Racism and Discrimination
In addition to the Covid pandemic, another big newsmaker over the last two years has been around incidents of racism and discrimination. Numerous examples of anti-black, anti-Asian, anti-Muslim and hatred towards other groups have been covered extensively in the news. Discrimination is not always based on race or skin colour as people have been targeted due to differences in religion, sexual orientation as well as physical and mental capabilities, ie., handicapped people.
There is so much broadcast news coverage of racism and discrimination incidents that it makes it look like these are new issues in our society. But of course, racism and discrimination are not new. I’ve personally been dealing with racism as an Asian-Canadian all my life ever since childhood. In many ways I can say that it was even tougher to live as a kid with an Asian ethnic background during the 1960s and 1970s when I was going to primary and middle school than the present times. Back then, there was much less diversity in our Canadian population with barely a handful of ethnic kids in each school I went to so I did not have many other ethnic kids to team up with for moral support.
So to me, racism and discrimination towards people who are different has always been there but perhaps with more visible minorities living in our neighbourhoods and increased media coverage of hate incidents, these issues today are just amplified that much more in the forefront. This in itself is a good thing since new laws are created to try and make hate crimes illegal and create more awareness but laws can only go so far since they cannot enforce how people feel inside their hearts.
My Retirement Project In Antiracism And Antidiscrimination
Now that I’m retired from corporate life and much of my former professional business activities, I have more time to do other things. Those who know me personally are already aware that I spend much of my retirement life scuba diving and skiing but in addition to these recreational sports, I’ve decided that one key retirement project of mine will be to promote antiracism and antidiscrimination.
However for me, I want to go beyond just promoting diversity and multiculturalism. I want to go beyond just promoting tolerance. It’s nice to encourage and support different cultural groups showcasing their cultures through their cuisines and arts but I want to go beyond these.
It’s great to see people from different cultures, religions, sexual orientations and physical as well as mental capabilities given opportunities in the workplace and indeed we do see many companies and organizations very successful with more diverse employees than ever before. It’s awesome to see people from different demographics working together but again, I want to go beyond the fact that many different people are able to function well together in just the workplace.
I want to show that people from different backgrounds can have very positive experiences interacting with each other not just because of getting pay cheques. I want to show different people actually enjoying each other’s company in non-working environments such as social and recreational activities. I feel that it’s with these leisure moments when we truly show people have accepted each other from different races, religions and other backgrounds.
I have always put myself in social situations where people from all different types of backgrounds are included such as with past Meetup groups I organized for social, dining and sports related activities. I’ve always had friends from different racial backgrounds too, not just Asians. My ski group has always had skiers from different backgrounds as you can see from the top photo.
The photo below shows another example when I hosted a big house party and people from all sorts of different backgrounds were invited. I personally benefited from my interactions with people from different backgrounds since I learned so much about different cultures they shared with me. As a result I feel that my own life has been enriched because of my positive exposure to different people.
So not only do I intend to continue this type of diversity in my own social and recreational time, but I want to put energy into promoting this form of antiracism and antidiscrimination. I want to involve other people initially from my geographic community to do different projects that promote antiracism and antidiscrimination but through fun ways. I want to help promote these via community projects that I hear about or ones that I start up that have some elements of diversity and antidiscrimination.
One such project that I have already started working on is called ‘In Harmony’ which is actually the title of a song I wrote to promote antiracism and antidiscrimination. I’m bringing a few people from different backgrounds to work on this music project with me and it will combine the arts (music and video) with antiracism which will personally be lots of fun for me since I do have a music background.
More details of the development of In Harmony are coming soon and this will be the first big project in my overall antiracism and antidiscrimination promotion.
