Category: Intersectionality

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.

March 2024: Integrate this! Grammars of recognition, survival, and resistance

Marcia

As Dr. Douglas notes below, March contains both International Women’s Day and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Maybe we need an International Day for Intersectionality to recognize the fullness and wholeness of our identities and how that intersects with our experiences of social systems that structure access to power, money and resources- including the resource of health care.

From the time I was a junior faculty member, I would often use the predictors of referral for cardiac catheterization (table 5 from Schulman et al. – linked below) to highlight how it’s not enough to just say women receive inequitable treatment for heart disease, we have to look more closely at how different women are treated.[1] This isn’t a standalone study. Other research demonstrates Black Women have a higher risk of heart disease, hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure and  diabetes but are significantly less likely to receive appropriate preventive care.[2] From maternal health outcomes to gender pay gaps, when we look more closely we see the interaction of race and gender- reminding us that both our analysis and our action needs to be more complex than trying to reduce our experiences of difference to a single variable.

[1] Table from Schulman et al. The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization. NEJM (1999). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199902253400806.

[2] Jha et al. Differences in Medical Care and Disease Outcomes Among Black and White Women with Heart Disease. Circulation (2003). https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.cir.0000085994.38132.e5

Delia

Following a landmark ruling by Canada’s highest court of appeal in October 1929, some women were legally recognized as “persons.” Notably, this ruling did not apply to Black, Indigenous, or racialized minority women.

March is Women’s History Month.
March 8 is International Women’s Day.
March 21st is International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

While that ruling was passed nearly a century ago, the question of personhood, of humanness, remains a site of struggle.

I have been thinking about ongoing efforts to discipline and punish those on the margins.

Who is often excluded in language that homogenizes…which women are we referring to when we say women?

I have been thinking about women, 2SLGBTQQIA+, folx, and disabled folx – where and when (if at all) does race enter these conversations?

To put it another way, disability, gender identity, and expression, and sexuality are always racialized. Race is always present whether or not it is named. What I mean is this – there is a tendency to address race as if it is only relevant to those perceived to be raced subjects – Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority folx. Excluding whiteness from the racial order fails to identify the racialization processes assigned to people of European ancestry.

Racism occurs in 2SLGBTQQIA+ spaces. Racism occurs in disability politics. Racism occurs between and among diverse women…there is no place to stand outside of racism.

All our lives are shaped by multiple axes of power.

I have been thinking about recognition, survival, and resistance.

How might we begin to make sense of the complex ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and disability operate independently and simultaneously to shape our diverse lived experiences?

Diverse women are differently vulnerable in a society organized around heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism. Not all women experience these violences, harms, and wounds in the same way.

We must acknowledge and prioritize complexity.

Disrupting and dismantling racial-sexual-gender-ableist hierarchies requires nuance and a rejection of either/or thinking.

The rejection and denial of difference, the rejection and denial of complexity, and the rejection and denial of personhood are part of past and present settler colonial projects.

If we can’t recognize the specific identities and experiences of people, then we won’t be able to adequately respond to their needs.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framing of intersectionality discourages us from attempting to determine one form of inequality as separate from other forms of inequality. For example, it does not see race as more or less important than gender, rather it acknowledges and responds to people’s experiences as simultaneously shaped by the intersections of the various elements of identity, including race, gender identity, and expression, sexual orientation and ability. Intersectionality is a lens that does not position forms of inequality against each other to determine who has endured harm, resulting in a hierarchy of oppression which is itself another form of harm.

So, I am thinking about the need for a racial literacy that is expansive in its capacity to identify and challenge multiple systems of oppressions at once. It is a racial literacy that considers disability and its integration with anti-racist, feminist, and queer practices in its conceptualization of social justice struggles.

Resources

Lindsey, Treva, B. (2015). “Post-Ferguson: A “Herstorical” Approach to Black Violability.”  Feminist Studies, 41(1), 232-237.

Simms, Sy, Nicolazzo, Z., & Jones, Alden. (2023). Don’t say sorry, do better: Trans students of color, disidentification, and internet futures. Diversity in Higher Eduation,16(3), 297-308.