A hate-crime in London, Ontario

 

This is the Afzaal family. They emigrated from Pakistan to Canada in 2007 to start a new life. That new life ended on Sunday, June 6th, 2021, when they were murdered in London, Ontario, the city they called home.

The family was taking a Sunday walk together when they were mowed down by a black pickup truck driven by a 20-year old man named Nathaniel Veltman, a home-schooled Evangelical Christian part-time egg processing plant worker, who frequently quoted the Bible at work, and who, police say, targeted the Afzaal family because they were Muslim.

They are, left to right, Yumna Afzaal, 15, Madiha Salman, 44, Talat Afzaal, 74, and Salman Afzaal, 46. Their 9-year old son, Fayez, described as "a shy third-grader" remains in hospital, and has now been told that his entire family is dead.

In 2001, I watched in horror as George W. Bush weaponized anti-Muslim hatred in America to help sell a war, after 9/11. I watched Trump tend it like a noxious, poisonous garden. I've watched Canadian right-wing politicians do a particularly ugly Trump-lite direct-to-video Canadian version, particularly in Quebec where it led to a mosque massacre in 2017.

I watched the former Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, in 2011, try to draw a line between so-called "old-stock Canadians" and newer ones, as a racist dog whistle to shore up votes. The irony of Canadians whose grandparents couldn't speak English when they first arrived in Canada railing about "immigrants" would have been funny if it wasn't so grotesque and pernicious.

And I've watched western organized religion become a dependable source of dangerous anti-Muslim rhetoric, with the imprimatur of sanctity attached to it like a rocket. Conservative politicians and religious leaders wear this hate like a lapel pin. Ambivalent liberals tend to watch what they say, but when they want to indulge a bit, they tell themselves it's really about 9/11, or the troops, or more recent Middle East conflicts, or about how "oppressive" it is when observant Muslim women voluntarily wear hijab as a sign of their faith, even when the women tell them it's their choice, and their joy.

I've seen people who can't even find their own countries on a map casually substitute "Muslim" for "terrorist" in conversation, online of course, but also in person—and occasionally, they're not even the “bad" people, but the “good" people , the ones who just don't think about what they say. They're the people who might be chagrined, or confused, when it's pointed out to them.

So poisoned is the cultural groundwater on this topic that things roll off our backs now that would have horrified and shocked us 25 years ago.

I have said before, and will likely say again, and again, that the lack of empathy in this era—an era where we have every tool extant to create empathy—is killing us as a society. And much worse, it is driving us mad in the process of the very long, very painful death of decency,

Lack of empathy—the literal inability to put ourselves in the place of people who are different from us, and to find a common humanity by instinct—is behind racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, and any other number of lethal prejudices that seem to leave otherwise intelligent people scratching their heads and wondering "how" this happened.

The four members of this family murdered on Sunday are far from the first victims of this type of hatred, and they will by no means be the last. But until we all start speaking out against this with one voice—all of it, not just the parts that affect the groups with which we personally identify, or which we deem worthy of our social and political voices —this blood, and all the blood still to flow, will be on our hands.

To the Afzaal family: may Almighty Allah dwell your beloved dead in Jannatul Firdaus.

To the rest of us: may we all find some way to acknowledge what we've allowed to fester in our midst, name it, atone for it, fight it, and keep it from happening again.

We can all tell ourselves "we're better than this" after we've done so, not before. Until we do, we're most emphatically not better than this. We are this.

Remembering Olympic gold medallist in the Decathlon and pro-football player Milt Campbell during Black History Month, 2021

This is Mario Geo's 1967 Toronto Star photograph of American Olympic gold medalist and ex-pro football Milt Campbell and his family, residents of Cooksville, Ontario, moving back to New Jersey to join in the Civil Rights movement following the Newark Riots that year. 

Campbell was the first Black decathlete ever to win the gold medal, in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Campbell played one season of football for the Cleveland Browns before being fired by the team's coach Paul Brown, according to Campbell because of his marriage to a white woman. Determined to continue to play football, Campbell found himself welcomed by Canada and the CFL, playing for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Toronto Argonauts until his retirement from football in 1964. Upon his return to the United States, he started a community centre and co-founded the Chad School in Newark, which had a specific focus on Black history and culture.

Campbell was inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1992, and he died in 2012, in Georgia, from complications related to prostate cancer. 

Campbell's life and career were extraordinary, and should, in all fairness, have been the subject of a major biopic by now. Perhaps one of the brilliant young screenwriters and directors making films today—in either of our two countries—will rediscover this story, and start writing. Check out this excellent video here. 

Remembering Canada's Black Loyalists during Black History Month, 2021

A detail from John Singleton Copley's "The Death of Major Pierson, 6 January 1781" (1783) features a Black Loyalist soldier fighting on the British side. During Black History Month in Canada, it's worth remembering that the Black Loyalists—former American slaves who joined the British side in the War of Independence—were among the original non-Native Canadians, and should be counted among Canada's founders and settlers, in spite of the terrible struggles they endured, against everything from the violent weather to various forms of institutionalized racism, in a new country that promised them acceptance and land, and frequently shirked on both counts. Many of the Loyalists eventually left Canada, travelling to Africa and settling in Freetown, in Sierra Leone. Those who remained, and established themselves in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, contributed to the evolving fabric of the new nation. Until relatively recently, their achievements and histories have been downplayed in favour of Canada's (predominantly white European colonial) history.

The coat of arms of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society of Shelburne, Nova Scotia were granted by the Canadian Heraldic Authority in 2006, and the elements are as follows—

The shield: "Sable between three Loyalist civil coronets a ship’s wheel with four spokes in saltire Argent." The crest: "A demi-lion Or gorged of a Loyalist military coronet and holding between its paws an anchor Sable." The supporters: "Two lions Or each gorged of a Loyalist civil coronet Gules, the leaves Vert, and standing on a rock set with mayflowers proper."

Statement on the Allegations of Racism by Chesya Burke

In the spring of 2013,  I posted a thread on my Facebook page addressing the media takedown of southern celebrity chef Paula Deen. 

The gist and intent of the thread was that the opprobrium being meted out to Paula Deen, a woman, was not commensurate with the opprobrium being meted out to white male celebrities in comparable circumstances, such as Don Imus, who had made reference to “n*ppy headed hoes” in a television interview. 

My premise was that this was due to sexism, ageism, and classism—in Deen’s case, because she was an older woman whose image was frequently mocked, derided and lampooned as representing a rural, regional, working class background that is often the butt of jokes. 

It was not in any way a defense of Paula Deen herself, nor a negation of the accusations of racism levelled at her. 

I also pointed out that, as a queer person, I was tired of hearing male rappers, and football players of any race, using words like “f*ggot” and “q*eer” as slurs, and that I would likewise genuinely welcome a pillorying of the next gay man who used the word “tr*nny.” And I said that what Paula Deen had said was both offensive and stupid, and that the Food Network was entirely right in firing her.  

At one point, Chesya Burke, whom I did not know at that time, having only recently accepted a friend request from her, joined the conversation. She was justifiably outraged at any perceived defense of Paula Deen, and said so, passionately. 

Earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down DOMA, but LGBTQ people were still not allowed to marry in all states, and could still be fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes, unlike any other minority in America.

This was still very raw and fresh in my mind at the time, and informed the later tone of my discussion with Ms. Burke. 

At that point, I wrongly engaged in a “misery comparison” argument, pitting homophobia against racism, that, in retrospect, was both unhelpful and disrespectful to the gravity of the topic, and Ms. Burke’s position itself. 

Ms. Burke asked why we were now talking about gay rights, and I replied that we were talking about it because of the hierarchy of slurs, and how some slurs resulted in severe opprobrium while others were given a pass. I posited that because of Ms. Deen’s age and gender, and celebrity culture in general, this had turned into “a feeding frenzy based on it being an extremely lazy way to feel good about fighting racism without doing anything at all.”

Ms. Burke suggested that I was defending Paula Deen, which I again denied, reiterating that, in the media, “this has stopped being about what Paula Deen may or may not have said, and is now about what Paula Deen represents in a cartoon sense,” and that “a mob mentality has taken over.”

I wrote (without abbreviations or asterisks) about the word Paula Deen was accused of using:

“Do I defend the use of the word ‘n*gger?’Not remotely. Do I agree with the people who are saying, ‘Well, black people use the word ‘n*gger,’ why can’t I? No. Quite the opposite. I disagree vehemently. As a friend of mind said, ‘I can call myself a f*ggot, and so can my gay friends. Straight people can’t.’ [The n-word] is not an across the board word."

I did not use the word to, with regard to, or about Ms. Burke, as was alleged—or indeed any other African American person—nor did I use it "at least 50 times" on the thread as was also alleged, and I used quotation marks around the word in each instance, both to indicate that I was quoting someone else, and in order to make it clear that the word was not being used or endorsed by me, and was, in fact repellent to me, and that I was using it here exclusively as it pertained to the discussion at hand regarding the hierarchy of slurs, and in denunciation of the toxicity of racist language. 

That said, I should never have spelled out the word at all—I should have used asterisks, or some other way of shielding the word in the discussion. 

I should have considered the impact my use of the word would have on Ms. Burke as a WOC, and I should never have used it more than once over the course of our interaction.  

The consistent position I had held prior to 2013 was that shielding any slur with asterisks gave cover to its offensiveness, by allowing readers to experience the slur while evading the experience of its deeply ugly impact, and thereby diluting the slur's impact and capacity for dehumanization.  

When I read Ms. Burke’s first blog post about our encounter, I was horrified by  how I  had come across to her in our interaction.

More importantly, I was abruptly aware that my position on spelling out slurs was a one of eye-watering and quite obvious white privilege, and that just because I, as a white queer person, had found a way to cope with the terrible, dehumanizing slurs used about me and others like me, still others justifiably find the ones used about them to be acidic and destructive, and indeed devastating to read in print. 

I also regret my occasionally condescending tone to her in our exchanges on that thread. Over the years I have cultivated an online delivery in some of my posts and comments that has not served me well. As a wise friend recently pointed out, the one who loses their temper first is the one who loses the argument.

Reading her 2013 blog about our encounter began a six-year process of reaching out to, and seeking guidance from, POC friends and colleagues about the power of those words, and how, exactly, I, as a white person, should use them—if ever. 

In the time since that encounter, I have been humbled by, and grateful to, those many, many generous POC friends for helping me understand, and especially for their patience in helping me understand the degree to which there is a hierarchy of oppression, and that anti-LGBTQ oppression and the oppression of POC is not the same thing—and how acknowledging that fact is central to successful intersectionality and reconciliation.

I have also been grateful to writers of colour for their work, which is not only essential to our genre, but also essential to non-POC writers to understanding how to better make room for the genre to grow. 

One of the books I treasured most  during the journey was Ms. Burke’s Let’s Play White, which I cited in an unpublished interview earlier this fall as teaching me about the perils of white privilege—including my own. 

I met Ms. Burke at Readercon in 2013, some weeks after our encounter on Facebook. I apologized, and told her how much I regretted the tone our interaction had taken, and how much I admired her passion and her activism. It was a cordial encounter. 

I still do, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and insult my words caused her in 2013. 

She deserved better, both as both a WOC and as a literary colleague. 

I have loathed the concept of white supremacy and racism my whole life—not only the overt and obvious racism we see around us everywhere, but the more insidious kind of structural, ingrained racism that has elevated white people at the expense of POC,  traces of which are unavoidable in those of us of white colonial descent, whether we think it’s there or not, and whether or not we believe we have benefitted from it, or whether we're actively aware of it. 

We have all benefitted, period.

Both my social media footprint and my published nonfiction work bears out my fervent hatred of racial oppression, and indeed my loathing of the oppression and exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized groups of all kinds by the wealthy and powerful. 

Aside from everything else, this conversation has refocused me on my ongoing, very imperfect life journey to becoming the sort of ally that POC and other marginalized groups need—and deserve. 

Thank you for reading this.

Michael Rowe