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THursday, June 11, 2020
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Anti-racism protest organizer Emmanuel Drame gets his message out to the crowd gathered Saturday afternoon at the Mr. P.G. site.
Anti-racism rally draws crowd Ted Clarke Citizen staff
Three months after he arrived in Canada as an immigrant from Liberia, Emmanuel Drame was driving on an Alberta highway when he got pulled over by an RCMP officer.
He wasn’t speeding or driving erratically, but having seen real-life police shows on TV he did what he thought he was supposed to do. “Before he even did come over, I was afraid,” said Drame. “Back then I had seen what was going on in the States and had experienced a certain level of racism, so the first thing I did was I opened the car door and put my hands up and put my leg out to show that I was harmless. “He came over and I thought, OK here it goes, but he was nice and he said, ‘I’m going to show you how this is done.’ I told him it was my first time experiencing that and said OK, get back into your vehicle, close the door, put the window up and put your hands on the steering wheel and when I come over I will knock on your win-
dow and I want you to roll the glass down. I thought he was going to do what I had seen in the movies and ask for my licence and insurance but then he asked me ‘Are you high, are you drunk? Do you have any weed in your car.’ Just going through that awakened something in me.” For Drame, that awakening manifested itself into his role as organizer of the antiracism protests in Prince George the past two days. The 26-year-old, a UNBC international studies/political science graduate now working as a B.C. Corrections officer, let his passion for the anti-racism cause be heard through a megaphone Saturday afternoon. Sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minnesota while in police custody, Drame led a crowd of about 400 sign-waving people gathered at the feet of Mr. P.G. in chants of “Black lives matter,” “We are unique, we are all people,” and “No justice, no peace.” Chiko States can relate to similar experiences he lived growing up as a black man in Halifax. States, who moved to Prince George last year to attend the College of
New Caledonia, says while he has met many kind people in the city who treat him with dignity, Canadians still have much to learn about what life is like for visible minorities and the need for more empathy and sensitivity. “When you’re with a person who is not of colour they might not see the dirty look that you’re getting or they might not recognize you’re being followed around a store or that the cop asks you to get out of the car you’re not driving and asks to see your ID,” said States. “When you grow up and didn’t have to experience it, it’s harder for you to understand. Because it’s never happened to you it’s just makes it harder to accept it’s happening to someone else. But it’s not overreacting. If you see something going on that you don’t believe is just, speak on it, address it. When you close your eyes to the issue, you’re not part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem.” Ivan Paquette, a Prince George musician who works as a government advisor for the Metis Nation of British Columbia, is encouraged the growing tide of pent-up
emotion unleashed by a world outraged by the circumstances of the last eight minutes and 46 seconds of Floyd’s life and he is hopeful his death will cause people to reconcile their differences and rethink how they treat people of different cultures. “There was a cause and effect and it gave us an opportunity to come together, and we have to come together,” said Paquette. “The (Indigenous) medicine wheel teaches that the colour black means reason. There’s a reason why everything has happened and it’s a shame what’s happened but justice will be served and those seas will ripple and they will create change. COVID is a curse but it’s also a blessing in so many different ways, because it’s revealed a lot of things. When we were sitting in isolation we were thinking about a lot of things and that’s brought this forward. It’s revealed the darkness in the soul of man. This brought out the awareness we needed in order to make change, and we’re going to make change. We’re living in exciting times and we’re going to do this together.”
T-Wolves star speaks out against racism Ted Clarke Citizen staff
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Tyrell Laing has seen it with his own eyes. The 22-year-old UNBC Timberwolves basketball team point guard couldn’t believe what those eyes were telling him while he checked his computer to find rental accommodations. “It’s hard to talk about personal experiences but the best example was when I went on the internet maybe a year ago and there was an ad on Kijiji for somebody renting out a basement suite and they had ‘whites only’ in brackets in the post – that was pretty shocking to see,” said Laing. “In our city of community, how would that ad ever be perceived as acceptable to society? Racism still exists in Canada. People seem to forget there was slavery in Canada and I think it’s important to understand it’s not
strictly a United States issue, it’s a global issue. Canada experiences different levels of racism and we have our own issues, especially with the Indigenous community.” Laing, who won the U Sports Canada West Conference scoring crown and was chosen as UNBC’s male athlete of the year, spoke to a crowd of several hundred people who gathered downtown for a protest rally and march Friday at city hall. Laing, the product of a white mother and black father, has lived his whole life in Prince George. “I think in a smaller city like Prince George, why people have a hard time (accepting people of colour), it’s because they are not exposed often enough to the different minority groups like black people,” Laing said. “When I was a young kid in the city there weren’t very many black people and that has recently changed with the college and university and people
coming in from other places. But I think it is harder for people to become accustomed to or accept when they aren’t exposed to it, like the big cities are.” Laing was encouraged by UNBC sports information officer Rich Abney to sit on a stool at centre court at the Northern Sport Centre and share his thoughts on racism and that video is now available on the T-wolves Facebook and Instagram sites. He’s hopeful his video and the protests will continue to reshape public attitudes. “They’re giving the black community a voice and currently they’re doing a great job of that, and I really hope this isn’t something that blows over in a week or a month,” he said. “I like to think that we’ve come a long way but there’s still ground to make up and we need to keep pushing the bar to make this a better place to grow up in for any culture or race.”