Since we mentioned the death of George Floyd in our newsletter on May 28th, ABSI staff have been focused on reading, watching, and listening about the problems of systemic racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy. We’ve been quiet this past week to allow space for Black and anti-racist voices to be heard.
We’ve heard the troubling news surrounding the deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet and Chantel Moore, two Canadian women - one Black and Indigenous, the other Indigenous. We watch the quest for answers and justice in the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others. We’ve found many articulate anti-racist thinkers, and focus on systemic racism. To start, we wanted to share some of those voices that we’ve been hearing through a list of resources.
We also invite you to check out the hashtag #amplifymelanatedvoices . We will continue to read, engage and listen to Black, Indigenous and people of colour, and other anti-racist voices past this current news cycle. We will be more deliberate about sharing that out on ABSI channels including creating a permanent section of resources on our website about challenging systemic racism.
Edit, June 25: We are aware that reading and talking without deliberate action is not helpful, and we will continue to work on ensuring we take deliberate action. As a result, you can see a few updates to this blog (if you accessed it when we first hit publish). We know that ‘book clubs’ aren’t helpful, so while the action to take with this list of lists is to read and share, we encourage you to join us in cultivating the habit, of asking yourself, ‘what can I do in my projects to be inclusive and break down harmful systems?’
Resources
Mental Health Resources for Young People of Color includes organizations, digital resources and videos, support groups, and therapy directories to help support the mental health of young people of colour. This resource also provides a list of instagram accounts of mental health educators, therapists of colour, and community support pages.
LISTS: Book Lists, Watch Lists, read lists, and Listen Lists
Soni Dasmohapatra is an Albertan social innovator and philanthropist with an impressive list of impact work. She is the core team member for Edmonton ShiftLab 1.0. In 2019, she wrote three blogs published here on ABSI’s website about diversity and inclusion in Alberta’s social innovation efforts. Read part 1 on historical considerations, part 2 on contemporary realities, and part 3 on where we can go from here.
A ‘carrd’ linking some great information well worth reading right now. It shows the lives lost, state of the community over the past 72 hours, resources, and how you can help.
A reading guide in the Los Angeles Times toward becoming a more educated ally for Black Lives Matter. Memoirs by Kiese Laymon and John Edgar Wideman; essays by Darryl Pinckney and Mikki Kendall; masterpieces from Michelle Alexander and Claudia Rankine.
Victoria Alexander, (MEd), broke down her anti racism booklist into categories. She also has a great antiracist resouce guide.
CBC list of Books, radio interviews, TEDx talks, and documentaries featuring Black voices.
A document compiled by Autumn Gupta for Justice in June: a month’s worth of resources to read, listen to, think about and do as step one in becoming better allies.
This blog posted by Pretty Good Design is a roundup of resources to enjoy with the youngest people in your life that are easily digestible and prove that your kids aren’t too young to talk about race.
READ
Five charts that show what systemic racism looks like in Canada. Compiled by CTV news.
Article spotlight on economic and social innovation marred by racial bias and exclusion.
Dancing on Live Embers: Challenging racism in Organizations is a fantastic book about challenging the structures in organizations that lead to a lack of diverse voices being listened to in organizations. Consider finding a Black owned, Canadian bookstore to shop from and browse!
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is one of the leading figures in the anti-racism movement. He is probably the leading scholar in racism in the United States. Here’s a Q&A with him. He’s also written fantastic books like How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning that are on our ‘to read’ list.
This article on the use of police force in Canada looks at Supreme Court rulings. contains a section on excessive use of force in Canada: Andrew Loku , Sammy Yatim, Robert Dziekanski, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a video appearing to show a police officer ramming a vehicle into a man, and a Kelowna man punched by an arresting officer.
This report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission shows stats on crime in Ontario, including that a Black person in Toronto was nearly 20 times more likely than a White person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police Service (TPS). It includes the results of the OHRC collecting statistics, speaking directly to 130 individuals in Black communities, and five calls to action.
This academic article in the American Sociological Review regarding the role of community based social agencies in systemic crime reduction, which in turn reduces need for policing to be the only tool used in solving social issues.
Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own home. Here’s where her case stands on her birthday today.
Information on the investigation into the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who died after a fall 24 stories when she was alone with police. Also information about the death of Chantel Moore was killed during a wellness check by police on June 4th in New Brunswick. (Since the death of Chantel Moore and as of June 25, 2020, Rodney Levi, Ejaz Ahmed Choudry and an unknown man in Montreal have died following police intervention in Canada.) An article in Vice explores police responses to an intersection of mental health and race within the context of the deaths of Korchinski-Paquet, Moore, Levi, Choudry and a fifth man, D’Andre Campbell, who was killed during a police intervention in April.
Dr. Peggy McIntosh wrote about her own examinations of privilege in 1989 with a paper on unpacking the invisible knapsack of white privilege. Here that paper is presented with some suggestions on how to use it to facilitate conversations.
In 2017, Lori Lakin Hutcherson saw a Facebook friend ask for someone to explain white privilege. This was her response.
This one page graphical PDF shows the Prime Ministers on Canadian currency, with quotations from each showing the policies they supported at the cost of Canada’s diversity.
Toronto Life published a longform conversation with changemaker Paul Taylor of Foodshare on the links between race and food insecurity. Taylor says, “When you’re Black, you’re at greater risk of everything that sucks.”
This article, Racial Trauma in Film: How Viewers Can Address Re-traumatization, depicts the racial trauma and psychological impact movies and TV shows have on our mental health.
WATCH / LISTEN
CBC’s The Current episode from June 1, on racism in Canada and the U.S.
Sandy Hudson has written an article on why she hasn’t been a guest on The Current. You can listen to this co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto on her podcast, Sandy and Nora Talk Politics.
My Brother’s Keeper Alliance conversation with Barack Obama, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Phillipe Cunningham, Playon Patrick, Eric H. Holder, Jr., Rashad Robinson about Reimagining Policing in the Wake of Continued Police Violence. When we listened in, we found some inspiring messages about a path forward. Watch Phillipe, Playon, Brittany and Rashad - they are going to just grow in their power as inspiring leaders.
Tim Wise has been an antiracism activist since 1995. This is him in 2008 talking about the origins of “whiteness” and white privilege as a tool to divide and conquer lower socioeconomic classes that is still effective today.
Lawyer Greg Doucette has been collecting videos of police riots. These are hard to watch.His tweets have been gathered into a spreadsheet, here.
Tyree Boyd-Pates spoke at Tedx about ‘The Myth of Black Male Exceptionalism.’ If you’re interested in the intersection between museums, history, diversity and inclusion, or even in listening to Tyree’s point of view a little more, consider signing up for his newsletter.
Vu Le asked what may seem to some as a very uncomfortable question to sit with when he wrote: ‘Have Nonprofits become the “White Moderate” that Dr. King warned us about?’