The Province

Anti-extremism in the age of Donald Trump

- Tara Carman tacarman@postmedia.com Twitter.com/tarajcarma­n

It was in September, amid the heat of the U.S. election, that Nathaniel Lam and his classmates had the idea to create an anti-extremism campaign. At the time, they had no idea how relevant it would become in their own back yard.

As they were putting the finishing touches on the campaign, Donald Trump won the U.S. election, emboldenin­g some in that country to carry out racially motivated attacks. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has documented more than 1,000 since the election. Even here in Metro Vancouver, the Ku Klux Klan distribute­d flyers in parts of the Fraser Valley in October and anti-Chinese flyers circulated in Richmond on two occasions in November.

The campaign, called Voices Against Extremism, has several parts. There is an online video that gives a history of extremism in the world and explains how people can become radicalize­d. There is also a series of social videos, inspired by the Humans of New York project interviewi­ng the people in that city about their life experience­s.

Lam and his classmates, who were students in a fourth-year criminolog­y class at Simon Fraser University, call this component Stories of Resilience.

“We go out, we look for community members ... and we ask for their story, their own narrative about what it means to be Canadian for them and what it means to be part of a community,” Lam said.

These people are from diverse background­s and could be recent immigrants, community police officers or professors. “The hope was to display that they have a life that is very relatable, they’re not just these immigrants that we always hear about in the media who people blame for problems like economic downtown ... especially during the U.S. election, that was a huge problem. And so we really wanted to do something to ... step up against that.”

The campaign has garnered internatio­nal attention for the students. They placed second in a competitio­n sponsored by the Organizati­on for Security and Cooperatio­n in Europe.

And about those racist flyers showing up around the Lower Mainland?

“For us, it just kind of highlighte­d that, wow, this isn’t just something that happens in the U.S.”

 ?? GERRY KAHRMANN/PNG ?? An anti-extremism campaign created by Simon Fraser University criminolog­y students examines what it means to be Canadian and part of a community.
GERRY KAHRMANN/PNG An anti-extremism campaign created by Simon Fraser University criminolog­y students examines what it means to be Canadian and part of a community.

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