Educating youth about racism is essential
Curriculums don’t adequately cover deadly prejudices, past and present, Alexandrine Royer says.
In the past few days, communities around the world have mobilized to denounce the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota. During this global pandemic, with many suffering from the devastation it has caused, we are beginning to turn our attention to another deadly virus: hate.
Racism and injustice have plagued our societies for too long. We have allowed them to fester, to spread and to contaminate our institutions. We cannot let this go untreated. Preventative anti-racism education should be our first response.
The United States is not an exception, but a mirror to a new normal. In Canada, Indigenous, black, Asian and Jewish communities have long been the targets of discriminatory policies and racist treatment, even by those who represent justice and the law; more recently, Muslim communities have been added to that list. Online and offline, these communities are the victims of vicious hate-fuelled attacks.
A report commissioned by the city, made public last October, detailed the systemic biases in the operations of the Montreal police, with Indigenous people being four to five times more likely to be stopped than their white counterparts. By failing to take effective action to stop racist behaviours and attitudes in our police forces, we become silently complicit.
According to a poll by Ipsos for Global News in May 2019, about 50 per cent of Canadians admit to having racist thoughts and viewing the latter as “normal.” If we want to truly promote inclusion and equal opportunity, we must confront this darker side of our society and shine a light on our racist behaviours.
Though the federal government has started to embrace the idea of acknowledging and apologizing for its wrongs, such as its ill-treatment of the First Nations, true change needs a catalyst to push it further.
More comprehensive human rights education, starting with our youth — the leaders of tomorrow — is a necessary step toward making Canadians more aware of how many of us judge and treat others on the basis of their skin colour, history, origins or religion. Many high school educational curriculums across the country do not adequately address our country’s own history of enslaving populations from Africa and Indigenous groups. Students fail to be exposed to Canada’s past racist immigration policies and refusal of entry to refugees. Often, they are not taught about genocide, the most extreme case of violence against a group marked as “other,” and whose initial stages of discrimination and symbolization are present even today.
The Foundation for Genocide Education is filling the gaps in the educational system by providing presentations on racial and religious persecution to high school students, based on testimonies of survivors from different backgrounds and their descendants, including those who experienced the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide. We are also working with the government of Quebec to introduce a teaching guide on genocide.
Despite these efforts, we are repeatedly confronted with the fact that many students and the wider public remain ignorant of the realities of intolerance. If left continuously unchecked, these patterns will only be repeated in the future.
To the victims and their families, we see and we hear your pain and suffering, and we promise to do better. We promise to educate our children and youth about racism in the past, and racism and equal treatment in the present.
We promise that we will teach them to care, to stand up, to speak out, and to demand universal justice. But we demand that governments accompany us in this commitment to providing anti-racism education to future generations.
Only then will “je me souviens” lead to never again.