Citizens discuss strategies to eradicate racism from community

THUNDER BAY – Racism can be expressed in many forms that are unique to individual communities.

The city’s anti-racism advisory committee hosted a community engagement session on Tuesday at the Italian Cultural Centre, where more than 140 people attended to discuss strategies to eradicate racism in Thunder Bay.

Becky Sasakamoose Kuffner, race relations consultant for the City of Saskatoon, was a guest speaker and said the issue is not a simple one to solve.

“Racism is a global issue. It just looks different in Africa than it does in Thunder Bay than it does in the United States,” she said in an interview following her discussion.

“It takes a community working together when we’re talking about racism. Racism is a deep seeded, multi-faceted, very complicated issue. It takes a community to work together to understand each other, understand their history, identity and culture and then it takes collaborative, conscientious and deliberate work.”

The theme of the session is to encourage the community to shift the lens to understand how racism can be found within.

Sasakamoose Kuffner said there have been efforts in Saskatoon to shift the focus to anti-racism education more so than multiculturalism and diversity education.

While multiculturalism and diversity education have value, they have lacking qualities in adequately addressing how racism remains prevalent.

“What it doesn’t do is deconstruct what the power differential is and how colonization and the whiteness doesn’t take responsibility for the impact racism has had on people of colour and indigenous people,” Saskamoose Kuffner said.

“The inclusion of that and educating people about their own history and their own cultural involvement works to be able to deconstruct the issues that have had the greatest impact on Aboriginal people.”

Coun. Rebecca Johnson, who is a member of the anti-racism advisory committee, said the goal of the session was to broadly examine what can be done to eliminate racism in Thunder Bay.

“We’re trying to figure out what the key issues are regarding specific individual organizations and businesses and what they feel are the issues in the community,” she said.

“We’re also looking at having further conversations. This is just the start of a community conversation about this issue. We’re hearing very clearly people want to talk about this further.”

Organizers were expecting about 70 people and were pleasantly surprised with the strong turnout.

Johnson said the results of the session will be brought back to the anti-racism advisory committee, which hopes to develop a plan by the end of the summer to begin implementation in the fall.