Introduction

What’s in a Name? The Importance of Naming Racism and Anti-racism

We write this introduction amid the global uprisings that are taking place in response to the systemic anti-Black racism that led to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the intersecting anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racisms that led to the police killing of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, Ontario; and the anti-Indigenous racism that led to the additional seven police killings over an eight-week period from mid-April to early June of 2020 across Canada: Eishia Hudson, Stewart Kevin Andrews, Everett Patrick, Abraham Natanine, Chantel Moore, Jason Collins, and a thirty-one-year-old man from Clyde River in Nunavut whose name has not yet been disclosed. These deaths occurred in the middle of four concurrent, intersecting, synergistic pandemics: the global pandemic of violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies; the global pandemic of gender-based violence that disproportionately targets women, non-binary, and trans-identified people; the global pandemic of poverty; and finally, COVID-19. None of these pandemics is an accident of nature or an “act of God.” Police violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people is state-sanctioned violence. Gender-based violence is often framed as a public health problem when it is a problem of misogyny and organized disregard. Poverty, like racism and sexism—in Canada, at least—is often construed as a personal failing rather than a systemic, structural problem. Despite that none of these has been treated with the same urgency as COVID-19, we posit that the global prevalence and health costs combined with the uneven distribution of fatal and severe outcomes of all three make them synergistic pandemics occurring in tandem with COVID-19, rendering some bodies more susceptible to premature death than others.

This framing is uncomfortable. This book is intended to make people uncomfortable. It is intended to draw into question the uncritical move away from naming racism to talking about diversity and inclusion. It is designed to lead to more questions, not to provide answers. It is an act of resistance against what Ien Ang (1995) refers to as a “more sophisticated and complex form of assimilation” (180). As Irfan Chaudhry (2019) has articulated, there is power in naming racism:

Anytime you use the word anti-racism, people get heightened [. . .] no one wants to be called a racist. [. . .] I think what often happens is when you use that term people still connect it to those overt forms of discrimination [. . .] but what we often [also see] with racism [are] more subtle, micro-aggressions or [. . .] people avoiding certain spaces at certain times because certain demographics occupy that space and they connect that demographic with a lack of safety, so there is a hesitation to utilize the term [. . .] but there is also power in naming it because if you have a problem with discrimination [. . .] it’s really important to address it directly [because otherwise] the key issue doesn’t get addressed.

Feminist critical race scholars have long been attentive to the costs of reducing difference to “diversity” and racism to a problem of “inclusion.” In the 1980s, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1989) pointed out that when difference is “defined as asymmetrical and incommensurate cultural spheres situated within hierarchies of domination and resistance,” it “cannot be accommodated within a discourse of ‘harmony and diversity’” (181). Absorbing people into pre-existing communities like cities, nations, states, or institutions without “challenging the naturalized legitimacy and status of [those communities] as [. . .] communit[ies]” (Ang 1995, 180) does nothing to disrupt the systemic violence that allows for them to remain uninterrogated. It also does nothing to undermine the structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence—including genocide, dispossession, and exclusion—that brought them into being in the first place.

To be included in any combination of these uninterrogated communities often glosses over the structural, systemic, and intersectional nature of the racism, sexism, and classism that persist within them. Rather than imagining new realities, this kind of inclusion ends up reinforcing the white, non-reproductive, able-bodied, cisgendered, propertied, atomized individual as the dominant norm around which everything from the workday to personal priorities are expected to be structured and reinforces heteropatriarchal social scripts and family forms. It also perniciously disavows and erases the ways that racism plays out in the context of everyday life when the experiences of those who are racialized and othered are measured by their proximity to instances of discrimination that mirror those experienced by non-racialized people through pretences to “claimed solidarity” (Ang 1995, 181).

Identity politics and allyships can thereby also be problematic. Sometimes, the collective can be invoked in ways that efface the individual by eclipsing the contexts and specificities of personal experience; at others, the individual can be overemphasized to the exclusion of the collective. Crenshaw (1991) has pointed to the ways that identity politics often obscure intra-group differences, thereby erasing the intersectional failures that are the result of anti-racist organizing that does not address sexism and conversely feminist organizing that fails to address racism. The invisibility of intra-group differences and the tendency to either reduce experience to only a single axis of oppression or have the individual stand in for the collective in ways that erase the structural and systemic nature of intersecting forms of oppression reproduce rather than challenge, erase rather than acknowledge, the particularities that contribute to the overarching structures of racism. It is our contention that one need not erase or efface the other. Each personal experience in this volume is unique and qualitatively different. Each academic analysis focuses on the structural and systemic issues that shape many of these personal experiences. Together, they show the structural, systemic, and interdependent nature of intersecting forms of racist violence that both uphold and are upheld by other forms of violence, oppression, and discrimination. This is the intersectional nature of the racisms that are discussed in this volume.

Intersectionality as a concept has not only become foundational to feminist theory and praxis as a way to describe interlocking forms of racist violence; it has also crossed borders, making appearances within and in between multiple legal jurisdictions, theoretical planes, and geographic locations (Hodes 2017, 71). As Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has noted, “In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race” (quoted in Adewumni 2014). Crenshaw’s initial objective was to create “an everyday metaphor that anyone can use” to interrogate and intervene in the ways that social life is experienced, discussed, represented, structured, and institutionalized (quoted in Adewumni 2014). However, when intersectionality appears on international, national, regional, and municipal social policy and legal agendas, it can end up becoming what Jasbir Puar (2007) has called “a tool of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism” (212). As both Puar (2007) and Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) have since pointed out, it thereby often ends up being used in ways that collude with the disciplinary apparatuses of states by recentring universalizing essentialist identity formations, harnessing mobility, and encasing difference “within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid” (Puar 2007, 212). As a result, it often ends up working the same way as mainstream diversity and inclusion initiatives by creating a universalizing identity project that recentres whiteness as the measure of normalcy, acceptability, and intelligibility.

Identities are not, however, fixed, unchanging, or absolute. They are instead “processes constituted in and through power relations” (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 277). Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall (2013) have responded to these criticisms of institutionalized approaches to intersectional anti-racisms, arguing that intersectionality need not and should not be so narrowly construed. Intersectional approaches are not about who people are; this complexity cannot be captured through a structural framework. They are instead about how things work—the structural, systemic, and interdependent systems of oppression that shape everyday life, access to resources, opportunities, and futurity in different times and different places. We therefore assembled this volume of essays and poems to challenge the emerging reductionisms in anti-racist writing, institutional culture, and movement building.

The contributions to this volume all name and interrogate racism and, therefore, power. They also disrupt the notion that the structural and the particular are antithetical to each other—the notion that somehow accounting for the messiness, partiality, fluidity, and temporal limitations of narrative moments of lived experience or snapshots of events situated in particular historical contexts and geographic spaces are not indicative of the broader forms of structural and systemic violence that persists in the present. Instead, the contributions to this volume challenge readers to “de-privilege the human body as a discrete, organic thing” (Puar 2012, 57), a perfectly delimitable sociological object, and invite readers to refuse all final closures; to consider the ways that the structural, temporal, personal, and political intersect with geographical space, settler-colonial practice, and systems of oppression; and to consider the ways that it is possible to simultaneously refuse fixity but nevertheless acknowledge the specificity of textual representations of moments in time and place simultaneous to the structural and ongoing nature of racist violence in all its intersecting forms. As such, this collection refuses tidy dichotomies like oppressed/oppressor, male/female, self/other, and victim/perpetrator by omitting them entirely or interrogating them where they appear as examples of intersectional failure and mechanisms through which to further settler-colonial violence through reductionism and essentialism.

During this time of global transitions, many have asked, When will things go back to normal? This book instead asks readers to think about why anyone would want what has passed for normal up until now. If normal means the tacit acceptance of what contributors to this volume have narrated as settler colonialism; structural genocide; state-sanctioned violence against Indigenous, Black, and people of colour; gender-based violence; poverty; exclusion; denial; and disavowal, following Bernadette Atuahene (2020), consider the following: If this is the normal you want us to return to, what kinds of violence are you comfortable with?

Racism and Anti-racist Activism in Canada

In one of his COVID-19 daily public addresses (Trudeau 2020), the Canadian prime minister recognized a range of different kinds of racism, including its everyday and institutionalized forms, and their impact across Canada. After hesitating for twenty seconds to consider his answer in response to questions about the threat by the then US president (Donald Trump) to deploy the military to suppress the overwhelming number of public demonstrations that came in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, he eventually acknowledged the structural and systemic nature of racial discrimination—this, two years after photographs of him were found in a 2001 yearbook where he was captured appearing in blackface at a gala event for West Point Grey Academy, where he had worked as a teacher prior to his political career. These moments taken together highlight the interconnectedness of the individual and structural, where personal and state-sanctioned racist violence intersect. Intersectional, systemic, structural, everyday, overt, and covert racisms have, however, been the subject of academic study, activism, national and international reporting, inquiry, and public debate in Canada for a very long time.

In Canada more broadly, a United Nations expert delegation on people of African descent “visited Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax and Montreal to gain first-hand knowledge on racial discrimination, Afrophobia, xenophobia, and related intolerance affecting African-Canadians.” Their findings led them to express “serious concerns about systemic anti-Black racism in the Criminal Justice system” (United Nations 2016). In addition, books have been published documenting racism and anti-racist activism across Canada for over twenty years. Most recently, Robyn Maynard (2017) and Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi (2019) have published books about state violence against Black bodies, and Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware (2020) have put together a collection of essays about BLM in the Canadian context. Toronto feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist organizer Beverly Bain has been engaged in anti-racist, feminist movement building, organizing, and pedagogy for forty years. In 2014, Janaya Khan and Yusra Ali co-founded Black Lives Matter Canada; Khan is an international ambassador for the BLM network. In Lethbridge, the Group United Against Racial Discrimination, including members Jordan Ledyit and Legacy McAdam, organized a series of anti-racism rallies in solidarity with the BLM movement, drawing what has been estimated at one thousand supporters, thereby putting a small southern Alberta city on the map for anti-racist activism in 2020.

Indigenous writers and activists have been interrogating the racisms foundational to the violence of settlement since before Confederation. As a result, there is not enough room in this volume to include all of them here. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (2013) “Leaks” from her book and album Islands of Decolonial Love provides one example where she describes a young woman’s first experiences of racism. Despite her own inability to protect her daughter from this violence, Simpson acknowledges her ability to mitigate its impact on her daughter’s life by teaching her to be proud of who she is. Simpson’s 2017 book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, provides the context for “Leaks” through the broader settler-colonial history that has generated the contemporary social conditions within which this kind of heteropatriarchal racism is not only normalized but commonplace. Drawing on Glen Sean Coulthard’s (2014) challenge to the colonial politics of recognition, Simpson (2017; Coulthard and Simpson 2016) theorizes Indigenous resurgence through grounded normativity, which Coulthard defines as “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and long-standing experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and non-human others over time” (Coulthard 2014, 13). For Simpson (2017), radical resurgence involves rethinking dispossession as the “gendered removal of our bodies and our minds from our place-based grounded normativities” (45). Refusing dispossession as the foundational force in Indigenous lives means not only reclaiming Indigenous lands but also reimagining nation building outside of settler-colonial states, taking into account the “interdependence of land and bodies in a networked fashion rather than a gendered hierarchy” (46).

Audra Simpson has analyzed the ways that nation building in settler-colonial contexts is dependent on “categorical forms of recognition and misrecognition [that] are indebted to deep philosophical histories of seeing and knowing.” Courtrooms and classrooms thereby enable “disproportionately empowered political forms (such as ‘Empire’ or particular nation-states such as the United States, Canada and Australia) to come into being in a very short time” (2007, 69). Leroy Little Bear (2000) discusses the onto-epistemological violence, discrimination, and oppression inherent in colonial projects that seek to create the “singular social order[s]” that are described in Simpson’s work “by means of force of law” (2007, 1). Ongoing Canadian settler-colonial practice erases epistemic pluralism, thereby reifying the colonial onto-epistemologies that have fixed the human and extrahuman worlds in place, separating them from each other. Little Bear’s work is a resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing, including a cyclical and holistic view of the world based in constant movement and change. To understand the world in “cyclical or repetitive patterns, emphasizes process over product” through an understanding of “constant motion and flux” as “firmly grounded in a particular place” (2000, 77, 78). Time is therefore not linear. As part of this constant flux, it goes nowhere. Stories and life experiences are not fixed in time, subjective, and unscientific as positivist methods might suggest; they are instead the ways that “customs and values are shared” and identified (80, 81). Racism, therefore, not only manifests through overt and covert judgments based on phenotype, accent, culture, and/or country of origin; it is also built into institutional contexts that devalue and dismiss Indigenous ways of knowing and other kinds of epistemic pluralism, including the repudiation and exclusion of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and Indigenous feminisms.

Anti-racist solidarity movements among Indigenous organizers, labour groups, and people of colour have also long been prominent across Canada. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) wrote a pivotal piece that laid the groundwork for Malissa Phung (2011) to ask, “Are people of colour settlers too?” Both these signal works ask refugees and people of colour to think through how they are also “participants in and are the beneficiaries of Canada’s” settler-colonial project (Phung 2011, 292). In 2001, Sunera Thobani gave a speech at the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres discussing racial profiling and police violence against Indigenous women, refugees, and women of colour—the very issues that are on national and international political agendas today. She has subsequently written books about these topics. Two years earlier, Sherene Razack (1998) published Looking White People in the Eye, a pivotal work outlining institutional forms of racism against Black people, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour. In 2010, they both collaborated with Malinda Smith to publish a book collection entitled States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (Razack, Smith, and Thobani 2010), including chapters by Patricia Monture, author of the signal Indigenous feminist work Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (1995).

Organizations such as No One Is Illegal also emerged in the 1990s. Founded in Germany, chapters were later established in Canada in the early 2000s. The Canadian chapters are dedicated to Indigenous solidarity and sovereignty. Harsha Walia (2013) has combined personal experience, transnational analysis, and short contributions from more than twenty organizers in her book Undoing Border Imperialism in order to provide alternative frameworks for engaging in decolonial practice. Finally, white Canadian settlers have also begun to unpack the connections among anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and other forms of racism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in efforts to build solidarity movements and allyships. Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker (2015) and Paulette Regan (2010) have unpacked settler identity in efforts to challenge settler colonialism and the pervasive and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples.

In the context of post-secondary institutions, academics have long documented systemic racism, highlighting the failure to collect adequate data as a significant impediment to addressing it. Although the research was conducted in the UK and Australia, Sara Ahmed (2012) has asked the difficult question, What does diversity do? This is a question that Robyn Maynard (2017) has identified as one that has enormous implications in contemporary Canada at the federal, provincial, municipal, and institutional levels. Through interviews with diversity practitioners, Ahmed shows how institutional diversity talk can obscure the racisms that persist in institutional contexts despite the inclusion of racialized bodies. Not long after, in the Canadian context, Frances Henry et al. (2017) also challenged the notion that universities are bastions of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are promoted and racism does not exist. They posit instead that Canadian universities are subtle, complex, and sophisticated sites of exclusion marked by an absence of data that speaks volumes about their persistent, systemic barriers and the ongoing racisms that shape the experiences of faculty, staff, and students alike. The findings in all the literature discussed here are brought into stark relief through the contributions to this volume, showing that the local resonates with the national and global in significant ways that have implications beyond the times and places captured by the authors.

Racism and Anti-racist Initiatives in Alberta and Lethbridge

Chapter Outlines

This book does not advance the perspective that racism is rooted in ignorance. Instead, its contributors posit that racism is a carefully constructed body of knowledge that has its roots in the foundational violence of settlement in Alberta and Canada more broadly. Therefore, along with building awareness about the range of ways it manifests, racism needs to be unlearned. Racism is real. Racism has been and continues to be central in building, reproducing, and rearticulating the Canadian nation and the Canadian state. Racism therefore happens in Canada across all provinces and within all institutions. Racism is pervasive in small, rural cities like Lethbridge. Racism is violent, structural, and systemic. It takes place daily and plays out differently in the context of people’s everyday lives. It is intersectional, and as this brief sketch of available resources and data shows, there is no shortage of documentary evidence of racism, exclusion, and erasure. From academic studies and examples of social movement building and grassroots organizing to international and non-governmental reports and statistical surveys, the absences are just as revealing as what has been documented—as Maynard (2017) points out, however, the “systematic collection of publicly available race-based data is rare at the national, provincial or municipal levels and most universities” in Canada (3). It is nevertheless not hard to see that racism is pervasive, systemic, and ongoing. What is often missing, however, are experiential accounts of the resilience of those who experience it in its intersecting forms or the localized histories and snapshots of moments in time and place that can provide inroads into developing local solutions to large-scale structural, transnational problems. This is the contribution of this volume.

This book is organized around three themes: “Everyday and Institutional Racisms,” “Belonging/Unbelonging,” and “Policing and Carceral Logics.” The themes are tied together by each author’s contribution to unsettling underlying practices of everyday racism, settler colonialism, myths surrounding Canadian nation building, and the systemic racisms that structure the Canadian state and its institutions through narratives about life in a small, rural Alberta city: Lethbridge. The chapters that fall under the first theme are focused on everyday and institutionalized racisms in secondary and post-secondary contexts, in municipal governance, and as experienced by refugee communities. The authors discuss hopes for and gaps among inclusion, reconciliation and equity talk, policy, institutional practices, and their own lived experiences. The chapters located under the second theme—“Belonging/Unbelonging”—address the complexity of being a visitor in Treaty 7 territory, the instability of racial identities, the invisibility of Métis identities, consciousness, state racisms, and the experience of displacement and occupation between one home and another home. The chapters located under the “Policing and Carceral Logics” theme address practices of carding, racial profiling, the use of victim/perpetrator narratives in crime reporting, anti-Black racism, and local anti-racist initiatives—each interrogating how policing, crime reporting, and discursive carceral logics contribute to the materialization of Canadian settler colonialism.

Dustin Fox opens the collection with an autoethnography of experiences of everyday and institutionalized racism. He takes up and stories questions of history and family as central to the experiences and identity projects of Blackfoot peoples in southern Alberta. Situating these stories within a broader set of colonial histories and structures, he draws on a desire framework to story the resilience of Blackfoot peoples and culture, highlighting evidence of survivance and resurgence in local Blackfoot communities. The second contribution to this section is co-authored by the members of the Reconciliation Lethbridge Advisory Committee, a committee created to develop meaningful relationships between the City of Lethbridge and surrounding communities. These stories explore questions of truth and reconciliation to provoke meaningful dialogue by emphasizing individual journeys to reconciliation, the importance of truth telling, and the recognition that individual voices, experiences, and stories can transform collective realities in ways that honour and give life to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action. The third contribution to this section examines the experiences of two Filipino women teaching in a “white classroom” at the University of Lethbridge. Using an approach to duoethnography, one faculty member (Glenda Tibe Bonifacio) and one international student (Roxanna Balbido Epe, PhD) juxtapose their experiences against institutional policies and practices in order to bring to light shared but different meanings and interpretations of pedagogy. The final contribution under this theme is a critical engagement with discourses of multiculturalism and the everyday experiences of racism described by Bhutanese refugees currently living in Lethbridge. Through semi-structured open-ended interviews, Rabindra Chaulagain examines how those who were interviewed have conceptualized race and racism, their feelings and thoughts about racializing practices in Lethbridge, and their perceptions of the impact of multicultural policy on their lives.

The first contribution to the second theme, “Belonging/Unbelonging,” is an edited conversation between Roderick McLeod (a Métis elder living in Lethbridge) and Monique Giroux (Canada Research Chair, University of Lethbridge). Following the work of Dylan Robinson (2016), this chapter serves to centre Indigenous voices through the redress of the exclusion of Métis people in discussions of race/racialization in southern Alberta. Through this conversation, McLeod and Giroux highlight the challenges faced by Métis people in Lethbridge as they work to gain recognition from the settler public—and a sense of belonging for themselves—while also respecting the Blackfoot territory on which they live. The second contribution under this theme critically engages with the concepts of belonging, unbelonging, diaspora, and pan-Indigeneity to introduce the concept of ephemeral trans territories (ETTs). Migueltzinta Solís creates a non-traditional academic essay using techniques of reflective personal narrative, experiential research, and critical theory to bring these ETTs to life. In the third contribution under this theme, Darren J. Aoki and Carly Adams draw on a montage of memories from oral histories gathered between 2011 and 2019 in Lethbridge and surrounding areas. Critically assessing strategies of self-exoneration and progress narratives that position Lethbridge as “a paradise of racial harmony,” they interrogate Canada’s twentieth-century nation-building processes, inviting readers to question how Japanese Canadians went from being categorized as “yellow peril” and “enemy aliens” to “the most assimilated of all visible minorities in Canada.” In the final contribution, Deema Abushaban’s poem, “Beneath the Olive Tree,” narrates the memory of living on Palestinian land and losing home. Through the collective voice “I,” she represents all people who have lost family members, friends, and place through occupation and displacement, with a reflection on her experiences of racism and racialization in Lethbridge.

The final theme, “Policing and Carceral Logics,” begins with an overview of how institutional racism operates through policing in Lethbridge. Providing a historical overview of the role of policing in settler-colonial societies, Gülden Özcan moves through racial profiling, carding, and the public policy that perpetuates racism and the criminalization of people of colour in Lethbridge. She concludes with a discussion of anti-racist initiatives and social movements that have emerged in response to racialized policing to offer and invite readers to think through alternatives to racist policing. Ibrahim Turay then takes a discourse-historical approach to analyzing what language is doing in mass media portrayals of racial profiling in Alberta. He concludes that racial profiling is either justified or denied across the media sources selected for his study. Next, Caroline Hodes examines victim/perpetrator narratives in mainstream media coverage of the 2016 arrest and 2018 sentencing of Denzel Dre Colton Bird for aggravated sexual assault in Lethbridge. Her contribution outlines how critical discourse analysis can be a powerful tool for understanding framing. She concludes that the media representations of this case unyoke past from present, contributing to the opposing ways that Indigeneity, whiteness, masculinity, and femininity become both hypervisible and invisible and thereby reinforce racist sexisms both inside and outside the text. In the final contribution to the volume, Jason Laurendeau interrogates (social) media engagements with the Black Lives Matter rally in Lethbridge, with two contributions to the Lethbridge Herald that criticize policing in the city, and with the (mostly) volunteer organization the Watch. He concludes that the reactions offered point to the ongoing persistence and perniciousness of racism in Lethbridge and the reluctance of local media to go beyond “feel-good” stories to a deeper engagement with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racisms in Lethbridge. This chapter invites readers to imagine different futures through reflections on and possibilities for anti-racist work in the city.

Not-So-Final Thoughts

In this historic moment, the emblems, statues, and street names of those who became instrumental in the institutionalization of racism and who were the key architects of colonial genocide in various cities across the US, Canada, and elsewhere are being removed, upended, and destroyed. This transnational public outcry against both historical and contemporary wrongs signifies one of the many beginnings—past and present—that have and will continue to generate painful yet meaningful introspection on what has been done, what persists in the present, and how to transform the future. It is our hope that this global destruction of public symbols may slowly shift collective consciousness away from the commemoration and glorification of violence, genocide, domination, dispossession, and abuse of power and the valuation of all that we call “privilege” that has been garnered at incalculable cost to our collective humanity and relationships with the extrahuman world. Understanding the multiple ways that exploitation, dispossession, genocide, and other intersecting forms of racist violence erode the bonds of humanity and make equity, respect, and dignity impossibilities is the first step toward unlearning the knowledge that has produced the intolerable conditions that make upheavals such as these necessary. This book is a collection of the voices of those who have found strength in adversity, who instill a consciousness of different futures, alternative presents. It is dedicated to all those who use not only adversity but pandemic and global upheaval as portals, as gateways “between one world and the next” (Roy 2020).

References