They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  How can the imaginary, perceived threat to whiteness—the fear of losing the privileges and comforts associated with being white—be ripped away simply because of “diversity,” when every system has defended and upheld whiteness ferociously for centuries? And yet those who fear that whiteness is under attack then attack people of colour in the form of threats, violence, and harassment. Those who defend their right to freedom of speech try to silence others who exercise that same right. These posters reveal the anxieties over what could happen when those of us oppressed by systems of whiteness start to pick at the cracks in its structure.

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  In minus 20 degree weather, I waited for the bus in my parka, an extra pair of mitts, and my winter boots. London winters are bone-chilling and the buses are never on time. After fifteen minutes, an older, white woman showed up. We exchanged a quick smile. The snow crunched underneath our boots as we waited.

  “It’s very cold!” I said.

  “Oh, honey, you must not be used to this weather,” she said sympathetically, looking me up and down. “I’m sure it must be hotter in the islands.”

  “Yeah, the islands would make a great trip right now!” I said. With reading week around the corner, I thought about all the warm places where I could make a last-minute escape.

  She looked back, confused. “Yes, you must be used to that hot weather! You know, where you’re from…” She paused at seeing my furrowed brow. “…In the islands.”

  “Uh, I was born here. In Canada.”

  “Oh, okay.” She sounded reluctant to believe me. The bus arrived a minute later.

  While working my first job on campus, helping first-years with their internet in residence, one of the cleaners, a woman with a European accent, saw me wiping away sweat on a hot day. “Why are you sweating like that? You must be used to this weather where you’re from.” And at a Tim Hortons in the winter of my final year, the cashier gave me the most pitiful glance.

  “You poor dear, it must so hard adjusting to Canadian winters,” she said, handing me my coffee.

  “Well, no. I was born here,” I replied.

  “Oh, that’s great. You speak English well.”

  Why is it so hard for some people to believe that anyone with beige or brown skin can be “from here?” Some of this ignorance can be attributed to the homogeneity of university towns. But things are changing: Southwestern Ontario, particularly London, has seen an 8 to 15 per cent shift in demographic over the last decade, with more immigrants moving to the city and students coming in from outside the region. This has brought with it a fear of people of colour, and an uptick in white nationalism and hate crimes. In 2010, London ranked fifth in Canadian metropolitan areas for police-reported hate crimes. Reported hate crimes in London increased by over half from 2016 to 2017, making it the largest rate in Southwestern Ontario.

  There was a time when Black people considered London one of the country’s more accepting cities. By the early 1850s, over 40,000 refugee slaves and free Blacks who came to Canada from the U.S. settled in Southern Ontario. London’s geography made it an ideal home for refugee slaves who came through the Underground Railroad: while kidnappings of slaves were commonplace at border points like Windsor and Niagara Falls, London was far enough for safety.

  London was a bustling little town that was home to some of the richest Black settlers in Ontario. They had more opportunity to make a living and own property in London than in larger cities like Toronto. But a man named Alfred T. Jones said that in London there was a “mean prejudice” that couldn’t be found in the States. Several slave accounts corroborate this, including that of Frances Henderson, a man who said Black people were turned away from hotels. By the early 1860s, segregated schools were in the works, but a lack of funding halted the idea.

  The Ku Klux Klan were active in London by 1872. That year the city welcomed a South Carolina Klansman who was fleeing U.S. police after murdering a Black man, and when he was finally captured, there was outcry among white Canadians, who viewed him as a hero. A decade later, a group of white hoodlums burned down the childhood home of a London-born Black man named Richard Berry Harrison, who was the son of fugitive slaves. It happened about two days after he and his family moved to Detroit. Harrison later became a renowned actor and was on the cover of Time magazine in 1935.

  Today, London is home and rally territory to several far-right and white supremacist groups. Far- and alt-right protesters clash with counter-protesters in the city, and white pride marches take place on main streets, not far from Western. Hate speech and hate-promoting activity became so problematic that, in 2017, the City of London announced that the Managing Director of Parks and Recreation would be able to refuse or revoke permission for events on city grounds if they believed it promoted hatred or discrimination. Hate incidents in the city have been so shocking that they’ve made national headlines.

  In 2011, during my second year, a man threw a banana peel on the ice while Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers was skating towards the goalie during the shootout of an NHL exhibition game at the John Labatt Centre. The man’s lawyer said he was “oblivious to the racial connotations” and he only received a $200 fine. In February 2016, E.B. Smith—a Black actor from Cleveland who was playing Martin Luther King Jr. in a local production—said he had been the victim of racial slurs twice since arriving in London. Three months later, a Western University Ph.D. student from Iran was beaten outside the Covent Garden Market in downtown London. His attackers allegedly told him to go back to where he came from as they hit him. They were later charged with assault. The next month, a thirty-eight-year-old woman attacked a twenty-five-year-old Muslim woman, spitting on her and pulling at her hijab. The Muslim woman emerged with a black eye and chipped teeth, and the attacker was charged with assault.

  In April 2017, Cody Perkin was charged with manslaughter and assault after brutally beating Vijay Bhatia, a London cab driver, to death. Video footage from witnesses caught Perkin telling Bhatia to “Go back to India,” and uttering other slurs as he pummelled him. In 2018, Perkin was sentenced to four years, but with two years of time served counting towards his sentence, he will soon be out of jail. In December 2017, a Black family said they found “Nigger” written in the snow on their car and were considering moving out of London.

  In July 2018, a thirty-nine-year-old London man was charged with assault, forcible confinement, and causing a disturbance after a viral video showed him blocking another man from leaving a grocery store. He called the man an illegal alien. Police initially let the attacker go with a warning, saying it was difficult to prove whether the incident was race-related or a hate crime, and didn’t charge the man with assault until two weeks later, presumably only after public outcry.

  During the 2018 municipal election, supporters said their signs for Arielle Kayabaga, a candidate running in Ward 13 and the first Black woman to be elected in London, were vandalized and urinated on several times. When Sudanese-born Mohamed Salih, London city councillor for Ward 3, was running back in 2014, two of his campaign signs were destroyed with fried chicken and watermelon. We have no hate crime laws, so criminal charges like assault, mischief, and damage to property are often used instead, as proving hate or bias is difficult.

  With a rapidly changing landscape that is perceived to threaten white privilege, the “Go back to your country” rhetoric has become the attack of choice for the far right, white nationalists, and social conservatives. It’s a phrase that exposes the fear of our diversifying country, of losing the benefits that come with maintaining the status quo. Its use can’t be understated: it often accompanies threats or violence, and targets all people of colour, despite their nationality. It’s also a political tactic amid a global wave of anti-immigration sentiment. In the U.S., it has been used by Donald Trump to throw immigrants into detention centres, to keep out migrants, and to dismiss any criticisms by people of colour ov
er his administration. In July 2019, the “Go back to your country” discussion was renewed when Trump attacked four new Democratic members of Congress on Twitter—all women of colour; all U.S.-born except for Representative Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali refugee—and told them to go back to their country. Emboldened by his comment and his continued attacks on Omar, the crowd at his North Carolina rally days later chanted, “Send her back.”

  At its core, “Go back to your country” is the embodiment of the white rage—white fear—that has been responsible for many mass killings in schools, places of worship, public spaces, and workplaces. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2017 report found that in the past decades white supremacists and right-wing extremists committed the majority of murders in the U.S.—more than double the number of the year before. Nearly every year, white supremacists commit the highest percentage of extremist-related murders—not refugees or immigrants.

  Since I graduated in 2014, hate crimes in Canada have been increasing steadily, hitting an all-time high in 2017—nearly doubling from the year before. The majority of these crimes were race-based: Muslim, Jewish, and Black populations were the targets of most incidents. Experts like Dr. Barbara Perry have been documenting the rise of far-right extremism in the country for decades; she estimates that there are more than two hundred right-wing groups in Canada, and the number is only increasing. Despite years of these warnings, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service only recently began recognizing that right-wing extremist groups are a significant problem. In March 2019, Public Safety Canada announced it would be giving Perry and her team at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology $366,985 over three years to study right-wing extremism.

  White rage is considered a legitimate, acceptable form of anger—one intended to maintain the integrity and purity of the country—so it is rarely viewed as threatening. White rage encourages and enacts violence against bodies of colour; yet when people of colour speak up against harm, they are told by society that they don’t have a right to be angry. That there is nothing to be angry about, that they are dramatic and irrational. That they should stop complaining and go back where they came from. People of colour are not supposed to be angry about white rage, even when that rage seeks to hurt them. And as we ignore it, dismiss it, say it isn’t that bad, it only grows worse.

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  With five suitcases full of food, cooking utensils, and clothes, my grandfather brought his family to Canada.

  They arrived from Karachi on a cool, breezy day in April 1973. It was two years after the Canadian government announced its multiculturalism policy, and South Asian immigrants were coming to the country in droves. My family lived with my great-aunt, who had sponsored them, and within two weeks, my grandfather got a job bookkeeping at a nursing home run by a white couple, making $2.25 an hour. He and the white employees got the same salary; the Black workers got $2.00.

  It was an easy decision to move to Canada. The country offered a place to raise a family and move up in society without fear of repercussions.

  A few weeks after arriving in the country, my grandfather was on his way to work when a group of men in a car approached him and yelled, “Go back to your country, Paki!” My grandfather, the calmest person I know, picked up a rock and chased the car down the street. On the bus, walking to work, even in front of their house, the attacks were the same: You Pakis, go back to your country.

  That didn’t stop them from going out in public. They had family picnics at parks on red-and-white checkered tablecloths alongside white families. They went camping and watched the fireworks on Canada Day. In the summer, the whole extended family carpooled to Niagara Falls. My mother and uncle grew up like other teens, hanging out with their friends until late and listening to their idol Prince loudly in their rooms. The comments by strangers dwindled with time. So, it came as a surprise to my family when I told them that the same kind of derogatory comments, the ones that had pierced them so deeply many years ago, were aimed at me. My family rarely spoke about racism, or anything polarizing: politics, religion, injustice. They knew what it meant to be told to go back to their country—they had once been new immigrants to Canada—but I was born here, how could people say those things to me? How could that kind of hate exist after all these decades?

  In my early twenties, as I started writing more about anti-Black racism and my work became visible, my relatives were surprised at the stories I covered. “Why do you write about them when you’re one of us?” they asked. As if I’d been done a favour to have South Asian blood. As if being born Black were a curse.

  I know they wanted to understand what I was going through, to understand how best to support me. But anti-Black racism, this unfamiliar type of injustice, was hard for them to comprehend, especially when they didn’t see me as a Black woman.

  My family was surprised to hear me refer to myself as Black. There was no simple way of explaining to my relatives that, regardless of how they saw me and how I had grown up, I was intrinsically tied to the things they didn’t want to talk about, the things they didn’t want to think could happen to me: police violence, discrimination, genetic health issues. I could never pass for a brown body like theirs, as much as they believed I could. I didn’t share their skin colour or their features. People didn’t care what family I was born into, if I was “mixed” or not—my body moved through the world as a Black woman, and that’s how I was treated and perceived. That’s who I was, despite also being South Asian; despite being multiracial.

  They had always been extremely supportive of my decisions, no matter how rash. They let me figure out who I was on my own, and encouraged me to pursue the things I loved—reading, writing, going out with friends. When I applied to university, they supported my eventual decision to switch into an arts program, even though they wanted me to study something more sustainable like nursing or social work. Being my own person was always encouraged in my household, but referring to myself as Black in front of them seemed to make them question if they really knew me the way they thought they did.

  I couldn’t explain to them that unapologetically embracing my Black identity wasn’t a sudden realization—it was survival. It gave me a sense of belonging in a city that made me an outsider; a way to both protect myself and make sense of these new experiences. It was empowering and magical, and I wasn’t ashamed. To live somewhere like London, I needed to know who I was. Western was not like high school; I couldn’t live in the in-between. There were no light skin and dark skin teams, no mixed-race camps. There was white and Black, and you were treated accordingly.

  Resentfully, I closed myself off to my family, unwilling to share any more stories. If I couldn’t even tell them about the slurs and microaggressions, how could I tell them about the close calls with violence? Or that I was depressed—that I was scared of everything and everyone? That I feared for my life every day, whether they believed it was rational or not?

  Faced with their lack of understanding about how anti-Black racism affected my studies and my health, I found other ways of seeking encouragement. I enrolled in more race-related courses. I started reading the works of more Black scholars and feminists, feeling at home in their words; and I started documenting my experiences, which I could identify in the theories and stories of other writers.

  It still wasn’t enough to curb the loneliness, and food became a replacement for my emotions. After class, I’d go to the grocery store or pick up takeout from my favourite restaurant and then eat it all in one sitting. Instead of going out, I would go home and eat. Being painfully full distracted me from my racing thoughts.

  Numerous, detailed studies have shown that racism is a chronic stressor, and experiencing anti-Black racism has serious mental and physical health effects. Experiencing discrimination or microaggressions every day—or simply living in fear of experiencing them—can cause enough stress to increase the risk of anxiety, depression, suicide or suicidal tho
ughts, common colds, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, hypertension, and high blood pressure. These extensive studies into minority stress have been conducted in the U.S. and the U.K., but are harder to come by in Canada, even though Black Canadians have one of the worst health profiles in the country.

  Black people are constantly at risk for developing health issues or having them worsen. Much has been written about how socio-economic discrimination affects Black Canadians in terms of employment, education, and housing, as well as the justice system. And the stress of experiencing racial discrimination on a daily basis also has a significant impact on the achievement of Black students, negatively affecting their success and causing them to drop out, fear going to school, and develop mental health issues.

  I needed help carrying this heavy burden of racism, and I’d thought my family could alleviate some of it. We had experienced the same things in the same country, the same rejection, the same hopelessness. But there was a sea of distance between us.

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  On a hot summer day when I was eight years old, my mom hit a bird with her car. She was shaking with dread as two of her co-workers pulled out the injured, screeching bird from the car grille and killed it. A bad omen.

  I was aimlessly playing a Nickelodeon Flash game on the computer at my cousin’s house, counting down the hours until my mom picked me up, when my great-uncle came in and told me my grandmother was in the hospital.

  Scans showed a golf-ball sized tumour in her brain. CNS lymphoma. Six months to live. If she tried the experimental treatment—one year. She figured there was nothing to lose if it promised her more time with her family.

  She beat the cancer. But when she started turning yellow, there wasn’t a single nurse or doctor who thought to check for jaundice. The chemo had destroyed her liver. By the time they figured it out, nothing could be done.