Tag: Race

Members of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario’s Youth Action Council discuss the present and future of the disability justice movement.

granny’s voice cracks when she calls. “when you coming home baby?” i am burrowed in darkness to be reborn. fingers stained ink indigo, daddy’s prison letter is scratched on paper like he already faded into the massive metal mouth that consumed him before we met.

Today, Tamil people are Toronto’s working class as well as, increasingly, its elite – but behind the Canadian Tamil community’s historic struggles and resistance lies the fact that most of us arrived in Toronto fleeing a genocide

In February, in the midst of solidarity protests against the RCMP’s invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory, I created a Google Doc: “How to explain what’s happening to the Wet’suwet’en people in Chinese.” The long history of grassroots translation work shows that it is one of our strongest tools to build solidarity against white supremacy.

In Toronto’s easternmost suburb, a photographer seeks out beauty in immigrant communities that are literally pushed to the edges of the city.

“She doesn’t understand that she was born into a white supremacist society that devalues and underestimates Black women. Instead, she only knows that she doesn’t have ‘good hair.‘” Photography runner-up of the Writing in the Margins contest.

Afrikans living in Toronto and across Canada face targeted police profiling and violence. Organizer Ajamu Nangwaya explains why and what can be done.

A complexly layered urban fantasy, Sister Mine explores the space between the spiritual and material, and the murky pool where these worlds bleed together.

Crass sees “collective liberation” – a term borrowed from an essay by bell hooks – as a “vision of what we want and a strategic framework to help us get there.”

After a decade of captivity, Omar Khadr, the first child ever convicted of a war crime, became the last Western citizen to be repatriated out of Guantanamo Bay.

Evidently, the Conservatives’ “most-wanted” list has become a permanent and ongoing means of enlisting public support in the burgeoning business of deportation.

As both Canada and Israel come under increasing scrutiny on the world stage for their crimes against Indigenous peoples, their fates are increasingly bound together.

The Silence of Our Friends asks important questions. How are racist attitudes internalized or rejected by children? What does it take to earn the trust of others across boundary lines marked by race privilege? And, how can we make progress in the struggle against oppression?

While the Conservative government continues to fortify our borders and tighten restrictions on immigration, our culpability in the unprecedented levels of migration worldwide has never been clearer. From Canadian mining companies in Latin America to the occupation of Afghanistan, our overseas adventures continue to violently dispossess people around the globe.

In August 2010, the MV Sun Sea arrived in Vancouver carrying 492 Tamil refugees fleeing post-war Sri Lanka. All on board were immediately detained upon arrival in Canada. Nearly a year later, 19 are still in jail.

As the last 10 years have made painstakingly evident, imperial interventions in the Middle East and Pakistan have relied heavily on the conflation of the figure of the Muslim, the immigrant/outsider, and the terrorist within mainstream discourse. It is within this context that many have begun raising alarm over the looming demographic threat posed by domestic Muslim population growth.

In this book, you’ll meet Palestinians and Israelis whose struggles for peace, justice and an end to more than half a century of illegal dispossession and brutal occupation, belie the racism and harmful homogenising of history that fuel the current policies of the Zionist state.

In news coverage of violence, women are almost always portrayed as victims. Whether they are worthy, innocent victims in need of rescue (“virgins”), as in the case of Afghan women post-9/11, or unworthy, culpable victims to be ignored or incarcerated (“vamps”), as with Indigenous women in Canada, depends on their strategic value to the forces in power.

Of the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children who were forcibly removed from their families and enrolled in one of the many Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada, it is estimated that there are 85,000 residential school survivors in Canada today. Alongside these survivors are the thousands more impacted by the intergenerational effects of residential schools on Aboriginal families.

The burqa, chador or niqab (henceforth used interchangeably), a loose-fitting robe worn by some Muslim women that covers the body from head to toe, is one of the most powerful symbols of women’s subjugation under Islam. This garb is often presented as an existential threat to the West, capable of destabilizing the very foundations of our liberal democracies.