The Tribune Vol. 43 Issue 19

The Tribune TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024 | VOL. 43 | ISSUE 19

Published by the SPT, a student society of McGill University

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EDITORIAL

SPECIAL

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Black-Palestinian solidarity serves as an example of liberation for all, by all

The Deadly “Start-Up Nation”

Black Theatre Workshop’s ‘Diggers’ is a tribute to essential workers

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(Mason Bramadat / The Tribune)

Anthropologist and filmmaker Sheila Walker showcases documentary and discusses the plurality PG.4 of Black communities

Professor David Austin’s ‘Black Politics in Dark Times’ talk explores history as a methodology Austin reflected on his 2013 book ‘Fear of a Black Nation’ and its 2023 second edition Eliza Lee News Editor

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n Feb. 12, a small crowd gathered in the Rare Books Collection in McLennan Library for a talk by David Austin entitled “Black Politics in Dark Times: Revisiting Fear of a Black Nation After Ten Years.” Austin—a McGill alum and

professor in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College—offered reflections on his 2013 book Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal and on its second edition released in 2023. In the book, Austin discusses the history of Black political organization in the city and its connections to organizing beyond Montreal, as well as state surveillance and policing

Podcasting with BSN’s Soul Talks

Soul Talks dives into Black culture and experiences at McGill Claudia Efemini Contributor

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ust over a year ago, McGill students Pamela Fankem, U2 Science, and Zoë Anum, U1 Arts, helped launch McGill’s Black Students Network’s (BSN) podcast Soul Talks. By engaging in deep chats on topics like mental

health, relationships, and media, Soul Talks has become a space that centres Black discourse and community.

Active members of the McGill committee, both Fankem and Anum joined the BSN in their first years of university.

Fankem serves as the Vice-President (VP) Media, while Anum

is the VP Internal. The BSN already had plans to create a podcast and a joint interest from Fankem and Anum— who share a passion for graphic design and Black discourse—brought the idea to fruition.

Fankem explained the importance of her collaboration with Anum in an interview with The Tribune.

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of Black political organizers.

“This book’s overarching thesis can be summed up in the following way: We live with the deep-seated racial codes that have roots in slavery and colonization, codes that were designed to discipline and punish people of African descent in the Americas—Black subjection to capital for the purpose of economic production,” Austin said, reading from the second edition’s preface.

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“Defying time and season:” Black McGill scientists through history Black scientists carved space on campus for innovative research and activism

Matthew Molinaro Editor-in-Chief

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he history of science and technology is still reckoning with the contributions of Black researchers. White supremacy has deployed the sciences, and their ideal of objectivity,

to dehumanize Black people, experiment on them, and legitimize slavery, colonialism, and dispossession. With the fights for medical and environmental justice still urgent and Black scientists excluded from these critical disciplines, there is no better time to explore the deep

history of Black scientists’ struggles and innovations.

The Tribune discusses some of the Black scientists whose presence and research have shaped this campus, people who former McGill professor Barbara Althea Jones would have said, “defied time and season.”

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NEWS

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Professor David Austin’s ‘Black Politics in Dark Times’ talk explores history as a methodology Austin reflected on his 2013 book ‘Fear of a Black Nation’ and its 2023 second edition Eliza Lee News Editor Continued from page 1.

“Today, these codes are deeply rooted in a fear of Black self-organization and of Black folks in general, as well as Blackwhite and Black-Indigenous solidarities.”

During the talk, Austin reflected that much of the discussion surrounding the book tends to focus on two events—the 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams protests in 1969—rather than on his larger argument. Austin highlighted that he instead views these events as “vehicles” to discuss the politics at play behind them.

One of the changes Austin made in creating the second edition of Fear of a Black Nation was including a map marked with the events discussed in the book. Not only does the map illustrate Montreal, it represents the city in connection to other locations of political importance, such as Detroit and New York. Rather than seeing Black organizing in Montreal during the sixties as a “micro-history,” Austin emphasized that it is entangled with national and transnational politics in an interview with The Tribune.

“Let’s think about Montreal as a kind of cosmopolitan composite, Caribbean [...]

Black Island that is tied to the politics of Indigenous struggles, Quebec nationalism, Canadian nationalism,” Austin said. “And then Black nationalism and Caribbean nationalism become part of that conversation [...] informing those other conversations and [...] interacting with them [....] So the particular site is Montreal. But it’s a universal expression of Black political struggles in multiple places, and a universal expression of what it means to be free and the struggle for freedom.”

Devanie Dezémé, U2 Arts, was among the talk’s attendees. In an interview with The Tribune, she explained that she attended the event to learn more about the history of Black people in Montreal.

“I grew up here in Montreal, but I never really had a sense of the history of Black people in Montreal, not just in the sixties, but even before that,” Dezémé said.

“And you know, [Austin] was mentioning the archives [on Black political organizing] at McGill and elsewhere, and I think I’m going to try to seek them out.”

Camille Georges, another attendee, explained that through her position as Black Community Outreach Associate at McGill’s enrolment services, she noticed that the Black youth she works with were “missing” an education about Black history.

“This whole idea of identity, and how do you fit into this narrative is really inter-

Fear of a Black Nation won the 2014 Casa de las Américas Prize in Caribbean literature in English or Creole. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune) esting to me, because I’ve been following the work of David Austin for a little bit, and [...] just to know our history is grounding to help us move forward,” Georges said. “I would consider myself a community organizer, so these types of talks are really important to me just to learn about what happened in the past.”

Austin also spoke to the importance of using Black organizers’ history to make sense of the present and stressed that “history is a methodology” for imagining the

future.

“For me, there’s a different sense of urgency when it comes to invoking history.

Because [...] we’re talking about surveillance, we’re talking about policing. We’re talking about a myriad of issues and problems, incarceration. They were talking about all these questions back then, and we’re still dealing with them today. So how do those conversations from that time inform our understanding of those questions today? That’s the point.”

Law professors go on one-day strike as negotiations with McGill reach a stalemate Education professors and student organizations support AMPL at the picket line Fabienne de Cartier Contributor

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he Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL) held a one-day strike on Feb. 13 to pressure McGill to return to the bargaining table and negotiate their collective agreement in good faith. The collective agreement, which has been under negotiation for more than a year, will set the terms of employment for tenured and tenure-track professors in the Faculty of Law for three years.

AMPL first started drafting the collective agreement in November 2022 when they were certified by Quebec’s Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) and became the first faculty union at McGill. However, in a letter to students, AMPL explained that despite the TAT’s decision, McGill continues to contest their certification before the courts and delay the bargaining process, offering AMPL just “two and a half days of negotiation between now and the end of the semester.”

AMPL’s proposal for the collective agreement contains 32 articles, 17 of which have already been resolved. However, in their letter to students, the association stressed that critical aspects of the collective agreement are still being negotiated. These unresolved articles include both monetary proposals, such as salary and employee benefits, and working conditions, including promotions, tenure appointments, and sabbatical leaves.

Evan Fox-Decent, AMPL’s president, told The Tribune that the strike had two key

aims. First, AMPL hopes that the strike will compel McGill to set up a reasonable bargaining schedule with meetings once per week. Second, AMPL hopes to pressure McGill to negotiate a collective agreement that is binding for both parties. According to FoxDecent, although McGill has been willing to negotiate key issues, they have refused to give up the authority to unilaterally change the terms of the collective agreement after the contract has been signed. He highlighted that if McGill retains this unilateral authority, the collective agreement could essentially become moot and called on McGill to negotiate a collective agreement that is mutually binding.

“We’re not striking for a better salary, or for even better work conditions,” Fox-Decent said. “We’re striking for the possibility of better salary and better work conditions just by virtue of getting McGill to agree to actually engage in a process that results in a binding collective agreement.”

Fox-Decent also noted that McGill locked members of the Faculty of Law out of their email and online services on the day of the strike without justification or prior notification.

“The university gave us no notice that we would be electronically locked out, and since then has not provided any justification for its action,” Fox-Decent said.

The Association of McGill Professors of Education (AMPE), which applied to become McGill’s second faculty union in September

2023, supported AMPL at the picket line. Tribune. “We all have power, power to withDennis Wendt, AMPE’s interim president, draw our labour and our support and I think told The Tribune that AMPE has faced similar that it’s very important that McGill knows that pushback from McGill in their effort to be- we support our professors.” come certified. Wendt asserted that McGill’s Although AMPL members expressed efforts to impede AMPE’s unionization have hope that the strike would be effective, Foxbeen unnecessarily obstructionist.

Decent noted that AMPL has the authority to “McGill’s already fought the law and the call up to five strike days. AMPL has notified law won,” Wendt said. “It is a waste of time, McGill that if they do not have a collective waste of money, [and] waste of resources agreement by April 15, they will go on strike [….] We’re going through a long drawn out once again. process for an inevitable outcome.”

Frédérique Mazerolle, McGill’s media Several student organizations, including relations officer, declined to comment on the the Association of McGill University Support collective agreement discussions, noting that Employees, the Association for Graduate Stu- “[McGill] will let the pending negotiation prodents Employed at McGill, and the McGill La- cess run its course.” bour and Employment Law Club (MLELC), also joined AMPL at the picket line. Brette Thomson—a thirdyear student in the dual BCL-JD program and president of MLELC—underlined the importance of students showing their support for the strike.

“I think it’s absolutely crucial that faculty organizations and student organizations band together,” On Dec. 11, 2023, AMPL members voted to grant the union the authorThomson said in an ity to call up to five strike days during the negotiations of their collective interview with The agreement with McGill. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune)

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

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‘It’s like a lose-lose situation’: Students report lacking accommodations at McGill Students with registered accommodations face misplaced exams, poor communication, and faulty equipment Jayda Smith & Ella Paulin Contributor Science & Technology Editor

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ordan* has been registered for exam accommodations through McGill’s office for Student Accessibility and Achievement (SAA) for approximately a year. At the end of last semester, they wrote their final exams at alternate locations with extra time, as per their accomodations. When grades were released at the end of the winter break, Jordan was distressed to learn that they had received a J, a failing grade administered for failure to write a final examination, in one of their classes.

“I was so stressed out because I knew I wrote that exam [...] I proceeded to email my prof for that class, and she responded saying that she did not have my exam,” Jordan said in an interview with The Tribune. “It was never sent to her.”

Jordan reached out to the SAA by email several times to attempt to resolve the issue, but says they did not receive a response, heightening their feelings of stress.

“My initial reaction is kind of anxiety. I freak[ed] out […] I was crying. I was having a breakdown. I went from that feeling of just anxiety and panic to then anger at the fact that the one resource that needs to be there to accommodate people is failing constantly,” Jordan said.

The SAA, formerly known as the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD), is the primary unit of support on campus for students with documented disabilities. It is one of Student Services’ eight units aimed at assisting students in overcoming academic obstacles and facilitating progression in their studies. 94 per cent of students registered with the SAA use exam accommodation services, with McGill reporting 6,000 accommodated exams issued between Fall 2022 and Winter 2023.

The Tribune has received claims from students with testing accommodations about receiving subpar accessibility services. This includes experiences with having their exams lost by the SAA, being sequestered without warning after taking accommodated exams, scheduling errors, delayed responses, and slow equipment.

Beck* has been receiving accommodations for approximately two years and reported being sequestered without warning after completing an accommodated exam during an interview with The Tribune. They shared that they were writing their exam in the Exam Center, located at 3459 McTavish, while the rest of the class wrote the exam three hours later.

Staff allegedly told Beck, and approximately four to five other students, that they would have to stay in the Center for three and a half additional hours after completing their threehour midterm, with no prior notice.

Beck recalled being told by staff that though students wouldn’t be physically stopped if they tried to leave, there would potentially be a need to report it for ethical reasons.

“It was very dehumanizing, to be honest,” Beck said.

McGill media relations officer Frédérique Mazerolle did not respond to a question about whether the SAA warns students before they are sequestered before the time of publication.

Remy* receives extra time for exams and a separate examination location as a part of their accommodations plan. During the Fall 2023 semester, Remy’s accommodated exam was reportedly lost.

“I wrote the exam, I studied really hard, and then turned it in,” Remy said. “And then break comes around, and I get an email from MyCourses that my grade has been updated, and I see on MyCourses that I got a zero.”

After emailing their professor, Remy discovered that the professor had not received the exam from the SAA. Both the professor and Remy allegedly attempted to contact the SAA to resolve the issue. Remy reported having to go through the process of calling and emailing several times without receiving responses before deciding to go to the SAA office in-person, where they say they spoke with staff who did not know where the exam ended up.

“And I was like, ‘Oh, well, you probably did this already, but did you check with the other classes that were writing at the same time as me in the same room?’ And [the staff member was] like, ‘That’s a great idea. I’ll check that for sure,’” Remy said.

According to Remy, the SAA staff member they spoke to promised to call them with updates, but a week went by with no response.

“I go in-person again, and I was like, ‘Why

haven’t you called me?’” Remy said. “It’s like a one-sided relationship [....] I couldn’t even focus on my schoolwork because I didn’t want to retake the class [...] It was so stressful.”

Jordan also reported having scheduling issues with their midterm during the Fall 2023 semester. They claimed to have contacted the SAA via phone and email, only to be met with delayed responses. Given that the SAA informs students of the exact location and time of their accommodated exam one business day before it takes place, they felt there was very little time to resolve an issue if one was to come up.

“When they mess up, which they do, they don’t give you any time to try to fix their mistake,” Jordan said.

Supported by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), Special Researcher on Academic Accessibility and Accommodations Mina Pingol conducted a research report on student experiences with the SAA’s services during the 2022-2023 academic year.

Pingol collected the responses of 66 students and recent alumni and noted similar complaints. The report found that students testing with the SAA frequently received incorrect instructions regarding the location, scheduling, and duration of examinations. In addition, the report found that students were concerned

Approximately $2.4 million of the Student Services’ budget was allocated to the SAA for fiscal year (FY) 2023 and approximately $2.3 million for FY 2024. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune)

about receiving their exam location notice only one day in advance.

Mazerolle told The Tribune that such errors are uncommon, and that SAA holds meetings with delegates from student groups to receive recommendations and reviews feedback shared through their website or through appointments to ensure they are meeting students’ changing needs.

“While human and system errors are relatively rare, they can and do happen,” Mazerolle wrote. “Student Accessibility and Achievement takes these very seriously and works with those involved to find the best possible solution to the problem within the regulatory framework that governs our actions.”

Beck also criticized the SAA’s inadequate accommodative equipment.

“I also had an accommodation for if you wanted to type on a computer instead of writing [by hand] […] You would have to press a key [on the computer] like 10 times for it to work, or if you pressed the backspace button it would delete a bunch,” Beck told The Tribune. “So it created a very stressful writing experience to where the next time I had to write an exam, I actually chose to not have the accommodation, because I was like, ‘I would rather just deal with the problems I have writing than have to deal with this buggy computer system.’”

While some students mainly reported issues with the examination accommodations offered by the SAA, others reported difficulties with services offered by Access Advisors.

In a written statement to The Tribune, Deputy Provost Fabrice Labeau expressed that the role of the SAA Advisors is to develop individualized accommodation plans with students who have documented disabilities based on diagnosis-related barriers. The statement listed exam accommodations, note-sharing, resources for learning, assistive technology, and animal accommodations as some of the academic accommodations provided by the SAA. Jordan reported having to wait for approximately three weeks last semester to get an appointment with an advisor to modify their plan, a period during which they allegedly had to go without their regular accommodations until they could get their plan updated. They also reported feeling like there was a discrepancy between the accommodations their access advisor recommended and the accommodations they felt they needed.

Mazerolle did not respond to a question about whether students go without accommodations while waiting to update their plan before the time of publication.

“I really had to kind of convince [the advisor] to give me additional accommodations,” Jordan said.

Although students report difficulties in accommodations, students registered with the SAA also shared that they depend on the SAA’s services for academic success.

“I mean, I definitely need it [...] because if I don’t have it, if I’m not able to have extra time or get that alternative testing environment, I will not succeed,” Remy said. “I have to do it, and I just wish it was better [....] It’s like a lose-lose situation.” *Jordan, Beck and Remy’s names have been changed to preserve their confidentiality.

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Anthropologist and filmmaker Sheila Walker showcases documentary and discusses the plurality of Black communities Film showcases the global nature of the African diaspora, from India to Chile Jasjot Grewal News Editor

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ultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Sheila Walker hosted a discussion for McGill faculty members and students on the morning of Feb. 14 on the individuality of Black peoples across the globe, especially outside of the Atlantic world. On the evening of Feb. 14, Walker’s documentary, Familiar Faces, Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora, was screened at the McCord Stewart Museum.

Hosted by McGill’s Faculty of Law, the event began with an acknowledgement from Frédéric Mégret—Co-Director of McGill’s Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism— that James McGill, the university’s namesake, enslaved at least five Black and Indigenous people throughout his life. Mégret recognized that McGill’s wealth, which was built by exploiting the labour of the people that he enslaved and his participation in transatlantic slavery, was part of the foundation of the university.

Tamara Thermitus, Boulton Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Law, subsequently introduced Walker and spoke to the importance of including Black history in curriculums.

“I think it’s important to talk [about the fact that] there’s not a Black community, but there’s multiple Black communities. When we say there’s only one Black community, we erase part of our history again,” Thermitus said.

“Black History Month is not only an event, but it’s also a time for reflection and taking stock.”

Walker began by highlighting the central theme of her research: Exploring Black com-

munities outside of North America and Africa.

She also asserted that the history of genocide of Indigenous peoples and the mass enslavement of Black people is what shaped the continents.

Thus, Walker argued, defining all of the Western hemisphere as a “European creation” leaves out the majority of the historical demographics of the Americas.

“There’s a problem with seeing the Americans then as a European creation [....] It was originally characterized as a meeting of two worlds,” Walker said. “I think some Native Americans [said] ‘What do you mean meeting?

It wasn’t a meeting.’ And then some Africans said, ‘What do you mean two worlds? What about us?’ So, it was really a meeting of three worlds.”

Several hours later, Walker’s film Familiar Faces, Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora was screened at the McCord Stewart Museum and was followed by a joint discussion between Walker and Michael P. Farkas, President of the Board of the Roundtable on Black History Month. Walker’s 30-minute film focused on the global nature of the African diaspora, shedding light on Black communities such as the ones in Argentina, Chile, and India. The film also looked into various aspects of global Black spirituality, focusing on Black Saints in the Catholic church.

In an interview with The Tribune, Walker explained that the film is made with footage that she shot with no intention during her travels, but that ended up showing the commonalities and differences within various Afro-communities.

While she was well-versed with the African diaspora in the Americas, she became interested

in researching non-Atlantic Black communities after a 2006 conference in India.

“While there, I met AfroIndians from various parts of the country,” Walker said. “Did I know they were there? No. So, it was a great experience, and then I got to know more about the global nature of the African diaspora, and the sense of consciousness of peoples’ belonging to the African diaspora.”

Following the film screening, Sarr led a discussion with Walker and questioned whether the countries that Walker investigated were conscious of having Black communities.

“Many [countries] like Argentina, there’s a lot of denial [...] that there’s even a Black community. As a minority group in the country, they are severely marginalized [....]

Especially [in] Turkey, India, Bolivia, where it’s less known that there’s even a Black com- Familiar Faces, Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora is munity,” Sarr said.

Walker’s second film. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune) Walker went on to explain that while there are countries, such as Chile, “All the countries in the Americas have with governments that deny the very existence organized groups of African descendants, in of African citizens, it’s becoming increasingly places where they’re generally denied to exist,” difficult to take this stance as African peoples Walker said. “In the past 20 years, they have across the globe have mobilized for their rec- done so much to recuperate their African culognition. ture.”

The Tribune explains: The Essentials, SSMU’s legal care program for students This program allows for the provision of legal advice by practicing lawyers Leah Gilbert Contributor

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s of Fall 2023, members of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) are eligible for a new legal care program offered by StudentCare called “The Essentials,” for an additional $30 per year.

Unless they choose to opt-out, members will automatically have access to many legal services for a whole year. Students who enroll in the winter semester will have a lower fee of $20 to pay for the program.

How does it work?

The legal care program functions in partnership with a law firm which provides access to lawyers certified by the Barreau du Québec for both consultation and representation purposes.

Consultation services include legal meetings, research, document analysis, legal interpretation, and case follow-up. This advice will be available to students in any area of the law.

Representation services include expenses which are incurred through hiring a lawyer, attendance fees, court fees, as well as witness fees and expert witness expenses that value up to $1,000. Concerning aid in legal proceedings, students are covered in specific areas of the law including housing, employment, academics,

small claims, human rights, and civil mediation.

In an interview with The Tribune, Samuel Wong, a first year student in the Faculty of Law at McGill, explained the value he sees in the provision of legal aid to university students.

“I think it’s really important especially [...] in light of issues of access to justice because, let’s face it, [...] legal aid isn’t always the most accessible thing to have, so I think there definitely is value,” Wong said.

What is the goal of the program?

According to their StudentCare webpage, SSMU established this program to facilitate undergraduate students’ access to legal counsel, which can be intimidating and expensive, with the average hourly wages of lawyers in Quebec ranging from $100 to $350.

According to SSMU Vice-President Finance Amina Kudrati-Plummer, SSMU felt comfortable implementing the program because they had seen it successfully adopted in other student unions and had done well during a trial in the previous academic year.

Kasia Johnson—Director of Community Services at the Legal Information Clinic at McGill (LICM)—spoke to the importance of providing university students with clear legal information in an interview with The Tribune.

“A lot of the time [...] there’s just so much

information out there and it’s really confusing,” she says. “Sometimes people just need to know how to contest a rent increase,” Johnson said.

How is it different than the LICM? The LICM has provided students with legal information since its establishment in 1973.

What SSMU’s legal care program will offer to students is legal advice.

In an interview with The Tribune, Blaise Evelyn, LICM’s Executive Director, differentiated between the legal information provided by LICM and legal advice offered by SSMU’s Essentials.

“Legal advice is what lawyers are, under the law, reserved to provide. So that’s advice on what a client should do in a specific case, and as well as reviewing documentation, and representation in court,” Evelyn said. “Legal information is providing people with information on the state of the law, on what their rights are, and all their options under the law without necessarily telling them what they should do.”

This new legal care plan seeks to provide legal advice to students, which LICM is unable to do. However, the two program’s services are highly complementary and in instances of student advocacy when lawyers are not allowed to be present, LICM, too, fills a gap in the Legal Essentials program’s services.

The program serves as both provision of legal aid and an insurance program, covering the costs of most services required. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune) “There are so many things that Legal Essentials doesn’t do or can’t do for students that the LICM does. So, in a lot of ways, we’re complementary, like we’re the walk-in clinic to see the doctor for an issue, and they’re the hospital emergency room,” Evelyn said.

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Editor-in-Chief Matthew Molinaro editor@thetribune.ca

Black-Palestinian solidarity serves as an example of liberation for all, by all

Creative Director Mika Drygas mdrygas@thetribune.ca

The Tribune Editorial Board

EDITORIAL BOARD

Managing Editors Lily Cason lcason@thetribune.ca Arian Kamel akamel@thetribune.ca Tillie Burlock tburlock@thetribune.ca News Editors Eliza Lee, Jasjot Grewal, & Caroline Sun news@thetribune.ca Opinion Editors Chloé Kichenane, Liliana Mason, & Isaiah Albert-Stein opinion@thetribune.ca Science & Technology Editors Ella Paulin & Coco Zhang scitech@thetribune.ca Student Life Editors Abby McCormick & Dante Ventulieri studentlife@thetribune.ca Features Editor Fanta Ly features@thetribune.ca Arts & Entertainment Editors Dana Prather & Suzanna Graham arts@thetribune.ca Sports Editors Sara Escallon-Sotomayor & Julie Ferreyra sports@thetribune.ca Design Editors Drea Garcia & Zoe Dubin design@thetribune.ca Photo Editor Mason Bramadat photo@thetribune.ca Multimedia Editor Anna Chudakov & Alyssa Razavi Mastali multimedia@thetribune.ca Web Developers Eleni Lyberopoulos & William Kiem Lafond webdev@thetribune.ca Copy Editor Theodore Yohalem Shouse copy@thetribune.ca Social Media Editor Sainka Walia socialmedia@thetribune.ca Business Manager Sophie Smith business@thetribune.ca

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n Nov. 4 2023, the same day as the largest pro-Palestine rally that Montreal has seen to date, Black feminist Robyn Maynard gave a speech delineating the intricate correlations between genocide and colonialism. In this same speech, Maynard turned to the parallels between the oppressions of Black and Palestinian people, emphasizing the exigency of addressing the Canadian government’s support for systems of apartheid and occupation. Black and Palestinian fights for freedom have historically been intimately connected. Understanding and acting on these linkages of common oppression is necessary to make meaningful progress toward liberation for all, by all.

Black-Palestinian solidarity has been a prominent union between movements for decades.

Emerging most clearly during the Black activism of the late 1960s and its support of the Palestinian cause in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, solidarity between the two groups remains vital in more recent Black Lives Matter activism, such as the Ferguson uprisings in Missouri and Israel’s 2014 attacks on Gaza.

On Aug. 9 2014, Ferguson police

officer Darren Wilson—whose chief spent a week in Israel in 2011 being trained by Israeli police, intelligence, and security forces–– fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. Brown’s murder resulted in a series of protests and riots that sparked intense conversation worldwide regarding the systemic racism in policing, police violence, and the militarization of American police forces. As Palestinian protesters joined in support of the Black diaspora in Ferguson, Black and Palestinian activists foregrounded the shared struggle of fighting against a highly militarized police force. That same summer, the Israeli military perpetuated assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank and killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by Minneapolis police officers, Palestinian activists demonstrated their solidarity yet again by painting murals in the streets—notably on the Israeli Separation Wall in the West Bank—and echoed the infamous phrase “I can’t breathe” during confrontations with Israeli security forces.

Many critical Black-led movements proved to be important models for subsequent activism.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fundamentally altered

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aking pride in silly things is one of life’s little pleasures.

Developing a minor godcomplex over these same silly things is cautionable. Yet, as founder, captain, and president of my high school Go Club, I held a minor tyranny over a room full of my own classmates weekly—and I turned out just fine.

Go is a Chinese board game, thought to be the oldest board game in existence. In a sign of the fast-approaching technological

singularity, an artificial intelligence model finally managed to beat a top professional player in 2016, shocking those who view Go as an innately human art. The difficulty–– previously thought only to be playable by the intuitive human mind––lies in the game’s sheer complexity. Pieces are placed on the intersections of a 19 by 19 grid, resulting in a number of possible combinations that are simply incalculable by me right now.

The gameplay itself is aesthetically pleasing, with a controlled clicking of polished shell and stone pieces onto the tight grid of a wooden goban. Not that my Go Club had the traditional clamshell pieces. My Go club had plastic pieces with magnets glued preciously into their centres. We had cheap magnetic boards, and small plastic bowls to collect captured stones. We also were eating lunch, and my friends had very sticky fingers.

The time spent hand-washing pieces aside, being Go Club captain was a very cool position. To be clear, I mean cool as in popular, as in major spendable social capital.

In my eyes, Go Club captain

OPINION

EDITORIAL

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protest culture, introducing boycotts and sit-ins, shaping the movement to divest from South African apartheid in the 1980s, and, more recently, the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. Black social justice movements have always condemned the imperialism that pervades the Canadian state and all its institutions.

Despite the importance of Black activism, anti-Blackness is particularly pervasive in both the political and institutional response to Black-led movements, including their pro-Palestine fight. This often manifests itself in the violent suppression of peaceful protests, with institutions frequently involving police—such as during the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair or the altercation between Zionist students and pro-Palestine students selling keffiyehs at Concordia University in Nov. 2023. While universities are intended to act as spaces that facilitate free speech, debate, and protest, their administrations continuously choose to invoke police power and to put Black students in harm’s way.

Yet, Black student groups at McGill—the Black Students’ Network and McGill African Students’ Society in particular— have a long and consistent history of showing support for Palestinian

human rights, despite the threat of violence. Unlike North American white progressive students, Black people have never had the luxury of ignoring oppression––no matter where it occurs. Black and Palestinian struggle emphasizes that all must take on the burden of a shared fight for liberation.

Students must take the time to thoroughly educate themselves on both the ongoing injustices in Gaza and here in North America to avoid the sanitization and erasure of history. The McGill administration must stop extracting from Black lives and step up to provide a platform for these stories to be shared. Palestinians remain under a physical and intellectual blockade that academia perpetuates and reproduces.

We must learn from Black antiimperialist freedom fighters, from the Black Panthers who made contact with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to Black anti-apartheid leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Reverend Jesse Jackson meeting with Yasser Arafat, to contemporary Black activists organizing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. The connections that strengthen Black-Palestinian solidarity must be uplifted toward the end of occupation from North America to Palestine.

was as cool as one could get in a college-prep high school where the primary form of bullying was GPA mocking. And, as a little lesbian nerd in Texas, it was a place where I managed to blossom a minor superiority complex, like a little bespectacled wildflower poking her young, smackable head through a concrete sidewalk.

Every Friday, I would take great pride in laying out the boards and helping pair people off as they came in. Then, I would stalk around the room, making comments on gameplay and giving tips. Mind you, I was not very good myself, so I’m not quite sure how seriously my commentary was taken. I reached a casual level of 15 kyu (25 kyu is total beginner, and one is almost professional) according to the online platform I spent my free time playing on.

I was, however, very obviously passionate. I would play online Go during lectures and on the bus, I would teach anyone who’d sit still with me. I bought boards, founded a club, and even ran a meme account in the hope of boosting participation.

Members would flag me down,

asking me for help. We would work through moves, putting down pieces to try out variations and discussing which types of stone formations were most efficient.

The atmosphere was laid-back, with glimpses of passion and thrill that come from executing a complex strategy. Despite my hoodies, my messy backpack, and my generalized teenage grossness, I felt respected in the space I had created.

Maintaining your confidence is hard.

Academics are competitive, and require an ability to compartmentalize that can break down when life gets rough.

You will move, and lose friends and spaces that grounded you.

And, worse, there will always be someone cuter than you (so I’ve heard). Constant ego-death is a beautiful and normal byproduct of young adulthood.

So, get freaky with what you take pride in. Remember, the more niche, the less competition. As long as there isn’t another ex-Go Club captain, founder, and leaderfor-life in my immediate vicinity, I will always walk with a little––but perceptible––pep in my step.

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OPINION

COMMENTARY Kendra-Ann Haynes Contributor

M

icroaggressions are like a bee sting. You can always recover from the sting, but the memory of the pain lasts forever.

Microaggressions are the tiny pricks that slowly erode your self-esteem.

And, because society deems acts of casual racism acceptable, these pricks persist. People believe it is fine to touch a Black woman’s hair—a profoundly complex and hard-to-comprehend aspect of our identities that narrates our individuality. These metaphorical bee stings etch the memory of the pain that we carry. It is in those moments of anguish that I find the answer to the question: “Why do Black women carry so much anger?”

It was November 2022, the middle of the rush hour commute on the Montreal metro. Exiting at Atwater for an early class, I felt it—the unfamiliar, yet subtle tug at the end of my head that pulled me back ever so slightly. Though I never lowered the volume, the melody in my earbuds stopped. I unconsciously drowned out the music as my head swiveled around and laid eyes on a stranger weaving her fingers through my braids. I felt confused in that moment,

COMMENTARY Charlotte Theofanous Contributor

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gbert Gaye, the founder of one of the few Black-run newspapers in Montreal, and the only one to continue to operate over past decades, passed away on June 4, 2023, leaving behind an incredible legacy for Montreal’s Black community. His newspaper, Montreal Community Contact, provides media representation for Montreal’s English-speaking Black and Caribbean communities in a province that fails to address their needs and respect their history and culture.

Gaye’s life and decades of accomplishments in journalism should be celebrated, but, to truly honour his work, Black journalism in Montreal and Quebec still needs greater support and recognition. The Community Contact made strides for Black anglophone journalism through its one-of-a-kind voice, and the loss of its founder reminds us of the pressing need to represent the voices of Black anglophones in Quebec.

Since the first newspapers in Canada originated in the mid-1700s, Canadian journalism continues to privilege white writers over writers of colour. Despite radical Black journalists who confronted discrimination and forged their own paths by creating independent newspapers to

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

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The Memory of a Bee Sting: Unveiling Black Women’s Anger but that reaction disguised what truly resided deep down: My anger at this violation of my identity and safety.

I still remember the sting of that moment like it was yesterday. The metro zooming past every five minutes would make the chorus of shuffling footsteps and swishing coats grow louder and softer as more people went about their daily commute.

Yet, as the stranger continued to grasp my hair like a lifeline, I could only stare silently, like a statue struck

by Medusa.

Rage overtook me and started to bubble up to the surface as she wielded my strands of braids. Yet the only protest I could muster was a softspoken “Why are you touching me?” in French. At that moment, I only saw red, but my filtered response was the only communication I could use as I did not want the narrative of the “Angry Black Woman” to come to fruition. This harmful stereotype characterizes Black women as being overly aggressive, angry, and difficult to deal with without provocation. Though cultural institutions and the media stylize and dramatize this narrative, it is intentionally perpetuated to control and undermine Black women’s expressions of valid emotions. So, I refrained from voicing

my genuine reaction, afraid that the consequences of that negative image would hurt more than the subtle act of grabbing my hair.

Each time someone reaches for a Black woman’s hair, it singles all of us out, emphasizing the dissimilarity between us and the majority. The deliberate act of grabbing our hair reinforces the notion that we are somehow the other. It induces a sense of unworthiness compared to women without hair like ours who receive the respect we yearn for and demand. Envision growing up understanding that you could never fit into the imaginary box created for you. A box defined by society’s narrowed standards and expectations that were never intended for Black people, let alone Black women. While you hold this idea deep down, whenever these microaggressions occur, they serve as a poignant reminder that, no matter how hard you try, you may never adhere to the norm.

Nobody wants to feel like an outlier, like the last kid picked in gym class, the emotional toll these experiences take makes us feel like we will never even be a part of the team. It’s akin to swatting away a persistent bee, only for it to return with greater force, each sting fuel-

Studies show that microaggressions have quantifiable consequences on mental and physical health, disproportionately affecting Black women. (Source: Savala Nolan’s ‘What Society Gets Wrong About The ‘Angry Black Woman’ Stereotype’) (Marc Schulte / unsplash.com) ing the emergence of the anger that is associated with the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype—a stereotype that is unfairly thrust upon us, exacerbating the emotion it falsely claims is intrinsic, rather than justified.

Society has stung us so many times as Black women that sometimes the only way to articulate the excruciating nature of the situation is through anger—an emotion that deserves acceptance and not

dismissal. We have every right to be angry when our boundaries are disrespected. Black women, like everyone else, deserve respect, and persistently grabbing our hair—our crown, a pivotal piece of our identity—without consent demonstrates a lack of regard, and rather, pure objectification. Appreciate our hair, and acknowledge its uniqueness or styling, but please do not touch it, for the bee’s sting may heal but the mark it leaves lasts forever.

Egbert Gaye’s death leaves a gaping hole in Black anglophone journalism in Quebec educate their communities—such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who became the first Canadian woman to publish a newspaper with the release of The Provincial Freeman in 1853—Black Canadians continue to be barred from fully participating in journalism due to persisting institutional and systemic barriers. As a result, in 2023, 78 per cent of journalists in Canada identified as white, with Black journalists significantly more likely to work in a part-time role.

However, the lack of hiring opportunities and full-time job stability is still only one barrier for Black anglophone journalists in Quebec.

In the 1950s and 60s, the provincial government implemented a series of policies that specifically targeted Black anglophones, pushing them out of their established spaces and forging divisions between the angloand francophone communities.

Contemporary language laws like Bill 96 carry on this discriminatory legacy and speak to the province’s deeply-rooted xenophobia, where the French language is only acceptable when spoken a certain way.

Gaye’s establishment of Community Contact in 1992 contributed to building the foundations for a more diverse variety of voices in the world of Quebec journalism, by amplifying not only the voices of Black Montrealers, but Black anglophone

Montrealers, who face more discrimination and barriers to accessing essential services in the city such as mental health. The Community Contact created a space for Black struggles to be represented, and for aspiring Black writers to make their first appearance in the journalism world outside of the majority-white mainstream media. Young contributors to the newspaper expressed that Gaye never doubted their potential and always made sure to tell them that there was a space for them. He shaped an entire generation of Montreal Black journalists, who wrote about topics relevant to Montreal’s Black community, ranging from traditional Caribbean customs to the housing and labour shortages in Canada.

While Gaye addressed numerous political and social issues in his own paper, such as the politics of division in Quebec thanks to leaders such as François Legault, he also contributed to other forms of Montreal-based media such as CJAD 800 Radio. Black anglophone journalism is a historic necessity for Black expression in Quebec, where Black anglophones make up an even smaller portion of the population.

The Montreal Community Contact managed to achieve success by reaching a wide audience in a field that is deeply inhospitable towards

Black journalists, Black media, and Black communities.

Gaye has left a mark on the Montreal journalism community at large, but his accomplishments require new commitments to Black journalism in Quebec.

More than 30 years after its creation, there is yet to be another Blackowned newspaper in Montreal. The Community Contact is undeniably a beacon of hope for Black journalists in Quebec, and opens the door to future Black anglo- Well over 100 years before Montreal Community phone journalists to Contact, The Provincial Freeman’s editorial board make it into the field. led the way with abolitionist, investigative, and Black But more needs to be feminist reporting. (news.ourontario.com) done to truly emphasize Black an- which Black students need better glophone media voices. In a time opportunities for them to make so critical for the survival of Black their own space in white-domianglophone journalism in Quebec, nated fields, elevating their voices meaningful provincial initiatives instead of letting them fade in the during Black History Month should background. For this, it is necesinclude funding alternative media sary that McGill engages in direct sources that platform Black voices. conversations with Black student Preventing the disappearance of all groups on campus and acts on their of Gaye’s accomplishments also demands to include their history in should be a priority for McGill, in the university.

scitech@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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“Defying time and season:” Black McGill scientists through history Black scientists carved space on campus for innovative research and activism Matthew Molinaro Editor-in-Chief Continued from page 1.

William Wright (1827-1908) William Wright was the first Black doctor (and first person of colour) to receive a medical degree in Canada and become part of British North America. Born in Quebec City while slavery was still legal, Wright taught at McGill for 30 years as Chair of Materia Medica (pharmacology) and served as co-founder and editor for the journal Medical Chronicle. When students eventually voted him out for not keeping up with medical developments, he became ordained as a priest.

Charles Lightfoot Roman (1889-1961) Roman was the grandson of runaway enslaved people who took flight through the Underground Railroad. Roman’s uncle and namesake, Charles Victor, also worked as a physician and surgeon with specialties in ophthalmology and otolaryngology.

The elder Charles dreamed of attending McGill, and Charles Lightfoot ultimately fulfilled

this ambition, graduating in 1919 after serving in the First World War. In Quebec, he was also a leading voice in the field of industrial medicine.

Kenneth Melville (1902–1975) While you might know Kenneth Melville from the eponymous Black Faculty Caucus, Melville was a pharmacologist and civil rights icon in his own right. From his experience as a top student at McGill in 1926 to his research proving that adrenaline is not a sympathetic neurotransmitter, Melville broke barriers in the sciences at McGill as Chair of McGill’s Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He fought discrimination both in Montreal and abroad, once being arrested at a 1960 medical congress in Atlantic City after the cafeteria refused to serve him and fellow scientists because they were Black.

Barbara Althea Jones (1936 1969) Jones was a Trinidadian geneticist who served as an assistant professor at McGill until she died suddenly at the age of only 32. She was the first Caribbean

woman to receive a PhD, which she completed in 1965 at Cornell. A “geneticist by vocation, and poet by avocation,” Jones had a vibrant career as a poet, performer, and visual artist. Her collection of poetry, Among the Potatoes, registers the natural world, the Caribbean, the monotony of campus life, and the Black struggle, evincing modernist technique, avant-garde flourish, and radical worldliness. Whether she was writing poetry, teaching lectures, advocating for Black Canadians, or collecting science textbooks, Jones made clear that she was working “Towards a new black man, towards the full realization of man’s consciousness and potential, and towards a new humanism.”

Julius Garvey (1933-) Son of pan-Africanists Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, Julius Garvey received his undergraduate and medical training at McGill. As a cricketer, Garvey represented Canada in a game against England. In 1961, he interned at the Royal Victoria Hospital before moving to the United States for the rest of his surgical career.

Professor Kenneth Melville wrote over 80 peer-reviewed articles and helped Nigeria develop its medical program. (Mia Helfrich/The Tribune) Garvey was only seven when his father Marcus died, and he would lead the unsuccessful charge to have President Barack Obama posthumously pardon his father, one of the most influential Black nationalists of the 20th century.

Dorothy Thomas Edding (19352023) In the 1950s, the young Thomas Edding travelled from Jamaica to Montreal to start her university studies in physiotherapy. By 2001, after 11 years of

spearheading collaborative work with the University of West Indies (UWI) as a McGill professor, Thomas Edding would help build UWI’s School of Physical Therapy with an undergraduate curriculum and, in 2009, a graduate curriculum. A community builder in Montreal as well, Thomas Edding chaired scholarship and educational leadership at the Quebec Black Medical Association and the Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal.

Searching for sustainable heating methods in McGill’s basements Architects study Royal Victoria Hospital’s thermosiphon system Ella Paulin Science & Technology Editor

W

ith the advent of sustainable architecture, complex and innovative techniques for increasing energy efficiency have proliferated. But what if the key to this puzzle lies in the basements of 19th-century Canadian institutional buildings, built to resist the extreme cold of Canadian winters prior to the widespread adoption of electricity?

In particular, McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) and the original Centre Block on Parliament Hill share an intriguing system for natural heat recovery called a thermosiphon, which uses some clever architecture to recirculate hot air throughout the building. The RVH site currently hosts McGill’s New Vic Project, which is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit and investigation as the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) fear that there may be unmarked Indigenous graves on the site.

In a recent study published in iScience, Anna Halepaska, a PhD candidate in McGill’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, and her colleagues, Annmarie Adams and Salmaan Craig, sifted through archival records, performed calculations,

and conducted experiments in order to understand the dynamics of the RVH’s thermosiphon.

The process started by figuring out exactly what the system even looked like in the first place.

“It was a very long, slightly confused process of discovery,” Halepaska said in an interview with The Tribune. “We have all of these archival drawings from the 1890s when [the hospital] was first built that show many different possible systems, and we really weren’t sure which was the final one we were working with.”

Having followed the architectural paper trail, the researchers had enough information to start theorizing about how the thermosiphon system in the RVH may have worked and do some preliminary calculations.

“The concept with the thermosiphon, essentially, is like siphoning gas out of a car,” Halepaska explained. “So you’re pulling a fluid against its natural tendency.”

The architects of the RVH achieved this by using another necessary part of the building: The exhaust chimney, which was roughly 20 metres tall and vented both the exhaust air and the smoke from the hospital’s furnace. The exhaust, naturally rising up and out of the chimney,boosted by the heat from the furnace, created a low-density pocket beneath it.

“All of that [air] rising up, it needs to be replaced with something,” Halepaska said. “So the designers used the siphon to pull air up to the wards and then back down to the basement.”

This “used” air, which had circulated through the hospital and was pulled back down to the basement, was then vented out through the exhaust chimney. On its way to the exhaust chimney, the warm air flowed through a brick channel, heating the brick as it travelled. This channel, in turn, heated up the “plenum,” where new, cold air was taken into the building.

This scheme allowed for a degree of “preheating” the incoming air, solving a critical design issue for buildings in Canadian climates: The traditional method of heating air used heat transfer from hot water pipes, but in the frigid Canadian winters, cold air straight from the outside ran the risk of freezing the water and bursting the pipes.

So this was the concept: Using the motive force from the exhaust chimney to cycle used, warm air back through the basement, where it could heat up incoming air before it hit the hot-water pipes. But the question remained—Did it work? The researchers set out to answer this question through a series of experiments.

“The first set of experiments was just understanding how the flow loop circulated, without even getting into heat recovery,” Halepaska said.

Halepaska’s team started with a salt bath experiment, which utilizes the density difference between saline and freshwater to mimic the density difference between hot and cold air.

Following this, they employed a larger model, which used actual airflow to track the change in temperature gradients. Finally, they developed a mathematical model to generalize the behaviour that they observed.

The system functioned nicely, creating a stable flow loop, and re-

covering heat at close to 50 per cent efficiency. But there was a catch: In order for the air to cycle, there has to be a temperature fluctuation within the building.

“For heat recovery to happen, there’s this kind of implicit necessity that there is a temperature difference between spaces, which is really contrary to the Western idea of thermal comfort in a building,” Halepaska noted. “We have this idea that every room in every building, and every season, in every climate, should be 21 degrees Celsius, which is absolutely ridiculous.”

The Royal Victoria Hospital was established in 1893 (Saxon Snell Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library)

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SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

The Deadly “Start-Up Nation” Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights at McGill

T

hree McGill course trips to Israel have something in common: Under the guise of promoting technological innovation, they tout the name “Start-Up Nation.” This moniker derives from the 2009 book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, that examines how such a young state now boasts the highest number of start-ups per capita in the world. Adopting this narrative, the Desautels Faculty of Management and the Faculty of Engineering lead heavily subsidized, accredited courses on touring the supposedly innovative tech startup scene of Israel. In these courses, the faculties portray technological innovation as an apolitical, neutral force striving for progress and social good.

In reality, these start-ups produce the technology foundational to Israel’s surveillance system. By way of cameras, drones, and satellites, Israel uses this tech to illegally profile, detain, prosecute, and kill Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Critics of Israel are not alone in recognizing the connection between start-ups and violence—the Start-up Nation authors themselves note that the omnipresence of the Israeli military is a major factor in the concentration of tech start-ups.

However, the authors consider this link to be a beneficial byproduct of young soldiers hon-

ing their leadership, rather than a direct consequence of American and Israeli funding that fuels technological and imperialist innovation for military and police activities. These operations, which uphold occupation and perpetrate genocide, are justified through the discourse of opportunity and innovation. Under the guise of entrepreneurial spirit and evident across several faculties, McGill’s contribution to Israeli settler-colonialism is extensive and in a long history of reciprocal collaboration between McGill and genocidal Israeli institutions.

Although course descriptions for the Start-Up Nation courses are coded with the innocuous language of Silicon Valley innovation, they are not far from the land-grab tactics used to entice white Europeans to settle Turtle Island with promises of cheap, fertile land. Touted as a trip to the nation of opportunity, the promotion for the Engineering course FACC 501 encourages McGill students to pitch business ideas to Israeli venture capital firms aiming to attract foreign business owners. Additionally, during the FACC 501 course, McGill students frequently learn from model start-ups which are, in reality, military contractors for the Israeli Occupation Forces. In 2022, Professors Jiro Kondo and Brian Rubineau, Desautels Faculty Scholar in “EDI and Ethics,” brought students to visit Au10tix, an Israel-based facial recognition company that provides intelligence for airports and border control and is affiliated with Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency.

As the Israeli state attempts the final stages of ethnic cleansing in Rafah, McGill students must demand accountability Israel’s start-up economy from their University. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune) is not an organic phenome-

non—it is a continuously manufactured attempt to legitimize Israel’s statehood amidst its project of settler colonialism. Domestically, the Israeli regime relies on imperialist tactics of military dominance to maintain its occupation. On an international scale, Israel needs investments from foreign capital to establish economic legitimacy and independence in a global market system. In the Global North, programs such as McGill’s FACC 501 are essential in facilitating this influx of capital. Particularly in the tech market, Israeli investors incentivize the migration of new business ventures to Israel, benefitting from government and military subsidies for “innovation.” By way of direct financial incentive, McGill students participating in the FACC 501 course are encouraged to establish new businesses in Israel, thereby expanding Israel’s settler economy. Thus, student meetings with venture capital firms do not serve as innocent networking opportunities—they are a necessary component of Israel’s colonial project, and ultimately, a form of settlement.

The Start-Up Nation courses stand out at McGill because they are heavily subsidized, advertising that nearly all participant expenses are covered by gifts from external donors.

One major donor is Heather Reisman, Indigo Books founder and former Governor of McGill, who also created the HESEG foundation for ‘lone soldiers’ to provide funding to foreigners who join the Israeli military.

Whether sponsoring university students networking with military contractors or funding young Canadians who join the Israeli regime, Reisman’s “philanthropy” serves a clear purpose. By facilitating the export of Canadian capital and personnel, Reisman’s donations at McGill bolster the system of international economic and settler exchange that legitimizes the Israeli state—and by direct extension, the violence of its occupation of Palestine.

The Start-Up Nation courses stand as undeniable evidence of our university’s deep-seated support for the Israeli occupation and the genocide of Palestinians—a stance which echoes McGill’s many histories and ongoing participation in colonial violence.

Protest Recap

Mason Bramadat

Mason Bramadat

Abby Zhu

Mason Bramadat Mason Bramadat Abby Zhu

Mason Bramadat Sophie Becquet

Abby Zhu

Jay Lauzon

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

scitech@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

Immunotherapy and artificial intelligence for melanoma treatment AI can help researchers tackle the complexities of individualized cancer treatment Zoe Dubin Design Editor Malignant melanoma, a cancer that originates in melanin-producing cells, is the deadliest variety of skin cancer. In the past 11 years, immunotherapy has increased the median survival rate of advanced melanoma from nine months to six years. However, it is still a developing treatment.

Farida Zakariya, a masters student in McGill’s Division of Experimental Medicine, explored the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in immunotherapy of melanoma in a new review paper.

“One major problem of immunotherapy is the diversity in response rate across different cancer types,” Zakariya wrote in an email to The Tribune. “Some cancers like melanoma are very responsive to immunotherapy while others are not or become resistant over time.”

Currently, the most common immunotherapy for melanoma stimulates the production of antibodies that bind to immune checkpoint inhibitor proteins.

These proteins are usually found on the surface of healthy cells and inhibit cytotoxic T-cells—an immune system “weapon” that recognizes and induces cell death in infected or cancerous cells.

When a T-cell comes into contact with a checkpoint inhibitor protein, it receives a signal to turn off and leave the cell alone.

Cancer cells sometimes produce these same checkpoint inhibitors to avoid detection. When a patient undergoes immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, checkpoint inhibitors become covered with antibodies, T-cells are inhibited from turning off, and the cancer is recognized and killed.

However, not all cancers are responsive to treatment, and some patients experience a recurrence of their cancer with newfound resistance. Thus, developing different therapies is crucial.

The potential role of mutanome in developing immunotherapies is a new subject of research.

“Mutanomes are the entire mutations that underlie a particular type of cancer. Every cancer is different and within the same cancer type, the underlying mutations differ from person to person,” Zakariya wrote.

Via sophisticated whole genome profiling and next-generation sequencing, researchers can now obtain the complete genomic profile of the mutanome of each patient and an understanding of its spatial folding in the genome for more precise treatment.

Vaccine immunotherapies take data from mutanome sequencing to recreate patient-specific neoantigens— unique proteins that cancer cells present on their surface. If a range of expected neoantigens are injected into the patient, T-cells learn to diversify their targets, and the tumor is destroyed.

In reality, however, cancer treatments are never this straightforward.

Therapies are altered by differences in the absorption and metabolism of treatments. Furthermore, there is a real lack of research into how these responses vary by ethnicity, sex, and disease stage, an information gap that causes groups of patients to slip through the cracks.

Genetic variations between patient’s genomes, along with the mutations of the cancers themselves, create an overload of data for researchers to consider. This is where AI comes in.

From identifying neoantigen DNA in the mutanome to developing personalized vaccines and predicting metastatic risk—the chances that the cancer will spread—AI’s ability to detect patterns in large data sets has the potential to revolutionize individualized treatment. “[AI] will greatly eliminate most of the barriers that the large scale sequencing required for the application of mutanome [sequencing] in melanoma immunotherapy,” Zakariya wrote.

While AI is already changing the landscape of treatment and drug discovery, it has limitations: The dynamic relationship between the mutanome, immune system, signaling pathways, and the patient’s bio-

logical makeup and environment are challenging for current static models.

“This [problem] is not something AI can solve for now, but it can increase the turnaround time of the drug discovery process,” Zakariya wrote, “[This] enabl[es] more hits to be identified within a short period of time and increas[es] sequencing and testing capacities. Thus, ensuring

that more medications will be available for cancers in the near future.”

Zakariya is currently researching the effects of inhibiting a protein linked to cancer resilience to investigate its role in the tumor’s response to immunotherapy. “I am hoping that the paper will unlock new pathways that can be explored by researchers in the pursuit of a cure for cancer.”

(Zoe Dubin /The Tribune)

A look into the economics of cannabis The financial side of legal marijuana, the black market, and policy reforms.

Jenna Durante Contributor

W

ith cannabis as the most popular illegal drug worldwide, the recent increase in legalization has sparked discussions among economists. Upon analysis of legalization, impacts on crime and violence, drug consumption, and taxation, there have been calls for a review of the cannabis market and its reformation policies by governments and industry experts alike.

Should governments fight legalization policies, or do they assist with reducing the influence of the black market? Can the legal market compete with the black market? These questions are addressed in “Weeding Out the Dealers,” a paper published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

In this paper, Tiffanie Perrault, a postdoctoral researcher in economics at McGill, examined several policy goals, recent legislative reforms, and the outlook of the cannabis market in Canada. Perrault is also dedicated to studying the different ways the legalization of marijuana can be

implemented to pave the way for a future of regulation and reform.

From a public policy perspective, legalizing and taxing cannabis can bring in a new source of revenue. Looking to the US, the state of Colorado collected USD 325.1 million of tax and fee revenue in 2022, and the state of Washington collected USD 515.2 million in the same year.

According to existing research, policies controlling drug use through taxation are more efficient than prohibiting the drug. Overall, prohibition fuels violence, high incarceration rates, and racial discrimination while stretching law enforcement resources thin. In contrast, in the US and Canada, legalization leads to a decrease in overall criminality and generates tax revenue but at the cost of increasing overall cannabis consumption.

The primary focus of Perrault’s research is on legalization and taxation, and how the legal market can start to overtake the black market.

“In order for the legal retailers to actually compete against the black market, they need to introduce more competition,” Perrault

explained in an interview with The Tribune. “You need [a] quality dimension, and the other important aspect is risk.”

The researchers broke consumer behaviour in relation to the cannabis market into five areas, for instance risk aversion, attention to legality, and reactions to price differences.

Furthermore, Perrault discussed a strategy to fight against the black market by reducing its ability to compete with the legal one.

“The idea is that you want the black market not to be able to compete anymore, so you want to push their price down to the marginal cost,” Perrault explained.

By forcing them to lower their prices, the black market’s profitability and competition will diminish significantly. Based on the article’s model, by not repressing illegal providers, we allow them to compete fiercely and push the price of cannabis down, increasing consumption of illegal cannabis post-legalization by 64 per cent.

Despite the introduction of new reforms, Perrault noted that the black market will always respond strategically to keep their

businesses alive. One mistake policy makers often make when rethinking cannabis policies is focusing solely on the price of products and neglecting their quality.

“So, we need this improvement in quality, and then it enables you to raise the price [of legal cannabis]. And because you raise the price, you can control the increasing demand that is subsequent to legalization,” Perrault said.

In the end, Perrault’s study highlights the relationship between legalization of high-quality

cannabis and sanctions against illegal trade. Legalization will be effective at regulating the demand for cannabis if consumers are compelled to buy good quality, legal cannabis rather than uncertified illegal products, and, at the same time, if illegal suppliers are targeted by repressive measures that drive them out of business.

With continuous efforts, governments will weed out the dealers of the cannabis market while curbing the legal demand for the drug by raising its price.

Smoking rates are now falling in most countries in the world. (Zoe Dubin /The Tribune)

studentlife@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

STUDENT LIFE

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Too Good To Go: The app offering affordable meals Saving food from the dumpster made tasty, and easy Auxane Bussac Contributor

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ith over 85 million users, Too Good To Go is exploding in popularity. The app is especially widespread among students, budget-conscious consumers, and environmentally-aware citizens who are concerned about having a positive impact on our planet.

Launched in Denmark in 2015, the app’s main objective is to fight food waste by connecting users with partner services like grocers, restaurants, and bakers, who save unsold and close-to-expiry food and sell it at lower prices. Beyond its ecological purpose, Too Good To Go also allows people access to affordable food, as the products are sold at a third of the original price.

The app covered mostly European cities until 2020, when the service became available in the United States. As of now, it is available in 17 countries around Europe and North America with 150,000 active partners.

In Montreal, well-known brands such as Tim Hortons, Metro, and Pizza Pizza work with Too Good To Go, along with local shops such as Café Navire, Chatime, and some convenience stores.

For Romeo Bande Martinez, a regular user of Too Good To Go in both Lausanne, Switzerland and Montreal, the eco-friendly aspect of the platform is what matters the most.

“The system is great, you get to avoid throwing food away and that’s why I started using it in the first place,” Bande Martinez said. “Even if they raised the prices it wouldn’t bother me and I would still use it. Being able to combine eating things I love and making a gesture for the planet is so satisfying for me.”

The app is easy to use; once you enter your location, you have access to all the stores around you that offer surprise bags with prepared meals, baked goods, and groceries, as well as vegan and vegetarian options. The amount of food varies, as does the price, which typically ranges from $5 to $15.

Flore Bantegny, U2 Arts, shared her experience with the app in an interview with The Tribune.

“I like the idea of not knowing what you are going to get in the surprise bags,” Bantegny explained. “You’re the one choosing the restaurant so you know you are going to like it but it allows you to still discover products you’ve never tasted before and it’s fun.”

Some complaints about Too Good To Go include that there seems to be a disconnect between the app and its partners. For example, Bande Martinez mentioned that the app might sometimes show that a bag is available despite the restaurant being closed. Still, those occurrences appear to be quite rare. Others such as Noriane Fetiveau, U2 Arts, believe that Too Good To Go should strive to increase the number of restaurants it collaborates with by incentivizing food services with good stand-

The app won the 2023 Cultural Impact App Store Award. (Jasmine Jing / The Tribune) ing and publicity.

As a new user of the app, Fetiveau expressed her discontent toward her perceived lack of offers in Montreal.

“The problem with Too Good To Go here is that there are not enough places where it is available,” Fetiveau shared. “I activated the one-kilometre filter to find offers close to my apartment but I rarely find any. In France, we have so many more options.”

No on-campus eateries—which are notoriously expensive and inaccessible—currently

use this service. Using Too Good To Go would align with the university’s environmental policy and help combat food insecurity among students. The Redpath Café is actively using Cano, a service offering reusable cups—Too Good To Go could be the next step.

For students like Bantegny, who often use the platform, this would be a great opportunity to further their ecological aspirations.

“If it ends up being used on campus, I would definitely be the first client!” Bantegny said.

Bloody good work Behind the scenes of the SSMU Menstrual Health Project Katherine Weaver Staff Writer

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f you are a McGill student who menstruates, you’re likely familiar with those seemingly-magically-refilled little caddies in the washrooms stocking plenty of tampons and pads for those in need. The force behind these little baskets is no period fairy, mind you; rather it is the team of six McGill students running the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Menstrual Health Project.

The SSMU Menstrual Health Project, which started in 2017, aims to provide free period products to the McGill community. It does so by stocking many of the women’s and gender neutral washrooms on campus with pads and tampons, as well as providing free menstrual discs, menstrual cups, tampons, pads, and period underwear at monthly on-campus pickups.

The reasoning behind this initiative is simple: Many are now realizing that menstrual products are a basic hygienic need, akin to toilet paper or soap, but can be very costly.

Julia Miracle, U4 Arts, is the SSMU Menstrual Health Project Commissioner.

She credits much of the program’s momentum over the past few years to funding from student fees and from the Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF).

“We had a pretty big rollover of student fees from COVID-19 years, and we received $50,000 from the SPF in 2022, so

we were able to scale up and out so much bigger and faster than [programs at] other universities,” Miracle explained in an interview with The Tribune.

On top of this, her committee works to secure partnerships with period brands such as Saalt, Aisle, and Joni, which have been instrumental to the success of the program. Joni provides the project with bamboo-based disposable products like tampons and pads, while Saalt and Aisle supply reusable products for monthly pickups, like menstrual discs, cups, and underwear.

These initiatives are growing nationwide, especially following recent legislation from the federal government requiring free menstrual products to be provided in federal workspaces. Since its debut in 2017, the project has grown in recognition on campus and has been well-received by the McGill community, menstruators or not.

“When I first started on the team in 2021, no one knew about us, and we hadn’t started the monthly pickups,” Miracle said.

“It’s been really cool to see how big this has gotten and how much more we’ve been able to communicate with students about our goals.”

For Miracle, much of this communication is around ending period stigma.

“I think a larger goal for us is to kind of shift the needle in the conversation as well by talking about it in a way that’s not gendered and not like making it on the burden of the individual,” she said.

The average menstruator uses about 17,000 tampons or pads in their lifetime. (Lily Cason / The Tribune) At monthly pickups, Miracle’s team puts this into action by trying to convince even those who don’t menstruate to take a box of products to keep at hand in case someone else is in need.

“You never know if someone else is going to need it; just throw it on a shelf in your washroom at home,” Miracle explained.

The initiative’s seemingly seamless execution can be credited to many factors, funding from the SPF and brand partnerships among them. However, Miracle rec-

ognized one vital factor above all: The four coordinators on the team who run the program on the ground.

“Whenever you see a product in the washroom, just know that that’s like our small team of four people going out there every week, keeping those stocked, and I want to give them more credit.”

The SSMU Menstrual Health Project will be hosting its next monthly pickup on February 23, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. in the Leacock lobby.

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STUDENT LIFE

studentlife@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

To tip or not to tip: The question of gratuities in the age of ‘tipflation’

Students share their thoughts on tipping culture in Montreal Josie Hodgson Contributor

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cross Canada, tipping is a central part of the dining and service experience, considered by many to be a form of expressing satisfaction with the service provided and a personal reward for exceptional staff. However, research released last year by the Angus Reid Institute has uncovered that 78 per cent of Canadians now believe that tipping is expected, regardless of the quality of service.

With many individuals employed within the tipping-based industry—particularly students— relying on gratuities as a critical source of income, consensus regarding tipping etiquette is increasingly causing divisions as the cost of living rises.

In conversations with The Tribune, students from McGill and across Montreal expressed their relationships with tipping—both on the giving and receiving ends.

Saaya Fujita, an exchange student from Japan and employee at the Japanese restaurant Japote in Montreal, highlighted her complicated relationship with Canadian tipping culture.

“As there’s no tipping culture

in Japan, I’ve experienced many awkward situations here in Montreal. I was told I don’t necessarily have to tip, but one time I was forced, and many other times I’ve felt so much pressure,” Fujita said.

However, Fujita’s experience as an employee within the tipping industry in Montreal has also had its benefits.

“As a worker though, the experience has been quite different.

I’ve worked both in Japan and Montreal,” Fujita said. “In Japan, it’s taken for granted that workers behave well, even though they cannot [receive a] tip. Here, however, I can get a lot just by doing service as I’m used to, which makes me feel good.”

Another young person belonging to the international student community at McGill and thus unfamiliar with this phenomenon is Michael Cunningham, a Ph.D. student from Ireland. For Cunningham, tipping has lost its meaning in Canada, since it is an expectation rather than a reward for exceptional service.

Cunningham’s detachment from the personal implications of tipping is not a new feeling; “tipflation” and “tip-creep”—the spreading and embedding of tipping into new and existing industries—are

on the rise, particularly with many point-of-service transactions now involving automated tipping on card machines.

For Carly Beard, U2 Arts and employee at Gerts Bar and Café, her position as a student means she appreciates the difficulty this creates for student customers. ‘‘You should be able to click a button to choose to tip, not feel obligated to,” Beard said. “I try not to look at people when the screen comes up, as I don’t want to influence them.”

Amongst the rising anti-tipping discourse, however, lies a significant number of students who rely on tipping as a critical source of income.

For Silvano Vezio, a first-year psychology student at the Université de Montreal and tipping-based employee at Ferreira, a Portuguese restaurant on Peel, tipping is important for both employers and employees.

“I think [tipping] should be encouraged [or] even mandatory in places where you receive service,” Vezio said. “We know that [...] [places] that encourage tipping can’t afford to pay their employees at a high hourly rate [....] I’m a student and can’t work more than two days a week [...] I’m working less

but getting an advantageous pay.”

However, for U2 Arts student Lyla Stauch, tipping is not always necessary for the survival of businesses.

“There’s now an expectation for everyone to tip regardless [...] I think this represents a deeper structural issue.”

Stauch’s argument is not a new one; rather, this sentiment is shared across the country. The Angus Reid Institute study has shown that 73 per cent of Canadians now believe that tipping is a way for employers to underpay their employees.

With tip-based workers receiving a lower minimum wage of only $12.20 in comparison to the non-tip

wage of $15.25, many are increasingly noticing an overreliance on customers for providing more substantial wages to staff.

To combat this, some establishments such as vegan restaurant Folke in Vancouver or popular restaurant Larry’s in Montreal have recently adopted a no-tipping model, where wages are being increased in order to compensate for a lack of tipping. Whilst this model has yet to be widely adopted elsewhere, this move appears to many a step in the right direction for tackling this culturally embedded issue, encouraging employers to take responsibility for providing adequate wages to employees.

From independent cafes to fast-food chains, many card machines now feature an all-too-obvious tip prompt prior to service. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune)

Podcasting with BSN’s Soul Talks

Soul Talks dives into Black culture and experiences at McGill Claudia Efemini Contributor Continued from page 1.

“Zöe and I have similar but different perspectives on a lot of things. It’s good to bounce off each other and we have a similar work style.”

Fankem and Anum both take very creative approaches to deciding what they want to talk about in each episode. This usually consists of individual brainstorming and then collective discussion that weaves their ideas together.

For Anum, this creative process is all about being free. She believes that “with podcasting, it’s important to document your thoughts and not be too critical about your own ideas.”

The discourse between the co-hosts serves as a reminder that despite the shared experiences among members of McGill’s Black community, being a Black student is not a monolithic experience and we can learn from each other through conversation.

Recalling their February

Zöe Anum created the graphic for the Soul Talks podcast. (Zöe Anum / Black Students’ Network) 2023 “HAIR HISTORY 101” episode, Fankem and Anum discussed how they interviewed Claudestine Williams-Tucker, owner of Montreal’s Studio Claudi, because they were curious to know why braiders were hiking up their prices. After Williams-Tucker explained the

hours braiders work and how their earnings often fall under minimum wage, Fankem and Anum felt more empathetic and understanding of the city’s soaring braiding rates. Their perspectives on the matter shifted due to that critical discourse. For the co-hosts and many guests

and listeners, Soul Talks has provided a safe space for Black discourse. Given that Black students at McGill are few and far between, creating a sense of community was critical. For them, the podcast has become a space for authenticity and an absence of perceived judgment from outsiders.

Williams-Tucker is not the only guest who has been featured on Soul Talks. In fact, guests are a key element of the podcast whereby Black students at McGill frequently feature, including last year’s BSN President, Ashley Jonassaint (BA ‘23).

Fankem and Anum attested to the fact that guests often help enrich conversations and broaden perspectives. Fankem explained that having guests on is also beneficial from an engagement and outreach standpoint.

“If we have people coming from outside, their friends also want to listen because they are promoting it,” Frankem said. “It keeps our community of listeners actively engaged.”

Fankem and Anum have formed a well-functioning, harmonious system of collaboration.

Reflecting on their experience so far hosting Soul Talks, they spoke warmly about their seamless partnership. Their compatibility as colleagues makes the work so much more meaningful and enjoyable. The podcast is their outlet outside the confinements of academia and friendships: A platform that they have creative control over.

“It’s nice to look back at all the things we have done and see how much more confident we have become at sharing our opinions,” Fankem told The Tribune.

Fankem and Anum have ambitious plans for the semester ahead. They started the semester with a “NEW YEAR, NEW ME,” and their latest episode “YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT” is their first for Black History Month discussing social media and how media consumption shapes our identities. Looking into the year ahead, they aspire to heighten their social media presence through collaborations and regular posts.

An annual Black History Month collaboration with CKUT is in the works.

arts@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

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Black and Palestinian poets’ aesthetics of solidarity bring us to new worlds Their poetic tradition guides us away from nationalist, genocidal forms Matthew Molinaro Editor-in-Chief

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very February, like clockwork, literary institutions—mega-chain bookstores, Amazon, Oprah, and English departments— advertise the urgent necessity of reading a Black writer. Whether it’s Invisible Man, Omeros, or Things Fall Apart, these institutions commodify and repackage Black writers into a promise to the susceptible and well-intentioned reader. The hope? Upon turning the final page, you will be transformed, magically becoming more anti-racist. “Congratulations,” the end of the book reads, “you have tackled white supremacy one novel at a time.” The purpose? To strip Black writers of their insurgent politics and their visions for liberation.

This capitalist, imperialist, and institutional effort to aestheticize African, Caribbean, and Black diaspora literatures reveals an underlying problem: Erasing these authors’ longstanding solidarities with Palestine. In doing so, the Black-Palestinian struggle becomes something of the past, something accessed only through retrospection. Black writers understood these terms of conscientious engagement. Do not forget that in 2006, eight years after Toni Morrison published Paradise, a novel that critiques chauvinistic Black (and American) nationalisms on stolen, Indigenous lands, she co-wrote and signed a letter denouncing Israel’s liquidation of a Palestinian state. Hollowing anti-imperialism from Morrison and from the people and institutions that have sustained Black life, including Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter, these

historical accounts ignore the call of liberation.

Almost 76 years after the Nakba and four months into Israel’s destruction of Palestinian archives, publishing houses, and universities, along with the killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, we must refuse despair by returning to these Black and Palestinian cultural archives.

From the Americas to Israel, Black writers and Palestinian writers have a shared history of struggle against the inventions and imperialist projects of the West. Our narratives represent the need for a liberated poetics, one that returns poetry to its roots—that of making new worlds. This solidarity counters and reveals the violence that underwrites the nation-state, the language of “human animals,” the language of “Hamas-controlled Gaza,” the language of “Palestinian minors killed.”

Dionne Brand’s poem “prologue for now - Gaza,” published on Oct. 27, exposes the insidious terror of the West’s coordination of this genocide, concluding “liberal democracy has entirely failed and failed to even hide its / fascisms / this narrow path of language / leads me here.” Invoking poetry’s truth against representative government’s fascism, Brand banishes the neocolonial present to envision an alternative future.

To write against American imperial formation and interventionist policy, Black women writers ground themselves in Palestine and urge their audiences to commit themselves to an anticolonial struggle not-yet-here. This is Audre Lorde’s historical imperative of “So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” This is June Jordan inhabiting Palestinian self-determina-

Witnessing the ongoing Nakba, June Jordan dedicates her poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children living in Lebanon, 1948-1983 (Abby Zhu / The Tribune) tion through the Black woman’s body, “I was born 1919 Red Summer’s white supremacist terror and a Black woman / and now / I am become a Pales- racial riots. Where Alareer’s speaker concludes, “If tinian /… / It is time to make our way home.” The I must die / let it bring hope, / let it be a story,” collective vision of the plural first-person bonds McKay’s speaker ends, “Like men we’ll face the reader and speaker as we move, openly and trans- murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, formatively, toward a free Palestine. dying, but fighting back!” Between the blazes in These historical linkages speak to the uneasy Gaza and American cities, 100 years indexes this transition between oppression and freedom for allusion between the Harlem Renaissance and AlaBlack and Palestinian peoples. At the turn of the reer writing for life until an Israeli Defence Force 20th-century, Black writers drew from our oral airstrike killed him and his family, his brother, his traditions—blues and jazz particularly—to impart nephew, his sister, and three of her children. embodied cultural knowledge on their readers and Our writers alone will not end this genocide. the next generation. Asserting the self against op- How do we close-read a bomb? Create rhythm pression adapted onto the line. So when Gazan from the screams? This cultural tradition of Blackpoet Refaat Alareer circulated his “If I Must Die” Palestinian solidarity indispensably guides us before his murder, we hear echoes of Claude against this unbearable form of life. Let our shared McKay in his poem “If We Must Die” after the struggles be a story.

Black Theatre Workshop’s ‘Diggers’ is a tribute to essential workers The play draws from gravediggers’ tedious routines in Sierra Leone Suzanna Graham Arts & Entertainment Editor

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n a town, on a hill, within a graveyard, there are two gravediggers. Solomon (Christian Paul) and Abdul (Chance Jones) live, breathe, and work the graves, day in and day out, weathering torrential rains, pandemic, and death. They are overworked. They are tired. They continue to dig.

Solomon and Abdul are the foundational characters of Diggers, a play co-commissioned by Black Theatre Workshop and Prairie Theatre Exchange to undergo its world premiere during Black History Month. Diggers is part of playwright Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s 54-ology, a project where she and her collaborators work to bring to life performance works inspired by stories centered in and around each of Africa’s 54 sovereign states. The play is a love letter to gravediggers in Sierra Leone, one of many countries to experience Ebola outbreaks and their devastating casualties in recent years.

It’s a unique performance. The audience enters to see bleachers surrounding a fenced-in stage where Abdul sweeps rubber “dirt” near a raised grave. Meanwhile, the audience trickles in, watching him; he is alone. The house lights dim. We watch Abdul with more intention.

Not much happens during the 90-minute runtime. We see the daily routine of wake, dig, sleep—a fact of life that many

in Sierra Leone and elsewhere face every day. Early in the play, Solomon’s nephew Bai (Jahlani Gilbert-Knorren), a young adult in his early twenties, comes to visit the graveyard. He is jumpy and full of life, and then his auntie sends him to stay and work as a gravedigger. Bai is unskilled in the art of gravedigging; Solomon and Abdul dig in sync while Bai exudes effort, trying to keep up. He breaks one of their precious shovels. On their radio, you can hear an announcer mention a pandemic.

The gravediggers make no mention of it.

The bodies keep arriving.

The stage’s fence is a curious part of the set design. Does it keep the gravediggers in or the townspeople out?

Only one woman visits the three during the performance: Sheila (Warona Setshwaelo), a town council member who brings them food provisions. I think Abdul has a crush on her—he smiles and seems lighter at her small kindness. But the gravediggers need more than food; they need supplies to fix their south wall, raincoats to survive the downpours, and sandbags to prevent the collapse of their graveyard. Yet the town needs gloves for their doctors. Their people need medicine. In a town without enough means, how do you support all essential workers?

There’s a sense of powerlessness in each character’s eyes, as they realize the overwhelming number of bodies is continuing to arrive with the beeping of trucks. Each gravedigger relies on different

coping mechanisms to keep up their spirit.

Bai has a DIY model of their town, made of scraps and dedication. Solomon has an imaginary dog, a memory of his real dog who had since passed. The others agree not to shatter the illusion, telling Solomon not to let it escape. And Abdul has this, his mind, internal strength, and total resilience.

He taps a finger to his forehead when he speaks that line. He says, “you can bust my back, my knees, my shovel. But don’t take this. That’s for me.”

In a town, on a hill, within a graveyard, there are three gravediggers. Stuffed onto a tiny stage, the four actors bring the show’s message to life; essential workers are the backbone of any community, and despite their perseverance, it is exhausting work.

They are the individuals who carry the life and death of a community. It is individuals like Sheila who help them survive. Diggers isn’t trying to explain this real situation— but it shows its audience that their comfort relies on others’ depraving labour.

‘Diggers’ ran at the Segal Centre from Feb. 1–17. It marks the first of many theatre performances celebrating Black History Month. (Andree Lanthier / The Tribune)

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

arts@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2023

Reframing nature with Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore “Giants of Modern Art” exhibition opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Kellie Elrick, Staff Writer

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he exhibition is not organized temporally. The rooms move from bones to stones, from landscapes to recreations of O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s studios.

It weaves and jumps through the 20th century, from New York to Mexico to Scotland, from gastropod shells to irises to pelvises.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art, organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and curated by Anita Feldman and Iris Amizlev, opened in Montreal on Feb. 10.

The exhibition has a certain preoccupation with twos: O’Keeffe and Moore, inner and outer, sculpture and painting, earthy bodies and human bodies. O’Keeffe’s paintings feature objects in pairs: Feather and leaf. Sawbone and fungus. Moore’s sculptures often function simultaneously as frames and framed—you can look at them, but you can also look through them.

And if you stand at the right angle, you can see O’Keeffe’s paintings through Moore’s sculptures. The exhibition space is set up to reflect the art inside; Moore-like keyholes in one room’s walls stretch partway to the ceiling, allowing space to complete the picture.

Another room is divided with jagged, cliff-like shapes jutting out from either side—cliffs that could exist in an O’Keeffe painting.

Recreations of the artists’ studios sit roughly in the middle of the exhibition, not at the start. Moving through the exhibition, it becomes clearer why. O’Keeffe and Moore focused on objects that had lives before they did: Bones, mountains, shells. The artists are perhaps placed partway through the journey because the story started long before either of them lived.

Where does the body end—and does it end at all? Moore’s sculptures can be read as reclining bodies, but also as landforms, dipping in and out, curving at parts. One of O’Keeffe’s paintings—perhaps my favourite in the exhibition—Barn with Snow, depicts a winter landscape at Alfred Stieglitz’s farm. The Gallery label includes a quote from O’Keeffe, written about Gaspésie: “[T] he beautiful barns looked old, as if they belonged to the land.” She visited Quebec in 1932 and became enamoured with the Gaspé Peninsula. Far from her New Mexico studio,

she encountered another landscape at once soft and rolling; jagged and foreboding—land that doesn’t seem to finish where bones and barns begin. Barriers, beginnings, and endings often blur within the exhibition. Perhaps they don’t exist at all.

Zooming in and out, the story changes.

O’Keeffe and Moore look at objects so closely that they become something else entirely: Moore’s Working Model for Oval with Points seems to be a study of peculiar shape, something not often found in nature—but was inspired by observing the inside of an elephant skull. A point existing inside a shell.

O’Keeffe’s From the River Pale(1959) derived inspiration from a bird’s-eye view of rivers snaking through landscapes (with the rapidly rising popularity of air travel likely in mind). I initially thought it was an up-close shot of a leaf. But O’Keeffe modelled the shape and flow of the rivers from a tree branch.

A close view of a branch becomes a wide view of a landscape: Both are equally detailed.

If the whole exhibition is considered to be the shell, then the paintings, sculptures, sketches, and perhaps even museum-goers, become the invisible machinations inside.

The curvature of bone inside the elephant skull; the careful folds of the jack-in-thepulpit. Exhibition spaces made by their art, art made by exhibition spaces; museums made by people, people made by museums.

Digital-media conceptions of learning often result in information overload at high speed. Stories are everywhere, all of the time, accessible immediately. But perhaps a greater volume of knowledge can be procured from single sources—taking the time to know something you care deeply for. O’Keeffe and Moore focus intently upon certain objects unfolding over time. Bones and flintstones take time to record their stories and emerge.

Flowers take time to unfurl. O’Keeffe and Moore take the time to stop and look.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.

I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower,” O’Keeffe wrote, her quote featured on the gallery walls. “I want them to see whether they want to or not.”

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art runs until June 2, 2024.

Tickets are available online or in person at the MMFA.

Moore constructed art out of everyday objects—safety pins, wire, piano keys. (Mason Bramadat / The Tribune)

sports@thetribune.ca

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

SPORTS

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Varsity Round-Up: Feb 14 - 18 The Tribune catches you up on what you may have missed in McGill sports this week Tillie Burlock, Julie Ferreyra & Sara Escallon-Sotomayor Managing Editor & Sports Editors Swimming After dominating all season long, McGill Swimming excelled again this weekend at the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) Provincial championship. Earning over 1,100 points and 33 medals combined, including 19 gold, Redbirds and Martlets left little for their competitors. In 2023, McGill became the first team to win all three categories for three consecutive years, and they broke their own record this season,winning it for a fourth time.

Claiming the new RSEQ standard in the men’s 4x50-metre freestyle relay, Pablo Collin, Hazem Issa, Bruno Dehem-Lemelin and Mathieu Ionescoux-Tremblay overrode the previous McGill record established in 2021, completing the feat in one minute and 29.09 seconds.

With four medals, third-year software engineering student Naomie Lo was crowned athlete of the meet, alongside senior engineering student Hazem Issa, who tied with senior Elizabeth Ling to be the most decorated athlete of the meet with

five gold medals.

Closing the RSEQ championship on a victorious note, rookie Mats Baradat was crowned Athlete of the Year and Rookie of the Year after stellar performances on 1500m and 4x200m relay during the season.

McGill will be hosting the USPORTS National Championships on March 7 to 9 at Pointe Claire.

Martlet Hockey Martlet Hockey (5–18–2) were edged 2-1 by the Carleton Ravens (18–16–1) in overtime on Feb. 16 at McConnell Arena. This defeat marked the end of the season for both sides, as well as the Ravens’s last ever game in the RSEQ as they are set to move to the Ontario University Athletics along with UOttawa Gee Gees for next season. Finishing last place, it was a challenging season for a young McGill squad. The team has been rebuilding for the last two seasons after their run to U SPORTS Nationals in the 2021-2022 season, and hope that the challenges of the last two years will propel them back into playoff contention in 2024-2025.

Martlet Basketball Martlet basketball (5–10) was

defeated by the Concordia Stingers (6–9) on Feb. 17 at Love Competition Hall. While the Stingers only led 18-15 at the end of the first quarter, McGill was unable to close the gap, and lost 76-59. While McGill was outclassed, exciting freshmen Lily Rose Chatila led the scoring with 10, and Seyna Diggs and Daniella Mbengo bagged nine points apiece.

Martlet Basketball (5-10) will be hosting undefeated Laval Rouge et Or (15-0) in the last game of the regular season at Love Competition Hall on Feb. 24. This is also the Martlet senior night.

Redbirds Basketball Last-place McGill Redbirds (3– 12) prevailed over the league-leading Concordia Stingers (11–4) to claim the Lengvari Cup in a 83-81 thriller that went right to the buzzer. Cocaptain Sean Hercovitch scored 11 points and made 14 assists, breaking the school record for most assists in a single game (10) which had stood since 2009. This is the fourth year in a row that McGill have won the Lengvari Cup, only losing the initial iteration of the competition.

This victory is not only a significant morale-booster, but also jeopardizes Concordia’s first-place position.

The Redbirds (3-12) play their final game of the season against fourth-placed Laval (6-10) on Feb. 24 at Love Competition Hall.

Martlet Volleyball On the heels of a dominating 3-0 (25-23, 25-18, 25-15) win against the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees (10–11), the Martlets hosted the first place Université de Montreal Carabins (17–4) for their final game of the regular season. Despite being their first home loss all season, the ultimate 0-3 (16-25, 15-25, 1925) loss for the Martlets was a big one as it occurred on their Senior Appreciation Day. With co-captain

Victoria Iannotti sidelined with a cold, the Martlets were no match for the Carabins as they boasted 44 kills and only 12 errors on 98 attempts while McGill had just 24 kills and 18 errors on 98 chances. To add insult to injury, McGill posted a season low .061 hitting percentage while the Carabins dominated with a .327 success rate.

Finishing second overall in the RSEQ standings, the Martlets will kick off the playoffs with a bestof-three semifinal series against Sherbrooke Vert et Or that is yet to be scheduled. McGill finished the season ninth overall in the USPORTS women’s volleyball rankings.

Junior defenceman Olivia Pridham in action for Martlet Hockey. (Matt Garies / McGill Athletics)

Kansas City and the NFL’s ongoing hypocrisy in addressing racism Writing “End Racism” in the end zone fails to take any action to actually end racism Sophie Block Contributor

T

he Super Bowl is 2024’s biggest marketing event.

As the most watched U.S. program ever, each image shown influences droves of North Americans. Luckily, the Kansas City Chiefs avoided propagating racism.

Sure, their name, history, and mascot are all offensive, but that’s not what they stand for! In fact, they’ve proven it, by writing “End Racism” in the end zone, above the insignia of their (racist) team name. In viewing the Super Bowl last weekend, it was not a sweaty Usher on roller-skates nor the mistaken decision to receive by the 49ers in overtime but the glaring insincerity that stood out most. The hypocrisy of the Chiefs’ team name and their attempt to prove their anti-racist sentiments demonstrate the severity of their performative activism.

What is the problem with the name “Kansas City Chiefs”? The name ‘Chiefs’ originates from a white man who appropriated and impersonated Native American culture. Harold Roe Bartle, the eventual mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, was a member of the Boy

Scouts program where he went by the nickname “Chief Lone Bear”, claiming that the local Arapaho nation welcomed him, although they did not. Ultimately, when selecting a new name for the former Dallas Texans when they relocated to Kansas City, the Chiefs was officially chosen in 1963 making it the most recent team to adopt a name or logo that referenced Native Americans.

Quickly, the “Tomahawk chop,” an arm gesture along with a singing chant, became a popular cheer. As well, fans adopted Indigenous nontraditional headdresses, regalia, and face paint to support the team. Until 2021, the games began with a horse named ‘Warpaint’ galloping in, ridden by a cheerleader playing an Indigenous-style drum beat.

The team has superficially attempted to move away from their racist practices, but only through performative activism. In 2014, Kansas City created guidelines with local Indigenous groups for fans to follow. Though the chop, along with other references or appropriations of Native American culture, were banned before the 2020 season, many fans elected not to abide by this.

These actions proved to be nothing more than performative.

If this fixes everything, then why were masses of Americans gathered, cheering to “stop the chop” and “change the name”? A true dedication to ending racism would be listening to the decades-long calls from local Indigenous groups, like Not in Our Honor to change their name, and through this, team culture.

A 2005 study from the American Psychological Association wrote that “mascots based on stereotypes had a harmful effect on the social identity development and self-esteem of young [Native American] people.”

Writing “End Racism” does not tangibly help Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The participation in racist practices, both in the stands and of fans at home, is what matters.

Although it took years of activism, McGill serves as an example for Kansas City. A 2018 report by a McGill Task Force on Indigenous Studies and Education recommended that McGill change its team name. Many student mobilizations also pushed for change, and in 2019, McGill became the Redbirds. 2020’s Arts Valedictorian Tomas Jirousek, one of the few Indigenous valedictorians in McGill’s history, was critical in raising awareness and speaking out

against this injustice. Showing that McGill would commit to redress their Indigenous appropriation, this spurred some relief and hope for more reconciliation efforts in the future.

At the beginning of the regular season in 2020, Kansas City wrote “End Racism” in their end zone. As the Black Lives Matter movement was at its heights, the team took it upon themselves to do the most

American thing possible: Act performatively. Kansas City must listen to the demands of Indigenous peoples and change their culture of Indigenous appropriation. Writing “End Racism” is not enough to do that. While the NFL continues to have a long way to go in a number of respects, a name change for Kansas City is the first step to combatting the practices of a racist league.

Kansas City has won three Super Bowls in the past five years. (Interceptor73, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia) Commons

16

SPORTS

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 2024

sports@thetribune.ca

‘Black Ice:’ The absented presence of Black Canadians in hockey The Tribune speaks to producer Hubert Davis and professor Debra Thompson about the documentary Tillie Burlock Managing Editor

W

ho invented the slapshot?

If you answered Bernard Geoffrion of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1950s, you are mistaken. The correct answer is Eddie Martin of the Halifax Eureka in 1906. Who was the first goalie to drop to a knee in order to stop a puck? If you thought it was Ottawa Sentator’s Clint Benedict you are again, incorrect. It was actually Henry Franklin. Now, as you might be tempted to open another tab on your computer to Google “what league were the Halifax Eureka in” or “Henry Franklin hockey,” pick up a copy of Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895-1925 by Darril Fosty and George Fosty—it will likely save you some time.

The Fosty brothers’ 2007 book delves into the history of the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes (CHL). Founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the league was organized by Black Baptists and Black intellectuals in 1895 and became a driving force in the push for equality for Black Canadians.

However, like much of Black history in Canada, the CHL is purposefully erased from Canadian historical memory to serve white supremacy.

“As [many] Black Canadian scholars argue, Black people are an absented presence in Canada,” Debra Thompson, a professor in McGill’s Department of Political Science, explained. “Black people are absented or purposefully erased from Canadian history, but also present in that so much of Canadian history is about presenting Canada as being the Promised Land.”

Vinay Virmani––a producer working with UNINTERRUPTED Canada––embarked on Black Ice, the documentary, drawing on the Fosty brothers’ book. Charles Officer, a Canadian documentary filmmaker who passed away earlier this year, reached out to Hubert Davis to suggest he take on the project. Davis, an alumni of the McGill varsity basketball team, did not have a background in hockey, however, he viewed directing Black Ice as a “Trojan horse.” Davis hoped to use hockey as a catalyst to explore the Black experience in Canada, by delving into the history of the CHL and its descendents, alongside gathering testimonies from both current and former hockey players in Canada.

The documentary focuses on the Africville Seasides––one of the CHL teams––and the Black community that lived in Africville until the city of Halifax forcibly relocated its residents and destroyed the community’s infrastructure in the

1960s. “[The people who lived there] have such love for this place and this idea of community, [...] I feel like that was something that kind of got lost in the Black experience in Canada,” Davis told The Tribune.

“When things dispersed, like when people had to leave for economic

experience has always been tied to hockey [and] you realize how ridiculous the whole thing is. How absurd it is [to claim] Black people don’t belong in hockey when they are some of the pioneers of the sport.”

Yet, as highlighted through testimony from players such as Blake Bolden and Akim Aliu, systemically

in a better direction in terms of inclusivity, Thompson explained that practices of predatory inclusion are commonplace in hockey. The term predatory inclusion, as popularized

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her book Race for Profit, is used to describe instances when marginalized communities are included into spaces

The documentary can be watched on Crave. (Abby Zhu / The Tribune) reasons or systemic racism [...] I think they lost some of that identity of who, or what, community builds [...] [W]hen you look at a lot of other cultures that have been able to keep that intact, they still have this sense of belonging and place and I think we unfortunately lost that in Canada.”

The documentary highlights how white Canadian media undermined Black hockey culture and the quality of play in the CHL to maintain white dominance of the sport, despite the CHL’s success.

The CHL, achieving great popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s, consistently attracted more than 100 fans to its games and generated sufficient gate revenue to compensate its players. Hoping to gain access to part of the revenue, white teams in Halifax requested to play exhibition games against CHL teams, breaking the colour barrier. However, cartoons in the Sydney Post portrayed Black players as violent, unsportsmanlike, and unskilled, leading to a diminished interest among white fans in paying to see them play.

Understanding the history of systemic racism and its active role in belittling the skill of Black hockey players spoke to Davis’ goal of fleshing out the historical context in which racist incidents occur today.

“It’s really hard to understand a problem without having a bigger context,” explained Davis. “[When] you [go] back and look at the history of hockey, [you see the] Black

racist perceptions of Black players as being “uncoachable” continue to strip Black players of opportunities to excel.

“When I started reading the stories about some of the current day players, what was going on with them, I was still a bit taken aback,” Davis continued. “I was a little bit shocked at just how brazen some of the incidents were and how, and [....] it seemed like it was kind of glossed over a lot of times.”

While on an individual-team basis, the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs demonstrated support for the documentary, Black Ice has largely been neglected by the mainstream professional hockey community. Davis explained in taking on the project, some hockey insiders warned him that the documentary would likely not go over well with the National Hockey League (NHL).

“As a documentary filmmaker, to make something that is specifically about a sport and then be told what you should or shouldn’t say is always a very curious thing to me,” Davis said.

However, given the NHL’s unwillingness to collaborate with the Hockey Diversity Alliance–– an organization that many of the players in the film are members of––on a number of fronts, their lack of acknowledgement of the documentary itself is unsurprising.

While the sport is moving

they were historically excluded from on exploitative and predatory terms. While Taylor uses the term to describe the way in which Black people were included into the real estate market after explicitly racist housing policies came to an end, Thompson explored how it can be applied to hockey.

“In the film, I use predatory inclusion to talk about the ways that Black people are so frequently included in these institutions, often for profit [...] [in ways] that are ultimately quite harmful,” Thompson said. “Nobody ever asks what happens after we are included, what are our lives like? What violence do we face? What if being included is itself violent, dangerous, predatory, exploitative?”

Many point to the NHL’s “Hockey Is For Everyone” campaign as an example of the hypocritical nature of rhetorics of inclusion in hockey. However, Thompson believes that initiatives like these can be reconceptualized in a more positive light.

“In another interpretation of [Hockey Is For Everyone], it can be seen as a normative assertion,” Thompson said. “In order to make that normative assertion, more genuine and less hypocritical, what we want to see from leagues from institutions for organizations is a genuine, concerted effort to ensure that teams are not racist, that these environments are not harmful for

Black folks and other people of colour.”

For Thompson, this more hopeful conception allows for a symbiotic relationship between initiatives at the professional level and their realized impact at the youth level.

“We see youth leagues that are not toxic, and that are promoting the same kind of egalitarian values that the leagues are promoting at the other end. That’s kind of the hopeful thing,” Thompson said. “Things can be hypocritical and hopeful at the same time.”

To draw out this connection, the documentary spotlights Seaside Hockey, a local youth hockey program in Toronto named after the Africville Seasides. The program was co-founded by Kirk Brooks, his son and current Arizona Coyotes skill development coach Nathaniel Brooks, and former NHL player, Anthony Stewart. In the documentary, Kirk discusses his relationship to hockey and the mission of Seaside.

“What I loved about [Kirk] is that he was like this representation that the Black experience in hockey has always been present,” Davis explained. “He grew up playing hockey, it’s part of his life and he had always known about the Coloured Hockey League so none of these stories were a surprise to him [....]

Going back to Herb Carnegie and Willie O’Ree and all these [players], there’s always actually been a presence. Not all of them are well known or famous, but a lot of them have been behind the scenes and I think Kirk represented that.”

For Davis, gaining insight into those with generational knowledge about the Coloured Hockey League, including interviewing descendants of former players, provided him with a “certain kind of pride.” Despite tackling harrowing stories of racism told by a number of former and current players including Saroya Tinker, Wayne Simmonds, Willie O’Ree, and Matt Dumba, Black Ice illustrates this very pride felt by many players by putting their love for hockey on display.

“I didn’t play hockey and by the end of the documentary, I kind of wish that I had,” reflected Thompson. “Black Ice really captures the complexity of Black livingness because in a world that focuses so much on Black death, and destruction and domination, to really emphasize that like we are here, we’re still here, we’re still doing this and there are beautiful things that remain about this incredible game.”

‘Black Ice’ will be screened at Taverne 1909 near the Bell Centre on Feb. 20 at 6:00 p.m.. Tickets can be reserved online free of charge.