Questions and Answers

I struggled to answer this one, because I honestly don’t know which racism is worse. I know that discrimination of any kind is about fear and shame . . . it makes you not want to be who you are and you have to fight to love your own Self. I know that the U.S. has a history of slavery and internment camps, but Canada has the Komagata Maru incident and a healthy scattering of Neo-Nazis in all provinces.

And I know that here in North America, we fight whatever our fight is – discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality, class . . . while in other places women are fighting the politics of Faith. They are fighting for the right to say no to sex with their husbands. They are fighting men who call them whores because they are not being “good Muslims” and are, instead, embracing the ideology of “Christian infidels.”

And the only thing I know for sure is that none of us is fighting for the right to be Brown or female or gay or wealthy. We are fighting for our very basic human rights. The right to be who we are, exactly as we are, and entitled to the same privileges as anyone else.

So as I considered the questions at my book launch at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I was grateful to be in a room with such thinking, probing minds. People who are looking for answers—hoping, knowing that the way things are right now isn’t really working for anyone. And that there absolutely is a better way . . . we just have to keep asking the questions that will help us find it.

Page 2 of 2 | Previous page