Anti-Racism Reading List January 2023

“many white people simply aren’t used to thinking of themselves as having a racial identity. Race discussions are about “other people,” not them, so when their whiteness is labeled, for many, it can feel off putting.”

“If you’re curious about Indigenous spirituality, that’s commendable—everyone should want to know more about us, and should feel frustrated and angry that our stories have been shut out of history and popular culture. Key to this is observing respectful boundaries: You can learn about another culture without feeling entitlement to it. You can recognize that misusing traditional cultural practices can lead to consequences like exploiting, stereotyping, and ultimately, mistreating people whose ancestors created them.”

“Companies committed to interrupting the white gaze must focus on a few things. No progress can be made without education, understanding, and awareness of how the white gaze operates. Bring in consultants, speakers, and researchers to educate employees about the white gaze. Have a human resource consultant that specializes in diversity, equity, and inclusion review workplace policies and practices. You may be surprised to learn that policies that seem benign on the surface are actually exclusionary to different populations of workers.”

“These issues are just the latest example of long-standing health inequalities that could be resolved with greater equity in clinical research. Some of the most obvious examples include many areas of women’s health, pregnancy, infant mortality and perceptions of pain in Black people. In all these areas there is an intersection with socioeconomic class and race that compounds the inequality, but also helps disguise the role of simple racial discrimination.”

“Recasting Black activism as anger is ubiquitous in academia, where White researchers become experts on Black issues, under a veil of objectivity, and Black scholars are accused of being emotional, opinionated, subjective, and angry.”

“This cultural supremacy has become embedded in the very fabric of our reality, in the collective unconscious; in the values we uphold; and especially, in the conceptualization of how privileged classes and castes psychologically justify their grip on power. It is something happening on a global scale, being adopted throughout the Global South.”

“Although there’s no one-size-fits-all DEI solution, a typical journey through these stages includes connecting top-down strategy and bottom-up initiatives around DEI, developing an organization-wide culture of inclusion, and, ultimately, creating equity in both policy and practice.”

“All employers have a duty of care to their employees, especially when they may come from a marginalised community. This means creating environments that: are actively anti-racist, celebrate neurodiversity, are intolerant of homophobia and transphobia, and are actively dismantling toxic masculinity at every opportunity.”

“To learn that the QHRC may have harboured a possible sex offender for years in positions nominated and approved by the provincial government? Both the Quebec City police and the Sûreté du Québec were well aware of Picard’s past, yet his career progressed. How was he afforded the benefit of the doubt for so long? And why wasn’t Thermitus, a decorated lawyer with decades of experience in human rights law, granted the same?”

“He found this modified Arabic script everywhere. Shopkeepers kept records with it and poets wrote sprawling verses in it. Ngom discovered religious texts, medical diagnoses, advertisements, love poems, business records, contracts, and writings on astrology, ethics, morality, history, and geography, all from people who were considered illiterate by the official governmental standards of their countries.”