My mom told me that once, when I was a toddler, a stranger advised her to sign me up for modelling. My green eyes, medium-light skin, and curly dark brown hair gave me a certain look, they said, which was super in. My mom said no, despite the fact that mixed-race girls like myself were in demand.

Kimora Lee Simmons, who is Black and Asian, began modelling for Chanel when she was just 14 years old. It was the late 1980s, and soon, she was being mentored by Karl Lagerfeld, reportedly the first designer to put a mixed-race model on the Paris runway. Ten years later, she launched her own clothing brand, Baby Phat. It was an instant hit: people weren’t just obsessed with the clothes, but with Simmons herself wearing them down the runway.

By the early 2000s, when my toddler modelling career was put indefinitely on hold, being mixed-race in the industry was applauded: assuming, of course, that you were the right type of mix. Which is to say that your skin could be modified to suit whatever was most marketable at the moment. At the epicentre of this movement was America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), which Simmons would later be featured on as a judge. By the show’s second cycle, contestant April Wilkner’s half-Japanese, half-white race was regularly discussed. It wasn’t the only time race became a point of fashion on the show. The appearance of changing race through makeup and outfits was a challenge in cycle four.

Naima Mora, a mixed model whose background includes Black, Mexican, Native American and Irish, had her skin lightened with makeup and was posed alongside a blonde, blue-eyed toddler. Mora ultimately won the season. Her look echoed the sentiment across the modelling industry and Hollywood in general: it was the latest trend to be able to look at someone and not be able to tell where they were from.

In 2004, the Guardian dubbed this phenomenon Generation EA— ethnically ambiguous. “The fact that you can’t be sure who they are is part of their seductiveness,” casting agent Melanie Ross said in the article. What was attractive or “exotic” about my mom, a white woman from Ontario, or my dad, a Black man from New York, wasn’t something that I would fully grasp until I was a teenager. I didn’t want to be considered exotic or alluring or sexy as a mixed-race child. I wanted to see a family like mine on TV.

In elementary school, I was the only mixed kid. It was isolating: some kids made fun of my curly hair, others accused me of being adopted. Complete strangers would ask “What are you?” without even asking my name. Later, though, it seemed super common. In high school, there were at least three of us in just the school band. By the time I moved to Toronto for university, I had met tons of people who came from mixed backgrounds like mine.

Despite this, and despite growing up seeing that my identity was trendy in modelling, Hollywood tells a different story. The only time I saw a mixed family on TV actually exploring their identity was in a cartoon called American Dragon: Jake Long, and as much as I loved seeing the misadventures of a boy who was half dragon on his mom’s Chinese side, it wasn’t the same. It’s not that there aren’t mixed people on TV or in movies: Mariah Carey, Rashida Jones, Zendaya, Halle Berry, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Keanu Reeves are all examples. They also all have one thing in common: they have lighter complexions, allowing them to weave through roles easier than darker- skinned Black actors.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Viola Davis spoke candidly about not only missing out on jobs because of her darker skin tone, but also how easy it is to get cast in stereotypical roles. “If I wanted to play a mother whose family lives in a low-income neighbourhood and my son was a gang member who died in a drive-by shooting, I could get that made,” she said in the interview. “Let’s be honest. If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different.”

Colourism—the specific way that skin tone plays into prejudice and discrimination—is perpetuated by the global beauty industry. It acts within the realm of systemic racism: it’s not just that Black people are more likely to experience discrimination and racism, it is that within race, people with darker skin tones are more likely to struggle when compared to other people of colour. As a light-skinned mixed person, I benefit from this system whether I like it or not.

Season five, episode 10 of Black-ish discussed colourism in a way that TV hadn’t seen before. Protagonist Dre Johnson (played by Anthony Anderson), said: “Because we look different, we get discriminated against differently. Like in the case of O.J. [Simpson]. A magazine made his skin look darker to make him seem more villainous.” (That magazine was TIME magazine.)

Black-ish (and its spin-offs), which aired countless episodes focused on racial discrimination, has also been accused of perpetuating colourism itself, partly because of the show’s choice in casting biracial actors in the roles of Dre’s children, while also casting mixed women as the stereotypical exotic love interests.

The casting of mixed actors has sometimes been controversial. In 2016, actress Zoe Saldaña came under fire for her portrayal of Nina Simone in a biopic. Saldaña, mixed with Black and Latina ancestry, was accused of blackface after it was revealed that she was made to darken her skin and wear a prosthetic nose for the role. But at the same time, Saldaña has openly rejected the idea that just because she’s Latina, she can’t also be Black. “There’s no one way to be Black,” she said in an interview with Allure magazine. “I’m Black the way I know how to be.” (She has since apologized for playing the role.)

Saldaña’s words address the complexity of race, something that Hollywood has struggled to grasp. Though it’s common for celebrities to be mixed, they’re almost never cast as such. I would never deny Saldaña’s identity as Black; the issue is that actors aren’t given the opportunity to showcase their complexities in their roles. This contributes to toxic beauty standards of colourism and sends a horrific message, declaring that you’re only as beautiful as your skin’s ability to be marketable to the latest trend. More often than not, the trends involve lighter skin mimicking Eurocentric beauty standards.

In Hollywood, it’s easier to push mixed people into a single box. In Black-ish, the box is Black. For some actors, like Dwayne Johnson, the box depends on the project. His mix of Black and Samoan has allowed him to play roles from ancient Egyptian king (The Scorpion King, 2002) to Greek legend (Hercules, 2014) to Middle Eastern antihero (Black Adam, 2022). But usually, Johnson’s characters don’t have a background where their cultures are discussed, leaving it up to the audience to interpret.

Henry Golding, the British Malaysian star of Crazy Rich Asians, has said people told him that he wasn’t “Asian enough” to play the lead in the movie. “Just because by blood I’m not full Asian doesn’t mean I can’t own my Asianness,” he said in an interview with Bustle. He also said when he played a romantic lead in A Simple Favour alongside Blake Lively—his ideal role— the character’s race wasn’t specified: it was just a character written as a person. “It was never written as an Asian role— it’s never really highlighted that I am an Asian person married to Blake Lively. But that’s what it should be like,” he said.

But what about the mixed-race people who can’t fit comfortably into the ethnically ambiguous box? While actors like Dwayne Johnson and Golding can blend in, there’s more backlash for mixed people who aren’t Hollywood heartthrobs. Names play into casting just as much as skin tone does. Chloe Bennet, who is half white, half Chinese, struggled for years to book acting roles under her birth surname, Wang. The first audition she took after changing her name resulted in a job, she said back in 2016.

To be mixed-race is to be prepared to constantly contradict yourself. It’s always having to repeat yourself when someone accuses you of being too much of one thing or not enough of the other. It’s about never really seeing yourself accurately represented in media because there is no one way to look or be mixed. It’s unfair to say all mixed people in Hollywood should be forced to prioritize one half of their culture while simultaneously trying to prove that the other half exists. Pretending that mixed people aren’t mixed can perpetuate colourism. Dark-skinned Black girls deserve to feel beautiful and see themselves too.

You can’t choose your genetics, but you can choose to call out injustice. Whether we see ourselves reflected in media or not, there are infinite ways to celebrate culture while rejecting the idea that lighter skin is better.

Photo courtesy Kid’s Stuff [Trucs d’enfants]

Gender-neutral clothing is a growing trend in Canadian fashion, and one that is trickling down to the wardrobes of the youngest Canadians.

From chains such as La Tuque, Quebec’s Aubainerie, to small businesses such as Vancouver’s Pley Clothes, options for parents looking to build their children a genderless closet are growing across the country. Brands appear to be thriving in Canada’s larger cities and fashion hubs, including Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

Ideas of gendered children’s clothing have been evolving since the 19th century, when pastel colours for children came into fashion. Some historians say the idea of “pink for girls, blue for boys” only fully solidified itself in the public sphere in the 1940s.

Now, it seems these old ideals of gendered colours are being given up in favour of attitudes toward clothing that allow for self-expression in any colour or style, regardless of gender.

The industry is still in its early stages and its numbers can fluctuate due to self-reporting among other factors. While there is not much information available about the value of the market in Canada, industry projections see the global market for genderless clothing reaching a worth of $3.2 billion (U.S.) by 2028. Even A-list celebrities such as Megan Fox and Zoe Saldaña are raising their children to wear what they want, without gender stereotypes.

“Colour, clothing, style—everything can be gender neutral. It’s really up to us as adults to see it differently,” says Mary-Jo Dorval, the designer behind the Montreal-based gender- neutral kids’ clothing line, Trucs d’enfants. “By not labelling my clothes it makes it easier for consumers to see it like that as well.”

Dorval began her business producing alternatives to the highly gendered clothing of the fast-fashion industry seven years ago. She said she was inspired by her friend’s difficulties in finding sustainable, locally made genderless clothing for their children. Her website is chock-full of orange, purple and green shirts, pants and overalls. Most items are made from a cotton or bamboo-modal blend, and are modelled by children of all ages displaying the clothes’ stretch and fit as they play or nap.

“I really wanted to break this ‘black- grey-beige’ idea we have of gender- neutral clothing,” Dorval adds. By giving children genderless clothing, Dorval says, she provides them with the option to choose how to express themselves.

This rings true for Markus Harwood- Jones, a YA author and PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He says the decision to raise and dress his child, River, in a gender-open way was an easy one. He says he wants his child to be able to express themself now, and feel comfortable with their gender expression as they grow up, whoever they grow up to be.

“When they get older, if River is really butch, or really femme, or whatever, we want to just make sure that they have pictures that feel like, ‘oh, that’s me,’” Harwood-Jones says. His family often uses an analogy referencing starting babies on solid foods. “You don’t start your kid on solid foods on day one,” Harwood- Jones says. They want River to express their fashion sense as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, and provide River a wardrobe that helps them do just that.

Harwood-Jones adds that children show their preferences earlier than many would think. When River was six months old, Harwood-Jones, his husband and their co-parent would hold up onesies on the changing table so River could choose what they wanted to wear.

Now, at almost two years old, River takes the lead on shopping excursions, asking for purple dresses and tutus. Harwood-Jones says his family often thrifts clothing to keep costs low, but when they do buy new, they lean toward small businesses that are queer owned or gender neutral.

Dorval believes small businesses will continue to bear the torch of clothing designed for everyone once the mainstream sheen wears off. However, if parents want to ignore gender labels in big-box stores, she says they should go for it.

“You can buy a princess skirt for your little boy,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Nathan Kanasawe was 23 when they first went viral. Early one September morning in their town of Sudbury, Ontario, they decided to go on a 2 a.m. drive with a friend. While driving, they saw someone testing a Boston Dynamics robot dog.

“I did a U-turn because we’re like, ‘Well, what the fuck was that?’ And then, when we pulled up beside it, we were like, ‘That’s so cool. Can we take a video of it?’” In the video, Kanasawe and their friend could be heard saying “oh my God!” and “I love you!” excitedly to Spot, the black and yellow dog.

“I was really amazed by it. I didn’t have any other thoughts other than, ‘Oh my god, it’s a robot.’ I had no real thoughts about what it meant, politically or socially. I was just like, ‘It’s a robot dog!’”

When they went to bed, the video had gained about 60 retweets. They were woken up the next morning by their notifications going off as the post reached 50,000 retweets. The video later hit 14 million views and had thousands of retweets. Boston Dynamics themselves had to put out a statement. While the video continued trending, people started digging up Kanasawe’s tweets about being a K-pop stan, and posting pictures of their face.

It was 2020 and, though many people shared Kanasawe’s wonder, others began to criticize him for being excited about seeing the robot. “At first people were like, ‘Whoa, that’s really freaky.’ But then, people were like, ‘Have you guys heard about Boston Dynamics opening up a military contract? They’re gonna use the Boston Dynamics dogs as police dogs.’ I was like, ‘That’s fucking awful. But I didn’t know that.’”

Twitter users began commenting things like, “So, you love police dogs,” and calling Kanasawe a “bootlicker.” Some even suggested that they were part of Boston Dynamics’ marketing agency.

Kanasawe, who is Ojibwe, attempted to explain his position by responding to comments on the original tweet. “I was trying to [tell] people…I understood that these things were dangerous to people of colour as well. But it was hard to respond to everybody. I mean, I’m getting hundreds of replies in just a few minutes, over the course of maybe three days. Doing damage control in that type of situation is kind of impossible.”

Kanasawe says they didn’t realize people would become so hostile so quickly. “Because all of the comments on the video were negative, it started leaking into my other posts.” Despite the fact that they tried to maintain separation between their family and social media, Kanasawe’s family became aware of their Twitter account after the video went viral. Kanasawe says they never felt unsafe, but they did feel “exposed” and “embarrassed” as the tweet started to follow them in their everyday life.

“I had no privacy. I don’t think I realized that it was going to affect my internet footprint significantly. Ninety percent of the searches on my full name, that robot dog will just show up,” Kanasawe says. The negative backlash and subsequent pile-on led Kanasawe to delete his tweet, then his entire account. Out of an abundance of caution, he made his new Twitter account and previous Instagram accounts private.

“I really didn’t want it to happen again,” they say. “I felt very out of control of whatever narrative was being placed on that video. I think that because I didn’t have any control over it, a lot of people made assumptions about me and about my friend, too,” Kanasawe explains, noting that they hated it. They ended up wondering: should they continue to be this online?

*

Why are people so comfortable being awful to others on social media?

Faye Mishna, a University of Toronto professor in the faculty of social work, has studied bullying and cyberbullying for decades. She says there are different factors that lead to people choosing to be bullies online. One of the factors is, of course, the perception of anonymity. “If you don’t know me, you don’t see the effect that you have on me,” Mishna says. “Being online can disinhibit because it seems impersonal. You don’t see the impact you have.”

Mishna’s studies focus on how bullying, cyberbullying, and more recently, sexting, affect kids and young people—groups for whom being online has always been part of life. “When we first started, every family had a computer. They didn’t have small devices. [Those] changed everything. It was as large as the Industrial Revolution. Once you have cars and the industrial revolution, you can’t act as though you don’t.”

Statistics from Media Technology Monitor say, “Two in five Canadian kids aged two to 17 own a cell phone and 60 percent have used one in the past month. Usage (87 percent) and ownership (81 percent) are the highest among teens.” If you own a smartphone, chances are you’ve got at least one social media account. The 2018 Canadian Internet Use Survey says social media was regularly used by nine out of 10 Canadians between the ages of 15 to 34.

Since devices make us more connected, there’s more opportunity for young people to experience cyber victimization. According to Elizabeth Englander for the Journal of Pediatrics and Pediatric Medicine, “Increased digital exposure to a potential perpetrator of cyberbullying seems to increase the odds of victimization, in much the same way that greater exposure to a traditional aggressor can increase the odds of becoming an in-person target.” Simply put: the more time you spend online, the higher the possibility of being subject to cruelty on the internet.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) says in a recent study that most Canadians think social media usage has a “neutral impact on their overall wellbeing.” With that being said, there is a significant increase in the number of people who feel it can be “detrimental.”

“Slightly more Canadians feel social media is harmful (20 percent) to their wellbeing than in 2020, when 16 percent described it as such. Similarly, fewer see it as beneficial,” the study says.

The effect that cyberbullying can have on a young mind is “terrible,” Mishna says. “For young people, it can affect your ability to concentrate, to go to school, to socialize. It can make them depressed; it can make them scared to reach out, it can make them anxious.”

The Health Education & Behavior study by Meaghan C. McHugh, Sandra L. Saperstein, and Robert S. Gold “OMG U #Cyberbully! An Exploration of Public Discourse About Cyberbullying on Twitter” backs up that claim. It said that cyberbullying can lead to anger, low self-esteem, depression, and suicidal ideation.

While there is ample research about cyberbullying of kids and adolescents, the data for the phenomenon among adults is more scant. Statistics Canada discovered in a 2019 study that a quarter of young adults aged 18 to 29 years old experienced cybervictimization in 2018, with receiving unwanted sexually suggestive or explicit messages and aggressive or threatening emails, social media or text messages being among the most common forms.

The numbers also show that queer and Indigenous youth, of which Kanasawe identifies as both, are also at risk for even higher levels of cyberbullying. In fact, 52 percent of youth who don’t identify as male or female reported being victimized online.

The Statistics Canada study continues, “Besides gender, the likelihood of being victimized online was greater among sexually diverse youth (sexual attraction other than the opposite sex) and First Nations youth living off-reserve.” This means young queer and Indigenous people may be less likely to express themselves online, leaving them with fewer outlets to share and connect.

*

The attacks Kanasawe faced changed how they interact with others. Now, they tend to guard their posts, when they decide to make them, by keeping them private and limiting their number of followers. “I didn’t want a lot of people seeing tweets, and if they did, then I would delete them,” they say. “It kind of changed the way that I was on social media.”

On going viral, Mishna says it’s important to know that that kind of response is a possibility. “You can’t really anticipate it except just to know that it could happen. I think we really need to provide support for people [being bullied]. One of the things is, why is it important not to do that, not to join in and shame, because it really does affect someone terribly.”

In an interview with Paper Magazine, then 19-year-old Jazmine Stabler recalled going viral in a cruel meme posted on Twitter. The meme made fun of her facial tumor, which Stabler was born with and had grown to accept. “Why post me? I’m just over here in Alabama living my best life, attending college, minding my own business.” Her comments came after her prom pictures were posted on Twitter with the explicit intent of making fun of the young woman. She took it in stride, but not everyone who unwillingly has content go viral is able to cope with all the negative attention.

In 2019, actress Constance Wu received heavy backlash for a series of tweets criticizing the renewal of the show she starred in, Fresh Off the Boat. After taking a three-year break from social media, Wu said in 2022 that the negative reception she received led her to attempt suicide.

Going viral didn’t affect Kanasawe’s mental health the way it did Wu’s. Things took a weird turn about a year after the video was posted, though. Someone had edited the audio to include the n-word and antisemitic phrases. Kanasawe could do nothing about it, since they previously licenced the video to American pop culture blog Barstool Sports and no longer owned it. This made it impossible to get the video taken down after it went to the wrong side of the internet. Kanasawe was especially hurt that people couldn’t tell the video had been vandalized, and that others were finding the edited video funny.

“My friend and I, we’re not Jewish, and we’re not Black,” they explained. “But if we had been either of those two things, it would have probably taken a mental toll on us to see not only just the video, but the response to that video. To people just laughing and cheering it on. It would have been horrible.”

One of the worst parts of facing this kind of thing is the sense of powerlessness, the lack of agency over whether and how others understand us. “[Cyberbullying] really needs to be dealt with as a community,” Mishna says. She says it’s important that people not just pile negative comments onto viral posts. “One thing that can help is bystanders intervening. A bystander can respond privately to the victimized person just to provide some support. They are incredibly important, and research has shown that when bystanders do jump in and say something, it really makes a difference.”

Nowadays, Kanasawe doesn’t use Twitter that much. They’ve mostly migrated to TikTok, an app with its own host of cyberbullying and negativity. Though, their time on the app is spent trying to help others in the queer community. They run the account More Binders, a mutual-aid program that provides free binders to trans youth. They’ve even gone viral on TikTok, but this time around, it was more positive. “When I had a video go semi-viral [on TikTok], it was for a good purpose. That video was me talking about how I wanted to send trans kids binders for Christmas,” they say. They understand how expensive binders are, and they’re committed to sending the gender-affirming clothing to trans youth who can’t afford it.

“It’s just ironic now because without that video going even semi-viral, I wouldn’t have been able to run More Binders for the last three-ish years.”

It’s not going viral that’s the problem, then; it’s how we behave in groups when we don’t like something. Taking a second to think before commenting can go a long way toward helping ensure those who are already marginalized have a safer life, both online and off.

It’s actually pretty hard to construct a good lie. I learned this when I was sitting in a beige hospital chair, my skinny arm outstretched, purple at the spot where the wiry IV cord met my skin. I was in one of those Phase 0 studies for money, the kind where you have to stop smoking and drinking for a month in order to pass the health check. They were testing an antiviral drug, letting it bubble through my body, even though it had only been tried on rats previously. When you’re sitting around waiting for a reaction to happen, you can’t help thinking up lies. I’m a pilot. I’m good at crosswords. I like the same music as you. I feel like a stable human being.

Bridget sat in the chair across from me. “I don’t believe you,” she said. She had a purple cast that glowed in the dark. I wondered how she was eligible for this study with a broken limb. She struck me as the type of girl to worm her way into anything; she was short, and blonde, with bleached eyebrows and big boobs that I was jealous of. We got bored in the hospital, Bridget and I. It was a week-long study, and the dog- faced nurse wouldn’t let us look at our phones because it would “mess up the EKG.” I couldn’t figure out what heart-leaping content she thought we were consuming. All we got to do was walk around the research wing of the hospital, which looked so new it could have been a plastic reconstruction of a hospital, enlarged to life-sized. The other option was to write in the grey striped notebook that Bridget stole from the hospital gift shop, but I couldn’t write, it was like the antiviral drug was chipping away at my brain. Most of the time we just opted to sit and stare at each other. She was beautiful and I didn’t mind.

Bridget started telling me more and more about herself. As she talked she scrunched her nose so it wrinkled like a sea shell. Her dad was a multimillionaire. He made all his money from a multi-level marketing scheme for weight-loss milkshakes, and then he bought an island in the Atlantic Ocean. He met his second wife in Terminal 1 of Chicago O’Hare on a 24-hour layover to Berlin. Her dad doesn’t talk to her anymore because she shared an article about a lawsuit against his company on Facebook. She had played soccer all her life and realized she was gay when a girl tackled her and held her down by her ponytail. One time when she was 12 she spat in a boy’s eye after he tried to grope her. A known sex offender had once driven her to the gas station. All her cool artist friends called her Hands, because she’s really ambidextrous. She needed the money from this study to revive her band Bareback’s career after they had lost all their equipment in a fire.

I’d never met anyone so exciting. She stretched her body across the chair, her pale stomach twisting and bending like a snake. Her eyelashes were orange and long, streaking the window when she pressed her face against it to see the sunset. When she laughed her bellybutton blinked, like it was laughing too.

When Bridget and I finished the study, the dog-faced nurse scowled at us and gave us our clothes back in Pharmaprix plastic bags. We walked out the squeaky glass hospital doors and Bridget turned to me and asked to move in, just for a bit, until she could find a suitable van. I still lived with my ex- girlfriend. We were civil, but often the atmosphere was tense, the air prickly and heavy, like at any moment lightning could rip through the apartment. I tried my best not to eavesdrop on her conversations with her online therapist, whose crackly voice carried through the thin wall between our rooms. I was saving up to move out, and not just out of the apartment but abroad, I wanted to go to Ireland, I wanted to go to grad school for writing. But when Bridget asked me, I said yes. You can’t say no to Bridget.

Bridget was messy. She left half-eaten bowls of pasta, crusted with red sauce, all over the living room. She sang loudly and slightly off-key at all hours of the day. She slept like a skydiver, all her limbs flailing out, spanning the couch like she was perpetually in a state of free-fall. She became interested in tattooing and ordered a needle on Amazon, piled the living room with sketches and bottles of ink. My skin was always sore because I let her tattoo me. It felt good when she clutched my arm in her bony hand. My ex-girlfriend, sighing while eyeing the disaster in our living room, called her Behemoth Bridget.

Sometimes I felt like she was trying to take over my life. She wore my clothes. She started talking the same way I did, mimicking my Ontarian accent, popping “like” and “literally” into all her sentences. I even caught Bridget telling my ex a story that I had told her during the study, a story about me, except she pretended that it was her story, that the events had happened to her. I pointed it out, but Bridget was so animated, so convincing, that my ex believed her more. So when Bridget tattooed on herself the same tattoo she’d given me, a crooked black heart on her hipbone, then showed it to me proudly, exclaiming “I did mine even better than I did yours!” I told her it looked like shit. She asked me for money to get it removed, since she spent all of hers on the tattoo gun. For the first time since I’d met her, I told her no, and I watched her face contort with defeat, like a crumpled bedsheet.

I was preparing for a new study when I caught Bridget with my ex. I was eating healthy, vaping instead of smoking, drinking water, not writing but thinking about it. I came home from a run and heard Bridget whimpering, a high-pitched squeak, and I knew she was having sex with my ex on the same bed I used to, and I knew she was doing it to bug me. I heard my ex yell, cartoonishly: “Bridget, you’re so emotionally mature and great at hooking up!” I was sure Bridget had told her to say that. Later that day, I pushed my ear to the wall and heard my ex telling her online therapist that it was so easy to be with Bridget, easy in a way it never was with me. Bridget was fun, and uninhibited, and she didn’t ask for much. “But she’s very giving in bed,” my ex added, giggling. That’s when I decided I was done.

I told Bridget she had two weeks to find a new place to live. She stuck her tongue out at me. The next two weeks were punctuated with Behemoth Bridget pouring bleach in my cereal, Behemoth Bridget leaving her socks on my pillow, Behemoth Bridget calling me a cunt, Behemoth Bridget hanging sausages on strings from the ceiling, Behemoth Bridget burning holes in the walls with a Zippo lighter, Behemoth Bridget screaming because Bareback was booking gigs, Behemoth Bridget leaning in close to my face, telling me to kiss her, and then jumping away when my lips were so close to touching hers. Then laughing at the desire and the dread plastered across my face.

I was fed up and decided to Google her. Bridget Bartholomew. She was from Kelowna, B.C. She didn’t cover her tracks. Her dad was looking for her. He had never been to Chicago. Bareback released an Instagram statement claiming they don’t know and have never known Bridget Bartholomew. Nothing of Bridget Bartholomew’s had ever burned. She had

a court date in two weeks for grand theft auto. In pixelated newspaper photos, Bridget Bartholomew is captured on a security camera, popping the door off a chrome Mitsubishi and going for a joyride. Watching her sprawled out on the couch, orange eyelashes draped on her cheeks, I didn’t know whether I loved her or hated her. I sent her dad a Facebook message before I could think twice. I dropped a pin so he would know exactly where to find her.

Behemoth Bridget left my apartment in a cop car. I thought she would put up a fight, kick and scream, scratch at the officers’ eyeballs, but she was silent, glowering at me from the window. I watched the car disappear over the Van Horne bridge, its red and blue lights blurring into the glow of duplexes in the distance. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had my credit card in the back pocket of her jeans. The whole way back to Michigan, where she would go to reunite with her dad and await her trial, she was tapping viciously on her cracked iPhone screen, her nails clicking against the glass, buying things I couldn’t afford: a VacPack machine, a $1,000 men’s razor, a 100-year-old bottle of wine. She bid on Liz Phair’s underwear on eBay and won. She donated $200 apiece to random right-wing political campaigns, and I was spammed with emails from a mayor in Florida thanking me profusely. She bought a star in Orion’s Belt and named it after me, texted me a photo of the certificate. She sealed my fate for me: my credit score plummeted. I couldn’t move out. My ex and I stayed living together, stewing in the sour air of her absence. She did all this, I imagine, with a soft smile on her face, thumbing the embossed letters on the card which spelled out my name.

I think about Bridget sometimes, imagine kissing her lips, running my fingers from her forehead to the split ends at the bottom of her hair. I imagine what I’d say to her, if I were to call her and reach her in Michigan or jail or in some other girl’s apartment. I’ve thought about it constantly, sifted through all the lies, jotted them down in the grey striped notebook she gave me, started to form sentences, alternative realities, positioned myself inside them, tried to explain the complete destruction of my life, the debt, the times I’ve cried on the phone to sympathetic but useless Toronto-Dominion Bank employees, the times my pen ran out of ink in my hurried longing to understand her. I’ve finally figured it out. I would say: “Listen, you are a mean, bitter girl,” then pause for dramatic effect, “but that was a brilliant story.”

Sometime around 2005, in the halcyon days of the internet when it was still treading its path to ubiquity, I peaked. Hunkered down late at night in a small room exclusively dedicated to housing a family desktop computer, I used the free peer-to-peer file-sharing client LimeWire to pirate the less-free peer-to- peer file-sharing client LimeWire Pro. The genius of such a move is one I will never again equal. From there, I sifted through mislabelled songs, copious malware, and recordings of Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” until I found something called digital drugs. The pirated folder contained audio files supposedly engineered to simulate, using specialized sound waves, the sensations of different substances.

Back then, on the precipice of puberty, I knew about drugs the way I know about the concept of enlightenment now. That is, I knew vaguely what sensation I was expecting without any firm idea of when I’d know I was experiencing it. With a smorgasbord of different drugs’ effects at my fingertips, I ran the gauntlet. Beyond the whole medley that appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there were audio sequences said to recreate the feeling of certain experiences: swimming in a frigid lake, déjà vu, having sex with a co-worker on an out- of-town work trip, confessing your love to a best friend, the anticipation floating around a marathon’s starting gun. I was surprised to find that these promises felt accurate: the sounds did take my mind to another place. To some degree, each felt like dreaming for the first time, like being dropped in the middle of an already running narrative and left to gradually fumble around for my place in the proceedings before being suddenly yanked into another thread of another unfolding story only to start all over again.

Of course, I had no idea whether any of it actually was accurate, or if anything was happening at all. As it turns out, that was a more difficult question than it would initially appear. What was being advertised as “digital drugs” were combinations of sound frequencies known as binaural beats, and their legitimacy, efficacy, and potential medical and recreational impacts remain up for debate.

*

Binaural beats were first discovered by Prussian physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839 by striking tuning forks on each side of a student’s head and learning they heard the difference in frequency as a slow, third beat. Dove didn’t pursue the discovery further. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the work of Dr. Gérald Oster, that binaural beats were taken as anything more than a mild curiosity by the scientific community. In 1973, Scientific American published Oster’s article “Auditory Beats in the Brain,” which outlined the differences between monaural beats and binaural beats. Oster described monaural beats as only requiring one ear to perceive. Binaural beats, on the other hand, he described as “perceived when tones of different frequency are presented separately to each ear,” which requires the use of both ears to localize and selectively filter out certain sounds, such as when eavesdropping on a conversation at a large, noisy party. His observations and insight opened the question of whether binaural beats could be a new, rich vein for cognitive and neurological research.

Later work further clarified the binaural beat effect as something akin to an auditory illusion. In the simplest terms, binaural beats aren’t a sound, per se. More accurately, they’re a perception of sound when two pure tones, played at a different frequency into each ear, create the recognition of an additional modulation of tone within the brain. This third tone is the binaural beat. Despite the technical lack of another tone, the brain registers the difference in frequency between the two tones as a third, distinct tone. For example, when a pure tone is played at an 80 Hz frequency in the left ear and a 90 Hz pure tone is played in the right ear, the brain would perceive a third tone at a frequency of 10 Hz. Most interestingly, the origin of this third tone is perceived by the listener to be from within their own head.

In the 1980s and later, neurological and auditory research began to focus jointly on the reasons our brains create this effect and on whether there are any potential usages, specifically whether it can entrain mood or perception or— perhaps—even act analogously to a drug. The optimistic belief in the ability of binaural beats to synthesize a selected result is based on two strong reasonings. One is that, for most of human history, music and sound have been used to tune into a particular headspace. All of us have a song or two that changes our mood, positively or negatively, simply by hearing it. The second reason for belief in the potential of binaural beats is due to our greater scientific understanding of brain waves with the invention and wider use of magnetic imaging.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that reads electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp which looks familiar to anyone who watches horror movies, we can see how brain cells communicate by measuring electric impulses. Our brain cells are always in communication, and the frequency with which they are in communication shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording. In 2016, researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in India used an EEG test to observe and group brain waves. Their research concluded there to be five main frequency bands of brain waves that are believed to correspond to our emotional states.

When we’re asleep, our brain waves are in Delta, low frequency, because there isn’t much to communicate beyond the messages required to keep us alive. During a deeply relaxing scenario, when our minds tend to wander into daydreams, such as being pampered at a spa, our brains are likely in Theta, which operates at a frequency between 4 to 8 Hz and relates to our subconscious mind. A slightly higher frequency, up to around 12 Hz, will likely be registered when someone is passively focused and generally relaxed. Thus, it’s likely this range—Alpha—will correspond to someone who is rewatching The Office for the dozenth time. Basically, it’s being in a general good mood free of the need to meaningfully engage with an external source. The Beta wavelength is typically our normal frequency. It operates between 12-35 Hz and can range from relaxation to anxiety depending on the world around us. The frequency band with the highest Hz, anything above 35, is Gamma, which signals a heightened degree of concentration. This is the wavelength of our brains when we’re focused on a task or situation.

All this is to say that it’s believed by some scientists, and binaural beat connoisseurs, that we can use the brain’s perception of binaural beats to simply recalibrate our current wavelength into whichever frequency band we desire to experience. But the question remains: does it work?

*

Back in 2005, I was an audio addict, digitally dosing myself on LSD, heroin, mescaline, and strange designer drugs only known by some combination of letters and numbers. As far as I knew, the sensations were similar to their physical counterpoints. Digital cannabis made me giggle. I’d have vivid daydreams on audio psychedelics. Binaural beats mimicking cocaine had me impatient and talkative, jittery with a vague sense of violence. Of course, that was the past. And time has a way of softening people, so now I use binaural beats to achieve a flow state of concentration or induce drowsiness for a power nap.

A pilot study conducted by the Oregon Health & Science University and the National College of Natural Medicine on the neuropsychologic, physiologic, and electroencephalographic effects of binaural beat technology on humans found no significant differences between the experimental and control condition in any of the EEG measures. But in that same study, the self-reported measurements of the participants saw an increase in mood and a decrease in overall anxiety. Better put: there was no scientific reason that participants felt an improvement in mood, yet they did.

There must be a motive behind why people are using binaural beats. Anecdotally speaking, I certainly feel calmer when I listen to one of the myriad binaural beats soundscapes that are easily findable online, so isn’t that the same thing as being calmer, even if my brainwaves disagree? After all: I think, therefore I am. That may be the entire point, suggests Dr. Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. “There are a lot of activities that affect our nervous system and can produce psychoactive effects, including meditation, chanting, exercising, even doing art,” says Barratt. “Yes, we can consider binaural beats through [this] lens.”

And I’m not alone in using them for this reason. In 2021, Barratt was a researcher with the Global Drug Survey (GDS), an independent research study that aimed to collect data on drug use patterns and trends worldwide. When questioned on the survey, five percent of the over 30,000 respondents said they used binaural beats to experience altered states at least once within the last year.

Dr. Cristina Gil López, a cognitive neuroscience researcher and educator, writes on her website that the beats have become trendy due to our increasing difficulty to focus and be productive in our daily activities. We live in a state of permanent distraction, so we seek new ways to mentally focus and decrease off-putting distractions, like anxiety. Other studies echo the sentiment that exposure to binaural beats can boost cognition by reducing anxiety and the perception of pain, albeit modestly.

So where do we go from here? While large-scale investigations comparing the effects of binaural beats specifically and auditory beats as a whole are still rare, there are some promising case studies for their potential application. One such avenue is the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP is a therapeutic tool that uses specially filtered music designed to stimulate the vagus nerve, which carries signals between the brain and heart. The SSP is intended to induce the body and mind into feeling a sense of safety. There have been successful case studies that show SSP exposure can improve social awareness in children and adults with autism and help to reduce chronic pain in older patients.

Barratt herself underwent the protocol as part of her research. For 30 days, she listened to audio files as part of the SSP and may have discovered the everyday benefits binaural beats could have on many of us. “I felt some positive effects and there [weren’t] any downsides. It could all be placebo in the sense that taking time every day to listen to some special music may be an intervention in itself.”

While writing this piece, I thought about what initially drew me to these files. The truth is I have no idea. There was no larger reason behind accessing them beyond the fact that I could.

It took roughly 135 years from a Prussian physicist striking tuning forks on opposite sides of the room and noticing the effect for another researcher to even give that effect a name. Since then, we’ve seen vast leaps in technology that have allowed scientists to measure, with as much certainty as currently exists, that nothing is happening within the brain that can explain why binaural beats can improve our mood and decrease our anxiety levels. But people who listen to them claim that they do, time and time again. In defiance of the science, they feel that listening to binaural beats can impact their mood.

Maybe in another 135 years we’ll discover that they’re right. Maybe we’ll still only know that the effects are something many people enjoy. Maybe that’s all the reasoning I needed to enjoy binaural beats as much as I did when I was 12.

I know it’s all the reason I need to enjoy them now.

In the summer of 2023, 200 African asylum seekers were left homeless in Toronto. With nowhere to go, they had no choice but to sleep on the streets after escaping poverty, political violence and climate disaster back home.

While municipal, provincial and federal governments twiddled their thumbs, Black and African organizations in the city rallied together to provide shelter, food and assistance to the group of Black migrants. One of the leading organizations behind the effort was the Rwandan Canadian Healing Centre (RCHC), a Toronto-based group that provides support to Rwandans and others facing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by violence and war. Forwarding a mission of hope, the RCHC gathered collaborators and accomplished what the three levels of government could not: they found local shelter spaces for the migrants.

Canada has a 156-year history of welcoming migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Today, the country is more diverse than it has been in over a century. In 2021, according to Statistics Canada, more than 8.3 million people, or 23 percent of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in the country. This marked the largest proportion since Confederation, beating the previous 1921 record of 22.3 percent and making it the highest number among the G7. People from all over the world have left violent situations to build a new home in the Great White North. This is the story of the Rwandan community as well.

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi is one of the worst atrocities in modern human history. In the span of 100 days of chaos, close to one million Rwandans were slaughtered by their fellow citizens largely due to their ethnicity. Millions of Rwandans, mainly from the Tutsi heritage, fled the landlocked nation to escape the carnage.

By 2016, Toronto was home to over 1,000 Rwandans. Today, most of the city’s Rwandan population is made up of older Rwandans who came as refugees post-genocide, and a younger generation too young to remember the horrors, but who still live with the scars of that time and long for the promise of a prosperous future. Part of that prosperous future means bringing the Rwandan community together to collectively heal from the trauma of war.

*

Kizito Musabimana escaped the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a child and came to Canada as an immigrant after spending years in Kenya. When he got to Toronto, he didn’t expect to spend time unhoused, but that’s part of his story. Now, he’s the founder and executive director of the RCHC. Since adopting Canada as his home, Musabimana has been a leader in the city, heralding the effort to find suitable shelter space for the African migrants over the summer. Facing his own history of PTSD, Musabimana knows how powerful community is, and how important physical spaces like homes, community centres, and third spaces are to mental health.

With the help of other East African organizations, the RCHC wants to create a purpose-built neighbourhood for Toronto residents in the Rwandan community and other groups dealing with trauma. The organization is also working with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada’s national housing agency, inside their National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs, a project aimed at finding community-driven solutions to the affordable housing crisis. The labs offer local and national organizations funding and expertise to help them solve complex housing problems. One successful project that started within the labs is the Gender Transformative Housing Supporting Women Leaving Violent Relationships: Co-creating Safe-at-Home Hamilton. Another, in association with the Canada Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Research Network (CanFASD) and the Alberta Clinical and Community-Based Evaluation Research Team (ACCERT), aims to create a framework to house youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Through the Solutions Lab, the CMHC provides groups like CanFASD or the RCHC with up to $250,000 through a competitive application process to develop a community-centred plan to solve housing issues as they relate to specific populations. “As a newcomer in Canada who has experienced homelessness,” Musabimana says, “I would have greatly benefitted from an affordable housing project like this, which focuses on community and connection that offers resources to navigate a new country.”

Together with the CMHC, the collective of African communities created the African Canadian Affordable Housing Solution/Model. The model is a framework that details all of the important elements necessary for their vision of a purpose-built neighbourhood. To determine what’s needed, Rwandan and East African communities participated in several interviews, surveys, and workshops to flesh out what an urban village should provide. The design of the AfriCanadian model hinges on three interwoven perspectives: intergenerationality, cooperativism and holisticism.

More than most, African families live together in one place. Grandparents, parents and adult children often cohabitate together as a way to keep familial bonds strong. Building housing with room for multiple generations of residents under one roof is a key element of the plan. The model also hopes to set up cooperative networks of self-governance, so community members have direct decision-making power in how their neighbourhood runs. Most importantly, it offers a holistic approach to mental health. With proper access to public space, recreation and onsite counselling, Musabimana wants the project to centre healing. “We want to recreate the support and community of a traditional African village for African Canadians living in Canada who haven’t been able to experience it. To bring a taste of home to the community,” Musabimana said at the onset of the project.

As of November 2023, the group has already created the framework thanks to community engagement. So what’s next? “Once we are able to identify land, then we will have everything we need to begin the development phase,” Musabimana says. But that is not so easy. The path to housing development, and to carving out space in Toronto, is filled with trouble.

*

Back home in Rwanda, the government, led by Paul Kagame, has been attempting to restore a country that almost destroyed itself. In 2005, the Rwandan government began creating the legal framework necessary to allow agricultural cooperatives that included housing to flourish within the nation’s market economy. Not only smart economic planning, cooperatives were also meant to build reconciliation among a population scarred by trauma. According to International Labour Organization documents, cooperatives in the post-genocide period flourished as many felt the need for protection and safety within the social grouping that they provided.

Here in Canada, the Rwandan diaspora does not have the resources to build the sort of communal neighbourhoods that provide safety, healing and community. A small but growing population in Canada, Rwandese families face the same housing issues other Toronto residents do, but without a historic legacy of property ownership. Although statistics on the rate of homeownership for Rwandan Canadians are scarce, the Black homeownership rate is only 45 percent, while it is 66.5 percent for the general Canadian populace. The reasons stretch from anti-Black racism to housing policy, but it also has lots to do with the generational effect. Generational Canadians have had the time to create communities when housing prices were lower, and because of that many have managed to hold onto legacy housing. The Rwandan community, and many other Black communities (though not all) have relatively recent histories in Canada and have become victims of the jump in housing prices over the last two decades.

In contrast, communities with a longer history in places like Toronto have managed to carve out areas of the city to protect their land rights. One great example is Toronto’s main Chinatown, which has avoided the worst of gentrification through collective organizations like the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust (TCLT).

The TCLT is a community-controlled effort to build an inclusive, culturally competent, and ever-evolving Chinatown in Toronto. Launched in 2023, the land trust is designed to protect the historic Chinatown community from condo developments. They acquire, develop and steward land, in perpetuity, for community needs and benefit. The organization was established by managing director Chiyi Tam, but is governed democratically by its members. An urban planning expert, Tam leveraged her experience with land trusts in both Parkdale and Kensington Market and decided to work with her community to save it from the host of developers buying properties along the Spadina Avenue neighbourhood.

Comparatively late to the game, the Rwandan and East African communities are now trying to get onto that property ladder. They’re searching for a sense of home, support, and for some, a sense of safety for the first time.

*

A filmmaker by training, Musabimana is a bit out of his depth when talking about housing and development, but the African housing project is filled with experts who believe in his vision. A partner with the RCHC, Jonathan Okubay is the executive director of New Nakfa, a nonprofit organization that caters to Eritrean Canadian youth. He has a background in housing development and has become an instrumental part of moving from the CMHC’s solutions lab, which led to the model, into the development phase.

One of the major hurdles now, Okubay says, is getting the city on board to help drive down the price of construction. He says the project will cost anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 up front. “We’re moving into actual implementation and looking at sites for potential development, and at how we get the CMHC and the feds and the city involved in making the project feasible,” Okubay says. Part of that feasibility has to do with finding a place to build in an already crowded market. “Ideally, we would like to have it in a central location with access to transit nodes, schools and grocery stores,” he says. “Despite the difficulty…due to high land prices, in an ideal world, we would like it to be in Toronto.”

Canadian real estate is some of the most expensive in the world, and the costs are only growing. They’re wildly inaccessible in Toronto, where the price of materials and labour has grown to be one of the highest in Canada. The average low estimate for constructing the hard costs (labour, materials and equipment) of multifamily homes was $250 per square foot. In Calgary, the average low estimate was $190. Currently, Toronto’s hard cost estimates are roughly keeping pace with smaller cities like Phoenix and Denver, which sit at around $180 (U.S.)—or about $244.

Where Toronto exceeds most other cities in cost is at the government level. Fees and levies to build are astronomical in the city. A 2018 real estate study by Altus Group found that fees levied by the government added around $165,000 per unit for high-rise condos and $206,000 for single-family housing. Once the price of land, developer profits and government fees are taken into account, Toronto becomes almost inhospitable to any sort of affordable housing. This means finding a good developer is part of the myriad of hurdles for the community in general.

Musabimana, Okubay and their team have been stuck dealing with government bodies and talking to stakeholders, all the while holding the community close. It has been a process, but one guided by purpose. “I would say we are mainly searching for a land and development feasibility study, then the next phase is fundraising,” said Musabimana.

With all of these challenges, it would be easy for many to get discouraged. Still, a few years ago, no one would have thought this tiny little segment of the city would be part of such a radical vision. Musabimana is positive that the RCHC’s model, co-created with the community, will become a reality. Based on Okubay’s development experience, he believes they could start building the project by spring 2025.

If everything goes to plan, Toronto could soon have an African village in the middle of its urban jungle.