The Distances Within & Between Us
Measuring the Divisions that White Supremacy Has Sown
Hi friends,
As you know, my work is largely centered around practicing anti-racism, anti-oppression, and equity. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with school boards, government agencies, businesses, non-profits, and other cultural organizations to educate staff and students alike about racial justice issues and how we can all act in solidarity across socially constructed lines.
Throughout the last few years of doing this work, I’ve noticed that much of the conversation is still centered around whiteness. When mainstream conversations address racism, the discussion is often – as most things always are – centered around white people. So much of our discourse today is still very much trapped in binary thinking – white people against all non-white people.
If I’m being perfectly honest and candid here, I’m tired of educating white people about their privilege and how they – knowingly or unknowingly – oppress, discriminate, and harm racialized people. This educating? This labour to show how they perpetuate the systems their ancestors created? It’s exhausting.
I don’t want to spend all of my energy teaching white people how to be better allies, how to stand in solidarity with racialized communities. This has been talked about ad nauseam and yet, it still feels like we’re having the most basic 101 conversations.
If there are white readers here, I call on you to do this important work. I leave it to the real white allies to educate their own peers.
The truth is that these days, I find myself sourcing powerful inspiration and beautiful, creative energy from working with various racialized communities to unpack the ways in which white supremacy has created a separation within ourselves and between us. The ways in which white supremacy has worked to set us apart. The ways in which white supremacy has created differences and division. By picking apart these distances that white supremacy has created between and amongst our communities, we are better able to create and build the bridge(s) we need to close these gaps.
That’s why over the last few years (yes, years!), I’ve been developing the second season of Living Hyphen’s podcast to explore this very issue. And I’m thrilled to share that it is now available wherever you listen to podcasts.
This season’s theme is DISTANCE and it is shaped intentionally to begin inwards, moving outwards. We start with the distances that are cultivated in our own minds without our even realizing it – internalized racism, sexism, and other -isms. From there we move out a step to the distances found in our relationships with loved ones, and then a step further again to the distances found within and between our communities…to the greater world we occupy as hyphenated Canadians.
Activist and writer Audre Lorde once said, "Revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us."
I have dedicated the last few years to examining, interrogating, and attempting to dismantle that piece of the oppressor within me. This season of the Living Hyphen podcast is an endeavour to capture that messy experience and share the lessons learned along the way. It is, as with all things we do at Living Hyphen, an ongoing work in progress.
This season brings you storytellers from all across what we now know as Canada to share poetry, short stories, and critical but caring conversations. This podcast aims to create an intimate space where we can turn inwards to decolonize our minds, while also working towards actively disrupting these systems of oppression that have been, as Audre Lorde writes, "planted deep within each of us".
Our world continues to be full of violence everywhere from Palestine to the Congo to Sudan to the land I find myself on in so-called “Canada”. Whether it is the resurgence of conflict from old wounds or the continuation of violence that has gone on for generations against Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, our headlines, social media feeds, and conversations are a never-ending stream of traumatic events.
It is my hope that the stories, experiences, and lessons shared by the 25 artists, writers, educators, and activists featured in this season serve as some kind of antidote to this pain. It is my hope that the stories we share in this season offer some pathway to healing.
As always, this is an offering and an invitation to greater connection and deeper understanding by way of tender and courageous storytelling.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “There is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them, wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the same disease.”
May we move towards our liberation together.
In solidarity,
Justine
What’s Happening In My World:
It’s back to school season and I’ve been working in partnership with the Peel District School Board (PDSB) through Living Hyphen on the Stories of Home – a multimodal and plurilingual project to support newcomer students and English Language Learners in their French as a Second Language classrooms. Learn more about this dynamic project.
Our partnership led to the development of PDSB’s first plurilingual poetry collection amplifying the voices of over 70 English Language Learners and newcomer students. It is a powerful testament to the beautifully diverse lived experiences of youth who have migrated to what we now know as Canada from all across the globe. Access the digital collection here.
At the end of August, I co-hosted an intimate, thought-provoking, and imaginative conversation on citizenship with friends at Reset. We brought our community together to listen to the stories of people who have experienced statelessness and/or conditional statehood here in so-called Canada. In a world where borders are constantly in flux and at a time when we are seeing unprecedented levels of mass displacement, we wondered together and imagined a world where boundaries do not exist. Catch a glimpse of the conversation here.
Living Hyphen is excited to be a part of the Good Mourning Festival at Evergreen Brick Works this coming November. We are looking for poets, musicians, and performers to share their stories with the theme of “Holding Grief & Gratitude”. Learn more and submit by September 22.
Support My Work:
If you enjoy reading this newsletter and find the work that I do valuable, you can also support my work by supporting Living Hyphen, the community I founded to explore the experiences of those living in between cultures. You can do that through a number of ways:
Hire us! Share our work with your school, company, or other spheres of influence. Over the last few years, we’ve had the honour of working with various partners to deliver our storytelling workshops to different communities across the country. We believe that our stories carry the power to heal ourselves, our relationships, and the world.
Support racialized writers in financial need with a one-time contribution. Your contribution will go to our scholarship fund to offset the cost of a ticket to our writing workshops.
Make a monthly contribution on Patreon to support our ongoing programming.
Support storytellers from 60+ ethnic backgrounds, religions, and Indigenous nations from all across Turtle Island by reading our magazines or listening to our podcast!
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