Boxed In tells the story of a young woman of mixed ancestry who struggles with an Equal Opportunity form that asks her to select one, singular ethnicity.
This four-minute piece by Shane Belcourt is the second installation in Work For All’s 10-week campaign to highlight issues of racism in the workplace through film.
Aisling Chin-Yee, a film producer who herself is a mixed-race person, explains the problem with the idea that ethnicity can neatly fit into bureaucratic check boxes on the Work For All blog:
I understand the positive reasons for self-identifying, and why these measures exist to ensure a diverse workplace. But the question of self-identity is much more complicated than checking a box, and like the Mountie in the film points out, it’s not how she identifies on the inside, it’s how she identifies on the outside. Notions of “diversity” and “visible minority” are based more on physical characteristics, colour of skin, shapes of eyes, colour of hair, than on cultural identity. And, sorry to tell you, this type of categorization is racist, even if it’s trying to promote inclusion.
So watch the video, join the discussion, and stay tuned for next week’s chapter in the Work For All campaign.
The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.
Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.
But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.
The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games have come to an end. Canada won more gold medals than any country ever in the history of the Winter Games. And yesterday, Canada took gold in men’s hockey in an electrifying game against the USA. A fitting end it seems to a two-week barn-burner of patriotism and national pride.
But the celebration has its darker side, one that few Olympic enthusiasts know about, or perhaps care to know about. For starters, in 2002 Vancouver residents voted in favour of a $3 billion Olympics that have subsequently mushroomed into a $7-8 billion bacchanalia of subsidies and debt. These “unexpected” costs have put unprecedented pressure on the provincial spending. Over the next two years, provincial funding for the arts will be cut by a staggering 88% – a devastating blow to cultural groups in British Columbia. School closures throughout the Lower Mainland reflect more of the pressure that has been brought to bare on provincial budgets. Add to these the ongoing crisis in homelessness and poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and the ways that Olympic enforcement ran roughshod over Constitutional rights of expression and assembly, and you have substantive fodder for a critical conversation about the Olympic Games.
Take a break from Olympic recaps on CTV Tuesday night and tune your radio to 90.1 CJSF (in the Vancouver area) or listen online at CJSF Campus/Community Radio, based out of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, and Vancouver musician Adaline will be speaking with local artists who have been affected by homelessness as part of the International Homelessness Marathon / Canadian Homelessness Marathon. Those in the area can come to a live studio braodcast at the W2 Culture and Media House at 112 W Hastings from 8–10pm.
Running through the night, this 14-hour marathon is a collaboration of national community and campus radio programming featuring the voices and stories of homeless people in the United States and Canada.
The Homelessness Marathon was started in 1998 by Jeremy Weir Alderson, host of “The Nobody Show” which was then broadcast weekly on WEOS in Geneva, NY, as a result of the heartsickness he was feeling at the huge homelessness problem in New York City.
The Marathon took up force in Canada after being adopted by McGill University’s CKUT radio in 2004.
When klezmer troubadour Geoff Berner sings that “the dead, dead children were worth it”, he does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Berner’s “Official Theme Song for the 2010 Vancouver Whistler Olympic Games” mockingly lauds the BC government for dismantling the Children’s Comission—a provincial body that investigated children’s deaths—in order to pay for the Olympics. And this is just one of many programs that have been scaled back or eliminated as the government makes cuts to compensate for a Olympic-sized deficit.
I caught up with Geoff in Saskatoon last week as he kicked off his latest tour, which will see his trio criss-cross the prairies before heading to Norway in early March. With the Vancouver Olympics just around the corner, I wanted to know how he felt about the long-term economic legacy of the games in BC, and how artists could get involved in speaking up against cuts to arts funding and social programs.
Grassroots hip-hop artist Vox Sambou recently launched DiscriminaSida, a powerful new track that hit on World AIDS Day, a musical expression in solidarity with the global fight against AIDS and an alarm bell on the growing AIDS crisis across the Caribbean.
In popular consciousness the global AIDS epidemic is often tied to Sub-Saharan Africa, while Africa clearly maintains among the highest AIDS infection rates in the world, the Caribbean region is also deeply impacted by the crisis.
In both the Bahamas and Haiti it is estimated that over 2% of the adult population is currently living with HIV, while beyond general statistics on AIDS in the Caribbean, according to data half of the adults living with the virus today are women.
“In Canada there is less focus on AIDS today, while in southern countries, in Haiti there is major AIDS crisis going on,” outlines Vox Sambou, “also in Haiti AIDS is still often a taboo subject and many religious groups are still telling people not to wear condoms, this must end immediately, we need to act to address the crisis in the open.”
For those of us who still have holiday gifts to purchase — and let’s face it slackers, that’s most of us — here’s our last minute gift guide for your politically inclined, arts-loving friends and family. Of course, some gifts here are also well-suited for those people us pinko commie types have yet to brainwash with our liberal, freedom-hating propaganda. You never know, you may even catch Glenn Beck questioning his convictions after watching the right documentary.
Where appropriate, separate affiliate links are provided for our Canadian and American readers.
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