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- Race and Racism
Eat, Travel, Oppress: Travel Discourse and Imperialist Nostalgia

September 18, 2012 • Raisa Bhuiyan

In an inspiration-intended to-do list aptly titled “25 things to do before you’re 25,” I read the following suggestion,

#16. Identify your fears and instead of letting them dictate your every move, find and talk to people who have overcome them. Don’t settle for experiencing .000002% of what the world has to offer because you’re afraid of getting on a plane.

I thought it was imperative to bold the second sentence of that suggestion for two main reasons. The first is that it implies that formative life experiences can only be found by travelling outside of one’s geographical borders. And the second is that it assumes that anyone can get on a plane at any time they desire to travel without much hassle.

While this particular suggestion may have been written with intention of encouraging readers to identify and reconcile their personal life pains, the privileged language used is exclusive and ignorant of the complex, multifaceted realities experienced by poor, racialized peoples in our communities - many for whom the idea of travel often has more negative connotations.

The self-obsessed language through which travel and travelling is typically talked about in our culture is rooted in an imperialist mode of thinking that sustains itself through othering poor people of colour. In fact, the ways of talking about travel have made it so that travellers going on vacations for fun, or trips to help others, do so in manners and behaviours that are strikingly similar to the trips that European colonizers took centuries ago when they first came to “civilize” the rest of the world.

In this light, travel discourse is directly perpetuating colonial ways of thinking: it markets travelling as an apolitical, carefree, schism-free and fluffy experience, unaccountable to historical and present violence caused by ongoing colonization. It ignores the reality that the actions of global powers are the main causes of the poverty and oppression in travel destination countries. We need new ways of talking about travel that does not equate gaining personal fulfillment at the expense of poor people, Indigenous people and people of colour.

(flickr user hmdavid)

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Interview: 2qtpoc-montreal show

September 4, 2012 • deb singh

Hey Shameless Blog Readers,

Having sadly been unable to attend the awesome 2qtpoc-montreal Show for the city’s Pervers/cite, I did get the opportunity to connect with one of the amazing artists from the show, Textaqueen. Their website reads:

“Texta” is Australian for felt-tip marker and TextaQueen is Australia’s felt-tip super-hero. Renowned for use of the humble felt-tip marker to boldly re-interpret the tradition of the salon nude, TextaQueen explores politics of sex, gender and identity in tangent with ideas of self-image and inter-personal relationships. Texta’s practice articulates delicate interplays between vulnerability and empowerment, intimacy and exhibitionism, and subjective and collective expressions of feminist, queer, and cultural identities.

I asked Textaqueen some questions about their work and involvement with the show. Check out what they had to say!

What interested you in being part of the 2-qtpocmontreal show?
Elisha Lim and I had been excitedly in contact via the internets, having had friends show us each other’s work. I am usually showing work in such a different context; not particularly 2 spirit / queer / trans or people of colour focused, so to be amongst rad 2qtpocs in this context is “refreshing.” While my “bigger” art shows bring my work into “broader” contexts, it is important to me to show my work in contexts where people seeing it may relate to it from their own experience. Showing my work alongside other people talking about queer and racialised identities is a rare dream come true. In other contexts the queerness of the work has literally been called quirky or kooky, and in my more recent work that talks about race, they may be sold on their edgy exoticness. It’s great to be part of a show where those themes are centered when being queer and racialized are central themes to my life. I’m not quirky and exotic to myself, and it’s great not to have me or my work treated that way here.

What would you like to see from people, in terms of sharing your work at the show? In 2-qtpoc communitites? In white queer communities? How do you want your work to help shape peoples’ thinking?(more inside…)
Recommended Viewing: It Gets Fatter

August 29, 2012 • Julia Horel

It Gets Fatter is a project started by three self-identified fat people of colour, with the intent of building a dialogue around being fat people of colour in a fatphobic world, eating together and being in safe spaces together.

“… maybe it could be a project, like It Gets Better, but actually better, because people of colour are doing it.”

They have so far posted an introductory video that can be found here, and a version with subtitles here.

“I think for me, it’s really important to be around people who look like me and think the same way I do, but also just to feel safe as a fat person, safe being visible, safe eating in public, and not feel pressured to have body shame or like I need to lose weight, or need to talk about losing weight, or feel like I always have to work on what I look like because I’m fat.”

There is a specific call for participation at the end of the video:

“I hope that if people want to upload things, videos or text or whatever themselves, too, that would rule.”
- Race and Racism
- Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading: Hate Crimes Always Have A Logic: On The Oak Creek Gurudwara Shootings

August 7, 2012 • Julia Horel

Highly recommended piece from the amazing Harsha Walia over at Racialicious.

While these murders were abhorrent, they were not ‘senseless’. The ad nauseaum suggestion that the killings were senseless attempts to construct the shooting as random and without logic, when in fact racist hate crimes operate through the very deliberate and precise logic of white supremacy.

White supremacy, as a dominant and dominating structuring, actually necessitates and relies on a discourse that suggests that hate crimes are random. Otherwise, whites might just have to start racially profiling all other young and middle-aged white men at airports or who are walking while white. Whites might have to analyze what young white children are being taught about in schools and in their homes about privilege and entitlement. Whites might have to own up to and seek to repair the legacy of racialized empire, imperialism, and settler-colonialism that has devastated and continues to destroy the lives and lands of millions of people across the globe.

Read the whole thing here.
Hold Ya Head: What will grab our attention after Jun Lin’s head is recovered?

July 10, 2012 • Raisa Bhuiyan

I remembered Yoshihiro Hattori when I first read about the murder of Trayvon Martin this past March. Yoshihiro was a 16-year old Japanese exchange student who was fatally shot by a man in 1992 when he had knocked on his door in search of directions to a Halloween party. Upon his arrest, the killer Rodney Peairs claimed that he was only ‘defending’ his home from the ‘intruder’ who was ‘was acting in a menacing, aggressive fashion…like a stranger invading someone’s home turf”.

While there was indeed a brief moral panic over Yoshihiro’s death in American and Japanese news broadcasts during the months following his murder, news cycle frenzy began to die down and soon enough everyone just forgot.

Yoshihiro’s murder isn’t a special case.

Rather he joins the numbers of other murdered international students of colour like 23-year-old York University student Qian Liu, 21-year old Coquitlam College student Amanda Zhao Wei and 33-year old Concordia student Jun Lin.

The murders of these three international students of colour is no coincidence, but rather their murders are symptomatic of a culture and society that just does not value things like social investment, protection, and accountability, especially when it comes to the murders of people of colour.

At the moment, the murders of international students of colour is receiving massive signal boosts within our news feed cycles. While often narrated by horror, fascination, disgust and sensationalism, these fast fix news stories often leave out how factors like race play a part in the murders of international students of colour.

In earlier eras, imagery of racist brutality and war atrocities moved nations to act and to change domestic and foreign policy in the interests of global justice. These contemporary images of the murders of people like Yoshihiro, Qian, Jun and Amanda moved all of us with collective outrage, but only, it seems, for a short time.

Where is this collective outrage today?

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- Event Listings
- Race and Racism
Toronto event: Brown Canada Showcase

June 12, 2012 • Julia Horel

Brown Canada Showcase, Wed Jun 27 @ Grace Toronto.
Premiere of the original play “Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!”
Tickets are free, RSVP now on eventbrite!

Brown Canada Showcase
Sharing Our Stories: Creating New Legacies

Wednesday June 27th, 2012
5:30–9:00 p.m
Grace Church, 41 Britain Street, Toronto (east of Queen station)

Dinner served from 5:30-6:30 pm.
Program starts at 6:30 pm, sharp.

This is a Free Event, but space is limited; please RSVP before June 25th ateventbrite or by contacting browncanada@cassa.on.ca or 416-932-1359 x14.

CASSA’s Brown Canada team proudly invites you to our project’s Showcase, an Informative and entertaining event featuring:

· The premiere of the original play “Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!”
· A screening of the Brown Canada DVD
· The “Our Stories, Our Histories” South Asian history exhibit
· An interactive discussion about Racialized & Indigenous histories
· A free resource booklet on South Asian histories in Canada

Visit www.browncanada.ca for more info & to share your story online!

The Brown Canada Theatre Project will be presenting “Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!” a series of vignettes written and directed by Alia Somani.

“Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!” is about one of the least known yet most significant episodes in the history of Canada. What is called the Komagata Maru incident took place in 1914, when a group of 376 Punjabi migrants aboard a Japanese ship – the Komagata Maru – was turned away from Canada’s western seaboard and refused entry into the country.

The Komagata Maru incident may have occurred almost 100 years ago, but it has not been forgotten. Instead it continues to haunt us, to reverberate in our nation’s consciousness.In fact, in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood up in Bear Creek Park and declared that on behalf of Canada, he was sorry for the events of 1914. “Oh Canada, Oh Komagata Maru!” explores, among other things, this apology; it considers how much of our past is remembered and how much still remains buried; and most importantly, it asks us to relive the experiences of those who traveled to Canada in 1914 in search of a better life, and a better future.

Brown Canada is a community-led history project that seeks to document, create and share South Asian histories in Canada initiated byCouncil of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), a social justice umbrella organization working with Ontario’s diverse South Asian communities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Community Historical Recognition Program of Citizenship and Immigration Canada in the initial phase of this project.

Eventbrite: RSVP here: http://creatingnewlegacies.eventbrite.com/
Tumblr: http://browncanada.tumblr.com/
Reblog event @ http://browncanada.tumblr.com/post/24781282199/racismfreeontario-brown-canada-showcase-sharing
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/browncanadaproject
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/204810092975235/
Website: Visit www.browncanada.ca for more info & to share your story online!
CROSS-POST: Youth violence in Toronto and our hierarchy of victimhood

June 11, 2012 • Guest Blogger

This piece originally appeared in the Toronto Star on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. It is cross-posted here with the permission of its author, Simon Black. You can find Simon on Twitter @_simonblack or at his website.

Last year in the city of Chicago, nearly 700 young people were hit by gunfire; 66 of them died. The vast majority of victims were African-American and Latino youth living in the city’s racialized low-income neighbourhoods. A recent analysis found that 8.5 per cent of Chicago (in terms of geography) contained almost all of the city’s shootings and homicides.

The mayor of Chicago insists that his city is safe. After all, around 90 per cent of neighbourhoods are not affected by youth gang and gun violence. This year, programs designed to reduce violence are being cut along with Chicago’s education budget.

While not as extreme in its geographic concentration, youth violence in Toronto is more likely to occur in our low-income postwar suburbs and pockets of racialized poverty in the downtown core than in white, middle-class neighbourhoods or shared spaces such as Yonge St.

As the 2008 report “The Roots of Youth Violence” found, while crime rates are stable “severe violence is apparently becoming more and more concentrated among socially disadvantaged minority youth.” The report concluded that the roots of youth violence are often found in poor, socially deprived neighbourhoods: the immediate risk factors of impulsivity, low self-esteem, alienation, hopelessness and lack of voice are compounded by longer-term issues of racism, poverty, community design, barriers to education and a lack of economic opportunity. The social exclusion of racialized youth and the alienation and denial of full citizenship they experience must be addressed.

When violence migrates from Toronto’s racialized low-income neighbourhoods into the spaces of commerce and tourism central to our city’s sense of collective safety, identity and international reputation, our public discourse shifts, government officials react and respond, and we reveal a hierarchy of victimhood and trauma that contravenes principles of equality.

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Ad·ver·sary: Making a statement in the industrial music scene

May 22, 2012 • Julia Horel

PLEASE NOTE: The video discussed in this post contains racist and sexist language, as well as violent imagery. The video is not hosted on this page. A censored transcript is found here, with a link to the video.

–—

The Kinetik festival (May 17-20 this year in Montreal) is an international festival of electro-industrial music. Toronto-based act Ad·ver·sary (Jairus Khan) was scheduled to play his set ahead of two bands he has openly criticized for using highly sexist and racist lyrics and imagery:

It was when I got booked to play Kinetik, and I found out that I was scheduled to open for Nachtmahr and Combichrist. Given how strongly I feel about the way they do what they do, I didn’t think I could just get up there and play and pretend as though I wasn’t going to be followed by these two acts that I’ve openly criticized. I actually considered just cancelling my performance, and being done with it. I don’t want to be associated with what they do, and I don’t want to be a support act for them, even in a festival setting …
- interview at idieyoudie.com

During the last five minutes of his set, Jairus showed a multimedia presentation speaking out against the use of violence, sexism and racism by Nachtmahr and Combichrist, using direct examples from their work to make his point.

(Mark Edwards (http://residualtraces.com/blog/13497388/ad-ver-sar)

Please be aware that some visual examples of violence, sexism and racism are used in the video. Because of the nature of some of the imagery used, the video will not be embedded here. You can find the video, a full interview with Jairus, a response from the other bands, and a spirited discussion in comments at idieyoudie.com.

Transcript found below.

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- Race and Racism
- Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading: An Ideological Mess or: How I Learned to Not Stop Worrying and Still Love Rock Climbing

May 22, 2012 • Julia Horel

This piece by Narinda Heng was cross-posted at Girls Like Giants and Racialicious. Narinda discusses navigating gender, class, sexual orientation and race as a low-income, queer Southeast Asian woman involved in rock climbing, and how while discussions are happening in some spaces, others in the climbing community still prefer to think of climbing as a place where one can leave one’s identities at the door:

… So I understand why Guidoprincess said this [in a comment thread]:

I think the reason many people, including myself, find this offensive is that we turn to climbing exactly to avoid worthless BS like this. While many other public forums are full of this “racial landscape navigation” nonsense, climbing is a pure activity where everyone can just chill the f-ck out.

The thing is, for me, it’s not nonsense. I navigate my race/sex/class everywhere, all the time, and telling me to “chill the f-ck out” is like telling me to perform a lobotomy on myself. I can’t “chill the f-ck out” because there’s a lot more in play when I’m trying to get into the “pure” part of the activity.

Check out the full post at Girls Like Giants or Racialicious.
Call for participants: Komagata Maru Actor Call-out

May 8, 2012 • Julia Horel

Brown Canada is looking to audition actors for a series of vignettes based on the Komagata Maru incident and related themes of exclusion, questions of belonging and unspoken/unknown histories, among others. Firstly, we are looking for actors to either perform at different venues across the province: 4 performances across Toronto, and 5 outside of Toronto. These projects will be performed at various times from May to July 2012. We are also looking for actors to perform in our final performance, which will take place at the end of June.

Staff at CASSA would set up the performances and facilitate the community dialogues following the performances. We do have a small budget and can provide compensation for the development of the work and pay travel expenses for the actors.

Actor/Performer:
Interest or experience in theatre
Interest in Canadian South Asian history
South Asian identifying preferred
Please send a CV/resume to deena@cassa.on.ca if you are interested!
Deadline: May 16, 2012
For more information, please call or email Deena Hai: 416 932 1359 extn. 14 / deena@cassa.on.ca