Rescued from the Fire, by Abdullah Nazir Uhuru was given to me by a sister I’d met through work and was one of those books that sat on my shelf for months before I picked it up. When I finally did it was the type of read you don’t want to put down until you’ve finished. I related …
Rescued from the Fire: Reading Reflections on Race Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I saw a video in which a man verbally attacked some people on a train in a racist and hateful way. This man is a racist. He is a bigot. He may or may not have been under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and he may or may not have a mental …
Mental illness is not a foundation for bigotry or violence Read More »
When working through some feedback forms to tie up a funding grant, part of the information we asked of the participants was their ethnicity. Why do we ask for ethnicity? We ask for information about a persons ethnic group because we monitor who benefits from projects and services to ensure we’ve targeted the right demographic and to make …
There came a point throughout my work around cohesion that I stopped caring. Not about the goal or about people in general, but about the people whom our work was centred around; the people whose perceptions and judgements we thought we needed to change in order to achieve better cohesion and in turn benefit the realities of oppressed …
How to centre those with less power in cohesion work Read More »
Who is Shamima Begum? Shamima Begum, a young woman who travelled to Syria at age 15 to live among the so-called Islamic State, was recently informed that her British citizenship would be revoked and she would not be allowed to return home to the UK; her place of birth and the apparent only country in which she …
Every so often one meme or another circulates attempting to define white privilege using simple and palatable concepts. One in particular reads that white privilege ‘doesn’t mean your life isn’t hard, it means your skin colour isn’t one of the things that makes it hard’, and I don’t disagree. But that’s only the very start of a …
The playing out of the last few days since the terrorist attack against Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand has been really difficult to process. A white supremacist terrorist and self described fascist, shot and killed over 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, citing the president of the country with the third largest military …
Allyship and being an ally are phrases often heard within social justice circles and from people that claim titles like liberal, woke or conscious. Sometimes it’s from people who have a conscious or subconscious desire to make up for years of being the opposite. Years of casual racism and intolerance. But what does it truly mean …
How to be a better ally even when you feel marginalised Read More »
When we talk about difficult topics we will almost definitely cross paths with people who are vocal in their disagreement of our perspective and position on that subject. By ‘difficult topic’, I mean something that people literally find hard to discuss because of their own social circumstances, ignorance or lack of understanding due to lack …
The Hate U Give is a 2018 movie based on a novel by Angie Thomas. It’s an intense, upsetting and provocative film that should spark multiple conversations (or debates). Here’s what I thought of the movie. Minor spoilers below. The movie centres around a scene where a young black man is shot by a policeman …