The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) released an interim report in December 2018 looking at racial profiling and discrimination by Toronto police toward the city’s black community. The results are dire. OHRC found that: Between 2013 and 2017, a Black person was nearly 20 times more likely than a White…

In 1994, I wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, sharing my experiences of being a Black youth in the city. I wrote about my lived experience of being followed around the store as I shopped. I rightfully asked: “When will people begin to see me as an aspiring youth and not as a stereotype?” A week later, a letter was published in response to mine. The writers identified themselves as two white ladies in their 50s. They shared:

When a Person of Colour (POC) or Indigenous Person shares their very real and very raw experience with racism, some White People tend to fall apart. Dr. Robin DiAngelo calls this white fragility which she defines as: a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable…

Dear Progressive Ally: I worked in software development as a project manager. With my history degree. But that’s another story… Let’s get back to my duties as a software project manager. I was responsible for managing projects with hundreds of human resources and a budget in the millions of dollars. When the software was deployed to production and the end user…

I graduated with a degree in History (how I ended up in tech is a loooooong story) and I studied the effects of the trans-atlantic slave trade on Caribbean and Latin American communities. Since getting my degree, I’ve come back to studying how the trauma of chattel slavery shows up…