Hip-Hop History: An Interview with Webster

      2 Comments on Hip-Hop History: An Interview with Webster

This interview originally between Christine Chevalier-Caron and Webster appeared in French on Histoire Engagée. Translated by Thomas Peace.

A few months ago, I had the chance to interview the inspirational Aly Ndiaye, better known as Webster. Growing up in the Quebec City neighbourhood of Limoilou, this Sénéquéb métis pure laine began to rap in 1995. Passionate about history, Webster’s work has fuelled historiographical renewal in Quebec by emphasizing the importance of its minority populations, specifically the histories of Black Québecois and slavery. As part of Black History month (in February), we present a transcript of this interview, tackling questions focused on activism, rap, history and inequality.

Christine Chevalier-Caron: What encouraged you to become an activist?

Webster: I come from a family of activists. Even in our youth, my mother and father were very active in the labour movement and immigration issues. I recall that during Apartheid we were never allowed to eat food from South Africa. My parents took us to many protests. I grew up with models like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panthers. This is what I became interested in and they played a formative role in my life. As I grew up, I decided to develop this – to invest a bit – by denouncing inequalities, the events taking place around me, and the inaccuracies of history. I embedded myself into the vein of history and it is there where I found my activism.

Aly Ndiaye, AKA Webster

Continue reading →

Remember / Resist / Redraw #03: Caregiving Work in Canada

      1 Comment on Remember / Resist / Redraw #03: Caregiving Work in Canada

In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project to intervene in the Canada 150 conversation.

We have released four posters. Poster #00 by Kara Sievewright and the GHC introduced and explained the goals of the project. Poster #01 by Lianne Charlie, which was showcased on ActiveHistory.ca and CBC, kicked off the series with a critical examination of 150 years of colonialism in the Yukon. Poster #02 by Naomi Moyer and Funké Aladejebi looked at Chloe Cooley, Black history, and the legacy of slavery in Canada.

Earlier this month, for International Women’s Day, we released Poster #03, which looks at the 150+ years of care work performed by racialized women in Canada and features the amazing work of the Kwentong Bayen Collective and Erin Tungohan.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for radical change in 2017 and beyond. Learn more about the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Continue reading →

She’s Hot: Female Sessional Instructors, Gender Bias, and Student Evaluations

      25 Comments on She’s Hot: Female Sessional Instructors, Gender Bias, and Student Evaluations
Girl Sitting at Desk

Girl sitting at desk flipping through textbook pages at Putnam School. 1961. Gar Lunney. Canada. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque. Library and Archives Canada, e010976007. CC by 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/7797311412/

by Andrea Eidinger [1]

I would like to acknowledge and thank the many female instructors who got in touch with me over the past week, not only for their bravery in sharing their experiences with me, but for their strength in continuing in their dedication to the field of history and education. I am profoundly grateful and honoured.

“I think your feminist stances are slightly overcorrecting reality. I’m sure minorities had a harsher experience than women, ESPECIALLY today, a point you seem to overlook. You’re a really nice person though.”

That comment comes from my student evaluations from one of the first courses I ever taught, back when I was still a graduate student. At the time that I read that, I burst out laughing. I mean really, how else can you react to that kind of statement? But many courses and student evaluations later, I am starting to think that this is reflective of a larger problem in the world of academia, and history in particular, with respect to female sessional instructors and course evaluations.

Over the course of the past year or so, there have been a number of studies that have emerged detailing the gender bias against female instructors in student evaluations.  According to one study, male professors routinely ranked higher than female professors in many areas. [2] For instance, male professors received scores in the area of promptness (how quickly an assignment was returned) that were 16% higher than those of female instructors, even though the assignments were returned at the exact same time.  Another research project, which examined word usage in reviews of male and female professors on “Rate My Professor” found that male faculty members are more likely to be described as “funny,” “brilliant,” “genius,” and “arrogant,” while female faculty members are more likely to be described as “approachable,” “helpful,” “nice,” and “bossy.”[3]

While many of these studies discuss the negative impact that this bias has on tenure and promotion few consider how devastating they can be to sessional instructors, particularly given the overrepresentation of women at this academic rank. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Ninety-Six: Fake History

      1 Comment on History Slam Episode Ninety-Six: Fake History

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Back in the fall of 2014, we had an idea for a podcast episode. The premise was that you were at a party, somebody finds out that you study history and asks a question to which you don’t know the answer. Normally, you might say that you weren’t sure, but in this setting you decide to have fun and make up an answer that sounds plausible. Perhaps not the most inspired idea we ever had, but we thought it was fun and recorded the show on November 27, 2014.

The decision was made, however, to not run the episode that fall, in part because we had a bunch of other material to post. Little did we know that the show was merely ahead of its time. Two years later the idea of Fake News has entered the political arena and there is more focus than ever on what constitutes ‘facts.’ In reading about ‘Fake News’ and the term’s changing meaning over the past few months, I constantly thought about this episode. In this episode we created fake history – everything was made up out of thin air. That’s fake. History that challenges your preconceived world view is not fake, however. Just as news that challenges your political perspective isn’t fake.

When we are too liberal in using the term fake news to describe stories based in fact that we disagree with, we distract from what truly constitutes fake news – like those conspiratorial stories that lead a person to a pizza place in Washington, D.C. with a gun. When CBS edits an interview that portrays Sean Hannity negatively, that’s not fake news. While Hannity has a legitimate argument about the context of the exchange and the need to make the entire interview available, the portion CBS aired isn’t fake. And when it’s called fake, it minimizes the damage done by ‘news’ stories that are complete fabrications.

That false equivalency between truly fake stories and stories that you may disagree with is dangerous. By using the term fake news as a partisan method to discredit political opponents, the term loses its significance when applied to stories that are legitimately fake.

This is ultimately why I decided to post this episode. We had a lot of fun recording this back in 2014 – there are a lot of laughs in this episodes. It is meant to entertain (whether we accomplish that is up to you), but in the current context, I think it shows just how easy it is to make things up that sound plausible. As we recorded, I was the only one who knew the topics ahead of time, the others were coming up with their answers off the top of their heads. That the answers sound plausible is evidence of how fake stories can sound real and how important it is to check the veracity of the content we consume on a daily basis.

In that spirit, I hope you enjoy this episode of the History Slam!

Continue reading →

The Politics of Personality and Abortion Access in Atlantic Canada

      2 Comments on The Politics of Personality and Abortion Access in Atlantic Canada

By Katrina Ackerman

While following the 2016 United States presidential election through social media and ‘fake news’ outlets, I was reminded of the significance of personality in creating social and political change. The personalities of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were constantly juxtaposed and used by opposition groups to discredit the presidential candidates. After Donald Trump was elected, other world leaders’ personalities were dissected based on their responses to Trump’s policies. When Trump released an executive order that suspended the “Issuance of Visas and Other Immigration Benefits to Nationals of Countries of Particular Concern”—seven nations with Islam as the dominant religion—the responses of world leaders created an important discussion about diplomacy and character. Some opposed to the Trump administration applauded German Chancellor Angela Merkel for censuring the Trump administration and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for tweeting that refugees were welcome in Canada, no matter their religion. Trudeau was also criticized by some for not denouncing the executive order, like Merkel, and was called on to show moral courage. Others suggested that Trudeau was walking a fine line by proclaiming Canada’s principles while maintaining workable diplomatic relations to protect the Canadian economy.

Henry Morgentaler with Jack Layton, 2005, Wikipedia Commons, rabbleradio – http://www.flickr.com/photos/rabbleradio/37995864/

The current discourse on the personalities of world leaders coincides with my own interest in the role of personality in intergovernmental relations and between non-governmental and governmental actors. As recent scholarship by historian Raymond B. Blake demonstrates, the personalities of Canadian politicians can have a significant impact on personal relations between government officials, as well as on public policy decisions. Creating political and social change often depends “on relationships and a capacity for compromise.”[1] Drawing on this research, I have begun to consider how personality shaped abortion access in Atlantic Canada in the late twentieth century. In addition to diplomatic and intergovernmental relations, personalities also influenced the ability for state and non-state actors to reach a compromise. An inability to compromise came to the forefront during interactions between Henry Morgentaler, an abortion rights activist and doctor, and the premiers in the Atlantic region over freestanding abortion clinics.

Continue reading →

Donald Trump, Brexit, and the Gentrification of Progressive Politics

      2 Comments on Donald Trump, Brexit, and the Gentrification of Progressive Politics

By Steven High

Note: This op-ed piece was published in French in Le Devoir on March 16, 2017.

FIRST BREXIT AND NOW THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP as President of the United States have shocked many of us. Outrage and anguish seem to be the dominant reaction in my social media feeds. It is as though the world that we knew has been ripped away from us, leaving frayed nerves and raw emotions.

At some level, the working-class supporters of Brexit and Trump – who proved pivotal – would probably recognize these feelings of disorientation and moral outrage. After all, tens of millions of industrial workers have seen their own life-worlds stripped away from them with the closure of mills or factories and the export of their jobs to low-wage areas.

The US Democratic Party, and Bill Clinton in particular, was an architect of trade deals that resulted in massive job losses. And, more recently, it was President Obama who attempted to foist the Trans-Pacific Partnership on us.  It is a measure of how far “progressive” parties have failed working people that it was Trump, and not Trudeau, who killed it.  While white working-class anger at “cultural elites” is a lot about race, it is also about the gentrification of progressive politics.

Deindustrialization has marked a crucial rupture in the lives of tens of millions of working class families, including my own.  The scale of the body count is staggering. The US lost almost eight million manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 2010. Other countries did just as poorly. Between 1990 and 2003, manufacturing jobs declined 24% in Japan, 29% in the UK, and 14% in France. For our part, Canada lost 278,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 to 2007. Trade unions have staggered from one tragedy to the next. Entire unions passed out of existence, part of a wider cultural and political defeat of working-people. Continue reading →

Genealogical Entanglements of Animal Rights and Feminist Movements

      1 Comment on Genealogical Entanglements of Animal Rights and Feminist Movements

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of posts from contributors to Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2017). In each entry, the contributors use their own chapters as the basis for wider discussions about contemporary developments that highlight the complex interactions between humans and animals. The editors of ActiveHistory.ca are pleased to publish these pieces that originally appeared in late February in The Otter, the blog of the Network in Canadian History & the Environment.  The first post in the series by Darcy Ingram spoke to strategies in the animal rights movement.  Christabelle Sethna followed, commenting upon the animalization and racialization of humans and nonhuman animals. Joanna Dean then discussed the use of guinea pigs in medical experiments. Today, Carla Hustak speaks to the visceral entanglements of women’s and animal bodies.

Feminism 2K14, idc collage, https://www.flickr.com/photos/73735208@N04/15257540381

 

My essay “Got Milk? Dirty Cows, Unfit Mothers, and Infant Mortality, 1880-1940,” in this edited volume grew out of a rich literature on the entanglements of feminism and animal ethics. At the same time, my attention to milk, both as a food source and as a lens for exploring the fluidity of women and animal bodies, suggests a possible new trajectory for capturing the viscerality of those entanglements.

It may seem that feminist and animal rights activists have very little to say to each other. However, the bodies of women and animals have been mutually affected by the cultural constructions of nature. Ecofeminists such as Karen Warren, Carol Adams, and Val Plumwood have shown that patriarchal and capitalist oppression of nature have snared together women and animals. Under patriarchy and capitalism, both share the material, discursive, and historical effects of being constituted as natural ungovernable bodies contrary to reason and culture, which continue to be perceived as human and masculine domains. Similarly, feminist science studies scholars have shown that putative scientific truths about nature have had significant negative consequences for the cultural, economic, and political treatment of women and animals. Their scholarly contributions have been marked by social and political activist movements. From vegan feminist dietary choices to public protests, feminist and animal rights activists have formed alliances that highlight the intersection of feminist and animal ethics. Continue reading →

Bob Kinnear, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and the History of Canadian-American Labour Relations

      2 Comments on Bob Kinnear, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and the History of Canadian-American Labour Relations

by Christo Aivalis

In recent weeks, a major controversy has enflamed the Canadian labour movement, and how it relates to the international unions centred within the United States. Last month, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 113, which represents around 10,000 members working within the Toronto Transit Commission’s system, was placed under trusteeship by the union’s international headquarters. This decision was made after Local 113 President Bob Kinnear had approached the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to activate a clause (Article 4) that would partially suspend provisions that prevent ‘raiding’ (where unions take members from another union rather than organize un-unionized workers) actions between CLC member unions.

Kinnear justified his actions based on the assertion that his local lacked sufficient autonomy in its ability to operate and received insufficient support from the international office. Further, Kinnear and others—including officials within UNIFOR like President Jerry Dias—have deemed the trusteeship an act of American domination. Dias sold this event as a wider struggle in Canadian labour, suggesting that he was “sick and tired of the heavy handed arm of the United States determining our collective bargaining strategy and determining how we operate.” This direct intervention from UNIFOR—which has included paying Kinnear’s legal fees—has led some to suggest that Kinnear’s goal was to transfer Local 113 from the ATU into UNIFOR. Despite all this, Kinnear’s move was opposed by a majority of local 113’s leadership, as well as the heads of five of Canada’s biggest unions, which include unions headquartered on both sides of the border.

While the story has a multitude of further details, the result has been that the CLC has reinstated the article 4 clause that would prevent raiding between CLC member unions, and Bob Kinnear has officially resigned his position as 113 President. As it stands, then, the main issue is largely resolved, but the fact remains that this whole affair has reignited divisions within the labour movement based on this question of American influence into Canadian unions. A large part of this is due to a sustained historical context that has played out for more than a century. Continue reading →

From Ignorance Towards Reconciliation

      2 Comments on From Ignorance Towards Reconciliation

By Jean-Pierre Morin

Editor’s note: This post is an abridged version of the February 7th, 2017 Ottawa Historical Association talk “Relationships for Reconciliation: Historical Relationships in the Process of Reconciliation”.

Treaty Medal, presented to commemorate Treaty Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1986-79-1638).

In December 2000, as a still new public servant, I was part of a group of representatives from Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) sent to discuss the historic relationship stemming from Treaty 6 with the Chiefs and councils of the Ermineskin and Louis Bull First Nations in the Maskwachis region, the heart of Treaty 6 Territory in Alberta. As the only historian and non-Indigenous person in the INAC group, I wanted to be well prepared. As the meeting approached, I began to review all the materials I had relating to the treaty, the communities and the government’s position on treaties. I was sure that I knew everything that was relevant and was ready to argue my “well researched facts”.

Arriving at Louis Bull First Nation on a bitterly cold morning, we filed into the band council office where my departmental colleagues were greeted as old friends. When I walked through the door, someone called out: “Hey, look! The Indian agent has arrived!” to a round of chuckles. To say that I was shocked at the comment is an understatement. Immediately, my back was up as I resented being saddled with such that pejorative label. For me, the rest of it was downhill from there. Any comment I made about the history of the treaty by referring to historical research, archival records or the reports of the treaty commissioners was mocked with the words: “I guess the Indian agent knows us better than we do…” Finally, one of my colleagues took pity on me recommending that I simply stay quiet and that I skip the next day’s meeting.

As a significant part of my work was to discuss the history of treaty making in Canada with Indigenous partners, this was not to be my only “difficult” experience during such meetings. Over the course of several years, it occurred multiple times. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why this kept happening and I felt growing anxiety about every upcoming meeting. I took me several more years to realize that I was part of the problem as these “difficult meetings” were being aggravated by my personal perspectives and my understandings of Indigenous-Crown relationships. Continue reading →

Map the History of Redlining, It Works

      3 Comments on Map the History of Redlining, It Works

The history of redlining matters. For decades, the government sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps that defined African American neighbourhoods as high risk, which resulted in people not having access to a Federal Housing Administration insured mortgage in these districts. Ta-Nehisi Coates used the research in Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Robert Conot’s American Odyssey, Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto to develop the case for reparations in his 2014 cover story in the Atlantic.[1] He convincingly argued that long after the end of Slavery, government policy actively limited economic opportunities for African Americans, created segregated cities and the significant gap in wealth between white and black Americans: “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market“.

A year earlier, Dustin A. Cable, at the University of Virginia, created the interactive Racial Dot Map based on data from the 2010 census. The map shows the stark racial divides in many major cities. The impressive level of detail, with a single dot for every person in the United States census, creates visually and analytically powerful maps. The divided racial geography of a cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee is startling and prompts a historical question: how did this happen? Coates brought together decades of urban social history and historical demography, along with his own journalism, to help answer this question for Chicago.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.


Continue reading →