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Burden to Bear: With work far from over, anti-racism advocates offer paths forward to curb racism

In the months since thunderous rallies calling for change gripped Calgary, Postmedia journalists explored systemic racism locally, its impacts, and the steps that must be taken to keep this vital conversation alive.

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This is Part 3 of Burden to Bear, a special three-part series documenting the ongoing struggle against racism that has persisted in the Calgary area for generations. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2. The series, written by Sammy Hudes and Alanna Smith, was edited by Ricky Leong, with visuals by photojournalist Azin Ghaffari.


A cramped hotel suite serves as a place of refuge for an Airdrie family afraid to go home.

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In a dimly lit common area, Ahmad Yar speaks of his family’s two-year-long nightmare, enduring incessant racial mockery and intimidation from neighbours.

He says his children now “hate their own skin.”

The family of eight fled to a hotel in October after hostile relations with their neighbours hit a breaking point.

Yar alleges his children have been followed and photographed, and his wife’s traditional garb mocked. Loud music has blared through the night, despite their pleas for peace and quiet. They’ve tried to park in front of their home, only to find someone else’s car taking up two spaces.

It feels never-ending.

“This is public parking and this road is not meant for ‘brownies,’” Yar says they’ve been told.

“We are basically the only Muslim minority in that neighbourhood. No one treated us the way it’s supposed to be.”

Yar has called Canada home for nearly three decades. Before moving to Airdrie in late 2018, he worked as a civil engineer in the Calgary area for the previous 17 years.

He’s tried reaching out to the neighbours, as well as politicians and police, but tensions haven’t cooled.

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The relationship has become so strained, it has resulted in duelling lawsuits and temporary restraining orders.

None of the allegations have been proven in court.

“It is so stressful. We’re scared to go there. We’re scared to live there. We’re scared for the safety of our kids,” says Yar.

“My little girl, (she says) ‘I wish we had white skin.’ Unfortunately there are people like this, they just make your life miserable for no reason. No matter how good a person you are, they just hate you because of your colour.”

The family says time spent in the gloomy hotel is “a kind of miserable life with no future.”

Their experience has been a private one and there’s no saying how many others are like it.

Powerful anti-racism protests across Calgary this summer called attention to high-profile cases, like the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in the U.S. and the violent arrest of Godfred Addai-Nyamekye by Calgary police.

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Members of the crowd at these events also spoke of their personal experiences of racism, whether quietly to friends nearby or loudly over the microphone at makeshift stages.

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The reality of racism isn’t new. Neither is the fight against it.

Those demonstrations in Calgary and beyond breathed new life into the anti-racism movement. Some called it the start of a “revolution.”

But the path to rebuilding the systems that perpetuate racial inequality isn’t clear.

In the months following thunderous protests in the city, those at the grassroots level — and those whose experiences underpinned the movement — called on those in power and everyday Albertans to move beyond the streets.

Imam Syed Soharwardy says misconceptions about Islam still run rampant. It can result in backlash toward Muslim Calgarians, like being told “you don’t belong to this country.”

Soharwardy used to grow angry when he’d hear an Islamophobic slur, or a distortion of his religion.

“In Alberta, there is a racist element here. And they are very vocal,” says Soharwardy. “They come to rallies at city hall against Islam and against Muslims and those kind of things.”

So far this year, 80 incidents are being investigated as hate-motivated crimes by the Calgary police. This is in line with an uptick in recent years, following 73 incidents last year, 81 in 2018 and 77 in 2017.

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Motivations for targeting victims includes race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and religion.

Between 2012 and 2016, hate-motivated crimes averaged 60 incidents per year.

The police service attributed the recent rise to “current events” and a focused effort by Calgary police to raise awareness about the importance of reporting hate-motivated offences. They are on track to see a similar increase this year for the same reasons.

According to police data, Black Calgarians are targeted the most, followed by Asian and Arab Calgarians when race and ethnicity are the motivations for crime.

Hate crimes go largely underreported.

For Soharwardy, education is the best path forward.

Decades ago, he saw hatred toward the Muslim community reach a pinnacle following acts of violence by extremist groups in the name of Islam. So in the late 1990s, he founded an organization called Muslims Against Terrorism to advocate for peace.

This past July, Soharwardy launched a digital billboard campaign around Calgary, seeking to spread messages of love in response to hate. He says this approach helps cool tensions and erase misunderstandings.

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“As an Imam, as a person of the Muslim community, it is my duty not to get offended but rather educate — sit down, talk, have patience, cool down — rather than getting emotional,” Soharwardy says.

“If I get angry, it means I’m failing.”

Soharwardy says the Muslim community should take cues from the Black Lives Matter movement “and show the value that we bring to the society.”

Others say people of colour should not have to bear the burden of educating white people about racism and share painful stories — stories of being targeted, harassed and seeing people that look like them murdered — to ring true the reality.

Allyship — or as anti-racism advocate Adora Nwofor calls it, being an “accomplice” — comes from non-racialized people doing the work themselves. Being actively anti-racist means performing research, challenging racism in everyday interactions, and making or giving up space for racialized groups.

“Ally means that you can change your mind whenever you want,” says Nwofor, president of Black Lives Matter YYC. “I need an accomplice. You’re going down with me or it doesn’t work.”

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White people need to recognize their privilege, regardless of barriers faced, to start anti-racism work. They need to accept any discomfort that arises, she says.

“You keep the momentum going by leaving your feelings behind. And by understanding that, like all of this work, when you open your eyes, it’s going to be better.”

There are simple, tangible ways people and organizations can do so day-to-day: Hiring Black people for their skills and expertise, ensuring better representation in media and creating Black-centred spaces in the city, such as community centres.

“I can’t wait another five years. I mean, I am so tired of this fight,” says Nwofor.

“This world is making it so much harder for (my children). I don’t want them to be living in trauma anymore. I want them to be living in healing. I need healing. My community needs healing. Black people need healing right now.”

As different communities face common yet unique struggles, activists say they must band together to advance each other’s goals.

Longtime Indigenous champion Chantal Chagnon, who founded cultural education centre Cree8, says it’s counterproductive to tackle only one issue at a time. Racialized communities, instead, need to forge relationships to become a “force to be reckoned with.”

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“It’s not about who’s most important, or whose issues are most important. They’re all important in different ways. And we can only attack the issue as a whole,” says Chagnon.

Chantal Chagnon plays and sings during Calgary’s 15th Annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil to honour murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls on Oct. 4, 2019.
Chantal Chagnon plays and sings during Calgary’s 15th Annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil to honour murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls on Oct. 4, 2019. Photo by Azin Ghaffari /Postmedia

“Through Indigenous ways of knowing and an Indigenous lens, we see that everything is cyclical, everything is connected. When we see those pieces of interconnectivity, that’s when we start to see healing and growth truly happen.”

Systemic racism in Canada can be traced back to colonization, which created economic marginalization of First Nations people, displacement through the reserve system, and physical and psychological violence against Indigenous people, explains Spirit River Striped Wolf, the first Indigenous president of the Students’ Association of Mount Royal University.

Through a “policy of cultural genocide,” as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) stated, Indigenous people have faced “systemic ramifications throughout our society that imbue itself into the structures that currently exist,” he says.

Adam North Peigan was just an infant when he and all nine of his siblings were forcibly removed from their home in Piikani First Nation by the Alberta government in the mid-1960s.

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They grew up separately in the care of non-Indigenous foster families across the province, bouncing from home to home. North Peigan’s childhood was characterized by abandonment issues and a lack of stability.

And there was “a lot of abuse that happened in those homes,” he recalls.

On a warm July day in Calgary, he gazes upon the open field at Prince’s Island Park.

The sunshine and foliage surround him as he sits on a bench by the Bow River. But North Peigan remembers a darkness in this place decades ago.

“There were times where I was homeless in the city of Calgary and I would come down to Prince’s Island Park and sleep under a tree for the night,” he recounts.

“I know what it’s like to be homeless and having to panhandle along Stephen Avenue mall, along 17th Avenue, pushing one of those grocery carts, looking for bottles. I have lived through hell and back, but I’m still here.”

Today, North Peigan is president of the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Alberta. He founded the non-profit group to help survivors heal from the trauma suffered at the hands of the state from the 1950s to the 1980s, when more than 100,000 Indigenous children across Canada were taken from their parents by child intervention services and placed in foster homes.

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But the emotional toll of the ‘60s Scoop didn’t end when he aged out of the child welfare system and could finally return home. Parachuted back into his community, North Peigan looked around and “it was like a war zone.”

He began drinking heavily to cope with the weight that came with adjusting to his new reality. He found his way to Calgary, where the pattern carried on for 15 years.

“I have two older brothers that died on the streets here in Calgary to alcoholism and the lifestyle and the drug addiction. I have an older sister that lived in Calgary here, too, and she’s not with me either,” he says.

Many survivors of the ‘60s Scoop are in their 50s to 70s today.

“There are a lot of survivors that still have not made it home and they have not come as far as others have,” North Peigan says. “They’re still wandering the streets, they’re still homeless, they’re still drinking heavily, involved in drugs — but they’re searching, they’re looking for someone.”

Trauma in Indigenous communities may not be “as outward or as obvious” as some might think, says Striped Wolf, who, like North Peigan, is from the Piikani First Nation. Both are children of residential school survivors.

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Striped Wolf says the next generation has been forced to inherit lingering emotional pain.

Suicides are far too prevalent, especially among youth, he says, and some communities have become numb to frequent upticks in addiction rates.

Communities need action from those in power, Striped Wolf adds. He challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his efforts towards reconciliation at a forum during last year’s federal election campaign.

“One thing I told Trudeau was residential schools were radical policy and we need radical policy to be able to deal with some of the issues that Indigenous people experience,” he recalls.

“What can civil society do and what can institutions like universities do? What can companies and the police do and so forth? I think we all have a piece to play.”

North Peigan says reconciliation goes beyond “putting together a committee and throwing billions of dollars to it.”

He says there needs to be a movement that emphasizes “healing programs.” The government can learn from the lessons of the ‘60s Scoop to reform the child welfare system, where Indigenous children are still overrepresented to this day.

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North Peigan calls it the “millennium scoop.”

“Because of what happened to the ‘60s Scoop, we are now in a position to have meaningful influence in child welfare reform,” he says. “But the government needs to have that willingness to sit down and willingness to listen.”

Extinction Rebellion and Idle No More Calgary members gathered downtown in February, blocking off the Reconciliation Bridge and Memorial Drive to support the Wet’suwet’en Nation in B.C.
Extinction Rebellion and Idle No More Calgary members gathered downtown in February, blocking off the Reconciliation Bridge and Memorial Drive to support the Wet’suwet’en Nation in B.C. Photo by Azin Ghaffari /Postmedia

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its final report in 2015.

It’s one of many government-mandated action items that detail the country’s push toward equity for all its citizens. The implementation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, for example, aimed to recognize and promote “the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society.”

The act may have inspired people, explains former MLA Teresa Woo-Paw, but it didn’t “have teeth.”

On a cool July day, Woo-Paw sits on the edge of a monument in Sien Lok Park, where part of Chinatown meets the Bow River. Just weeks later, dozens would gather there for a protest to call on officials to defund the police.

The large marble structure in the park honours Chinese pioneers who came to Canada before 1947 — a time when the country tried to actively restrict Chinese immigration.

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Woo-Paw, who chairs Asian Canadians Together to End Racism, says those in the community often struggle to feel a “sense of belonging.”

That anxiety has only amplified as anti-Asian sentiment grows amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Etched into the “Wall of Names” plaque, it reads: “The Chinese have been legally and culturally accepted into Canada with full rights and continue to enrich the Canadian mosaic.”

Woo-Paw says Asian-Calgarians know a different reality.

She says understanding the ideologies that perpetuate systems of exclusion is the first step to addressing systemic racism. It’s about understanding Calgarians’ deeply held beliefs of who belongs.

“Some Canadians still have to prove they are equal citizens every day,” says Woo-Paw. “And there are people that actually just enjoy that privilege without actually having to do anything because of the ‘right’ skin colour.”

She says Calgary has been slow to make meaningful change.

Before becoming an MLA in 2008, Woo-Paw facilitated diversity training in roles with organizations like the Calgary Health Region (one of the forerunners of Alberta Health Services), the Calgary Board of Education and the United Way.

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Woo-Paw says she participated in the first cross-cultural training with the Calgary police in the mid-1980s, reviewed health barriers in Calgary in the early 1990s and served on the Diversity Calgary Leadership Council in the early 2000s. But she said they’ve been aspirational exercises at best.

“We had good initiatives but they were developed and delivered by people, dedicated individuals like frontline people, nurses, police officers, social workers, but we have to ask — why did we fail?” she says.

“I think that our system has not actually committed to making systemic change.”

Elected officials and institutional leaders weren’t held accountable to implement changes, says Woo-Paw.

Regular reports detailing concrete measurements of progress and change are needed, with sufficient funding in place to enforce those calls to action.

And the need is urgent, says Saima Jamal, because those systems have left so many Calgarians behind for far too long.

Jamal, a well-known Calgary anti-racism activist, fears a failure to act could lead to a “clash of society.”

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“I truly believe there is a big conflict coming up,” she says, adding it’s unclear what form that could take. “We’re going towards a future where there has to be something really big that happens before things calm down or things level up.”

Canadians are influenced by their neighbours to the south, says Jamal, pointing to civil unrest, with media and pop culture, rife with stereotypes, that “brainwash” white people to view racialized communities as dangerous or different.  But the mentality, arguably more visible in the U.S., still stews in Canada.

When it comes to inequalities at home, there’s much more that local leaders can be doing.

If change ever happens, “it has to come from the top,” says Jamal.

In September, counter-protesters donning clothes emblazoned with logos of far-right hate groups like Soldiers of Odin disrupted a peaceful anti-racism protest in Red Deer, chanting “all lives matter.”

White supremacist groups took to the streets of Edmonton later that month, calling themselves “patriots” and accusing opposing demonstrators of being “anti-fascists.”

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“Obviously, we condemn racism and racial prejudice in any manifestation,” Premier Jason Kenney said when asked to unequivocally denounce such white supremacist groups.

“It is un-Canadian and un-Albertan, and I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve got a small number of kooks who go around trying to get attention for a message of hate. I don’t think we should give them the attention that they crave.”

Jamal says Kenney needs to outright denounce those groups and what they stand for.

“(Politicians) are the ones that are holding the real power to bring the real change,” said Jamal. “This awakening that has happened in the grassroots level, it is putting that pressure. But until or unless those people in power change, I don’t know how we, as a whole society, are going to change.”

But it’s everyday Albertans who have the power to make a difference, says Michelle Robinson, an Indigenous organizer in Calgary. She says it’s their “responsibility,” too, as much as it is the government’s.

“Everybody’s going to benefit from us having real conversations about racism, systemic racism, change with settler colonial mentality,” Robinson says.

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“We can really create a better place.”

When trying to raise their voices, Robinson says Indigenous people are constantly “gaslit” — manipulated to doubt their perspectives and truths, as though they’ve somehow misconstrued undeniable realities.

She questions why Calgary, one of the biggest major cities by landmass, continues to expand without input from Treaty 7 chiefs and how scores of Indigenous people can continue to live without housing, as public money gets allocated elsewhere.

“I actually don’t feel people are listening,” she says. “I don’t know if Calgarians really understand their own history.”

A pattern has repeated itself for generations — calls for change fall on deaf ears, adds Robinson.

It doesn’t matter that the United Nations has spent decades calling out Canada for racism and human rights abuses against Indigenous people. Still, the average Canadian “would be shocked, horrified and even hurt that is the case,” she says.

“But we have reports and graves to showcase it.”

Hope isn’t lost, though.

Students from Bishop McNally High School protest outside Calgary police headquarters on Oct. 8, 2020.
Students from Bishop McNally High School protest outside Calgary police headquarters on Oct. 8, 2020. Photo by Gavin Young/Postmedia

Advocates like Robinson find inspiration in the next generation of young anti-racism leaders.

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During a school day on Oct. 8, hundreds of high school students put down their pens and pencils and walk out the doors of Bishop McNally High School. Teenagers march through Calgary’s northeast streets before stopping in front of Calgary police headquarters during the demonstration organized by the Sankofa Arts and Music Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing opportunities for Black youth.

With fists raised to the sky, they take a knee, chanting “Black Lives Matter.”

Hundreds more students from schools across the city stage their own walkouts. They’re pushing for meaningful action by those in power, such as the inclusion of Black history in the school curriculum.

Students share difficult stories of being harassed by police, being racially profiled in shops and having to endure racism in the hallways of their schools.

They are unwilling to stand for it any longer.

Thousands of people gathered in Poppy Plaza to protest against racism and police brutality on June 3, 2020. The global protests which started in the U.S. were ignited by death of George Floyd, who was killed by the police in Minneapolis.
Thousands of people gathered in Poppy Plaza to protest against racism and police brutality on June 3, 2020. The global protests which started in the U.S. were ignited by death of George Floyd, who was killed by the police in Minneapolis. Photo by Azin Ghaffari /Postmedia

These young people are joining a growing chorus of Calgarians committed to weeding out the inequalities rooted in everyday systems — through roaring protests, new anti-racism organizations and by holding civic leaders’ feet to the fire.

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The fight for his family’s protection is Yar’s own act of resistance.

As he combs through court documents in the gloomy hotel suite, his wife sits to his side, her head in her hands and tears streaming down her cheeks.

The family stays there for 10 days, until mounting costs force them back to the house where they feel surrounded by fear.

That “dream home” Yar built for his family seems less idyllic now, having been adapted with increased safety and privacy measures, like security cameras and outdoor hideaway screens, to ward off unwanted attention. The parents have instructed their children to stay indoors, sealed off from the outside world for their own protection.

The pain this family feels is known by many others.

Too many others.

Those fighting for racial equality in every facet of society, with a fervour sparked by the tragic death of Floyd, want a better life for themselves.

But more importantly, they know it’s vital for their children and grandchildren.

The fight is far from over, they say, but now is not the time to remain complacent. Every person has a responsibility to step up.

Because if society fails today, the burden will fall on the shoulders of generations tomorrow.

And it’s a burden too heavy to carry.

shudes@postmedia.com
alsmith@postmedia.com

Twitter: @SammyHudes
@alanna_smithh

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