In the Blog
MID-WEEK ROUND UP: OCTOBER 30
Illustration: Erin McPhee
With Halloween right around the corner, let’s all do our best to make this a night of racist-free costumes. If one of your friends is thinking of wearing a culturally-appropriating costume, check out this article on how to talk to them about the problems with their attire.
If your friend is wondering why a culturally-appropriated costume is a problem, get them to a look at Kat Blaque’s video explaining why costumes can be so harmful and hurtful:
Content warning: the links in the following paragraph have violent images Ben Fields, the white police officer who violently assaulted a Black teenage girl in her South Carolina high school, was fired on Wednesday. Yesterday it was revealed that the girl is a recent orphan. What Field’s assault shows on a public scale is the over-policing in high schools and the targeting of Black students. Thursday’s episode of CBC radio’s “The Current” had a segment on how police in schools contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline and featured Black feminist scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw.
On Wednesday it was announced that police in Ontario can no longer randomly stop and card people. However, as journalist Desmond Cole writes:
“The Wynne government is finally acknowledging that residents’ stories of intimidation and surveillance are credible, and deserve a response. It’s a welcome, if long overdue, development. But new rules cannot, on their own, reverse a police culture of aggression and hostility towards residents, especially black Torontonians. We can’t regulate decency and respect in policing, but we must nevertheless demand it.”
On October 5th revolutionary Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs passed away at the age of 100. Tomorrow (October 31st) is the Allied Media Projects memorial in her honour. You can catch the livestream starting at 11 a.m. (eastern time).
Emi Mahmoud, a senior at Yale University, recently won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship. You can watch her 2013 performance at College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational here
For all you creative writers out there, make sure to check out Briarpatch’s Writing in the Margins Annual Creative Writing Contest.
