Homeless youth set for high school grad

As many as 11 young people could graduate from a new Richmond Hill program

Inside the classroom at 360 Kids, a Richmond Hill youth homeless shelter, students Kamisha Dianocky and Frank Grening-Morash are putting the final touches on their high school diplomas.

Less than a year after launching iGrads, a high school program designed for atrisk homeless youth, 360 Kids’s first full class will graduate on Wednesday.

Grening-Morash, 23, who is living on the street for the sixth time, is in the process of finishing his final two credits.

“I’ve been looking forward to graduating for over five years now,” he said, laughing. “I don’t really have means to navigate away from (homelessness) but this school’s going to help me so that I don’t go back there, because I’m looking at a job and not risking being on the streets again.”

Black Lives Matter was reviled as a hate group last year for protesting that lack of equal treatment, and making demands for more inclusivity. That demand already made an impact; Anu Radha Verma, a curator of brOWN/out, a Pride event focused on the South Asian gay community, publicly thanked BLM on CBC for making her Saturday event possible.

Do you know who is a hate group? The KKK, about a dozen members of which turned up in full regalia to crash an LGBTQ parade in Florence, Ala., earlier this month.

Which would you call hateful? Protesting against those who are the instruments of your oppression? Or stomping on the oppressed, when they rise to resist?

What that resistance has made clear to some of us straight folks looking from the outside in, and perceiving the LGBTQ communities as a unified force of good, is that anti-Black racism exists every- where, and the rainbow just covered up the streaks of racism within. Disagreeing with BLM does not make you racist, but being able to place how Black people experience police in your blind spot makes you privileged.

For some gay people, their history or experience of discrimination doesn’t seem to have exempted them from discriminating against others.

There was Darryl DePiano, the owner of iCandy, the Philadelphia gay bar whose audio recording calling Black queer men “ni-ni-nini-n-word” was broadcast on loud speakers in April. There was the other gay bar in N.Y.C. where multiple complaints surfaced about people of colour being discriminated against and not being allowed in. (Rebar, the bar in question, has denied that.) These are not isolated incidents.

Pride is not about race, say those who have never been excluded — or targeted — on the basis of their skin colour. It’s about celebrating gay successes, they say. Except that acceptance and protection have not been extended to all people.

How equal is equality, when it’s only for a few? Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar

For some gay people, their history of discrimination doesn’t seem to have exempted them from discriminating against others