They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  Later that year, I became best friends with two Lebanese girls who lived down the street. They called me Black all the time; I didn’t know why that mattered, but I knew I felt uncomfortable. I felt the reluctance of their father, too, when I came over for dinner. He could barely look me in the eye. When they invited me over during their family parties, the adults walked past me like I didn’t exist. One day, their baby cousin was over, staring at me, thumb in mouth as I waved. “She’s scared of Black people,” her sister said. My mom gave their parents a proper schooling, and that was the end of the conversation.

  My mom and I never discussed our contrasting features, even when I became a teen and servers started asking us if we wanted separate bills. Not even when she talked to strangers about her daughter and they asked “where is she?” as I her lookalike stood right there. And she didn’t feel the way I did when it came to my appearance. Boys didn’t turn her away because she was too dark. She wasn’t followed around department stores by old white ladies. She didn’t have to feel uncomfortable or nervous in the spaces white people inhabited. The small fraction of whiteness I inherited was nowhere near enough to pass like her.

  My father’s name was rarely mentioned in our house, unless I asked. And even then, my mom gave me one-sentence answers. But I wanted to know what his identity contributed to my own. What did it mean to have a Black father? How could I bridge these two identities harmoniously? If he was out of the picture, did I have a right to call myself Jamaican? Could I be both—Black but still brown, brown but also Black?

  To the mothers of my Black girlfriends, I was Black, and the percentage didn’t matter. When we turned thirteen and started going to the mall on our own for the first time, it was their families who taught me about my rights in case the police stopped me, about what stores sent security guards after Black kids, and what to say if I was falsely accused of shoplifting. Women like Angela, like these mothers, were the ones who first taught me how to navigate the world as a Black person, before I even knew what that would mean.

  * * *

  ///

  On my first day of high school, I took a seat beside another Black girl and got out my notebook. She stared at me intensely. I looked back at her, feeling insecure, but she didn’t break eye contact.

  “What’s your background?” she asked.

  I repeated what my mother always told people. “My mother is Pakistani and Irish and my dad is Jamaican.” The girl stared at me for a few seconds longer, nodded, turned back around.

  This question became the main interaction I had with the other Black girls in high school, and each time it was just as uncomfortable. I dreaded the pressure to describe myself in a few words, to decide what to include or exclude, of not feeling confident in my incomplete answer.

  But in a school full of teens who were also thinking about the nuances of their identities, I could start to think about my own. “Light skin” and “dark skin” teams were emerging, and kids put an ls or ds beside their Facebook names. People wore their ethnicities with pride through their clothing, or expressed their multiracial identities in the bios of their Facebook pages, calling themselves mixed. The lighter you were, the more attractive; the less conventional your mix, the more desirable. Mixed wasn’t a word I liked; and anyway, it was usually reserved for white-Black or white-Asian biracial people. But it was what the Black kids called me. Everyone else referred to me as Black; the brown kids, though accepting of our shared ethnicity, couldn’t get past my appearance.

  I felt the pressure to identify a certain way to the brown and Black kids, desperate to be accepted by at least one side. I felt like a fraud during cultural food week when my mom brought me sweet jalebis to sell at the Pakistani table. I was too embarrassed to be asked why a Black girl was selling Indian sweets and not Caribbean food, so I ate them all by the end of second period and then bought some pierogis from the Polish kids.

  How could I feel closer to being Black when I knew nothing about my own father? Was including my mother’s whiteness in my own identity necessary or excessive? Would I be accused of trying to distance myself from my Black side simply because I mentioned I was also brown? Was it a betrayal to my family to feel closer to being Black than Pakistani? How could I only call myself Pakistani but not consider how being Jamaican was the reason for my appearance, my dilemma of fitting in, that self-defence lesson from Angela?

  In Grade 11 chemistry lab, one of the popular Black girls walked over to my station. “Where are you from?” Her question caught me off guard; by now, most people already knew. I paused for a few minutes, wanting to say I was Black. I thought about leaving it at “mixed.”

  I used my default answer, hoping it would be sufficient: “My mother is Pakistani and Irish and my dad is Jamaican.”

  She laughed. She laughed and laughed and pointed at me, gasping for air as I waited to see what was so funny. Finally, she caught her breath. “You’re a terrorist,” she said, before erupting in another fit of laughter. She pointed at me again. “Terrorist! Terrorist! Terrorist!”

  * * *

  ///

  Shut the fuck up, nigger.

  It was my third year at Western, and my then-boyfriend, Amir and I were walking back to his car after a late-night study session at the University Student Centre. It was a frigid fall night and the campus was empty, except for two young white guys who were walking up the hill towards us. They must have been first-years: very drunk, wearing dress shirts and no jackets, and coming from the direction of a residence.

  The blond one, flushed with intoxication, asked if there was anywhere at this hour to get food.

  “The Student Centre is still open,” Amir said.

  “Shut the fuck up, nigger,” the blond hissed at him.

  “Excuse me?” I searched his expression to make sure this wasn’t a joke. My right hand started shaking. Flat palm. Maximum damage. Rage blinded me and darkness framed my vision. My heart was beating hard against the wall of my chest, my ears were ringing. I could barely hear Amir telling me to ignore this boy with his neatly coiffed hair.

  “I said, shut the fuck up,” the guy repeated, then turned to me. “And you, go back to your country, you bitch.”

  His friend held him back as he stalked closer, his arms flailing and feet stumbling over each other.

  “Yo man, what’s wrong with you?” his friend whispered to him, his own eyes widened in fear.

  “I was born here,” I said as I kept walking. I laughed—it seemed like the appropriate response to calm the fight-or-flight instinct that was threatening to take over my body.

  “Fuck off, you Black bitch,” he slurred. “Your boyfriend is a nigger, and I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

  He charged at me as he continued his threats, his friend desperately clinging to the fabric of his shirt. From Amir’s protective grasp, I yelled back at the blond that he was ignorant.

  The boy’s yells turned to screams so piercing he was losing his voice. Go back to your country, bitch. Nigger, bitch, third-world, kill you…Finally, his friend, apologizing profusely, was able to pull him towards the Student Centre.

  Silence returned, but I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I looked at Amir.

  “Aren’t you angry?” I was exasperated.

  Amir shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

  Amir didn’t flinch at being called a nigger. Each time he walked up the stairs to my off-campus apartment, white women looked on, terrified, watching him until he was out of sight. Clicks of locking car doors followed him when he walked down the street. Arabs, who didn’t realize they shared a language, would make racist comments.

  Driving a cab in London night and day, he experienced some of the worst verbal abuse I’d ever heard. People refused to get into the car because they didn’t want to be driven around by an immigrant. An older woman once hit him with her purse because he wasn’t a white driver. At night, m
ost of his customers were students. White girls asked if the stereotypes about Black men were true. Sometimes they mocked his English. Men started fights about paying the fare, threatening to beat Amir up when he refused to answer their ignorant questions. The police were always getting called to defuse situations.

  Sometimes, he kept me on speakerphone to listen to the conversations that took place in his cab. One night, I heard a drunk couple get into the backseat.

  “Your accent is so exotic,” the guy slurred. “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Bombaclat,” Amir told them dryly.

  “Bombaclat,” they both repeated pensively. “Is that near Kingston?”

  The day after the incident with the two white guys near the Student Centre, I went to campus police to file a report, empowered by the school’s zero-tolerance policy for discrimination—something that had stuck with me from the open-house tour years back. Days later, an officer brought me in for an update. I sat in a small dim room with a bright light in between us, like I was being interrogated.

  “We’ve looked into this and I wish there was more we could do, but there are no cameras around that area, so it’s impossible to identify these two boys.” He looked sympathetic.

  “So what happens if that guy does this again?” I asked.

  “Well, hopefully someone will report it and we’ll be able to get him then.” I thought about all the surveillance around the campus. How could there be no cameras in one of the busiest areas? Worse, how could an incident of this magnitude be dropped just like that, only to let it happen to another person? By then I had experienced a host of issues in the city and on campus that I’d handled myself, even when the weight of carrying it alone felt enormous. The one time I had asked for help, nothing could be done.

  * * *

  ///

  Western is known for its welcoming and lively campus, full of activities and school spirit, but like other schools around Canada, it has its share of hate incidents and crimes that go largely unmediated by officials. After all, Western is the school that employed the late psychology professor Philippe Rushton, a man who was part of the legacy of scientific racism and research into race-based intelligence. Under the security of tenure, Rushton carried out studies that used brain and genital size to claim that Black people were the most unintelligent and hypersexual of all races. He was employed at the university from 1977 until his death in 2012.

  While I was a student, friends shared their stories about seeing property defaced with the word “nigger” scribbled in trees, on walls in residences, and on campus property. About being mocked, both on campus and off, for the way they spoke. About the microaggressions they faced from strangers and peers. They recalled white students having “discussions” on whether racism was still real, and professors asking them specifically if the class could talk about it. In my last year, a young Black girl was allegedly mocked for the way she spoke and kicked off a bus by a driver who said her presence was “threatening,” yet no witness could confirm his statement. People who knew her described her as a gentle soul.

  In classrooms, white students took up time to share their thought process on racism out loud and then thanked us for giving them the space to learn about other cultures for the first time. When a course had a module on race, seats were noticeably empty that week. The following class, students gave me their excuses for why they skipped, then asked to borrow my notes. During a discussion on race in my third-year Literary Criticism course, a white girl who was always on her phone and talking loudly in class punched her hand into the air. “Like, I don’t get why we’re still talking about slavery,” she said with annoyance. “Like, it’s done. Get over it.” Thankfully, no one agreed with her.

  But she wasn’t alone in feeling attacked by conversations about race. A year after I graduated, the Gazette, Western’s student newspaper, published its first Black History Month issue. To show the amount of hate that students sent in because of the issue, the editor at the time, a woman of colour, published one of the letters the paper had received: “Why does it seem that the point of Black History Month has changed from celebrating black culture to making white people feel bad for being white?” In February 2015, a student hacked the Recreation Centre’s Twitter account and posted a tweet that said, “Fuck all niggers.” It was taken down and the university apologized. The following year, white students made national headlines when they posed in front of a “Western Lives Matter” banner. (While the school initially condemned this, it ultimately decided that it didn’t violate Western’s code of conduct.)

  Many schools do condemn racist and discriminatory actions of students, but punishment is enforced to varying degrees, from expulsion, suspension, or a warning. Often, it’s chalked up to a “learning opportunity,” while those targeted don’t even get a quarter of the support and resources that perpetrators do in order to move forward from the incident.

  Canadian students aren’t filing racial discrimination complaints, because they fear they won’t be believed, or because they ended up resolving the issue on their own outside of a formal complaint. Other times, it’s because they don’t know where to go on campus for help. The root issue is the same: students do not trust that their school will do anything to help them.

  Many post-secondary schools across the country report hate incidents on campus in the single digits, if they keep track at all. And there are so many hate incidents that police can’t follow through on, like with my own complaint, so these don’t get included in the data. Other reports may not even be considered a hate incident or crime by police. This means we don’t have an accurate account of just how prevalent this is on university grounds.

  The police couldn’t help me, and there were no human rights complaints that I could have filed, no charges to press when someone spewed the kind of hate that made me afraid, because there are no criminal laws against these increasingly common incidents. And things have not gotten better since I graduated. The past few years have seen an alarming rise in white nationalism on Canadian campuses.

  The alt-right, or alternative right, is a poorly defined group comprising white nationalists, white supremacists, nativists, populists, anti-Semites, Holocaust-deniers, incels, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and others. It’s popular with young men, and supporters are often found in the dark corners of the internet and online forums, including 4chan and 8chan. Some of its signature tactics are memes and cyber harassment. It also has more women at the helm, even though it’s just as misogynistic and anti-feminist as other far-right movements. Its members are often young, educated, and articulate, making it ideal on university campuses, hotspots of critical thinking and freedom of expression, and for students looking to express thoughts that would otherwise be deemed politically incorrect or racist.

  Students in Toronto organized a “U of T Rally for Free Speech” event in October 2016 with Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor who was the subject of protests over his refusal to use a student’s gender-neutral pronouns, and former right-wing Rebel Media employee Lauren Southern. In March 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University allowed white nationalist and soon-to-be failed Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy to give a talk entitled “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity,” but it was cancelled when a student pulled the fire alarm. Later that year, the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy hosted a debate on populism that included Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Free speech groups have also formed at several universities, including York, the University of British Columbia, and Concordia.

  As each year goes by, alt-right incidents across Canadian campuses gain more visibility. In 2015, a number of white pride flyers promoting a white student union called the Students for Western Civilisation were put up across Toronto universities. In September 2016, on the University of Alberta campus, Sikh students were targeted with posters that said “Fuck Your Turban” and “If you�
��re so obsessed with your third-world culture, go the fuck back to where you came from.” Two months later, flyers posted on McMaster’s campus and in downtown Hamilton read “Tired of Anti White propaganda? You are not alone.” Two weeks after that, posters with anti-gay, anti-Muslim images and the phrase “Make Canada Great Again” were found on McGill’s campus.

  In February 2017, posters denying the Holocaust were found at the University of Calgary campus. In September, recruitment flyers for alt-right group Generation Identity, which has a large presence in Europe, showed up on several Canadian campuses. That same month, two campuses in Fredericton were targeted with alt-right posters, including three on a Maliseet welcome sign at St. Thomas University that read “Critical thought is a crime,” “Equality is a false god,” and “We have a right to exist” alongside an image of two white people and a link to an alt-right website.

  In November 2017, the University of Victoria was postered with alt-right flyers encouraging people to “Defend Canadian heritage” and “Fight back against anti-white hatred.” Alongside links to alt-right websites, the poster also read “(((Those))) who hate us will not replace us” (triple parentheses are commonly used by neo-Nazis to identify Jewish people). Later that month, the University of Regina and U of T were postered with flyers that read “It’s okay to be white.” Weeks later, stickers and posters promoting white supremacy sprung up around Brandon University’s campus. In November 2018, posters that also said “It’s okay to be white” were posted on the Fort Garry campus at the University of Manitoba and faxed to the Women’s and Gender Studies department. In October 2019, a racist and homophobic note was posted inside a dorm at Queen’s University, threatening to “scalp you all” and “make you bleed.” The list goes on and on.