On Being Muslim and “Dark-Skinned” After Boston

Yassine Zaime and Salah Barhoun are both innocent, but worried that this New York Post cover could affect the rest of their lives

By Ali Zafar

#Muslims.

Last Monday’s trending hashtag intensified my suffocating sense of dread, the one that’s ebbed and flowed since Sept. 11, 2001.

Muslims.

That dirty word stripped Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his white privilege: he had been identified in news reports as a Chechen, terrorist and radical, but never American.

Because he’s Muslim. Like me.

I’d logged off from the 24-hour cycle of the world’s misfortunes that afternoon, deciding to take a breather before my workday started. I always expect something big to be breaking when I show up for my evening newsroom shift, but the news of the Boston Marathon bombings was still a shock. My stomach churned as I looked at graphic images on the newswire: the blood-splattered streets, the volunteers racing to help a man in a wheelchair with a missing leg.

And my heart dropped when I logged onto Twitter and saw #Muslims trending alongside #PrayforBoston. Was it possible that a person who calls himself a Muslim was behind those horrific images? What if his first name was Mohammad? Like mine? What if he had dark hair? Dark skin? Like me?

Anxiety, embarrassment and a shade of fear began bubbling inside me like a violent thunderstorm. Watching the news made it worse.

Hennessy and Enemies: Booze, Brands and “Liquid Bling”

By Denise Balkissoon

Can you read that wine label? Cause this brand causes dictatorships.

There were many things to be upset about after last summer’s shooting on Danzig Avenue: the deaths, of course, plus the youth of the accused shooters, and how easy it seems for firearms to slip through our porous border.

Farther down on the list, but still troubling, was “Henny & Hip Hop,” a story that ran in the Toronto Star about 10 days after the incident. Dotted with lyrics by Mobb Deep and Eminem, the piece informed the reading public that “Hennessy has been part of hip-hop culture for almost 20 years.” It quoted a Brazil-based spokesperson from Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, who emphasized that the company “was not part of the party.” In other words, it was embarrassing and nausea-inducing, and almost a year later, it still bugs me.

Does alcohol make people violent? Unquestionably, yes. But I can’t think of a culture other than hip hop for which a string of brand citations follows every incident. When Vancouver Canucks fans tore their city up after losing the Stanley Cup two years ago, I don’t remember hearing what kind of flat beer they were overcharged for in the Rogers Arena.  An upper-class Scottish chef killed his girlfriend last fall, but the news coverage has yet to inform me about what sorts of fine wines he might have been drinking. At a time when there were many important, heart-wrenching things to consider, “Henny & Hip Hop” was just another piece of Othering tripe letting us know that “in urban culture, [Hennessy] is seen as liquid bling.”

I have some questions of my own about liquor brands and identity, questions that I might have considered stupid if the country’s biggest daily hadn’t opened these floodgates. Let’s start with the most important one, and move on from there.

1. Obviously we all want a world without prejudice or hate. Anheuser-Busch InBev is on track to own every major beer brand in the world. When Corona tastes just like Rolling Rock tastes just like Hoegaarden tastes just like Quilmes, will racism be over?

A Dubliner’s Rantings on St Patrick’s Day

By Séamus Conaty

Being born and bred (and buttered) in Dublin, I will not attempt to debunk any myths regarding the stereotype that Irish people drink too much. We do. This is not because we have an inherent love for what smart people call C₂H₅OH. What we have is an inherent love for socializing, and this happens in pubs. Our fondness for the juice is a bi-product of our necessity for chat. You will rarely (if ever) see Irish people drinking with the explicit intention of getting rat-arsed. It just happens, like shit.

When I was growing up, St. Patrick’s Day was not unlike Canadian Thanksgiving. Until the early 1980s, pubs in Ireland were actually closed on St. Patrick’s Day. There was little or no alcohol consumed—it was like a day off from alcohol. One went to mass in the morning, had a nice meal with one’s family, went into the city to watch the parade, and then threw stones at Protestants. (Ok, we didn’t throw stones at Protestants, we actually all get along quite well despite what the newspapers would have you believe.) Anyway, I loved it. We used to have great fun mocking the Yanks that had made the 5,000 kilometre trip to the Vaterland for a relatively low key family affair where they were reminded that, no, they were not Irish, they were Yanks, and should go live with all the nasty shit they’ve done. Rather than being a phony celebration of all things green, it was a religious celebration of our most famous patron saint. (Tip: he’s not our only one. Having several patron saints is our bonus prize for tolerating a millennium of molestation, which is a delightful segway into the relatively kiddie-diddler-free land of the maple leaf.)

I moved to Toronto in 1998. Following my diasporic trail like a fly to shite, I ended up working in an Irish pub for a few years. I loved it! I met great people and earned lots of cash, which I spent on booze, drugs and guitars. As March rolled near, I first found the Christmas-like hype around my national holiday rather flattering. But when March 17^th arrived, fuck me: my Thanksgiving was a complete and utter blatant pissfest. The worst of all pissfests! Premeditated, plastic, phoney and pathetic (nice alliteration there).

What’s With All the Hype About Hipsturbia?

Roger Keil, the director of the City Institute at York, mentions the Ethnic Aisle (he calls us wonderful!) in his post about the NYT’s latest take on gentrification (which, says Denise who is posting this, I found fairly annoying and definitely dismissive of ethnicity).

Racism, Future: Racial Profiling & the Toronto Police

By Septembre Anderson

“Blacks arrested by Toronto police are treated more harshly than whites….

“Black people, charged with simple drug possession, are taken to police stations more often than whites facing the same charge.

 “Once at the station, accused blacks are held overnight, for a bail hearing, at twice the rate of whites.

 –“Singled Out,” Jim Rankin, Jennifer Quinn, Michelle Shephard, Scott Simmie and John Duncanson, October 19, 2002

 “You were sent here to protect us but who protects us from you?”

– KRS-One

 In 2002, a team of Toronto Star journalists sorted through mounds of police data from over 480,000 incidents to put together the Race and Crime series. The collection of articles, profiles, maps and statistics unveiled an unsettling trend in the Metropolitan Toronto Police culture: racial profiling.

For Toronto’s black communities, the Star series was just quantitative evidence of their qualitative experiences. In the rest of Canada’s most populous city, the numbers on racial profiling caused an uproar. Julian Fantino, then chief of the Toronto Police Service, denied the Star’s allegations, and in 2003, the police union launched a $2.7 billion class-action libel suit against the Star (which it eventually lost).

It’s been almost ten years since the Star released its groundbreaking report and while much has changed, much has remained the same. This year, the Star series “Known to Police” revealed that black people are 3.2 times more likely than white people to be stopped by the police.

Racism, Future: Let’s Mix it Up

By Denise Balkissoon

Officially, Toronto is way multicultural. In my experience, it’s increasingly segregated. Aside from the subway at rush hour, I see deepening cliques and enclaves. Some of them don’t bother me as much as others—the white crowd at a Neko Case show is no biggie, the white crowd at the National Magazine Awards very frustrating—but the overall effect isn’t the city where I want to live.

We’ve long known that Toronto is split geographically by income, and that the growing low-income areas tend to be majority non-white. Poverty is definitely racialized in this city and it’s impossible to talk about racism without noting that all of the ways that people can be marginalized are infuriatingly linked. Remember, ethnic segregation in Toronto isn’t just about poverty—middle-class and affluent people often live in ethnic enclaves long after they’ve earned enough to have wider housing choices.

Now, I like that I can get three different Jamaican dishes from three different restaurants on Eglinton West. I’m currently soliciting invitations to go dancing at one of the Ethiopian nightspots on Danforth. But rigid enclaves can encourage an Us and Them attitude, especially since, in hyper-diverse 2012 Toronto, “racism” doesn’t just mean Anglos versus everyone else. Plenty of ethnic groups are ok with white people, but continue to throw shade at other ethnicities. Old country beef fought out in the new land keeps dominant groups dominant—grudges and in-fighting allows the historical cream to stay on top. Lack of interaction gives suspicion an incubator in which to flourish.

Across Steeles, by Roxana Parsa

 

Roxana Parsa is an Iranian-Canadian illustrator and writer based out of Toronto; she has worked with the McGill Daily and is currently on staff with Shameless magazine.

Racism, Past: Toronto’s Bygone By-Laws

By Chantal Braganza

This piece began with a simple premise and kind-of crude headline: A History of Racist Bylaws in Toronto. It presumed the existence of such bylaws, that there were enough of them to constitute a history (possibly a timeline—how readable!) and that they were as easy to find as a sushi shop on Bloor.

Surprise: it’s really not that simple. Happily (with one major exception) Toronto doesn’t have a history of enacting obviously prejudiced municipal rules. What we do have is a habit of going through municipal proceedings without considering all the different types of people who live here, who might not have certain Anglo-Saxon values or whose community-specific practices might be considered “undesirable” (whatever that means).

So forget the timeline. Here’s a look at what happens when the law gets in the way of a community who wants to do things differently.

Laundry Drama

The Wah Chong Laundry, Vancouver, 1884. Courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives and Civilization.ca

The oldest example of these bylaws is the most straight-up racist.

Canada’s Racist Money

We are sorry that we haven’t updated in a while. It’s summer and we’re busy enjoying life and you know what? You should be too. Get off the internet, we’ll see you at the beach.

One day soon, we are going put up a Q&A with illustrator Ness Lee, a Hilarious-Hakka-Chinese-Canadian whose stuff we love love love. Above, her take on today’s news that the Bank of Canada wussed out on putting an Asian woman on our $100 bill because of some random jerks in a random focus group. If you want to hear Denise Balkissoon’s take on it, go here.

But really, you should go to the beach.

The Ass Issue

Sir Mix-a-lot may like a big butt, but anybody who’s actually got back has stressed over its size. Similarly, slim types with smaller handles worry that there isn’t enough of them to love. No matter where each individual body falls on the curvature scale, there’s a stereotype to bring it down: voluptuous types are slutty, the streamlined are asexual, and there are serious consequences if those lady (or man) lumps don’t fit inside the gender box you were assigned at birth. The more racialized a particular body is, the more stringent the judgments tend to be.

This Pride, we present the Ethnic Aisle Ass Issue. Our goal is to dissect how race and ethnicity in Toronto intersect with issues of body image, beauty, sexuality and the all-important ass. We’ve got some fun stuff, including our first-ever audio post and playlist, and some serious thinking. As always, we’re taking this very, very personally.

Karen K. Ho is tall, curvy, and Chinese. Crazy, right?

Hot for teacher: Vivek Shraya shares the story Bubble Butt, from his book God Loves Hair.

Jaime Woo reveals the most shocking thing about being a faceless torso on Grindr.

Our first audio post! In “How To,” MC Jazz takes on the ultimate signifier of feminine beauty: Barbie, of course.

Farzana Doctor’s poem Open Bar is about one-night stands, commitment ceremonies, long-term relationships, and s-e-x.

Shake your rump! Download an asstastic playlist, courtesy of Cherrybomb’s DJ Cozmic Cat.

If Kim Kardashian and Rihanna have taught us one thing, it’s that someone else can like your rearview, but if you flaunt it, you’re a slut. No fair, says Renee Sylvestre-Williams.

“Desire doesn’t care what your politics are.” Navneet Alang kisses a white girl, just like Undercover Brother.

Speaking with Denise Balkissoon, sexual health counsellor Rahim Thawer discusses HIV prevention, fetishes, stereotypes and, most importantly, keeping the ass fun.