On April 1, the Migrant Rights Network, a group of organizations from across Canada working to promote conditions for foreign workers, wrote a letter to public officials urging them to implement guidelines to ensure the health and safety of vulnerable workers. “Failure to implement these changes will lead to devastating public health consequences…and a human rights catastrophe,” the letter states.
The Migrant Rights Network sent several letters to federal and provincial authorities that outlined the concerns of vulnerable workers, according to a recent report from the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC). None of the letters received replies. Since then, three workers on farms in Ontario—Bonifacio Eugenio Romero, Rogelio Muñoz Santos and Juan López Chaparro—have died after contracting the virus.
Temporary foreign workers have been reporting mistreatment and low pay for years, but as COVID-19 shutdowns began, advocates knew that conditions would become even more treacherous. So far, there have been at least 17 outbreaks at farms across the country and at least 600 workers have tested positive.
Though we may not associate Canada’s workforce with foreign workers, they in fact make up around 40 per cent of agricultural workers in Ontario and nearly a third of agricultural workers in Quebec, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, according to 2017 figures. Migrant workers are an important part of the Canadian economy, and have been essential to keeping our food supply chain functioning during the pandemic.
Despite this, they have not been adequately protected. Between mid-March and mid-May, MWAC received more than a thousand complaints on behalf of workers from across the country about loss of income, poor housing conditions, and intimidation from employers, among other issues.
The MWAC report describes the ways that exploitative employers and poor government oversight have allowed migrant workers to fall through the cracks. After first arriving in Canada, new regulations required workers to remain quarantined for 14 days in the employer-provided housing in which they live while receiving the equivalent of 30-hours per week in pay.
However, many workers complained of crowded living conditions, a lack of access to proper sanitation, and that the amount of food provided by employers was inadequate to feed all inhabitants. Hundreds of workers also reported that they were not paid according to government guidelines during their mandatory quarantine. Then, once work resumed, crowded conditions at work, combined with difficulty accessing health-care services, made workers even more vulnerable to contracting COVID-19.
But while workers feared getting sick, they also feared reprisals from their employers — placing them in a particularly precarious position. “Migrant farm workers have work permits that tie them to their employers — this means that workers who speak out or complain can easily be terminated, deported, and banned from returning to work in Canada in future,” the MWAC report states. “This makes it impossible, in practice, for workers to be able to complain about their working and living conditions.”
Perhaps the most widely-reported example of these inequities occurred at the Cargill meat processing plant in High River, Alberta. The plant became the site of one of the largest outbreaks of COVID-19 in North America with over 1,500 cases being linked to the plant, which included about 900 workers.
Most workers at the plant are immigrants or temporary foreign workers whose status in Canada — like the migrant workers in Canada’s fields, vineyards, and greenhouses — is dependent on their employment.
This precarity, combined with economic pressures, makes workers especially vulnerable to exploitative policies from their employer. A CBC investigation showed that Cargill plant workers were made to work in cramped and sometimes dangerous conditions, and that some were pressured to return to work even after contracting COVID-19.
In fact, two weeks and a day after the death of Cargill employee Hiep Bui, who had worked at the plant for 23 years, the plant reopened and resumed production despite concerns from workers and union representatives who feared another outbreak unless working conditions were addressed.
As news of the outbreak at Cargill spread, Fillipino workers, who make up about 70 per cent of the plant’s workers, reported being targeted online by residents who accused them of bringing the virus to Alberta. Some reported being turned away from banks and grocery stores because they worked at the plant.
Fears about food supply disruption from outbreaks in Canada’s meatpacking plants and farms tend to focus on the effects on Canadian consumers and less on the workers who help ensure that the grocery stores themselves are stocked with food. And despite being deemed “essential workers,” low-income new immigrants and migrant workers are often treated as disposable and do not have the same access to services as others in Canada.
Without putting strict protections in place, these workers will remain vulnerable to mistreatment from employers who push them to work in hazardous conditions. Said one seasonal worker from Jamaica featured in the MWAC report: “We’re treated like machines. We just want them to recognize that we’re still human.”
The Institute for Canadian Citizenship and Embassy of Canada in Mexico partnered on the second of a three part Mexico-Canada Dialogue series, discussing the way women* are valued, specifically as it relates to labour and domestic violence during the COVID-19 crisis. The dialogue centered around three key topics: what do we mean by “women’s work,” both paid and unpaid, gender violence as a global issue, and policy lessons for alleviating inequities and violence against women. Women have been especially impacted by the pandemic, both in terms of domestic violence and the level of risk that they face for work that is often least valued: healthcare, education, childcare, eldercare, household management, and a variety of other service industry roles.
*Anyone who identifies as a woman or non-binary femme.
Featuring
– Introductions: Ambassador Graeme C. Clark
– Moderator: Juana Inés Dehesa-Christlieb
– Speakers: Karen Padilla (Mexico), Catherine Hernandez (Canada), Ana Pecova (Mexico)
– Interpretation: Teresa Flores
Key Takeaways
While the COVID-19 virus can spread no matter what your race, gender, or class, we’ve seen that the impacts are unequal. Women are a diverse group. When gender intersects with other factors, such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability — the economic, social, psychological, and health impacts of this crisis vary accordingly. This, added onto existing systemic discrimination towards women in the workplace and in the home, compounds these impacts.
The responsibility of essential care work should not solely be on women, and the work of women should not be deemed unskilled work, or paid as such. The COVID-19 crisis has shown us how fundamental care work is to the health and functioning of our society. Essential work, including child care, elder care, and education, is skilled work, and it needs to be financially compensated accordingly.
Data doesn’t always allow us to see the full scope or extent of domestic violence. However, even the data we do have available is cause for concern. Data on domestic violence doesn’t allow us to see the full scope of the problem due to barriers to reporting, a lack of transparency, and countless instances going undocumented before a final report. According to a Statistics Canada survey, 1 in 10 Canadian women reported domestic abuse as one of their top three concerns during the pandemic. This doesn’t affect all women equally, as has been made starkly clear in repeated reports and calls to action about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. In Mexico, there has been a 60 per cent increase in calls to women’s shelters in April 2020. This year, there have been about 10 femicides a day in Mexico, however it’s unclear if the numbers have increased since COVID-19. Domestic violence is the crime with the second highest number of formal complaints in Mexico — and that’s for a crime that is difficult to report in the first place.
More public education and awareness is needed on support systems, shelters, and justice and legal processes available for survivors of domestic violence. Processes for navigating support systems for domestic abuse can be quite opaque and inaccessible. More needs to be done to raise awareness about accessible shelters, gender inclusive safe spaces, family planning clinics, and the importance of both emotional and physical support. What systems are there for those who don’t speak the language that a support hotline is offered in, or for those who don’t have access to a phone?
Public policy changes can only go so far on issues in the home. If we want to do away with violence against women, we must address what is behind it. What happens in the life of a woman before the point of a domestic abuse report or femicide? As domestic violence occurs in the private realm, preventive and responsive actions are a collective community task. Drawing borders within our own households around toxic masculinity, valuing and protecting femininity, valuing care work, distributing labour equally, and defining clear lines around behaviour that is unacceptable are important places to start. Toxic masculinity and machismo need to be broken down and discussed to unlearn dangerous patterns of behaviour and reinforcement.
Policies addressing domestic abuse must be more inclusive of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation and how these intersections impact both experiences of domestic violence as well as experiences with community support systems. These systems must be accessible not just to those who fit a clearly defined category of “women experiencing harm from men,” and be sure not to exclude or discriminate against those experiencing mental illness, alcohol abuse, or trauma.
While prevention measures should be strived for, the reality is that funding of responsive or mitigating measures is needed in the meantime. Programs that help women pay rent and give them access to a safe home allows them to get out of a dangerous situation. It should be remembered, that oftentimes the main concern is to get out of a violent situation, rather than to punish the aggressor.
Rather than simply considering new policies, address the existing policies that continue to promote inequality. We must understand how gender equity is missing is every policy area in order to change things. Instead of thinking about issues in isolation, consider how justice, housing, and decriminalization policies intersect to negatively impact women.
We must rethink the institutions and structures of justice entirely, invest in community-level support, and learn from informal systems with expertise navigating safety and support, separate from the police. We can’t continue to place our bets on the traditional justice systems — police and courts — to deal with gender violence when they have often been shown to exacerbate issues. There is lots to learn from informal systems that effectively navigate safety and support outside of traditional justice institutions. For instance, sex workers are skilled at supporting their community in these areas. We must value and respect these systems and the people working within them in order to learn from them.
The current circumstances demand that we try harder to address the incontestable reality that is systemic racism. In this issue, we would like to pose the question: what role can professional training and academic education play in preparing museum professionals to counter values, practices and systems that perpetuate racism in our cultural institutions?
We spoke to Megan Sue-Chue-Lam, Chloé Houde, Dominica Tang, and Denise Tenio, who in February 2019 created the Museum Professionals of Colour (MPOC). Together, they are a student-run organization at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information aimed at addressing the lack of racial diversity within their Master of Museum Studies program (MMSt). In this interview, they talked to us about their journey, their work, and their vision for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) in museums.
[Above image: Detox Panel held in partnership with the Museum Studies Student Association. Wendy Ng, J’net Ayay Qwa Yak Sheelth, and Just John Samuels.]
Why did you create Museum Professionals of Colour (MPOC)?
Megan: The museum field in Canada, which includes our program, is predominantly white. I wanted to talk to other POCs in our program because I was feeling really isolated in our classes and unsure about whether they would really prepare me for my career as a non-white person. I say POCs because the Black and Indigenous representation is extremely slim, and not everyone wanted or was able to be involved in this group. The camaraderie between all our peers is quite good, but the content and facilitation of our classes is emphatically white and Eurocentric. All of our professors are white and being a BIPOC museum professional is not something that they can advise on. So, feeling a sense of connection, validation, and support was my main motivation.
The other (reason) was that I wanted to create a group in order to make our own network of BIPOC museum professionals, in order to ensure that future BIPOC students in the program wouldn’t have to go through the same sense of isolation. And now, having heard from BIPOC alumni, it really seems like this is something that a lot of students have been wanting. Ultimately, we want to see ourselves in the museum field because we really do believe in what museums are able to accomplish.
Is there any precedent for this type of student association?
Dominica: There was a casual support group for students of colour in the MMSt program a few years ago, but it dissolved once the members graduated. To ensure that future museum studies students of colour would have a structure of support, we decided to put down roots in the school and register as a ratified UofT student organization. Globally, there are a number of large and independent organizations that interrogate the lack of diversity in museums. One that we looked to was Museum Detox, an independent organization that supports Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic museum professionals, as a model for what we aspire to be in Canada.
Denise: In Canada, however, most DEIA committees are formed within a specific museum by their staff and work exclusively within their institution. We have yet to see an organization dedicated to DEIA in our Canadian museums; if you know of one, please send them our way! Within the Faculty of Information, we have found support in our Master of Information counterpart, the Diversity Working Group.
Megan: We are also limited by the lack of diversity in our group, which is telling of the general state of our program and the field. We are not Black, nor are we Indigenous, and we do not presume to speak on behalf of Black or Indigenous peoples. We aim to use our light-skinned and white privilege and platform to amplify others who speak from their own experiences. While we engage with perspectives outside of our own through our initiatives, we understand that this is not enough to create a fully inclusive environment. We truly hope that future MPOC committees at UofT can surpass our own capabilities and provide wider representation than we do.
This is a new initiative: what has the process been like so far?
Chloé: Overall, this process has been a whirlwind (a good one), through which we’ve discovered that the issues we want to tackle in our faculty are present on a much larger scale across Canadian museums.
We’ve been lucky to find ourselves in an environment with supportive peers and fellow student groups who believe in what we are striving for. Our program’s Museum Studies Student Association supported us from the start; they brought us in to collaborate on a panel, which was our first big event. In March, we co-hosted the panel, entitled “Museum Detox: Cleansing institutions of unconscious bias and developing anti-racist praxis”. Our incredible panelists were Wendy Ng, J’net Ayay Qwa Yak Sheelth, and Just John Samuels. This event helped us establish MPOC as a serious student group at the Faculty of Information and put us on the faculty’s radar.
We’ve also found support and collaboration with other DEIA-minded student groups in our faculty, such as the Accessibility Interests Working Group, the Diversity Working Group, and the Indigenous Connections Working Group. We have similar goals and it’s been empowering to work with these groups on multiple projects over the last few months, and know that we can present as a united front when faced with difficulties.
Social media has been another way for us to find like-minded and supportive people and expand our horizons as a group. It’s been amazing to find a community outside of our faculty who believe in our mission and values and want to help us make the museum sector in Canada more inclusive and equitable.
What data can you share with us about DEIA in your program, or in the museum sector?
Dominica: We can’t provide much data on the museum sector because there aren’t any comprehensive studies coming out of Canada! In a field that champions tangible data over lived experiences, the lack of data is a hindrance to DEIA work in Canadian museums. Around one in six (approximately 17%) people in our program is a visible minority. Compared to Toronto’s 51% visible minority population, our program is disproportionately white and does not reflect the diversity of Toronto at all.
Denise: Recently, we collected data from 125 Faculty of Information students and alumni to identify the extent of DEIA in the school. This was a collaborative effort with other student groups, namely the Diversity Working Group, Accessibility Interests Working Group, Indigenous Connections Working Group, the Master of Information Student Council, and the Museum Studies Student Association. From our pool of 125 respondents, we found that: (1) less than 30% of respondents feel supported by peers and professors, (2) less than 4% of respondents agree that there aren’t enough courses on BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+ and disabled experiences; (3) less than 1% of respondents feel that classroom conversations on colonization, use of racial language, and accessibility needs are facilitated properly; (4) only 14% of respondents feel comfortable participating in these conversations; and (5) 86% of respondents agree that staff and students would benefit from anti-oppression training. These findings from the faculty include, but are not exclusive to, the MMSt program.
Lack of diversity at cultural institutions is a long-standing issue. What kind of academic training could contribute to solving this problem? What role can museum professionals play?
Chloé: We believe that addressing issues in museums needs to begin where museum professionals are being trained, and consist of more than theoretical discussions about our future workplaces. To this end, we’ve been striving to diversify our faculty on multiple levels. First, the student body needs to be more diverse, and it is the faculty’s responsibility to recruit and admit more BIPOC students. Second, the hiring of BIPOC staff and faculty would make an important difference as well. However, to avoid tokenization and harmful work and learning environments, the faculty also needs to develop a culture of inclusivity and equity in which BIPOC staff and students can flourish, in order to mitigate racism or discrimination. Third, diversifying our course offerings and our syllabi is something we greatly hold to heart, so that we can have a well-rounded education that will actually help us in our future careers.
Megan: But as much as academic training can create a good foundation for action, it really comes down to that – action. All the training in the world won’t amount to anything unless it’s used to actually make space and amplify marginalized voices. The work is hard, and will require people to sacrifice their sense of comfort and security, but really showing up for people means shouldering some of the burden of the fight they’ve been taking on their entire lives. This can mean challenging people on their racism when BIPOC aren’t in the room, letting BIPOC take the lead on projects and supporting their work, even stepping down from a position if you notice that your leadership team is mostly white or non-Black and non-Indigenous.
Chloé: To echo what Megan said, these kinds of actions are how institutional racism can be tackled and eradicated. This type of work is just the start, and is not a list of items on a checklist. It is a process that needs to be constant, ongoing, and present in everything we do, in theory and practice.
What do you envision for MPOC?
Denise: We have two main goals for MPOC right now that we’ll really be striving for throughout the entire upcoming school year. First, we want to ensure that MPOC continues to live on at the faculty even after we’ve graduated the MMSt program. As mentioned before, this organization is foremostly a support group for museum professionals of colour. Founding MPOC has helped us not only have a voice to speak out against the systemic racism that exists within the museum sector and in our program, but it’s allowed us to feel more seen and heard than we did prior to MPOC forming. We want future BIPOC students to experience that same level of support and visibility during their time as an MMSt student. And once they graduate, they know they’ll have a community they can turn to for guidance in navigating this field as a marginalized museum professional.
Dominica: Our second goal is to establish ourselves as an independent organization outside of the UofT structure. We’re extremely passionate and committed to the work we’ve been doing and definitely want to continue with MPOC after graduating our program next year. We want to expand this group nationally and, through delivering programs, events, and other campaigns, we hope to create a larger network of support for museum professionals of colour across Canada. We still have many things to think about, but we draw a lot of our inspiration from Museum Hue and Museum Detox, as well as other organizations like archive and library associations who have chapters across different schools. That’s something we’d like to do as well – set up chapters of MPOC within the various museum studies programs throughout Canada.
What do you envision for yourselves as museum professionals?
Dominica: Ideally, DEIA work would be a perspective that everyone uses in all museums and across all aspects of museum work. Whatever we end up doing, whether it be collections management or visitor research, our work will always relate to DEIA. I enjoy working in the public-facing sector of the museum particularly in immersive and multisensory programming. At the moment, this takes the form of historic cooking, but I hope to employ multisensory experiences as a means to make museums more empathetic, inclusive, and accessible.
Megan: I also enjoy frontline museum work, and my background and where I envision myself is in education and public programming. That’s typically where you see the most direct community engagement, which is very rewarding, and it’s where a lot of BIPOC museum workers find themselves. Unfortunately, we’ve seen through COVID that these positions are also some of the most expendable. That’s why DEIA is crucial to all aspects of museum work. The way museums are run isn’t equitable, and BIPOC remain on the margins. We really need to see more BIPOC in leadership and executive positions in order for real change to happen.
Denise: While I also really enjoy public programming, I see myself pursuing a career in interpretive planning and being more involved in the exhibition development process. For those who don’t know what interpretive planners do, if curators provide the information, interpretive planners organize that information to create a storyline and figure out how to effectively communicate it to the audience. When planning an exhibition, interpretive planners have to ask themselves questions like: Whose stories are we telling? Whose stories are not being included? From whose voices are these stories being told? Is this information/text/strategy accessible for all? That said, DEIA is so intrinsic to this type of museum work.
Chloé: Just like Denise, I am also interested in interpretive planning when it comes to museum work. I have an appreciation for collections management, but I believe interpretive planning and its focus on how visitors learn and retain information is where I see myself in the future. As mentioned by Denise, DEIA work is central to interpretive planning, and should be central to all museum work. I also have a love for oral history and believe it to be an underutilized methodology in museums; the values intrinsic to oral history (like sharing authority) can greatly help museums create lasting bonds with community members and make museums places where people see their histories valued and taken care of. As a white woman, it is my responsibility to constantly work towards anti-racism in myself and everything I do.
Meet Canoo member Violeta. She chose to move to Canada for the “natural beauty, mountains and lakes, as well as because of the strong economy and plenty of business opportunities.”
What Violeta loves most about Canada is the “people, the diversity, friendliness, and last but not least – poutine!” Her favourite place in Canada is Banff National Park in Alberta.
The best place that Violeta has visited using her Canoo app has been the Montreal Science Center, which she visited with her family. “Everyone in the family is interested in doing simple experiments and hands-on activities, and the center offers plenty of those,” she says. “The exhibitions we saw were amazing and entertaining both for kids and adults. Before we knew it, we spent almost three hours there and when we left we felt like there is so much more to see. Awesome place!”
For Violeta, active citizenship is “contributing to society by being kind and respectful, taking care of the environment, helping others and making a positive difference whenever presented with the opportunity.” She believes that cultural spaces help us build more diverse and inclusive societies: “Cultural places give us another perspective,” she says, “They help us see the world through the eyes of others; it is a way for us to remember the past and all the lessons it holds.”
“I have had a very positive experience using Canoo,” says Violeta, “Having the chance to visit all these places (some of which I probably wouldn’t have visited without the Canoo pass) is definitely expanding my horizons.”
COVID-19 has prompted wide-ranging physical distancing ticketing measures across the country, with over $5.8 million in coronavirus-related fines reported by May of this year. Some fines, like those in Saskatchewan, are as high as $2,000, while in other provinces, like Newfoundland and Labrador, violations can even result in jail time.
Advocates rang alarm bells early, warning that physical distancing enforcement could have a negative impact on marginalized groups, including low-income people or those experiencing homelessness who are unable to pay fines, new Canadians with language barriers, or members of Black communities, who are disproportionately affected by police violence.
In Ottawa, a 21-year-old refugee from Syria with limited English language skills was fined $880 for allowing his younger sibling to climb on playground equipment in a park while otherwise observing physical distancing rules. In Hamilton, a man experiencing homelessness was fined the same amount for sitting near a group of people outside a health centre.
Evidence suggests that fines have not been meted out equally. In late May, a large crowd of thousands of people, most of whom appeared to be white, gathered at Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto. Despite thousands of park-goers being in close proximity to each other, Toronto police issued only four tickets that day.
Disparities in how physical distancing fines are enforced are even more clear in the United States, where race-specific data related to policing is more robust. In New York City, about 80 per cent of fines were handed out to Black or Latino New Yorkers. According to a ProPublica study of three court districts in Ohio, Black residents were “at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the stay-at-home order as white people.”
In Canada, over-policing and discriminatory practices against Black Canadians have also been a long-standing problem. One recent example is the discriminatory “carding” policies used by law enforcement in Toronto which unfairly targeted Black residents.
Carding, which has since been banned, allowed law enforcement to stop and confront any resident and collect their information, and resulted in the racist mistreatment of Black Torontonians. A 2014 analysis by the Toronto Star found that — despite only being about 8 percent of the city’s population — approximately 27 percent of all carding incidents in Toronto after July 2013 involved Black people.
Carding is just one of the many ways Black Canadians have been targeted by police. A 2018 report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission found that “between 2013 and 2017, a Black person in Toronto was nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police Service.” The report also showed that “Black people were over-represented in use of force cases (28.8%), shootings (36%), deadly encounters (61.5%) and fatal shootings (70%).”
The Ontario government’s recent physical distancing enforcement measures allow police to stop anyone they perceive to be in violation of the COVID-19 emergency orders, which the Canadian Civil Liberties Association directly compares to carding. “At best, this new Order is reckless and dangerous. At worst, it could be seen as a bald attempt to re-animate carding and re-populate a database with information about the residents of this city, and in particular, individuals who are racialized, Indigenous, homeless, have mental-health issues, or are otherwise marginalized,” wrote Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, the organization’s director of equality.
While Black communities tend to be over-policed, they also tend to be under-resourced and lower-income, with many people working in low-wage jobs (many of which are now deemed “essential”). This makes it more likely they will be outside of their home where they are vulnerable to encounters with law enforcement.
Any interaction with police can be risky, but a pandemic adds an additional layer of risk because it puts individuals in close contact with potentially infected officers. Police in Toronto and across Canada have reported positive cases of COVID-19 among officers. In New York City, that number has reached more than 1,400 cases among NYPD employees.
Not only are measures like these dangerous and racially biased, criminologists have cast doubt on the effectiveness of fines when it comes to enforcing physical distancing, arguing that they rely too much on blaming individuals in order to change widespread behaviour. But what experts can agree on is that widespread testing and contact tracing — rather than unfairly targeting marginalized groups — is the key to curbing the spread of COVID-19.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many people have been spending less time socializing and a lot more time staying at home glued to their digital devices. The act of obsessively checking the latest news updates during coronavirus has even garnered its own term: “doomscrolling.”
But consuming more information doesn’t necessarily result in being better informed. A 2019 report from the Digital Democracy Project studying misinformation in election coverage in Canada found that consuming high amounts of news through social media or traditional news outlets was also associated with higher levels of misinformation. For media to be as effective and accurate as possible, it also needs to be of high-quality and backed by strong reporting that includes perspectives that represent the full breadth of Canadian experiences.
We’ve already discussed the importance of fact-checking and the need to prevent harmful stereotypes when consuming news, but how can media structures themselves change to ensure their reporting is as accurate as possible?
One solution is to begin effectively addressing the issue of diversity in Canadian media. When it comes to COVID-19, diversity in how stories are sourced and reported helps to make sure all communities are being represented and served by health authorities. As it stands, Canadian media still has a long way to go.
Currently, very few recent metrics measuring diversity in Canadian media exist, and many news organizations have been unwilling to share their own data. In 2016, Canadaland reached out to 18 newspapers across the country asking them to participate in a diversity survey. Only three news organizations agreed.
What little information we do know shows that Canadian media is overwhelmingly white. A 2019 Ryerson University study found that white op-ed columnists were overrepresented in Canadian media outlets relative to the population of Canada, and that the gap had increased over time. An earlier 2004 study of 37 Canadian daily newspapers found that “racial minorities are more than five times underrepresented in daily newsrooms” across all sections.
Fighting misinformation also means allowing diverse voices to tell their stories in their own terms. Toronto-based filmmaker Sherien Barsoum is a founding member of the Racial Equity Media Collective (REMC), tasked with advocating for BIPOC media creators. REMC works mostly in film, documentary, and television, where BIPOC creators may face barriers when trying to break into the industry. “Newsrooms and boardrooms and executive suites are sadly not filled with diverse voices. They are overwhelmingly homogenous. And, you know, I think that means that we often get stories that are repeated and that are told from just a handful perspectives,” says Barsoum.
Diversity needs to extend beyond the journalists who tell the stories, and also include the experts, researchers, and community members interviewed for the stories themselves. When it comes to COVID-19, drawing from diverse sources at the reporting level will provide more accurate insight into what is happening on the ground.
Early-on in the pandemic, before the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was tracking the racial disparities of COVID-19 infection rates, Black doctors raised concerns that communities of colour were not being given adequate testing and treatment. They turned out to be entirely correct: data now shows that Black and Hispanic people in the United States are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
Black writers were also at the forefront of highlighting these issues. CityLab writer Brentin Mock laid out the long history of racist beliefs behind the myth that Black Americans were somehow immune to COVID-19. Back in April, Ibram X. Kendi, an author and the director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center, wrote in The Atlantic about the need for more data on the demographics of COVID-19 infections and deaths in order to understand the “racial pandemic within the viral pandemic.”
More diverse newsrooms make it less likely that perspectives like these fall through the cracks. The Canadian Association of Black Journalists and Canadian Journalists of Colour have recommended increasing “representation and coverage of racialized communities by hiring more editors and reporters of colour,” in a recent list of calls to action for increased diversity in Canadian newsrooms. “A more diverse news team translates into more diverse coverage,” the organizations stated.
There are some signs of change. The media landscape’s shift to digital has, in some ways, made it possible for a greater plurality of voices to come to the fore through a variety of methods, like making it possible for writers to grow their audience through Twitter or using online resources to connect to new opportunities. The recent worldwide protests surrounding racist police violence have also had an effect, forcing media publications to have difficult conversations about the diversity of their staff and how they report on race.
“I actually am really hopeful,” says Barsoum, citing promising progress in the media’s view on how diversity can add to their programming. “It’s not just essential so things become better for people of colour, it’s for all of us — we all benefit. It makes for a more human experience of the world.”
