language that is expansive, disruptive, and ultimately transformative.

Bigotry and hate crimes directed against Muslims are on the rise in Canada.

Recall…Quebec City, London, Ontario, Edmonton, AB, …Winnipeg, MB….

Anti-Black gendered Islamophobia.

See her.

Hear her.

Believe her.

Resources:

Bernhardt, Darren. (18, July 2023). Muslim community suggests Olive Garden attack on Black woman motivated by hate. CBC News.

Canadian Council of Muslim Women.

Douglas, Delia. D. (2020). Un/Covering white lies: Exposing racism in the era of racelessness. Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 7(2), 22-45.

Essed, Philomena. (2002). Everyday racism. In D. T. Goldberg & J. Solomos (Eds.), A companion to racial and ethnic studies (pp. 202-216). London, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Franklin, Ursula. (1991). Commemoration for the Montreal massacre victims. Canadian Woman Studies, 11(4), 9.

Greenslade, Brittany. (9, June 2023). Olive Garden employee repeatedly stabbed in ‘unprovoked and random’ attack at restaurant: Police. CBC News.

hooks, bell. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Toronto, ON: Between the Lines.

Lubiano, Wahneema. (Ed.). Introduction. The house that race built (pp. vii- ix). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Thompson, Sam. (18, July 2023). Winnipeg’s Muslim community calls for investigation into Olive Garden stabbing of hijabi woman. Global News.

July Blog: Part 2: Identifying grammars of resistance and refusal on the ground

Delia

The Politics of Language

Thinking about language as a site of struggle provides new sets of questions and invites new way of thinking, speaking, and disrupting racism(s). 

Case in point, we need to be attentive to the fact that anti-Black racism is not one thing.

Following the murder of Mr. George Floyd in May 2020, attacks on Black and racialized minority Muslim women in Canada increased. Identifying these attacks solely as incidents of Islamophobia does not capture the specific vulnerabilities, stereotypes, and harms different Muslim women face. The violence that these women experienced is emblematic of anti-Black gendered Islamophobia. We need to employ language that recognizes the specificity of Black and racialized minority Muslim women’s experiences as this provides clarity and furthers our ability to understand and respond to their needs. To do otherwise is to dehumanize the very targets of racial violence and terror further by denying them the supports and resources they require and deserve.

As Audre Lorde reminds us, “We don’t lead single issue lives.” In order to understand the full effects of racism, we have to see how race intersects with other forms of difference such as gender identity and expression, sexuality, dis/ability, etc. 

Language matters.

Just as Black folx are diverse, so too are manifestations of anti-Black racism.

So, if our consideration and commitment to addressing anti-Blackness focuses solely on the violence done to cis Black heterosexual men, while ignoring the voices and experiences of Black Muslims, Black queer, trans, and gender diverse folx, and Black disabled folx, then we undermine the movement for all Black lives. We cannot disregard or erase those in our communities who are typically positioned on the margins – our language should take in to account the diversity and complexity of Black peoples. 

A grammar of resistance and refusal refers to language that captures the nuances and complexities of racism(s) expands the conversation and enables us to attend to the fullness of who we are. 

In 2010 Moya Bailey and Trudy introduced the concept misogynoir to capture the particular forms of discrimination Black women experience when anti-Black racism and anti-Black misogyny collide in popular culture. Their insights are a purposeful intervention, one that recognizes the gender and sexual diversity that exists among Black women and captures the unique challenges/experiences/violences that confront diverse Black women. They also coined the term transmisogynoir to describe the particular challenges and forms of dehumanization that Black trans women face. 

Enter Eternity Martis: This past March the University of Manitoba invited Eternity Martis to give the Robert and Elizabeth Knight Distinguished lecture. Martis, a Black and South Asian journalist, author, and faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University discussed her 2020 memoir They said this would be fun: Race, campus life, and growing up. Describing how she was simultaneously exoticized, desired, and disparaged, Martis offered a critical lens regarding the intricacies and intimacies of how anti-Black misogyny, anti-Black gendered racism, and anti-Black sexual and gender-based violence are embodied. Crucially, she linked the all too familiar ways in which she was perceived and treated according to Canada’s history of enslavement, and the attendant white supremacist narratives about Black women’s sexual availability. Martis also offered points of connection and points of difference among and between diverse Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority women, providing potential pathways to establishing support for coalition and solidarity work in the areas of racialized sexual and gender-based violence and policing within Black communities and beyond.  

The marginalization of violence against Black women and their disposability endures – these are some of the circumstances behind the activism of two Black women – namely Tarana Burke’s life work and her founding of the MeToo Movement, and the Say Her Name campaign initiated by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Denial, disposability, and the damage done

In August 2022, Daniella Mallia, a 23-year-old Black woman, sought support and police protection from a violent former domestic partner. Ms. Mallia reported her concerns to two members of the Toronto police force. However, despite providing abundant evidence to substantiate her concerns about the threat her ex-partner posed, Ms. Mallia was cautioned: she was treated as a perpetrator rather than a target. Three days after filing a report with the Toronto police, Ms. Mallia was found in an underground parkade, the victim of a shooting. Her ex-partner has since been charged with first degree murder and one Toronto police constable is facing numerous charges including neglect of duty and making false or misleading statements related to his encounter with Ms. Mallia (a second officer is involved but the charges have not yet been made public). Ms. Mallia was not simply disregarded, she was criminalized. Ms. Mallia was not deemed worthy of protection – rendering her disposable. The absence of empathy demonstrates how the intersection of systemic anti-Black gendered racism, anti-Black misogyny, and gender-based violence contributed to the tragic violent end to Ms. Mallia’s life. 

Expanding our circles of connection is part of an ethics of struggle. 

Creating spaces that recognize our humanity, diversity, and complexity offer possibilities for Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority folx to find connections across our differences.

This journey towards racial justice invites a commitment to learning and unlearning. We cannot disrupt and dismantle all forms of racism unless we challenge the divisiveness of hierarchies of oppression and recognize the interconnectedness of systems of domination.  Just as we have to recognize that people’s experiences of racism are simultaneously shaped by their gender identity and expression, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and spiritual practices, we have to recognize the ways in which our histories and our communities are simultaneously distinct and connected.

Holla if you hear me…

#Tarana Burke: #MeToo
#Kimberlé Crenshaw: #Intersectionality; #SayHerName

Resources

Bailey, Moya and Trudy.  (2018). On misogynoir, citation, erasure, and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 762-768.

Beauttah, Biko. (19, April, 2021). Commentary: Black trans women need to be listened to, supported. Global News.

Carter, Adam. (29, March, 2023). Toronto cop who allegedly ignored domestic violence report charged after woman’s death. CBC. 

Huncar, Andrea. (4, March 2021). Edmonton Muslim women rally in solidarity after hate-fueled attacks. CBC. 

Martis, Eternity. (2020). They said this would be fun: Race, campus life, and growing up. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart.

Reclaiming power and place: The final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.

Sengupta, Joyita. (28, June 2020). In a time of protest, Black LGBTQ voices rise.

Statistics Canada. (2021). Gender based violence.

Ware, Syrus M. (2017). All power to all people? Black LGBTTI2QQ activism, remembrance, and archiving in Toronto. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 170-180.

Yourex-West, Heather (2021). Why are Alberta’s Black, Muslim women being attacked.