Workshop provides tools for students to help stop racism
A stop racism youth leadership workshop was hosted at the Swift Current Comprehensive High School on March 7 in advance of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21.
A total of 60 high school students participated in the workshop, with students from SCCHS joined by students from Hazlet School plus Moose Jaw’s Central Collegiate and AE Peacock Collegiate.
Rhonda Rosenberg, Executive Director of the Multicultural Council of Saskatchewan led the day long session which helped empower students to take action against racism and discrimination.
“I want them to take away that they are leaders and that they can make a difference,” she explained during a workshop break this past Thursday.
“And I want them to take away the hope and inspiration that we really can make a difference. That we can create communities that are really positive and respectful for everybody to live in.”
The Racism: Recognize it. Reject it! workshop was last held in Swift Current in 2017, and this past year they held an event in Maple Creek.
Rosenberg said the students are at a perfect age to share with the the importance of recognizing and rejecting racism.
“They’re really able to get this,” she said. “They’re at the stage of intellectual development where they can get their heads around discrimination. And they can see it.”
“I absolutely believe that the ideas that they develop now, and knowing that they can make a difference to their community now, will influence the choices that they make in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s and beyond.”
In light of the anti-immigrant sentiment among some of the participants in the yellow vest protesters, Rosenberg has a mixed reaction to the movement.
“I would say we have a long way to go, and there are things that encourage me too,” she said.
“When we have Yellow Vest protests, that there are other people saying ‘no, this is not what we believe. That even if you are against the Carbon Tax that you don’t have to be anti-immigrant.’”
“We’re not in the business of telling people what to think about the Carbon Tax. However, blaming immigrants for what’s going on in our economy just doesn’t have any sense to it.”
“We have much work to do, but I am encouraged by the fact that I think there are people willing to step forward and say these beliefs don’t represent me or my community.”
Rosenberg, who has been delivering stop racism workshops for the past decade, said the content of their sessions have changed over the years. One of their recent additions has been to include acknowledgment around the need for work around reconciliation.
Another new component has participants act out a simulation of colonization. Student groups are invited to represent their own first nation community, and one of the facilitators acts as a European settler. They explore trade, wanting land, and the issue of residential schools.
“It’s like an experiential simulation of several hundred years condensed into a few minutes.
“It helps them understand the relationships between those initial European contact relationships, but also kind of why we are the way we are today.”
“I find that by giving the experiential aspect of it actually lets them relate to the pseudo experience of First Nations people - but in a condensed enough way that they get it in ways that they might not simply by reading about it in a book or learning about it in school.”