Tag: racism

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There’s Food at Home

You have to choose. Do you want to be one of them. Or one of us.

Creator:
Haniya Syed (she/her)

So many things stay with us in our memories – the flavour of meals, the aroma of food, the sights and sounds of meal time, and the emotions of being around families and friends. In this cookbook, Haniya shares with you some of her most treasured family recipes that map onto her parents’ migration history, and her experience growing up in a multiracial family set within a society filled with racialization. To complement the amazing recipes, Haniya sprinkles this cookbook with offerings of scrumptious poetry, dashes of mouth-watering food photographs, and heaping portions of heart-warming family pictures. As you read through this cookbook full of amazing recipes set to immense nostalgia and reminiscence, what foods draw out some of your fondest childhood memories – and why?

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How can I learn in a world of color when the text is white?

[H]ealthcare inequities…can be traced back to…the foundational knowledge that future healthcare practitioners are educated on.

Creator:
Ying Jie Li 李颖杰 (she/her)

Guest:
Melody (Chinese heritage, nursing student)

It would be so easy for us to think about health inequities as something situated within clinics and hospitals, especially in terms of the health outcomes. While that is a valid assessment of health inequities, there is much more to these issues. Who are the academics/physicians producing and publishing knowledge? Who are primarily the participants in these medical studies? What demographics is published knowledge based on? What are the identities, perspectives, and experiences of the people serving as frontline medical caregivers? Who are the people who make policy decisions in clinics, hospitals, and government ministries? All of these questions, and many others, colour the health inequities that patients experience. How do we address inequities within the healthcare system when these issues are so systemic? Listen to Ying Jie and her guest tackle these difficult issues, what these issues feel like, and think of what a way forward might look like.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

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I don’t want being Asian Canadian to be the only thing they know about me

“[T]hat’ll be the day when we really have that freedom.”

Creator:
Kaitlyn Lee (she/hers)

Guest:
Cathy Huynh

Racialized and minoritized individuals involved in the arts often face a dilemma: On the one hand, being minoritized means feeling external pressure to have to tell stories associated with one’s minority group(s). On the other hand, there is an internal desire to tell stories that are true to themselves as an individual, and not to be known only as their minoritized identity. What does freedom from this dilemma mean? Kaitlyn interviews her friend and Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, Cathy Huynh, to discuss how these opposing pressures play out in the filmmaking process, how they affect her as a filmmaker, and how she reconciles them.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

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Working in the Global North

[S]tructures like a capitalist and exploitative nation-state will only see people…as just bodies that need to contribute to empowering those in control even further, no matter the cost

Creator:
Divine Reyes

An important aspect of Asian diasporic discussion within a capitalist system is the intersection of labour politics, gender, and racialization. For a long time, the provision of care-taker labour in Canada, whether in terms of medical care or domestic care, has been disproportionately shouldered by racialized women and femmes…particularly those with more complex migration histories because of the broader economic relationship between the Global North and the Global South characterized by one-sided exploitation. In Divine’s interview, her mother speaks about her experience creating and living and exercising agency within a predatory economic system and the difficulties that all of that entails. Have you noticed this kind of intersectional breakdown of care-taker labour around you?

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Invisible Queerness

Being queer and Asian is “a very powerful identity.”

Creator:
Clover Lee (she/they)

Mainstream discussions around diversity and representation often revolve around culture/race/ethnicity; but it’s obvious that an intersectional approach is needed to better address and understand people’s experiences. What happens when race and queerness intersect? What kinds of experiences do they have that might be different from those who aren’t queer? In Clover’s paper, she explores the experiences of queer Asians in Vancouver to illustrate the power of such an intersectional identity, and also the challenges of embodying this intersectional identity while navigating an LGBTQIA+ space that is very White-centric, as well as domestic spaces that are very heteronormative. While it is challenging to have to navigate these spaces and deal with discrimination in multiple forms in numerous spaces, the people featured in Clover’s paper are resolute in their pride for their identity.

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Planting a Seed

Ruolee holds the seed, like how Ah-ma held her hands. “I know it will grow now. It certainly will.”

Creator:
Maya Wu 吳妤蕎 (she/her)

Leaving a home to set up a new home elsewhere is as much a source of excitement as it is a source of sorrow. We often end up in a double-bind of experiencing sadness for leaving behind people we love and cherish, and also struggling with the loneliness of social isolation and cultural adjustment in a new environment. This is especially difficult for children who, while culturally and linguistically adjusting, also end up shouldering the domestic load of being the liaison between their families and the outside world. And sometimes, all it takes is that one serendipitous encounter with that one individual who helps change perspectives, provides assurances, and gives confidence to the immigrant child to know how to find a niche for themselves in this new cultural environment. If you had been in a similar situation, who was that one person for you – or perhaps it was a group of people? And what changes occurred as a result of that encounter? Read through Maya’s beautifully illustrated story of just such an encounter and I dare you to not feel like smiling at the end.

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“Where are you from?”

“Are you a ninja?”

Creator:
Anonymous

If there is one thing that racialized people have to do a lot as they move through society, it is having to explain their own identity, culture, and (presumed) history of migration. “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” While the person asking the question might not have meant it maliciously, the fact that racialized people disproportionately have to answer this question suggests a fundamentally and systemically different perception that many in society have about racialized people. In particular, this perception involves the insidious assumption that racialized people don’t belong here, or that they can’t possibly be from here. Instead, they really belong there, and must be from there. Take a look at this video and wonder for yourself…when someone experiences these perceptions so often, how does this affect their identity formation? How does this affect the ways in which one might see themselves?

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Can’t Use What’s Not There

Can’t Use What’s Not There

Creator:
Ghoncheh Eijadi

When we think about racialized or diasporic individuals establishing a livelihood in Canada, the prototypical conceptualization is an immigrant; but there are many others who do not fall into that group despite also trying to establish a livelihood here. This includes refugees, who often have very different experiences and are subject to very different obstacles from immigrants. Discussions around diasporic health, then needs to include this as well. From this perspective, Ghoncheh writes about IRER groups (Immigrants, Refugees, Ethno-Cultural, and Racialized) and their need for better and more culturally appropriate mental health support. In particular, Ghoncheh tries to outline the issues regarding the underutilization of mental health services among IRER groups, and lays out policy recommendations for how to rectify this issue.

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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When What’s Available Isn’t Enough

This population of millions in Canada needs immediate attention with culturally-adept solutions to improve their mental health

Creator:
Harleen Kaur Hundal

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated families around the world; but such effects have disproportionately hit certain populations more than others. Internationally, this in differences can be seen in infection/hospitalization/fatality rates across the world. Nationally, this disparity across various social lines, most prominently based on ethnicity. As COVID-19 swept across Canada, each province and territory had to figure out how to best manage this virus, often shutting down who sectors of economic activity while relying on those performing essential services to keep the world running. Unfortunately, zooming into Greater Vancouver, many essential services are visibly and disproportionately reliant on racialized folks, whether this include grocery store workers, truckers, healthcare providers, laundry service providers, meat works, or many others. This places racialized folks at a much greater risk of becoming infected with, or dying from, COVID-19 – including South Asian diaspora. Read Harleen’s impassioned letter to her Member of Parliament, Hon. Carla Qualtrough, as she dissects the racialized impact of the pandemic, and what needs to be done to help the South Asian diasporic community. So what can be done beyond the generic colour-blind health interventions that are already available?

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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“I don’t feel like I am desirable”

[G]ay Asian men must get their membership ‘approved’ when white gay men do not.

Author:
Nathan Bawaan

Nathan writes about the experiences of Asian Gay and Bisexual Men (GBM) and men who have sex with men (MSM), and the struggles that they often have to deal with – systemic racism within LGBTQ+ communities, the resulting internalized racism, and how both impact their mental health. As Nathan explains, Asian GBM and MSM exist in a system in which they sometimes reject their own ethnic identities and idealize Whiteness (and particularly White gayness), often out of a desire to fit into LGBTQ+ spaces. This piece dovetails nicely with Tiffany Ou’s animation about the stripping down of the fight for queer liberation into effectively a gay White man’s struggle. Nathan points out that this kind of self-loathing, to the point of not recognizing oneself as being desirable, presents particularly difficult mental health challenges for Asian GBM and MSM – with extremely concerning physical health implications, too. How, then, can Asian GBM MSM find community within LGBTQ+ spaces, or must they create their own?

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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