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Currently viewing articles tagged with Racism.
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Web Exclusive: Reflections on the Quebec nation
Quebecois and Quebeckers now live in a nation, however symbolic. All can agree that Quebec sands on the outside; consensus is, however, lacking on whether being on the outside is a good thing. There are clear benefits to Quebec’s cultural and political autonomy, but one cannot overlook the regressive elements within Quebec on this St-Jean-Baptiste Day.
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Web exclusive: Ahmadinejad’s Speech at the Durban Review
Your job just got a whole lot harder,” quipped Naomi Klein after Iran’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Ahmadinejad’s address on April 20, at the opening day of the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism. In the lead-up to the Conference, I had written and lobbied tirelessly to defend it against allegations that it was an anti-Semitic hate fest.
Naomi was right. The world’s powers instantly condemned the speech to banner headlines. President Obama called it “harmful” and White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs called the speech “hateful rhetoric.” Peter Gooderham, British ambassador to the UN said it was “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.” British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, labeled it “offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable.” And French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned it as “an intolerable call to racist hate.”
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The Emperor’s Old Clothes
It’s hard to know where to begin with this book, which purports to be a kind of “expose” of the use of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in policy making and ranges far afield into a critique of the idea of Indigenous rights and a survey of problems in the fields of Aboriginal healthcare, education, self-government, land claims, and so on. I had previously written these authors off as “kooks” from the far political right wing; but now they have been embraced by certain prominent left academics and have themselves started to gloss their opinions with Marxist rhetoric.
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Building Resistance
In western Canadian cities like Winnipeg, a new and particularly destructive form of poverty has emerged over the past thirty years. It is inextricably linked with racism, is disproportionately concentrated in the inner city and has especially damaging effects on Aboriginal people. At the same time, it is Aboriginal people and especially Aboriginal women who are in the lead in developing effective, close-to-the-ground strategies to combat this new poverty.
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Indian Country in the City
My mother’s name is Gail Catherine Thomas and my late father’s name was Peter Sinclair Sr., both from the community of Pukatawagan Cree Nation located in northern Manitoba. Like many Native peoples at that time, my mother was raised in the bush.
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Kissing Billie Draper
I fell in love when I was seven. I mean really and truly in love. It was the kind of rapturous love that changes the lighting in your world and makes everything sharper, clearer, like it never existed in quite that way before, or ever will again.
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Latino Mercenaries for Bush
n the faculty dining room at the California State University where I teach, a Mexican-American woman places the thin slice of turkey on the bread to make my sandwich. The stress lines that radiate down from her high cheekbones twitch as she tells me politely that she’s fine. One of her sons is in Afghanistan, she reports. The other will leave tomorrow for Iraq. “I pray every day,” she says, smearing the mayonnaise on the other slice of bread.
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Xenoracism and the Hypocrisy of Managed Migration
There are 125 million people who are displaced in this world. Who are these people? Where are they from? And what are the causes of their displacement?
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Solidarity Across Borders
Canada tends to take pride in its humanitarian tradition of providing protection to thousands of refugees who fear persecution, or who are at risk of torture or cruel and unusual treatment. Despite this popular image, however, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) are both highly flawed institutions, which often fail to protect those seeking asylum.
For example, members of Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), a Montreal-based coalition of self-organized refugees and their allies, recently received a call from Lilia Diaz. Telephoning in tears from Mexico, Diaz told us that she and her family are living clandestinely in the constant fear of being discovered and attacked, since their deportation from Canada this past summer back to the country they had fled.
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A Tent Without Poles
In Winnipeg, a city divided along race and class lines like so many others, the two solitudes of white and Aboriginal were recently forced to confront one another after a police officer shot and killed an Aboriginal teenager named Matthew Dumas. The 18-year-old robbery suspect was waving a screwdriver at three heavily armed police officers. By some accounts, he had already been pepper-sprayed.
The incident re-ignited simmering tensions among the Aboriginal community. Native leaders accused the police force of racism, demanded a role in the investigation and called for more progress on a separate justice system for their people. Unfortunately, those charged with administering the “system,” including the Mayor of Winnipeg, dismissed the complaints, especially after learning that the officer who fired the gun was also Aboriginal. This simplistic caveat, however, ignores the the complicated reality of Native/police relations in this city and, indeed, in the country as a whole.
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