The news of institutional racism at McGill’s School of Social Work speaks to a wider culture of racism at McGill that is no ‘news.’ If you consider the demography of almost all the other departments in the Faculty of Arts, the inequitable representation of folks of colour is patent. These inequities seep down into day-to-day overt acts of racism and micro-aggressions that occur all the time.

The day after the Human Rights complaint was starting to make its waves, I witnessed racial profiling in the SSMU lounge. “This is discrimination. I’m a black guy. I go through this every day of my life,” said this student, before he was forced to respond to the security officer’s request for his student ID to verify that he was a student who could use the space.

The SSMU couches have been my second home for my four years at McGill, and I have never seen anyone carded. The guard’s rationale was that it is his duty to card people he hasn’t seen in the lounge before. The many white students who I’ve never seen before, who haphazardly use the space, will never be carded, because they fit the prototypical image of McGill student – a prototype that is a function of McGill’s deeply-rooted racist history. In that interrogatory moment, that guard crystallized that SSMU and campus at large are not “safe(r) spaces.” The over-visibility of blackness in that space was further re-inscribed and will likely continue as black students are profiled across campus.

In these situations, we have a duty to intervene. We cannot control the fact that discrimination happens, but we can control how we respond to it. There will always be limitations in our interventions, but nonetheless, we must hold ourselves and one another accountable to responding when these incidents occur. I encourage us to spread the news of the School of Social Work around, to talk to our peers about it, and to critically discuss it together while asking ourselves how we can be lighter placeholders in systemic racism.

 —Shaina Agbayani
SSMU Equity Commissioner 2012-2013

The post Respond to racism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

As domestic labour continues to be regarded as the work of the female body, peripheral women – lower-class women and women of colour – have frequently taken up the mantle of this undervalued, underpaid work – instead of men.

The fact that the brunt of this work has been disproportionately borne by other – outside – women was highlighted by the Philippine Women’s Centre of Quebec and SIKLAB Quebec last Saturday, at their event “Change through the Revolutionary Road Towards Genuine Women’s Liberation!” in celebration of International Women’s Day. According to the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada, at least 100,000 Filipina women have emigrated to Canada since 1992 under the federal government’s Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) – which usually involves much cleaning in addition to care-giving. The event’s feature film, The Nanny Business, documented the plight of Filipino LCP workers, including a few SIKLAB members here in Montreal, after their arrival in Canada.

The LCP is a national program under which migrant labourers – 95 per cent of whom are Filipina women – work as live-in domestic workers in Canada. The LCP requires nannies to complete 24 months of live-in work to be eligible for permanent residency. Upon my arrival at the apartment of one LCP worker – which she rents on weekends seeking solace from the work that is so invasive to her privacy – she is engaged in an incensed, teary-eyed telephone conversation with her employer, delineating the hours she had worked that week. While it is the weekend (long her agreed-upon holiday), her employer, whose scope of authority often commits her to complacency because of her precarious residency status, reproaches her for refusing the request she work that day.

The callous disregard for women’s bodies under the program was illuminated in the documentary by the ordeal of one LCP caregiver, Juana Tejada, who entered Canada in 2003. After being diagnosed with colon cancer while applying for permanent residence in 2006 – hoping to sponsor her family – Tejada was faced with deportation after toiling for three years as a caregiver, because she was deemed a health burden. She died in 2009.

Sheila Neysmith, who researches the program, observes that in annihilating the distinction between “public and private spaces; work and leisure; paid and unpaid labour; pay cheque and rent cheque,” the LCP entails extensive overtime and unpaid work. According to her research, 65 per cent of LCP caregivers surveyed in the Toronto area admitted to working more than the capped 44 weekly hours and  44 per cent of these received no compensation for overtime. Program graduates bear the brunt of employment in which 12-hour days (unofficially) and $1,000 per month salaries (after charges for accommodation and food) are not out the ordinary. Complete these calculations, and pay under this government-sponsored employment program amounts to less than half of minimum-wage.

The long-term effects of the program are further cause for concern. Because LCP workers are actually prohibited from upgrading their educational and professional skills for the duration of the program, the caregiver often possesses no “legitimate” non-domestic work experience post-graduation. As a result, workers are circumscribed to insecure, low-level employment that limits their economic prospects, in effect sustaining their social marginalization. As of 2008, 50 per cent of male migrant Filipino youth (aged 12 to 16) in Montreal – a substantial proportion of whom are children sponsored by LCP mothers after several years of separation – were not attending school, likely due to the familial, societal, and economic marginalization sustained by the program.

As feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty observes, the relationship between centre and periphery always exists. As the position of white middle-class women shifts from the periphery to the centre, lower-class and coloured women come to occupy the position of the periphery. This shift is compounded by the failure of many men to accept the domestic responsibilities that must underpin a gender-equal society. This gender disequilibrium is one piece of the global patriarchal structure. Almost half of the women under the LCP are mothers who have left children in their home countries, often paying female nannies even lower wages to care for their own children.

Here in the West, what has been conceived of as the work of women is still not valued enough by our government for the proper institutions to be put in place that recognize how fundamental this work is by adequately subsidizing it. As we fail to tackle the deeply-penetrating gender inequality which we blindly see as, “Like, so last feminist wave,” socially and economically marginalized women continue to pay the price. ο

The post The patriarchy of feminism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In Democracy and Education, philosopher John Dewey asserts that education ought to presuppose the growth of not only individuals, but thriving democratic communities. Educational aspirations are indistinguishable from the pursuit of communal wellbeing. However, the marriage between education and community is being preyed upon by the capitalist hyena, rendering communal priorities subservient to corporate agendas. The rabid cost-benefit calculations that penetrate the policies of those dictating our educational experience are undermining the decency – in every sense of the word – of our education.

Principal Heather Munroe Blum’s Strategic Framing Initiative (or SRI, outlined in that oh-so-sanguine email we received Tuesday) exemplifies most tangibly our education’s tendency to veer toward the neoliberal. The SRI regards “find[ing] ways to either save costs or generate new revenues” as paramount, listing “cost-efficiencies” as the first of the initiative’s five themes on the project website. As part of the SRI, McKinsey and Co., a consulting firm whose infamous zeal for austerity measures heralds tuition increases and cuts to (lower-quality) higher education, has been contracted to work with McGill. The SRI further upholds a mandate to help “our researchers, with minimal red tape, attract the funding they need to put their great ideas to work serving society.” Indeed, the “minimal red tape” provision aligns with McGill’s lax research policies which have, for instance, permitted the unfettered capacity of Mechanical Engineering professor David Frost to conduct research on thermobaric explosives, which according to Human Rights Watch “kill and injure in a particularly brutal manner over a wide area.”  Permissiveness for unethical research, regardless of its callous disregard for consequences for humanity, is a corollary of the University’s neoliberal re-configuration from community-hub to corporate-hub.

The infiltration of cost-benefit philosophies into research production related to education demonstrates education’s weakening role as a custodian of humanity. In September, Joce Jesson, a professor of Critical Studies in Education at the University of Auckland, led a seminar on “Globalization, Education, and Change” at McGill. Jesson, who was commissioned to research the state of education in New Zealand, uncovered the chronic ineffectiveness of her homeland’s schools in cultivating motivated and successful students. After she completed her investigation, the board that commissioned it refused Jesson her promised payment and the publication of her research due to its incompatibility with the board’s penchant for capital-accumulation.

Corporate dosages have similarly been injected into McGill’s medical research community. Last year, McGill reviewed a case of potential academic misconduct by professor Barbara Sherwin, who was accused of supporting a scheme concocted by drug behemoth Wyeth Pharmaceuticals after she failed to fully acknowledge assistance she had in writing an article published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The article, exploring the effectiveness of a variety of treatments in dealing with age-associated memory loss – was drafted with some editorial assistance from ghostwriting firm DesignWrite, which collaborates with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to promote the latter’s products.  This evidence of the medical community’s reliance on marketing material rather than medical literature when dealing patients’ health marks the descent of “the community” in the hierarchy of what our education operates to serve.

Yet we have access to channels of agency in re-democratizing our education to serve the community rather than the CEOs. For instance, CURE (the Community-University Research Exchange) “is a database by which students can integrate their academic research with the work of local movements and activist organizations.” McGill already has the infrastructure in place to recognize CURE research – in the form of an internship or independent study course – for credit. The CURE database connects students with non-profit community groups that work in fields ranging from environmental justice, food policy, ableism, anti-police brutality, migrant justice, and first nations, and queer advocacy. Embarking on a CURE project allows us to “work with local movements for social change … to make rubble of the walls which enclose academic privilege.” Lingering in isolation in an academic setting allows us to erect theoretical shutters which block out vistas to the community.

Why not support Right to City Montreal’s goal of understanding and redressing the grievances generated by gentrification in the Parc-Extension neighbourhood, or assist Solidarity Across Borders in developing strategies for supporting migrant rights through a CURE research project while working toward your degree? Channels of agency always remain to create an academic experience that palpably supports the broader community. I encourage you to consider these avenues to subvert and reconstruct the narrow, individualistic neoliberal framework into which our educational experience is being compressed.

Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this article (Commentary, March 10, pg. 9) Professor Sherwin is incorrectly identified as falsely attributing herself as the author of the article; in fact, she failed to fully acknowledge assistance she had in writing it. Also, in the earlier version of the article incorrectly identified the topic of the article; the article dealt with a range of treatments for age-associated memory loss. Also, the earlier version mistakenly stated that DesignWrite wrote the article in question; in fact, they provided some editorial assistance. The article has been edited to correct these errors. The Daily regrets the errors.

The post Democratize your education appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Whether in the realm of beauty or intellect, what whiteness has come to emblemize is enchanting. Whitening creams and soaps are regularly advertised products in culturally-marketed beauty magazines. Once, after I shared with a friend that McGill is the “sexiest university” – as per an online student forum – she attributed this fact to our overwhelming whiteness. The blunt comment “sometimes I wish I were white,” is heard from second-generation immigrants – who are not in fact  self-hating downers, just in liminal, ambivalent cultural spaces.

In Zadie Smith’s contemporary classic White Teeth, Jamaican-English protagonist Irie Jones becomes enamoured with the English-English Chalden family, which has taken her under their wing as their cultural beneficiary. Irie “was fascinated. … No one in [her] household made jokes about Darwin, or said ‘my foot and mouth are on intimate terms’ or offered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from child to adult, as if the channel of communication between these two tribes was untrammelled, unblocked by history, free.” This passage spoke to my upbringing that, come university, rendered me somewhat aggrieved of my parents’ apolitical pleasantry, mostly my father’s recurrent jokes about the only fruit of his Philippine agricultural degree – that he’s the Asian male Martha Stewart of plant-watering (still gets me…and he does water well).

Yet it is ineffective to chastise the widespread de-politicization of immigrants – disproportionately visible minorities – forming the lower class majority: multiple underpaid jobs render opportunities for political “acculturation” and “integration” remote, romanticized realities.

What results is a scarcity of activism within an immigrant community that would benefit tremendously from such to redress their socioeconomic grievances. Activism, however amorphous the term, typically requires the luxury – time, resources – to cultivate knowledge about your “oppressions,” then battle against them. Marching with a throng of protesters brandishing signs emblazoned with socialist axioms; joining legions of idealists in all-you-can-drinks to raise money for the drinkless; or writing an article to rebuke odious institutional practices are all exclusive forms of activity.

Ironically, “commercial activism” supplants community activism for socioeconomically marginalized immigrants. Consuming and flaunting frippery becomes the primary form of activism-on-credit when commercial “communities” replace the virtues of the gregarious and homogenous cultural community that was left behind. Not surprisingly, then, working unrelentingly during the week and spending Sundays relishing in the pseudo-communal frenzy at the mall becomes a norm for many immigrants I observe (who, in fact, appear miserable while shopping).

Cultural alienation, little money and much work are counter-productive to political consciousness and activism, and, ironically, conducive to materialism – the idea that it is the “materialessness” that makes life so miserable.

Meanwhile, our government fails at making activism more inclusive for immigrants. The Conservatives’ December decision to eliminate funding from educational, social, and employment services to newcomers aggravates their disenfranchisement. This decision compounds the negative impacts of the disposal of the long-form census last July, which threatens the existence of government services that reflect the needs of those on the margins.

Fortunately, this is not the end of history.

The post Intersections: immigration, activism, consumerism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

–Teresia K. Teaiwa in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

As part of a series of events hosted by V-Day McGill this week, professor Adrienne Hurley of the East Asian Studies department read this excerpt to introduce her discussion on Monday, “Collective Responses to State Violence”.

The discussion’s theme of state violence was grounded in a dialogue concerning another island nestled in the Pacific: Guam, which is just 2,200 kilometres west of the Bikini Atoll. Under U.S. control  since American forces repelled the Japanese military during World War II, Guam is one of the 16 remaining non-self-governing territories in the world, according to the United Nations.

The destruction and irradiation of Bikini Atoll, due to its selection as the American military’s nuclear laboratory, prompted the forced relocation of its Indigenous peoples, who were moved to another nearby island that has proven unsuitable for a decent standard of living. Inhabitants unsuccessfully sought reparations for their plight by appealing the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009.

Similarly, Guam is in the process of a significant demographic shift orchestrated under the purview of American military, one that will negatively impact its population. As a result of the wholesale relocation of American marine bases from Okinawa to Guam by 2014 – a move that will spur a 45 per cent increase in the island’s population of 180,000 – the island is slated to become a nucleus of American military force.

Eight thousand Marines and their dependents will arrive, along with workers, who will construct the infrastructure required to support this population boom. Currently, the indigenous Chamorros make up less than forty per cent of the population of Guam, where the U.S. Department of Defence already occupies a little over thirty per cent of land. As Hurley noted, this, of course, means that the island’s inhabitants will have access to less land to feed themselves.

The Federal Environment Protection Agency cautions that “significant and adverse environmental and social impact” will result from the influx. In addition to the adverse environmental impacts of overcrowding, and the resulting stress on the land and the agriculture industry, the cultural impact will prove substantial: Marines have proposed the establishment of a firing range on cemeteries and on the sacred cultural sites of Pagat.

The Chamorros’ protestations are regarded as negligible in resettlement negotiations between Japan and the U.S., leaving them with minimal channels for recourse. Therefore, as Hurley voiced, simply raising the currently lacking international awareness is valuable in strengthening the movement to counter this neo-colonial “build-up” of the American population at the expense of the Chamorro community.

Yet organizing a collective response is a complex task. As stated by Chamorro psychologist Patricia L. G. Taimanglo, it is important to address the continued history of losses by opening indigenous forums for educating the islanders on the incipient changes.

Within what Hurley dubbed “the official discourse,” mass resettlement is promoted to the Chamorros as a positive variable for supporting Guam’s economic growth, while neglecting the inevitable dimensions of cultural disintegration. Therefore, as Taimanglo affirms, generating an exchange of critical dialogue within Chamorros communities on the causes and impacts of Guam’s reconfiguration should be prioritized.

Most importantly, Taimanglo notes, supporting Chamorro agency through the practice of remembering is invaluable for reconciling with the attack on their cultural tapestry.

For more information, visit decolonizeguam.blogspot.com

The post Organizing against legal invasion appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The post Sikh <i>Langar</i> appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The military is fundamentally an institution forged on the precept that coercive execution of power over another party is acceptable. If we anthropomorphize this military pathology in its inner clockwork, it should not be bewildering that U.S. military nurses who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq have conceded that they felt more preyed upon by fellow soldiers than by “the enemy.” According to a study conducted by the Journal of Military Medicine, 71 per cent of female American veterans since Vietnam have been sexually assaulted or raped while serving, an egregious figure despite and because of the truism that Military Sexual Trauma (MST) often remains a silent grievance.

Obama’s ratification of the Defence Authorization Bill earlier this month, in spite of its spurious expansion of the military’s tendrils, laudably incorporates provisions poised to better assist those who have suffered from MST. While this charts a course in the right direction for addressing the military epidemic of sexual assault, silence amongst the assaulted remains the norm due to a military judiciary which coddles perpetrators.

In filing charges, victims imperil their career and professional credibility, given the possibility of their allegations being deemed unfounded. The exigency of earnestness in such claims should therefore be reflected in high rates of criminal prosecution. On the contrary – -of 2,974 reported cases of rape and sexual assault in the American military in 2006 (when the Pentagon was first mandated to record it), a meagre 292 proceeded to trial, out of which only 181 prosecutions resulted. With the onus placed on the victim to substantiate the assault, which in many cases occurred years ago, a dearth of evidence ensures low prosecution rates.

While the disgraces of America’s chauvinistic military culture are being reversed by the repeal of the homophobic Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and the increasing pressure to permit women to serve in combat, an attack on the military’s gender disequilibrium and heteronormativity does not address the preeminent vice of military sexual culture. The military remains a milieu encouraging to the deleterious execution of power within the tremendously asymmetrical power dynamics of cultural conquest and division.

As this cultural access is globalized, the interplay of masculinity and violence remains pervasive outside the military realm. When traditional channels through which to satisfy notions of “manhood” – namely by fulfilling the economic and professional breadwinner function – are barred, power outlets shift. The violent groundswell of xenophobic right-wing movements in the West and religious fundamentalism in the East are largely populated by downwardly mobile, lower to middle class men militantly reacting to globalization’s economic and social shifts through a process of scapegoating. These bellicose, often nationalistic movements manifest disenfranchised men’s attempts to re-assert “masculinities” impoverished by hostile economic realities. Aggressively channelling blame for emasculation – powerlessness in the economic sphere – onto “others” becomes a rudiment of masculinity.

The military likewise operates on a logic of “othering,” one through which the inhuman enemy is simply fodder to supplement a chronic appetite for power and “manhood” while simultaneously placing men in a power matrix that normalizes prescribed gender roles and sexual violence by normalizing power hierarchies and coercion. As states mortgage off their economies by fortifying their military muscle, they are expanding the channels for their batteries – mainly men – to exert a military conceptualization of “power” concocted with the noxious spices of caricaturized masculinity. As a result, it is the rule – not the exception – that the military enterprise adulterates both its agents and its subjects.

The post Masculine military muscle appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It was there that after a bank teller belligerently cast spiteful invectives at me, hastening to accuse me of being the culprit behind BMO’s missing newspapers (under the pretext that I was primly reading the newspaper across the street), I bellowed back: “If I were an old, white man, you wouldn’t feel entitled speak to me this way without giving me the chance to defend myself.”

This mirthful exchange I contemplated after being edified by “Adventures among the anti-racists” (November 19, 2007). The article, by right-leaning National Post columnist Jonathan Kay, summarizes his role at a left-leaning convention christened “Combating Hatred” as “the angry right-wing freak who, for reasons known only to himself, was ruining this otherwise respectable festival of white guilt.”  He concludes that “I am an opinion journalist who can write about these issues candidly,” lamenting on behalf of orthodox anti-racists, “the jurists, NGO types, tenured academics, and public servants staring back at me from the audience [who] enjoyed no such freedom” (because of their rabid political correctness).

Perusing other articles in which he decries various corporations’ decisions to exercise their freedom to express their solidarity with the BDS movement, proceeding onto his mother, Barbara Kay’s columns (“Support Pride or You’re a Homophobe”), I marvelled at the volatility in the co-optation of the “freedom of expression” card.

Certainly, more draconian international materializations of expressionistic restraint reign supreme. Pakistani governor Salman Taseer was recently assassinated for promulgating his rebuke of the nation’s blasphemy law, which has summoned a Christian woman to death row for defaming Muhammad. Tunisian activists, bloggers and journalists reproaching their plutocrats’ embezzlement of public funds for investment in pet tigers are routinely detained and arrested. For their deeply-limited access to internet and communication with one another, Tunisians can express gratitude to American-manufactured network-intercepting software (Oh, Hillary would be proud after trumpeting, in a speech venerating internet freedom, that “On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does”).

Of course, in the corporate realm, freedom of expression remains unfettered in the United States. “Corporate personhood” under the 14th Amendment grants a carte blanche for CEOs claiming that erecting parameters around enterprise development (which itself curbs the freedom of expression of the indigenous peoples whose lands they adulterate and whose freedoms to protest they curtail) limits their freedom of expression.

While peaceful protest against corporate activity continue to result in the deaths of innumerable activists, Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression estimate that 87 government-scrutinizing journalists died last year worldwide, most of whose perpetrators were met with impunity.

Without the wherewithal to channel and defend peaceful, free expression, possessing the moral vocabulary to discern and dissent from the miasmas emanating from every corridor is but being a seed that languishes in fallow soils. Just as over-regulating the equine industry drains the soul of hickety-ho horse life, as deplored by my interviewees, over-regulating peaceful expression asphyxiates the virtues of human life. Protecting the streams for our voices should be of pre-eminent value, regardless of what comprises the outpour.

As Chomsky states, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for those we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” So while I actually concur with many of Johnny’s reproaches against anti-racists, let them spew their orthodoxy, and leave Barbara Kay with a pulpit for her apocrypha that sex education (“The Cult of Multisexualism,” April 28, 2010) is “a rudimentary form of collective voyeurism.”

shaina.agbayani@mcgilldaily.com

The post Watch out, I’mma censor you foo’ appeared first on The McGill Daily.

—Oscar Wilde

Faith – in an Occident made starry-eyed by secularism – is often unpopular. Yet it has quite simply evolved.

Secularism: the Politicization of Art
When feigned by apathetic Rage Against the Machine (politically-polemical nineties band) concertgoers screaming, “Eff you, I won’t do what you tell me,” the politics of rage can be seen as a practice of misguided wretches, brainwashed into fanatically commercialized performances.

“Without action, rage becomes just another commodity or marketing tool,” laments Mark Levin in an Al-Jazeera article titled, “No More Rage Against the Machine.” In response to the dearth of rage surrounding Wikileaks’ revelation of the myriad atrocities denied or concealed in Iraq by the American government, he criticizes how fury is channelled in concert-screaming rather than protest. The disparity between Rage’s enormous fan community and the petty fraction of them who exhibit the band’s commitment to political resistance against the woes of neoliberalism epitomizes, for Levin, politicized art’s artificiality.

The notion of politicized art – or any artistic creation that is not simply a religious product – is relatively new. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” speaks to the necessary politicization of art when bereft of traditional and ritualistic value. After secularization in the 18th century, paintings and music once commissioned primarily as veneration for religious figures or as accompaniment to religious ceremonies were diverted for secular purposes. The novel secularity of art revised its value as an end in itself rather than as means to the divine. This paved the route towards key loci of modern artistic activity – galleries, concerts, et cetera.

While Rage concerts may not foment political spirit in the traditional sense, they politicize the faith in music itself, required to replace the faith gone astray in the process of secularization.

Science=Faith
Atheism’s Jesus, Mohammad, and Abraham – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris – preach scientific scriptures, seeking to disenchant the brainwashed from theological curses.

Yet while watching Harris’s TED presentation – “Science Can Answer Moral Questions” – I was persuaded that he was engaging in mystic wizardry, casting a spell on his white, middle-aged, middle-to-upper-class audience. “Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics worth considering?” No, he responds to himself. Almost on cue, as if meticulously orchestrated, they chuckle at hackneyed, obtuse jokes. Laughter ensues from his theatrically-voiced response. Chuckles likewise follow his profession that he is the Ted Bundy (seventies serial killer) of string theory.

I frequently marvelled, Huh? Wtf is Sammy sayin’? Eventually, I was laughing incessantly at an often-illogical ramble (liked by 4,197 YouTubers) accompanied by visual presentations juxtaposing DNA strands with statues of the Virgin Mary; terrifying images of the Pope, sallow and dark-eyed, with even more terrifying pictures of gravely-gazed Rabbis; and women in burqas, with scantily-clad blonde bombshells.

While analyzing the infidels’ hyper-receptivity to Harris’s scientific sermon – their eruption into applause after remarkably uninsightful remarks – Bob Dylan whispered to me…

Moralizing conclusion
The Duchess moralizes Alice in Wonderland, “Tut, tut, child! Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

What is it?
Dylan chants, “The answer is blowin’ in the wind,” depending on what you listen to, or, more precisely, what you choose to hear, scream apolitically at Rage concerts, or laugh gratuitously at at TED talks.

Our ethnocentrism allows us to criticize all performances of faith as the actions of brainwashed androids. Yet the idea of brainwashing is curious to me. The moralizing din that religion, amongst other institutions, brainwashes, is banal. Everything “brainwashes” – capitalism, nationalism, art, ad infinitum. Humans require faith in somethings, the mere belief in which never inherently indicates vice. Faith is what forges institutions into existence, and what is humanly – not epistemologically – contrived for “good” or “bad.” As Wilde so astutely notes, skepticism and the subsequent disavowal of certain value systems is quite simply the beginning of faith in other systems from which to derive a sense of community and morality.

The post Art, science, faith appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This, I declared aloud after reviewing the seminal feminist text Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse, by C. T. Mohanty. While commendable for critiquing Western feminism’s penchant for typecasting non-Western women as victims requiring lofty Western mores and assistance, Mohanty’s penchant for stressing the “urgent” political magnitude of feminist theory irked me. “Urgent” indulgently mischaracterizes the political dimensions of feminist theory, often inaccessible for its protagonists – those to whom it is most practically relevant.

My concern more broadly speaks to modernity’s insatiable desire to intellectualize, classify, patent everything into systems of knowledge – a tendency Foucault detects in The History of Sexuality. He observes the foregrounding of ritualized confession in modernity’s pursuit of knowledge – its production of “truth,” through science’s categorizing subjects to extract “knowledge” that is servile to order, rather than amenable to truth. I was really feeling Foucault, irked by our fixation on embedding “facts” about ineffable climactic experiences into knowledge systems. Systems generated by the state to control histories about, among other things, sexuality. Histories those in power want to narrate.

This disparity between government-imposed histories and those organic to a group of peoples was delved into by Yale political scientist James Scott in his September presentation at Concordia. In “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” (the title of his book on the same topic as well), Scott proposed that modern state-making is an avatar of internal colonialism. He proffered an alternative outlook on history from the peripheries of the stateless, indigenous peoples of Zomia (the upland region of Southeast Asia inhabited by disparate, nomadic ethnic groups), challenging us to re-define our narrow historical conceptions of civilization to realize that “civilization” is a narrative for control that benefits the coterie (1) who define civilization and declare it the shit; and (2) who in its name, usurps the history and land of the peoples they civilizes. He suggests that Zomians espouse oral histories and traditions rather than “intellectualized,” written ones to escape state control since under it, the evolution of peoples’ histories occurs on corporate, coercive terms.

Classification makes this coercion easier. India has suddenly interested itself in and has increasingly categorized India’s predominantly indigenous Maoist groups (also called Naxalites) as “terrorists” since 2005, despite extensive indigenous histories of resistance that greatly predate Mao. This coincided with the discovery of lucrative mining sites in Maoists’ lands and the government’s ratification of treaties with mining corporations. Maoists, defending peoples and lands only now significant to India because they lay atop trillion-dollar bauxite mines, are justifiably seditious in order to defending their rights and land. Weeks after the ratification, tribal peoples’ militias were unleashed, burning hundreds of Maoist-defended villages.

This violent, inexhaustible desire for knowledge, classification, control over everything – land, libido, non-Western women, “terrorists”, intellectual “property” – reflects the modernity forecast by Bentham in 1785 when he conceptualized the Panopticon – an Orwellian architecture wherein prisoners cannot tell when they are being watched, which Foucault indexes in Discipline and Punish as a metaphor for hyper-regulative austerity measures that compel individuals to acquiesce to institutions’ value systems. Our totalitarianesque affinity for researching and monitoring forges a Panopticon culture obsessed with knowing and classifying the “everything” most beneficial to those who extract and often least so for those from whom it is extracted.

But heck, this article is so a product of the privileged knowledge systems that omniscience-obsessed culture affords me. As my homeboy De Rrida rhymes, “We cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” I am, inescapably, the offspring of (philosophy-minor-because-a-major-would-mentally-unhinge-me) histories that, I realize, get me high on abstractions.

Academia, let us reunite.

The post We are living in a Panopticon world appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Deleterious spending patterns
Irreverent to student debt, I relapsed into hyper-consumerist product dependency last week, purchasing septic fluid while I could have simply persisted in plunging.

Mired deep in a heap of deficit, Obama’s administration exacerbates the land-of-the-free(-of- prudence)’s, home-of-the-(fiscally)-audacious’s debt crisis by gratuitously increasing investment in the military-industrial complex. The U.S. spends 53 cents of every tax dollar on the military. Less than a fourth of this is earmarked for Afghanistan and Iraq, rousing us to posit that this expenditure is paranoid, pre-emptive, and provocative. America’s soaring defence expenditures – exemplified in the unprecedented $708 billion that the administration has requested from Congress for 2011 military spending – is symptomatic of a global arms addiction.

African debt to industrialized economies now exceeds threefold what was initially borrowed. This continent, where easily preventable and treatable condition such as diarrhea are the second-leading killer of children under five, expends four times more on debt repayments than on health.

Corporate hegemony debtifies us
Corporate philosophies regiment planned obsolescence. My Liquid Plumr Pro is a corporate-invented “necessity” that derides my clog-clearing capabilities as outmoded by providing me with a convenient alternative. Appeals to convenience often euphemize excuses for indolence and irresponsibility. For convenience, we treat Third World countries as depositories for our toxic waste.

The military’s economic stranglehold on the deficit-ravaged American economy is forged by a dynamic of supply and demand. The former is propositioned by avaricious weapons-manufacturing giants. They form the expansive nexus of corporate interest that undergirds excessive militarization by strategically ubiquitizing themselves. Weapon manufacturers are implanted numerously in all states, possessing tremendous leverage in lobbying Congress to increase defence budgets that channel multi-million-dollar weapons contracts toward them.

The most significant variables in the decline of Third World countries into debt crises played themselves out in the seventies and eighties, when developed countries rose interest rates starkly and oil prices quadrupled, increasing all costs. Both resulted from the cowrporate monopoly on determining interest rates and oil prices. To rectify the debt quagmire, Third World countries entered into Structural Adjustment Programs with the World Bank and the IMF that purported to assist borrowers pursuing debt relief through more money-lending or lowering interest rates. In exchange, borrowers had to comply with a neoliberal agenda that privatized industries and decreased spending on the health and educational institutions most beneficial to civilians.

Rectification: de-dependence
We gotta take the red pill and, like Neo, recognize the debt matrix – an excessive, irrational industrialization that has dismantled our mental mechanisms for apprehending how impotent, paranoid, and narrow-minded the interdependency on which capitalist globalization is predicated renders us.

Convenience-on-steroids – frozen mini-bagels with cream cheese, payforessay.com – typifies our zeitgeist (read: we have normalized a culture of incompetency). We breathe in the midst of a $1.5-trillion arms addiction (read: we are becoming more paranoid). Our freedom to cheaply buy whatever we want from wherever we want whenever we want is borne at the expense of the bleeding and disease of the earth and the Third World peoples who participate the least in this earth-tainting (read: our scope is insidiously narrow).

We must revise our conceptions of development and freedom – not in terms of military capacity, or of our freedom to buy avocados in January or to subject developing nations to usury. Amping up capital-obsessed globalization is unsustainable. Rather, we must reclaim competency and stability by seeking alternatives (see Anqi Zhang’s Culture article on Ecovillages, November 1) to the global over-dependency most patent in our transnational, corporate-sponsored debt crises.

The post Debt = Delirium appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Taylor paints a hollow portrait of modernity’s “liberalism.” Self-discovery and self-confirmation are the deceitfully narcissistic idioms of modern liberal rhetoric. While identity formation is contingent upon dialogue with others, individualist mores regard such encounters as mere instruments of self-realization, despite them being central to the dialogue of agreement and struggle through which our identities are properly formed.

The absence of such dialogue incites hollow relations with our selves, provoking pilgrimages towards illusory lands of self-realization and authenticity, via materialistic hyper-consumerism thriving on the latest transient trends, religion-shopping, or hiring a life coach… Yet these pilgrimages overlook the roots of the hollowness – a dearth of quality relations with others. The notion of an “inwardly-generated identity” dismisses the significance of negotiating one’s identity with others.

What stimulates me to recall this reading journey is the surge of “authentic” self-fulfilment lingo in popular culture. The bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love and its recent film adaptation chronicle a divorcée’s odyssey toward self-restoration and self-discovery by lavishly participating in cultural buffetism. Then there are those American Eagle advertisements and Rihanna’s exhortations to “live your life.” AE suggests we do this by buying unfair-trade clothes with an eagle on the tit. Rihanna suggests we do it by being “a shining star with fancy clothes and fancy cars.”

But haven’t AE and Rihanna learned anything from Mr. Scrooge and the Grinch? Livin’ the life doesn’t mean exploiting the shit out of the world’s soon-to-be-depleted resources by purchasing things we can certainly go swimmingly without. It means sharing life with others whom you value enough to be inconvenienced for and vice versa. Looking at everyone and everything as instrumental in expeditions of self-discovery is, as Taylor proposes, self-defeating.

Imagine being the most intelligent, knowledgeable individual in the world on a 500-foot yacht, with gold-plated toilets; inexhaustible supplies of your fave delicacies; the complete collection of your favourite brand of; impeccable speakers with the full discographies of your favourite bands. Yet you’re all alone.

Well that’s just shitty, ain’t it? That’s precisely what Taylor argues. He espouses a “communitarian” critique of liberalism. He argues that contrary to liberal-capitalist rhetoric, which says our existence finds meaning in the context of material items, it is actually society and those who compose it that provide the context for meaning.

We must re-evaluate how inane, narcissistic preoccupations have subtly yet surely colonized our lifestyles to the point that we forget that the virtues of human spirit – pure and simple – are what attract us to others, not what they possess.

This reminds about how often I have invested an exorbitant amount of time grooming and enrobing myself in preparation for an event where, without exception, the people worth spending my time with could not have given an [expletive] how I looked. And, without exception, all the people in my life who I hold closest to my heart evoke beauties that are entirely unrelated to attire or physicality. They could be wearing shit-stained pantyhose on their heads and I would still die for them.

So what realization emerges from this fragmented, pseudo-intellectual rambling? That the gauge of my existence’s richness relies on one material item – shit-stained pantyhose, and how many people whose faces are constrained in it I would die for. Because the pantyhose cannot constrain the virtues of their spirit. Without these people, even if wallowing around in the aforementioned yacht, I might as well die muttering bah, humbug!

The post Others are not tools of the self appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Elliott is the co-founder of Young Onkwehonwe United (YOU), a Six Nations youth group. Yee is a member of Akwesasne First Nations and the founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. The panel was hosted by QPIRG Concordia.

Yee and Elliott spoke of the similarities between the persisting mistreatment of Aboriginal bodies and that of Aboriginal land.

“The ravages of rape within Aboriginal communities directly parallels the rape of our land,” Elliott said.

As co-chair of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Yee collected research pertaining to aboriginal sexuality.

As part of a strategy for self-determination, Elliott urged Aboriginal youth to challenge the increasingly accepted idea that pursuing sexual dialogue is a “white thing,” as a lack of discussion is contributing to the proliferation of STIs within the Aboriginal community.

Both Yee and Elliot discussed the staggering rates of sexual violence in Aboriginal communities.

“These aren’t just words. These are realities for us. And it’s personal for me and hard for me to talk about. All the women in my family have experienced violence and abuse from the men in our family …. There’s the stuff you hear in the newspapers. Then there’s the stuff that we go through everyday.”

Yee also produced an investigation on the number of Aboriginal youth that were incarcerated, in custody, or in foster care.

“Prison cells are the new residential schools for us,” she said. “We were able to find out that basically what you have to do to get shit done at the UN is embarrass Canada enough to get ministers to run after you,” she said.

“When we finally had the opportunity to present this information, a Canadian minister came running after me and said ‘I had no idea.’ I asked ‘What’s your job?’ It turns out he worked at the Ministry of Corrections [sic]. And that all made sense. I should no longer be shocked or surprised that these politicians don’t know anything. Because they don’t.”

Elliott underscored the importance of the youth movement.

“We have to stop counting on the government to act responsibly toward our communities. History shows – in their abrogation of our treaties and their inability to fess up to and be held accountable for their actions – that we must actively pursue these changes ourselves,” she said.

The post Aboriginal youth speak out appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“Our need to classify and categorize is an essential part of being human. If we didn’t possess and employ this ability, we would literally be like children seeing the world for the first time every time we looked around,” says Inzlicht. “A vast majority of these images of classification are unconscious, arising without any level of volition. The framework of our brains which supports them is necessary for our survival. It only becomes sinister when we assert that one category is intrinsically better than another.”

Because it’s no longer socially acceptable to express antagonism toward any one group, Inzlicht explains that prejudice has developed into two types, modern and implicit, “A modern racist is someone who hides their racism behind things like objections to social policies. But the deeper issue is that most people who are prejudiced and have stereotyped views aren’t aware of it themselves. This is implicit prejudice.”             
These categorizations nestled into our crania are akin to filmstrips that play through our minds without much control. However, these filmstrips have been dubiously recorded. Charmaine Nelson, a professor of art history at McGill who has extensively studied Canadian racial politics, asserts, “We are socialized into a racist society.”

Enter philosophy teacher anecdote: He’s driving with kids and wife in Toronto and speeding to get his kids to a game on time just like the white soccer moms beside him. He is stopped by the police. Having been through this countless times before, he prepares to read off what he dubs the script of Canadianness. The dialogue involves the statement “I’m sorry, I was rushing to take the kids to hockey” (emphasize the hockey), articulated with verbosity. According to him, this assumption of Canadianness, replete with a rich dose of exaggerated diction, lets him off the hook every time.

The empirical evidence for the invented crime of “driving while black” is overwhelming. An investigative report on racial profiling conducted by the Toronto Star last month found that black Canadians are three times more likely than white Canadians to be stopped by the Toronto police. It analyzed 1.7-million “contact cards” collected by the police from 2003 to 2008 that identified the characteristics of the individuals stopped by authorities. The study confirmed that belonging to a visible minority group is undeniably a red-card trait for possible criminal tendencies as evaluated by the Toronto police. This racism is felt by its victims. Statistics Canada’s Ethnic Diversity Survey found that 32 per cent of the Canadian participants who identified as black reported experiencing some form of racial discrimination, either sometimes or often.      

Despite these telling statistics, there are skeptics who rebut that these claims of discrimination are the paranoid, self-inflicted result of a bad case of imagined racism with which Canada is afflicted. One of these naysayers is the National Post’s Barbara Kay. In her article “Multiculturalism was Canada’s Biggest Mistake,” Kay states that “Multiculturalism is idealistic in theory, but its real effect has been the entrenchment in our intellectual and cultural elites of an unhealthy obsession with a largely phantom racism amongst heritage Canadians that no amount of penance or cultural self-effacement can ever transcend.”

However, the Toronto Star report proves that racism does exist. Furthermore, a study recently conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies came to the chilling conclusion that many people condone these racist practices. The study found that almost two-fifths of Canadians support the use of racial profiling.

 Whether or not we choose to recognize it, inequality is widespread. A report issued by the United Nations concluded that visible-minority Canadians face rampant discrimination in policing, education, and labour, based on findings from visits to Canadian cities, including Montreal, in October 2009.  
Inzlicht notes that, psychologically speaking, this discrimination is the response of “racist attitudes which are a result of different parts of brain which contribute to certain emotional responses. For instance, in research subjects, the activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain in the frontal lobes in which activity is triggered by weariness and fear, spikes significantly more when presented with images of black people than when presented with images of individuals belonging to other racial backgrounds.”      
This phenomenon is a result of empirical reality and a deeply-yet-unconsciously embedded internalization of a history that has institutionalized racial hierarchies. The empirical reality in Canada is that Caucasian people still form a majority – five out of six Canadians are white. Human psychology is such that we discern things that are unfamiliar and conspicuous to us as discomforting. The white identity has been normalized and universalized as the ideal identity of beauty, power, and recognition.

The infrastructures of these institutions leave scant space for realistic understandings of racial politics. Due to centuries of racism, visible minorities often project inferiority onto themselves. In the book Crafting Selves: power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace, Dorinne K. Kondo, professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, asserts that, “People inevitably participate in their own oppressions, buying into hegemonic ideologies even as they struggle against those oppressions and those ideologies.” People of colour are the most racially-aware and racially-classifying because they experience race. Therefore, they are certainly complicit in sustaining a racial matrix.

This matrix is the deeply-inscribed modern collective psyche which has been wired according to the vestiges of centuries of European racial “sciences,” which were created to justify the colonial projects. These “sciences” institutionalized a polygenetic consciousness that created and maintained a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks – considered subhuman – at the bottom. Despite the fact that we now recognize the absurdity of these racially stratified theories (though for an anomaly, see current University of Western Ontario professor Philippe Rushton) our institutions have nonetheless inherited elements of this history.

These Eurocentric hierarchies characterized “blackness” as a derogatory, monolithic identity whose worth was to be determined in terms of its proximity to whiteness. Nelson explains that the underlying basis for modern racial socialization hearkens back to the early eras of slavery: “Slavery was extensively premised upon the institutionalized rape of black women by white men. These women were exploited as commodities, breeders of more slave labour. This was a built-in incentive for an owner to rape and impregnate black women. As slaves are getting lighter and lighter because of generations of miscegenation and gradients of blackness gradually lighten, terms such as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon emerge within European racial discourses to express racial proximity to whiteness. And the nearer you were to the white tip of the spectrum, the more beautiful you were considered.”

This slave mentality undeniably penetrates into contemporary consciousness. Consider that the vast majority of black women within mainstream media, or at least those considered the most beautiful and powerful – Halle Berry, Tyra Banks, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Vanessa Williams – are light-skinned black women.

This mentality has likewise infiltrated the field of interpersonal relationships. In an episode of Banks’s talk show, she interviews black men who actively pursue blonde partners, saying that they never find black women attractive. Never? You’ve met all the black women out there?
“Desire is socialized,” Nelson declares, adding that, “If there is a black man telling you that he will never date black women – women who look like him – we must consider how this is produced in part from consuming white-dominated media and from a resulting self-loathing that comes from being forced to consume derogatory images of black people.”

In this respect, Nelson observes, “Interracial dating can be fraught with danger insofar as it can be a terrain where people replicate colonial fantasies of racial difference, or what is sometimes referred to for blacks as a ‘slave mentality.’”

The residue of this mentality within the contemporary scope of media and interpersonal relationships was explored by a discussion recently hosted by the McGill Black Students’ network (BSN). The talk, titled “Shades of Black,” aimed to discuss if and how the media inscribes into the psyche of the black community the “vogue” merit of the varying gradients of black. In effect, the dialogue determined to question, first, whether these social divisions are a real issue within the black community, second, if and to what extent skin colour determines how “black” you really are, and third, how colour affects relationships and self-perception.      
One participant shared anecdotes about a friend who liked to date women of various hues, but wanted to settle with dark black women at the end of the day, for darkness bears connotations of stability and domesticity. Another participant from the Caribbean cited the advice she often hears from her elders to marry better, meaning to marry lighter to maximize the economic prospects of her children. Several individuals from Africa and the Caribbean articulated their confusion and unawareness of the black aggressive, ghetto stereotype. Another Sudanese participant shared the commentary a white friend offered up after she spoke about being black: “But you’re not really black.” Really black? How do we calibrate how black one really is? And why do different gradients of black denote economic prospects and stability?
Arash Abizadeh, McGill political science professor, notes in his essay “Ethnicity, Race, and Possible Humanity” that race does not exist independently from social beliefs about race. So although being a black person means a variety of things, beliefs about blackness are central to racial implications.

During the BSN talk, one participant suggested that stereotypes are simply reflections of reality. He asked, who are the producers and entertainers in stereotypical black “ghetto” entertainment? Black people. So the stereotypes are true.

This is true. Just as true as the fact that there are some white people who belong to the KKK, and there are some Muslim people who are terrorists.

However, we choose to assign these traits as essential to certain racial identities on our own. Throughout history, white institutions have painted static images, which narrow the space for people of colour’s self-representation. Nelson therefore emphasizes the importance of critical spaces of visual consumption, which are often scarce.

“Nuanced representation of ourselves is difficult to find,” she explains. “If we don’t consume critically – and this is difficult to do because we don’t have a variety of choices from which we can select our representations – we are easily brainwashed by what’s fed to us by the media. Therefore, visually uncritical consumers will perform and internalize these images.”

Even if think we are immune to these images, because we know they’re inaccurate, we must all acknowledge our complicity within these racial dynamics. Nelson explains how empowerment and change depend on all parties working to deconstruct these stereotypes: “Black people can do all they want for empowerment and self-advancement…. However, until white institutions of power begin to actively critique their racial privilege and to value difference as an asset, our efforts will not have as much value as they should.”    
The myth around affirmative action policies – which in fact do not exist in Canada, where non-binding diversity policies are the norm – is that they force institutions to hire unqualified people. That’s absolute bullshit. There is an abundance of qualified visible minorities who will only be considered seriously if affirmative action policies are in place.

Nelson asserts that “Perfect equity is not equitable,” adding that, “Excellence in contemporary society is defined Eurocentrically. Therefore, equity doesn’t have to do with the equitable playing field, because that field was initially plowed by white institutions to suit their needs.”

Despite these virtues, in Canada, equity policies are novel and seemingly ineffective. McGill only ratified a formal Equity Policy that considers racial diversity in staffing in 2007. Look at our sea of professors while considering the international reputation of McGill. Nelson is the first visible minority woman professor I’ve encountered at McGill. And we are still being taught East Asian and African history by white professors. Their positions could have been offered to individuals just as qualified, yet whose representational resonance would be substantially more significant.        
When I was first acquainted with the Benazir Bhuttos, Ayaan Hirsi Alis, Aung San Suu Kyis, Condoleeza Rices, and Adrienne Clarksons of the world, they replaced the Lucy Lius and Li’l Kims as the prevalent images of coloured female power. It was incredibly empowering to see that women of colour in positions of power existed, and to see that they were there not for their T ‘n’ A but for the good ol’ cranium.       
This leads to why Barack Obama’s election was of such importance to black communities around the globe (it always comes back to Obama, I know). That the patron of Western hegemony – symbolizing power merited for intellect and ability defined by white institutions – was for the first time a black man, offered the black community a reflection of their identity that formerly only encompassed negative, fear-inducing categorizations. Obama is an incarnation of the idea that normalized ideologies and identities of blackness could and should evolve into a power distinct from the depictions of blackness previously outlined.      
Placing qualified visible-minority individuals in positions of power provides images of empowerment for visible-minority communities. Moreover, it promotes awareness within the Canadian consciousness that excellence can be colourful. However, these benefits will only happen when Canadians decide to see colour for its virtues.       
We are governed by a prime minister who claimed last year that Canada has no history of colonialism. Do the terms “natives” and “residential schools” not ring a bell to Stephen Harper? We are citizens who claim that we are colourblind. That’s a huge problem. Colours paint onto their subjects a consciousness and experience.  Those who do not undergo the same experiences have a responsibility to recognize these invisible dynamics.            
Unfortunately, this recognition is being deterred by Canada’s libertarian rhetoric of tolerance, which claims “we’re different, so let’s just live and let live.” However, this attitude gilds the concerns highlighted by critics of multiculturalism, namely that Canada is simply a culturally heterogeneous hotel in which no one has long-term expectations to commit to cultural solidarity or collective identity. According to Kay, Canada’s slogan appears to be: “We’re here to serve you, and ensure you have a pleasant, worry-free stay. Your family is our family. Our family is…not your problem.”

To effectively rewrite this motto, we need to start seeing colour and creating ties based on it.  Both Nelson and Inzlicht emphasize the importance of interaction with your “other” in promoting the dissolution of our unconscious classifications. Inzlicht asserts that policies prohibiting racism, for instance, are ineffective on their own in preventing the internalization of racism. “Literally being shoulder to shoulder with different people who have different social identities and categories and engaging with them [makes] them more human and more unique,” he explains, adding that this contact “personalizes them and humanizes them to exist outside these categorizations.”

The post Your mind isn’t colourblind appeared first on The McGill Daily.