K, however, was a little overwhelmed when trying to listen to a story her grandfather was telling. She saw it as a lack of manners—exactly how it would have seemed to a young girl outnumbered by loud grown-ups. She hadn’t yet grasped the latitude adults grant each other when celebrating. As K saw it, we were obstructing her grandfather. Everything she had learned in life until then told her we were in the wrong.

She tried to silence us. I looked to my girlfriend to see if there would be a hush or an idle threat of bedtime (I had yet to earn a say in such matters). Sure enough, the moment came: she went over to K’s chair and pulled it out. Here we go, I thought. But instead of chiding her, she moved K over to her grandfather’s lap and he told his story directly to her. The rest of us continued on. Problem solved.

The moment stuck with me. It illustrated how quickly I assumed some kind of reprimand was necessary. My girlfriend, to her credit, chose to empathize with her daughter’s point of view and solve her problem. Though I know hers was the better decision, I still doubt that my internal reaction to the situation was particularly unusual, or that it had anything to do with K’s actions at all.

There’s a strong connection between the behaviour we expect from children and what we experience in the public at large. If we’re faced with adversity we think is illegitimate—at home, at work, or in line at a coffee shop—the easiest response is to enforce compliance without debate or explanation. No talking back. No questioning the boss. No butting in line. Growing up, I knew this as the “because I said so” rule. Employed by my parents, teachers, coaches, and eventually my peers, it meant the response was predetermined. I’ve always felt that shutting someone down like this was a desperate grasp for dominance. Such brutal effectiveness is hard to deny, though—and it is understandably addictive.

Dropping the proverbial hammer allows those in dominant positions to temporarily enjoy the illusion of willful obedience. But other crises will undoubtedly emerge, and regularly forcing weaker parties to comply can only lead to resentment and weakened capacities for compromise. We often hear campaigning politicians lauding disagreement as the lifeblood of democracy, although they entertain it as little as possible in practice. Our system is designed to suppress dissent with prorogations, omnibus bills, and majority governments.

It was just after my Easter dinner that Bill C-51, Canada’s controversial “anti-terror” legislation, flew through Parliament without much debate. Framed by the government as a necessary measure for keeping us safe, the few who spoke out against the bill were tarred as terrorist sympathizers. During committee debates this past March, Conservative MP Rick Norlock maligned the senior counsel for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. “Are you simply fundamentally opposed to taking terrorists off the street?” Norlock asked. MP LaVar Payne then mused that Greenpeace Canada shouldn’t worry about the bill unless the organization itself was a national security threat.

The Conservative party rhetoric coaxes us to be tough on our enemies, but their bill forces us to be tough on ourselves by broadly redefining security threats and diminishing Canadians’ access to vital information. With this new law, Parliament made an aggressive statement: we will have an obedient nation. And despite the promises from opposition party leaders to alter the legislation after this October’s federal election, reasonable dissent doesn’t resume its former health after it’s been crushed. It becomes something more bitter and intense. When I consider my emotional reaction to the bill’s passage, part of me wonders if I narrowly avoided fomenting the same feelings in K during our Easter dinner.

The recent surge of stories about police abuse against unarmed black civilians in the U.S. has too generated an international conversation about power, who has it, and how it’s misused. In The New Yorker’s August 2015 profile of Darren Wilson, the former police officer who killed Michael Brown and incited Ferguson’s unrest, Wilson describes his perspective on life as a refutation of historical context. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him,” he said. Context is inconvenient for Wilson because it prevented him from doing his former job the way he wanted to do it—by assessing only the immediate moment. His myopic view of the power he represented, and ultimately misused, echoes in the Harper government’s ad hominem attacks on critics. Refusing to negotiate meaningfully with dissent only exacerbates divisions. No press release, community engagement plan, or election promise can rebuild public trust once breached.

Power today is less a goal than a verdict, a privilege shored up in defence of an ever-increasing roster of enemies. Our superhero movie franchises portray it as both a responsibility and threat, and these fantasies hint at a darker undercurrent in the mirror of popular culture.

What Tony Stark does with his Iron Man suit isn’t as worrying as the tempting dream that such a suit should exist to set the world right. Our enthusiasm for billionaire Bruce Wayne’s extralegal vendetta against Gotham’s criminals hinges on a common agreement on the black and white of right and wrong. Somewhere in Christian Bale’s gravelly timbre, there’s a hint of former Conservative MP Vic Toews’ binary thinking: “Either stand with us or with the child pornographers.” Oppressive actions like C-51 don’t begin and end in party ranks, nor do they originate in comic books. They’re rooted in our broader cultural attitudes towards obedience.

In Stanley Milgram’s 1961 psychology experiment, he famously duped participants into thinking they were administering an audio-based word-pairing test to fellow volunteers in another room. With each incorrect answer, the attending scientist commanded the person asking questions to shock their peer at increasing voltages. Milgram found that, when prodded by an authority figure, 65 percent of participants were willing to go to the maximum of 450 volts. (There were no actual shocks—only actors and prerecorded howls of pain.) As Milgram wrote in 1974, “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” He goes on to connect a person’s early experiences with authority to their adult perspectives on obedience. This is what concerns me most as someone new to parenting.

I don’t know if there is an ideal obedient state to seek out in children. Contributing to a person’s growth is complex but I’m learning to be a positive influence on K. In the conversation we had after Easter dinner this year, my girlfriend told me it’s important to consider the kind of person we want her daughter to become. If K is to be someone who is unafraid to stand up to power, that process has to begin now. Its genesis is in the small moments when we negotiate our control.

French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu spoke of the human body as the most indisputable materialization of class: our clothing, diet, hairstyle and even posture function as signs within a larger system of social capital. Embodied socio-cultural capital and the ability to cash in on undeserved privileges associated with having the “right” physical aesthetics isn’t new knowledge to me. However, when faced with my falling tresses, I began to reflect on my identity in deep(er), often more embarrassing ways than I ever had before.

I mean, how dare I complain about thinning hair? I am not bald outside of one pesky patch. Here I am a Black, queer, fat feminist tooting body confidence one packed keynote at a time, with clearly more important systemic fights to shoulder than obsessing over my hairline. I’d ask myself, “What truly is your hair’s utility anyhow Jill?” I mean really… less hair means less participation in the capitalist beauty salon culture’s regulatory dos and don’ts, right?

The politics of hair is laced in all sorts of interconnected, intersecting histories of racist, sexist, and classist narratives. Hair has long been used as a tool to measure a person’s self-worth, poise, professionalism, desirability, strength, intelligence, and connection to culture. This is especially true if you’re a woman, and even more so if you’re a woman of colour.

To be faced with the gradual shrinking of my hair was to learn to lean into and listen to my abject body—a scalp, a spectacle to some, that I wanted to hide, cast off, and replace. I found resilience in communities of others living with alopecia. Since my diagnosis, I’ve met amazing people, mostly women, and together we’ve created Canadian Association of Scarring Alopecias (CASA) Fired Up!, a Toronto-based alopecia support, education, and advocacy group.

This Abject Body will share stories about bodies not often spoken about or counted. Some may say bodies of difference or defiance. I want to share how we live, talk back and take up space in places and through initiatives that demonstrate the possibility, strength and socio-cultural capital of the abject.

I’m still travelling. My truth is I became a better Black, queer, fat feminist when I remembered it was okay to sit momentarily in despair, to embrace the abject, and to seek out community to help get through the long-term journey. My hair goes and comes but more times than not I travel without my old wool hat.

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

About five years ago, a rumour began circulating in South Korea that Indian and Filipino nationals might become eligible for E-2 English teaching visas. At this time, I had already been teaching in Korea for eight years on and off. It had been a wonderful resource for paying for backpacking trips through Asia and boozy Saturday nights out—never mind food, shelter, and clothing. Yet, while I knew there were likely millions of Asian teachers equally or better qualified than me, I feared an influx of new teachers would probably result in significant pay cuts and fewer job vacancies.

I needn’t have worried. In the end, as a long-time Korean friend casually told me, “Korean mothers want white teachers.” As a white Canadian it meant my job was safe—an uncomfortable relief, if there ever was one. Today, E-2 visas for Native Speaking English Teachers (NSETs) are still confined to Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. No matter how fluent your English, if you are not a national of those seven countries (or a Korean) you may not legally teach English in South Korea. Of the seven countries, Canada is the second most well-represented, after the U.S. In 2012 , 17.5 percent of E-2 visas were stamped in Canadian passports, representing about 3,500 individuals—the vast majority of them white.

Besides the right visa, the only requirement for potential hires is to have a four-year university degree in any subject. Though the market has tightened in recent years, jobs are still plentiful compared to home, with between 20,000–25,000 positions opening every year. Some teachers who travel to Korea are placed in public schools, but most—about two-thirds, according to a 2012 article in the Korea Times newspaper—teach at private, for-profit after-school academies called hagwons. They are usually placed there by recruiters, who work freelance and are paid by schools to find them teachers.

By far, the vast majority of those hired are white. It is Korean custom to include photos with resumes, making it easy to screen out non-whites—not to mention anyone who might be considered too old, too big, or insufficiently attractive. Education-obsessed Korean parents pay an average of $200 per month per student for English lessons at hagwons, though the fee often tops $400 , about the same as my share of the monthly rent and bills, or two weeks’ worth of groceries for a family of four. NSETs usually earn between $2,400-$2,800 per month, usually with free housing. Combined with low taxes and a marginally lower cost of living, it’s easy for a teacher to save up to $1,000 per month, plus a mandatory bonus, equivalent to one month’s salary, paid at the end of the contract—a tempting offer for any young graduate drowning in debt.

According to BBC News, in 2013 there were just under 100,000 hagwons in the country, with over three-quarters of Korean children reportedly attending one—not just for English, but for math, Korean, science, as well as non-academic subjects like martial arts, swimming, and piano. The best hagwons (meaning the ones with the most graduates attending top universities) are located in rich neighbourhoods like Gangnam, where real estate prices are through the roof. NSETs are hired because it’s felt their pronunciation is superior to Koreans’, but also because it’s prestigious to have a foreign teacher for your child—even more so if that teacher is white.

Like everywhere else, whiteness has a pedigree in Korea. I have never had to dig deep to explain “white privilege” to my students—they immediately understand what I mean. In 2009, for instance, a study at Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul (a university set up by American missionaries), detailed how Korean students were more likely to want to make friends with whites than blacks or Southeast Asians. And in 2009, Lee Incho, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, published an article in the journal Language & Literacy, analyzing Korean English textbooks. He found the vast majority of artists profiled in the texts were white and Western, and only white and Western authors, in particular, were profiled.

Profiles of non-Western arts and artists included value neutral descriptions, rather than the glorious descriptions paid to Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the ballet. “In addition to the continued recognition of education as a means for gaining more power, Koreans eagerly search for role models who have already achieved what they perceive to be global power,” Incho writes. “Koreans are eager to position themselves closer to these groups, as opposed to the non-West, the Periphery, or non-Whites.”

Nadia Kim, a Canadian-born academic at Loyola University in Los Angeles, argues in her book Imperial Citizens that it’s white North Americans who most convey the concept of advanced, global society to South Korea —Koreans who, only 60 years ago, were some of the poorest people in the world. Blacks, Asians, and others are perceived to represent the “backward” Third World. Kim writes that Koreans “have been profoundly affected by U.S. mass-media saturation, whether in the form of pro-military programs on American Forces Korea Network, Gone with the Wind, commercials for Uncle Ben’s rice, Mission Impossible III, Peyton Place, or CNN’s coverage of the 1992 LA unrest.” She adds that when mixed with Korea’s national myth of a single bloodline, many Koreans’ erroneous conclusion is that “real” Americans and Canadians are white.

Jenny Jackson-Smith, 40, is from Ottawa and black. She has always loved travel, and after completing a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate, she decided to try her hand at teaching in South Korea. When dealing with recruiters, she was often asked to hide her race—or otherwise be told she couldn’t get the job she wanted. Recruiters weren’t happy when they discovered she was born in Bermuda, she says, and at least three asked, “Oh my goodness, are you a black person?” She could tell then that the interview was not going anywhere good.

Jackson-Smith did get a job (she doesn’t remember how long it took) but her first day at school was brutal. She’s not sure whether the school’s director knew she was black, or whether he thought she may be light-skinned enough to pass as white. Either way, when Jackson-Smith arrived, the director, as she puts it, “freaked out.” He commanded she not tell the children she was black, hoping apparently, that they wouldn’t notice. “I pretended that I didn’t understand him,” she says. “It pissed me off so much.”

A few months later, Jackson-Smith, returned from a vacation in the Philippines with braids and a dark tan. Even if she wanted to, she could not longer hide her blackness and phones at the hagwon were ringing off the hook. Parents wanted to know why they weren’t told earlier the teacher was “an African.”

Genny Vu, 24, a Vietnamese-Canadian from Montreal, estimates that for every job offer she received, her similarly qualified, white boyfriend would get at least three. “It usually started with one of us sending the recruiter an email with our information and it ended when we sent them our pictures,” says Vu.

It was once common to see recruiters advertising “whites only” jobs, but these are becoming scarcer, not least because the newest recruitment tool of choice, Craigslist, won’t allow them, per its terms of use. But recruiters say most schools privately ask for white teachers only. For the past four years, Jay Ahn has worked for a large recruiting firm, dealing with many of the large hagwon chains in Korea. He says most hagwons “pretty much demand North American, white-looking females, who are somewhat attractive.” If those requirements are met, often the hagwons won’t even ask for an interview. They will simply hand him a contract and say, “proceed.”

In the case of white males, he adds, a school will usually wait a few days, and then ask for an interview. If he sends an Asian or a black teacher’s resume, “most times they just ignore me.” He says hagwon directors twice questioned his abilities as a recruiter when he sent nonwhite teachers, asking “is this all you’ve got?” In one instance, Ahn sent a hagwon director a non-white teacher’s resume, and received no call back. Ahn then sent a white male’s name, and was told he would get a call back later. Then he sent a white female’s name and was called back in 30 minutes, with a request for an interview. It’s a common pattern, he says.

He says it’s the biggest hagwon chains that want the whitest teachers, because parents pay the most money to send their kids to those hagwons. While Ahn refuses to do so, he also says many recruiters will charge hagwons $1,300 for placing a white, North American female, but only $800 for a visible minority. Ben Glickman, CEO of Vancouver-based Footprints Recruiting, adds there are jobs for non-white teachers, if they are persistent. He says potential teachers should consider working at public schools instead of hagwons, since there is no profit motive at the public schools.

I repeatedly contacted five of the largest hagwon chains for comment: YBM/ECC, Jeongsang Language School (JLS), GnB, Avalon, and Chungdahm. All are household names in Korea, and together they run hundreds of hagwons throughout the country. I received no reply from any of them. However, the manager at one branch of Chungdahm was quoted in the Korea Observer, an internet newspaper, about a “whites-only” ad posted in March this year. “John,” who wouldn’t give his real name to the paper, confessed: “I am acutely aware of discrimination as I am a Canadian citizen. We cannot hire non-white teachers because we get too many complaints from parents.” He continued, “Hiring only Caucasians is not a rule but a common practice in Chungdahms as well as other language academies.”

Though it’s easy to simply categorize Korea as a virulently racist nation—as newspaper polls, dozens of academics, and even I have done—the racism reflects back on us, in Canada and the West. Koreans are acutely aware that whites continue to dominate top jobs in Canada and the U.S. They see minorities represented in the Western media as gangsters, pizza delivery boys, befuddled immigrants, or nothing at all. If Korean mainstream society embraces racism, it picked up on these racist cues from the West.

“I have a lot more forgiveness towards Korean racism than towards Canadian racism,” says Jackson-Smith. “The racism in Canada—Canadians often times don’t want to admit that it’s racism.” Just like in Korea, in Canada Jackson-Smith feels she’s black first and an individual second. Ziem Phala, a black Canadian who has taught in Korea for four years, agrees that in Canada, Canadian-ness often equals whiteness. “When people ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and I say I’m from Ottawa, the second question is, ‘No, where are you really from?’ Whereas no one is going to ask that of another white person, even if they’re straight off the boat from Italy.”

While looking for a new job, a black American friend of mine complained that he had never had to deal with discrimination like this ever before—and he’s from Los Angeles. But he admits that race is a tricky thing, and told me what is said out-loud in Korea is simply said under a person’s breath back home—or just shown on TV. Korea, a nation sealed off from the world only 120 years ago, did not develop its racism in a vacuum. It was imported, just like its English teachers.

Illustration by Miki Sato

The months leading up to my graduation this spring were a mix of excitement and desperation. Excitement, because after four years of journalism school at Ryerson University my love for academia had turned sour—I was aching to be done. Desperation, because I knew once I was done, my unemployment would be more apparent and stark than ever. I pored through job listings for hours on end, constantly tweaking my resumé, hitting the “apply” button so many times I started to forget which jobs I had actually applied for.

No emails back. No phone calls. Not a single interview. And all of this was made worse by headlines reminding me just how completely screwed I was. “Indisputable Evidence That Millennials Have It Worse Than Any
Generation in 50 Years,” read the Atlantic in February 2014. “Ontario youth unemployment among the worst in Canada,” from CTV in September 2013. “Why are so many of Canada’s young people out of work?” CBC in June 2013. “Recent university grads increasingly jobless, study shows,” Globe and Mail, September 2014.

The statistics were muddled. While one mid-2013 article on the CBC claimed that youth unemployment was at 14.5 percent, another, in Maclean’s, asserted serious youth unemployment was simply a myth, citing a Statistics Canada study that put unemployment in Canada for 25-29-year-olds at 7.4 percent in 2012. “[The] stagnation in the quality of jobs may explain some of the frustration,” the Maclean’s article allows. “Some university graduates are likely settling for lower-rung jobs that they would have avoided in the past.” (Perhaps true—but perhaps also this means that we’re so desperate to avoid unemployment, we’ll take anything.)

But beyond the headlines, there are the actual people of this highly discussed and debated generation—and, speaking as one of them, the employment drought sure feels real. Every time I read one of these articles, mostly written by someone who isn’t a part of my generation, it’s like we’re mice in a lab. We are the Boomers’ and Generation X’s greatest sociological experiment: scurrying through preset conditions, our achievements and pitfalls analyzed by people who are utterly detached.

“I think a lot of older generations are out of touch with the way that education and professional fields have changed,” says 23-year-old Kelsey Leung, “especially those who are comfortably collecting paycheques for jobs that they have had for quite some time.” Leung has a bachelor of arts with honours in history from Queen’s University, and a bachelor of education from University of Toronto. Currently, she’s a barista—a job that doesn’t require two expensive degrees.

Like myself, Leung has been told millennials are simply entitled and lazy. Apparently, our desire for meaningful work after grueling, expensive, and mental-illness inducing degrees means that we are spoiled, ungrateful children. These criticisms, more often than not, come from middle-aged suburbanites who seem to have scored jobs straight out of school in the 1980s and never had to contemplate the possibility of being in their 30s and making minimum wage.

“I think that if being entitled means that I feel upset that I put in thousands of dollars of my own money and in scholarships towards my education,” says Leung, “and have been told that it will be at least four to six years before I get a full-time contract position—minimum—then I am absolutely entitled.” If anything, my generation is not entitled enough: We willingly scrape through terrible jobs, and work for free after years of education. Most of us feel like we can’t afford a sense of entitlement. Pride is expensive. And though we deserve to have some, we know that pride means no exposure, no paycheque, no chance.

I certainly didn’t feel entitled when, after graduation, I was eager to take on a part-time babysitting gig. I never even asked how much it paid. All I saw was a job. Despite receiving my pricey degree, I was in the exact position as I was before I earned it. I was still writing for free, and, eventually, months after graduation, only making a little money for articles. And I was still spending way too much time on job search websites like Indeed and Monster, cursing at the computer screen every time I came across the dreaded “five years experience necessary.” Amidst pages of job postings that, according to the requirements, I was not qualified for, I felt like Major Tom lost in space.

I started to think the only people landing decent jobs were people who were privileged enough to have the right connections. Some of my fellow graduates had connections within their family, others came from wealthy enough backgrounds to not have to worry about unpaid work. My parents immigrated here with my sister and me in 1996 and, because of that, despite their successes, they haven’t been established here long enough to be able to provide those connections for me.

In the end, my babysitting job fell through. Without full access to a car, it was another job that couldn’t work out. And so by July, I fantasized about just packing up and leaving. There had to be a job for me somewhere in this world; and not just any job, one that would actually make me happy.

That’s exactly what 29-year-oldDavid Matijasevich was thinking in June 2013 while he was working on his Ph.D. in political science at Carleton University. In his fourth year, Matijasevich was, financially, on his own. Not wanting to take on more debt, and knowing that the teaching assistant position provided by the school wouldn’t be sufficient enough to pay rent, he made the move to Singapore. He worked on his Ph.D. from there, where he was able to find work as an associate lecturer in social sciences, and an instructor and academic manager at an adult education centre. Matijasevich just finished his Ph.D. in September.

Matijasevich says that it disappoints him to hear Generation Y labeled as entitled. “Entitlement means expecting something without working for it,” says Matijasevich. “Yet young people, particularly during their school days, seem to be working harder than ever.” Matijasevich recalls his days as a teaching assistant at Carleton University, in which all 15 of the students in his class were working part-time jobs during their studies. Some of them were working more than 20 hours a week, on top of schoolwork.

There are more young people pursuing higher education than ever before. In 1980, there were 550,000 fulltime university students and 218,000 part-time university students. Now, there are 979,000 full-time university students, and 312,000 part time students. This is a huge feat, considering tuition fees have tripled over the last 20 years, and are expected to continue rising, especially in Ontario. In 1975, the average tuition in Canada was $551. In 2013 it was $5,772. In 2017, it is expected to be, on average, around $9,483 in Ontario.

Matijasevich’s solution, however, is not for everyone. Despite my fantasizing, I know I’m not ready for a move like that. Going to an entirely different country, let alone a different continent, is an extreme solution to paying the bills. It means leaving behind the comfort of home, loved ones, and security—just to not become trapped in the exploitative monotony of minimum wage service industry jobs. Getting a job isn’t necessarily the tricky part, it’s getting a job that doesn’t make you hate yourself for ending up in the place that you swore you wouldn’t. The hard part is getting a job that makes you feel proud, that allows you to comfortably move out of your parents’ house, that makes it possible to pay off your Visa bill without your chequing account looking like a wasteland.

I’ve been told I ought to go back to my old jobs—I worked as a cashier at Indigo for two years, and then worked four semesters and one summer as a part-time shelver at the Ryerson University library. (My last job ended when the library no longer had enough work for part-timers.) I wonder if I should. After all, is working for free any better than my days of asking people whether they wanted their receipt in the bag? Yet, it pains me to think I might have to stand behind the same cash register I stood behind when I was 17. “But I have a degree now!” I think to myself.

I sometimes feel like my resumé is one giant “but I have a degree now!”

At family functions, I seek out any distraction and avoid all relatives so I won’t be asked that dreaded question, “What are your plans now?” If caught, I mumble the usual “Looking for better work; freelancing; doing my best.” This answer has never impressed any of my relatives.

But is it even polite to ask that question anymore? It’s hard to chew my food when I’m thinking about how much money is in my bank account, and whether there was a typo in the last resumé I sent out. There should be a new rule that you should never ask a young adult in a terrible economy what their plans are. It’s just bad etiquette. I see the generation gap present in the apathetic nods of my relatives when I explain my mish-mash of ways to make some money, practically pocket change compared to their salaries. They seem painfully out of touch when they declare I ought to go to New York; I’ll get a job right away. If only it were that easy.

I don’t regret going to university. And I don’t feel like it’s useless. Education is important and it does make a difference—my career in journalism would not be even close to where it is now without my degree—but it would be disingenuous to say the strenuous journey to find good work hasn’t made me question whether it was all worth it. I can’t be the only one. Now that university degrees are the norm, I bet many have trouble seeing the value in a bachelor’s degree. There are so many of us with degrees, after all—currently, 1.7 million students are enrolled in degree programs across Canada. Degrees are something you have to acquire to get ahead, yet getting one doesn’t guarantee that you will.

For now, Matijasevich, Leung, and I are all doing the same thing. There’s one common thread between going to Singapore, working as a barista, and picking up odd freelancing jobs: we’re all doing what we feel we have to do to make it to the place where we are financially stable and happy. Say what you will about the flaws of my generation, but there is no doubting that we are a perseverant one. Maybe I’m entitled, stubborn, or just another foolish kid part of an underemployment statistic. Maybe I am the quintessential millennial being analyzed in some think piece written by a Generation Xer with a good salary. Maybe. But mostly I like to think of myself as just another person who works hard and wants the best for themselves. I’m one of the mice in the social experiment that older generations have subjected me too, hoping to escape the maze.

Illustration by Matt Daley

If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a Canadian classroom to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference? I do not ask this question facetiously. It seems plausible that a good lesson in multiplication, chemistry, or a foreign language might seem equally at home in many parts of the world. The children in your local school probably learn how to read and write, just like students do in, say, North Korea or China. Students in your local school might learn to add numbers, do fractions, and solve algebraic equations. But that’s what students in Uzbekistan learn too. Maybe students in your local school learn not to hit one another, to follow the rules, and not to break any laws. They might sing the national anthem and learn about asteroids and the life cycle of the glowworm. I know of schools in Eritrea and Belarus that do those things too. So what would be different about teaching and learning in a Canadian school than in the schools of a country governed by a one-ruling-party dictatorship?

Do students in democratic countries like Canada learn how to participate in public decision making? Are they taught to see themselves as individual actors who work in concert with others to create a better society? Are they taught the skills they need to think for themselves and to govern collectively? Most of us would like to believe that they do. We expect that schools in Canada teach students the skills and dispositions needed to evaluate for themselves the benefits and drawbacks of particular policies and government practices. Democratic citizens should be committed to the people, principles, and values that underlie democracy—such as political participation, free speech, civil liberties, and social equality.

Yet, teaching and learning do not always conform to democratic goals and ideals. Research colleagues and I have conducted over the past decade reveals a clear and troubling trend: much of current education reform is limiting the ways teachers can develop the kinds of attitudes, skills, knowledge, and habits necessary for a democratic society to flourish. In fact, the goals of K-12 education have been shifting steadily away from preparing active and engaged public citizens and towards more narrow goals of career preparation and individual economic gain. Pressures from parents, school boards, and a broad cultural shift in educational priorities have resulted in schools across North America being seen primarily as conduits for individual success, and, increasingly, lessons aimed at exploring democratic responsibilities have been crowded out.

In many boards and provinces, ever more narrow curriculum frameworks emphasize preparing students for standardized assessments in math and literacy at the same time that they shortchange the social studies, history, and citizenship education. Moreover, there is a “democratic divide” in which higher achieving students, generally from wealthier neighborhoods, are receiving a disproportionate share of the kinds of citizenship education that sharpen students’ thinking about issues of public debate and concern. Curricular approaches that spoon-feed students to succeed on narrow academic tests teach students that broader critical thinking is optional. The last decade of school reform has seen education policy makers engaged in a myopic drive to make students better test-takers, rather than better citizens. A large number of public school teachers are reporting that disciplines such as science, social studies, and art are crowded out of the school day as a direct result of state testing policies.

As bad as that sounds, omitting lessons that might develop critical thinking skills is still different from forbidding them. Yet a number of examples of misguided education policy seek to do exactly that. Almost a decade ago, Florida passed a stunning piece of legislation that served as a clarion warning call to educators. The 2006 Florida Education Omnibus Bill included language specifying that “the history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history … American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable.” For example, the bill requires that only facts be taught when it comes to discussing the “period of discovery” and the early colonies. Florida thus became the first state or province I know of to ban historical interpretation in public schools, thereby effectively outlawing critical thinking.

More recently, in fall 2014, more than a 1,000 Jefferson County, Colorado, high school students and hundreds of teachers walked out of classes to protest the school board’s efforts to promote “positive” American history and downplay the legacy of civil disobedience and protest. The protests came in the wake of a proposal by the school board to make changes to the Advanced Placement (AP) history curriculum. AP history, the board suggested “should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard for the law.” One Jefferson County teacher characterized the board’s proposal as “an attack on teachers and public education” while a high school senior vowed: “If they don’t teach us civil disobedience, we will teach ourselves.”

In Canada, too many schools have become oriented toward pedagogical models of efficiency that discourage deeper consideration of important ideas. The relentless focus on testing and “achievement” means that time for in-depth critical analysis of ideas is diminished. Current school reform policies and many classroom practices too often reduce teaching and learning to exactly the kind of mindless rule-following that makes students unable to take principled stands that have long been associated with democracies. Students are learning more about how to please authority and pass the tests than how to develop convictions and stand up for them.

Even when educators are explicitly committed to teaching “good citizenship”, there is cause for caution. My colleague Joe Kahne and I spent the better part of a decade studying programs that aimed to develop good citizenship skills among youth and young adults. In study after study, we come to similar conclusions: the kinds of goals and practices commonly represented in school programs that hope to foster democratic citizenship usually have more to do with voluntarism, charity, and obedience than with democracy. In other words, “good citizenship” often means listening to authority figures, dressing neatly, being nice to neighbors, and helping out at a soup kitchen—not grappling with the kinds of social policy decisions that every citizen in a democratic society needs to understand.

Commonly called character education, these programs emphasize honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work. Or they hope to nurture compassion by engaging students in volunteer community service. What they don’t do is ask students to understand social, political, and economic structures or explore strategies for change that address root causes of problems. Voluntarism and kindness can be used to avoid much thinking about politics and policy altogether. Character traits such as honesty, integrity, and responsibility for one’s actions are certainly valuable for becoming good neighbors and citizens. But, on their own, they are not about democracy.

Former U.S. President George Bush Sr. famously promoted community service activities for youth by imagining a “thousand points of light” representing charitable efforts to respond to those in need. But if young people understand these actions as a kind of noblesse oblige—a private act of kindness performed by the privileged—and fail to examine the deeper structural causes of social ills, then the thousand points of light risk becoming a thousand points of the status quo. Citizenship in a democratic community requires more than kindness and decency.

Recall my opening question: If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a Canadian classroom, would they be able to tell the difference? Both classes might engage students in volunteer activities. Government leaders in a totalitarian regime would be as delighted as leaders in a democracy if their young citizens learned the lessons put forward by many of the proponents of character education: don’t do drugs; show up to work on time; give blood; help others during a flood; recycle; etc. These are desirable traits for people living in any community. But they are not about democratic citizenship. In fact certain ideas promoted by these kinds of programs—obedience and loyalty, for example—may work against the kind of independent thinking that democratic citizenship requires.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. Students don’t need to learn passivity, but rather that they have important contributions to make. There are many varied and powerful ways to teach children and young adults to engage critically—to think about social policy issues, participate in authentic debate over matters of importance, and understand that intelligent adults can have different opinions. Indeed democratic progress depends on these differences. If education policy makers, teachers, and administrators in Canada and elsewhere in the world hope to contribute to students’ democratic potential, they must resist the narrowing of the curriculum. And many do. In every province there are examples of individual teachers, schools, and sometimes boards that work creatively and diligently to keep their students thinking.

Approaches that aim to promote a “thinking curriculum” for both teachers and students share several characteristics. First, teachers encourage students to ask questions rather than absorb pat answers—to think about their attachments and commitments to their local, national, and global communities. Second, teachers provide students with the information (including competing perspectives) they need to think about subject matter in substantive ways. Third, they root instruction in local contexts, working within their own specific surroundings and circumstances because it is not possible to teach democratic forms of thinking without providing an environment to think about. This last point makes provincially standardized tests (especially in large provinces with both rural and urban settings) difficult to reconcile with in-depth critical thinking about issues that matter.

The exit of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, dedicated to a critical history of war, bears the following inscription:

“History is yours to make. It is not owned or written by someone else for you to learn … History is not just the story you read. It is the one you write. It is the one you remember or denounce or relate to others. It is not predetermined. Every action, every decision, however small, is relevant to its course. History is filled with horror and replete with hope. You shape the balance.”

I suspect many This Magazine readers could imagine a lesson in democracy that begins with just such a quotation.

Illustration by Katie Carey

Mary Gordon believes in the power of empathy. It can, she says, stop patterns of abuse, draw the curtain on generational cruelty, and create kinder, better worlds—especially if we instill its importance at a young age. That’s why, in 1996, the former teacher, as well as creator of the first Toronto District School Board daycare for teen parents in Toronto, created Roots of Empathy. Her goal: To rid communities of cruelty through teaching children empathy at a young age. Today, volunteers run 2,477 programs in Canada—and worldwide more than 2,000 volunteers have expanded the program to 10 countries. An independent program, Roots of Empathy is designed to fit into any school’s curriculum, and in a variety of subjects: using graphs to facilitate math lessons, for example, or literature to work with language arts.

The program’s approach to teaching empathy is uniquely creative. Far from what we see in traditional learning, Roots of Empathy facilitates interaction between students, a baby, and the baby’s parents. The idea is to encourage children to see the perspective of other children: what the baby’s needs are and how the mother responds to them. This is the beginning of understanding empathy—what others are feeling, how to feel with them, and then how to treat them accordingly. Gordon doesn’t, in fact, like to use the term “empathy teaching,” and prefers “empathy reaching.” Although she’s fought to get her program in schools, she maintains empathy isn’t something that can be formally taught; “it must be caught.”

Students, for instance, must imagine themselves making various decisions for the baby. When faced with a problem as simple as what diaper to buy, they are pushed to think: What does this mean for the baby? What does this mean for the parent? What does this mean for the environment? The idea here is to help them understand “emotional literacy”—how to explain what they are feeling. Once they know how to do this, the theory goes, they can compassionately understand how someone else might feel. Scientifically, it makes sense: empathy is something we naturally want to do. Research has shown that “mirror neutrons” make people react to emotions that others produce— similar to recoiling in imaginary pain after seeing someone else get hit by a Frisbee.

Teaching empathy in the classroom has been gaining momentum in education, along with the teaching of different “literacies”—a term that now applies to emotion, technology, or even social skills. More and more, teachers are encouraging students to put themselves in each other’s shoes. In Ontario’s York Region, a teacher has started resolving student disagreements by literally having them step onto different laminated illustrations of shoes, share their feelings, then switch to put themselves on the other side of the conflict. The picture book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today? has become a popular classroom staple, complete with corresponding lesson plans and school-wide programs. Its lesson: children need to fill, rather than empty, one another’s “bucket” with love, kindness, and empathy.

And it doesn’t stop there: The Empathy Factory, founded in 2010 in Halifax empowers youth to make social changes in the world. They do this by touring Nova Scotia delivering workshops that ask students to execute an idea that makes the world a better place. The organization also does work outside of the classroom, including a program called “Accelerating: Empathy,” where 100 high school students from around Nova Scotia are brought together. The students are asked to find a solution to a social issue of their choice, pitch it to the other students and eventually to a panel of judges, who give winners a chance to bring their ideas to life.

Then there’s The Empathy Library, the first online collection dedicated to imagining yourself in someone else’s life. The site’s collected works show others what it would be like to, say, have a disability or to live in another country. Anyone can access it and members can add to the database. The Empathy Toy, by Toronto-based Twenty One Toys, invites players to create a shape out of different pieces, while the other imitates it. The catch: both are blindfolded and need to patiently fall into tune with the other. Even Facebook has got in the game. Recently, it revealed plans for something similar to the often-requested “dislike” button. “People aren’t looking for an ability to down-vote other people’s posts,” Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has said, “What they really want is to be able to express empathy.”

Everywhere we look, it seems, empathy is gaining traction—reflecting the idea of social change in Canadian communities. Proponents of empathy learning hope that by starting with children, the next generation will promote a more accepting way of life that focuses on celebrating difference. Children learn that each individual in their classroom is different from one another, to value those different experiences, and that although people can never have the same experiences, they can empathize with them. It’s a skill many of us may wish CEOs or politicians had—we could be living in a very different world if, as Gordon says, we had leaders who saw others as they saw themselves.

And, in some cases, students are already starting to teach their adult instructors. Marion Kitamura, a trainer at Roots of Empathy for 16 years, was working with a Grade 7 class in 2005 when she got a request from a teacher that went outside the bounds of her usual work. The students wanted to talk about a sad news story: a man had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Toronto, carrying with him his 5-year-old daughter. Kitamura expected that they would share some of the same sentiments she’d heard from adults about the story—that they’d hate the father.

Unsure on how to start the discussion, she asked the students what it was about the story that made them feel so strongly. One student answered, “We’re really sad that the father was so sad that he felt he had to kill himself and bring his baby with him.” Another wondered if maybe the man was new to the country and hadn’t made friends yet, or if he didn’t have enough money and thought that dying was better than being poor. The children had done something that none of the adults could do: think about how other people are feeling. It showed Kitamura that the students knew how to apply empathy outside the classroom. “It was a moment for me when I was like—wow,” she says, “this program is really making a difference.”

As the years passed, the birthday outfits my mum bought me collected in my closet, and with them I began collecting memories of similar incidents. But that first incident was my introduction to a society that reminded me often of my weight problems.

I learned at an early age that people made judgments about others’ habits, personalities, and identities based on appearance. We live in a country where eating disorders affect anywhere from 150,000 to more than 600,000 people; many feel the weight of this judgment. I learned to expect this when we would go on summer vacation to London, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Flight attendants would help my sister and me with our seatbelt, and remark: “Maybe sometimes you should let her eat her own meals,” suggesting I picked from my sister’s plate.

But I managed to escape the prying, judgmental eyes of others with the help of my favourite sportswear. Under the folds of an over-sized tracksuit, I found a way to disappear. These days, I know putting a tracksuit on can’t stop other people from judging me. But clothing served—both then and now—as a way to gain control over my identity, the person I wanted to be.

The day I found my first tracksuit everything changed. I was 10, at home in Mississauga, Ont. School was cancelled: the streets were blocked off with mounds of freezing snow. I finished the book my mom had purchased for me for the month earlier, and I thought the snow day would be the best opportunity for me to look for next month’s book, which she often hid in the house.

After searching the whole house, I headed to the storage room in the basement where we kept my dad’s old suits and our salwar kameez, traditional Pakistani clothing. There was no book, but I found a Reebok tracksuit. That navy blue sweatshirt and its matching wide-legged sweatpants were three sizes too big for me—but it was my escape. I grabbed it, went up to my room, and put it on. It hung too loose and too long everywhere. It was perfect. Wearing something that was too big on me (for a change) hid the flaws people said I had—a kind of invisibility device. I believed no one could see anything in me that I didn’t want to reveal. I wasn’t just choosing what to put on my body; I was choosing who I was going to be that day.

For the next seven years, I wore only tracksuits. Most of them were hand-me-downs from my brother, over-sized and blue, black or grey. When the seasons changed, my mum took me shopping hoping that I would change my mind and buy a dress or jeans. But I always met her at the cash register with my athletic wear. Until I was 15, most of my classmates assumed I played a lot of sports; some decided my parents owned an Adidas store.

By the time I was 16, I stopped caring about what people thought of my body. The transformation occurred when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I studied the writers I read as a child and saw a pattern: they all used the way people spoke, walked, and even dressed as tools in character development. I decided to take the narratives I consumed and the influence of the people in my life into my wardrobe, an exercise in storytelling. I created my own therapeutic process: I wore my brother’s band shirts to school to carry a part of him with me every day. I dressed like Dean Martin to claim his song lyrics as my own.

After my high-school graduation in 2011, I took a trip to Italy with my family and transformed again—this time into somebody who wanted to be visible. There, the philosophy that bodies are vessels to be filled with good food and art ran rampant. Italians didn’t eat to stay alive: they lived to eat. While each city I visited was different on the surface, its heart was always at ease—a contentment I carried back with me to Canada.

This summer, at 22, I donated my navy tracksuit. My mom had already given away the others years ago, and this was the last one in my collection. Before folding it and placing it in a paper bag, I wrote a note on the tag inside the collar: “Served as invisibility cloak since 2003. May it bring you magic.” I no longer wear tracksuits. I’m no longer interested in concealing my body based on society’s expectations. Now, I am visible.

Illustration by Samone Murphy

I don’t have much in common with Eminem, but I do empathize with these lyrics about his pre-rap battle jitters: “Palms sweaty, knees weak, arms heavy.” My body floods with this nerve-wracking discomfort in a space so many others navigate with ease: the rich world of academia. As a 23-year-old woman with extensive coursework in creative writing and a degree in health studies and gerontology, currently completing my master’s of environmental studies, however, I spend a lot of time wondering why I don’t fit in. After all, on paper at least, I have all the credentials. I have spoken at a variety of conferences on topics ranging from health to feminism to student leadership; I have taught inclusivity workshops at a university level; and I have been a teaching assistant.

Yet, every time I have to do one of these things or, worse, enter a classroom, anxiety rips at my seams. I drown in these academic spaces. I usually flounder for a bit, perform, gesticulate. I come out of whole courses gutted or beached, my insides left for the foraging of others within the institution. I know it’s because, as a woman of colour, I was never meant to thrive in many of these spaces. People like me are only truly welcome when our knowledge and lived experiences are there for others to forage. When, my peers can use me for their own curriculum vitae, proudly listing credentials like:
• Ally
• Culturally competent
• Intersectional feminist
• Trained in anti-oppression
• Applies social justice lenses
• And on and on

I want to love this list of buzzwords because in their simplest form they are meaningful and integral to an equitable society; good intentions exist at the core of this list. At the same time, I have a hesitancy to embrace them—especially when they have manifested into popular talking points for those in academia who are trying to stay relevant, employable, and in solidarity with social movements and interest groups. These conversations never carve away at how these “attributes” are too often attained by exploiting the narratives of communities, not through truly active and constant actions of solidarity. A seminar will not make a white person understand the totality of their privilege and a degree in social justice (yes, it’s a thing) will never trump lived experiences.

As more schools start to formalize social justice learning, those who have the mobility to attain a degree speak over myself and members of other minority groups engaging in advocacy work. I feel a gnawing hopeless despair when I see academia giving accolades, funding, clout, and respect to those who trade on outside knowledge, making a study of us—strangers penning dissertations on my community and others. How do we move forward with integrity within institutions that were never meant for us?

In September, I walked through a law school I was debating on applying to after I finish my master’s degree, scoping out its holistic application approach, hoping it translates onto the class composites. But nobody looks like me. I see a bunch of white men, followed by a block of white men and white women, and then just a few brown faces. Not many of them are women. Positionality makes us all see the deficit we relate to most. As much as I try to carve out space with other women in academia, I always come back to the nuances. Some women can be marginalized, yet more privileged than many others.

As much as I strive to knead at this sense of sisterhood in academia, white women are better positioned to shatter through the glass ceiling than many of us deemed “other.” We’re not all on escalators to the top; some us have to tediously climb up—exhaustion is inevitable and often so too is subsequent defeat. Academia could take a few pointers from the experiences shared on #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

I have two parents who did not finish high school, and university has been a never-ending struggle. My parents deeply value education, but can do little to help me navigate the system. When I had surgery in my first year of university, my parents didn’t know what advice to give. Where they come from, Morocco and Pakistan, a deferral even for medical reasons can result in expulsion. My parents also did not always understand extra-curricular activities, or the importance of presenting at conferences. They often do not understand my work and it breaks my heart.

I hesitate to explain that I craft papers to get the necessary marks for school funding. Or to say how, at home, we have shared labour and responsibilities rooted in cultural values. Many misunderstand when I say I have to help family; it is not a “choice” to sacrifice schoolwork but an obligation to those who lent a hand in giving me the life I have today. Explaining that I have filled out immigration applications and written letters for family is dismissed with “why can’t your parents/ aunt/uncle/cousin do that on their own?” Such tasks take time, but also energy. It is a learned social justice education. Not that I get to pad my curriculum vitae with the short-list of buzzwords.

To our detriment, we seldom talk about how we came to be at this place in academia—where some bodies seem meant to be in these concrete buildings and some do not. Too rarely do we talk about the racism and sexism that pervades these hallowed hallways. How, for instance, Oklahoma University’s SAE fraternity was recently filmed happily reciting a lynching chant filled with racial slurs. Or how, in September, posters for a White Student Union popped up around three Toronto university campuses. The latter group’s website features a mission statement to “promote and celebrate Western Civilization” and a bunch of other racist stuff. These groups should not be dismissed: the long history of exclusion still exists in present day. As much as institutions have worked to tweak and fine-tune panels on topics such as diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression, these Band-Aid solutions miss the foundational problem that universities will discuss ally-ship, but not how we are accomplices to the system—talking about people who, thanks to systemic barriers, cannot be in the same classrooms.

Even when I know the coursework extensively and comprehensively, I walk into a space pondering its dynamics and all of the potential for harm. I daydream about how academia would work if we aimed for harm reduction in academic spaces with the clear knowledge that they are spaces where violence is inevitable. If we could preemptively equip professors and students with ways to combat micro-aggressions or conduct damage control. Where an entire academic system isn’t steeped in racism. I envision a future where when we discuss an identity on the margins we create a space where every student will learn. Because, right now, as it stands, when we have these discussions, it’s the most privileged amongst us who benefit, while the many students who are already marginalized are not able to learn.

It’s not as if the dominant academic culture doesn’t know these challenges exist. We often see tools, such as Peggy McIntosh’s famous “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” used in progressive classes. But bearing witness to such scenarios—in which open-minded dialogue about race, class, and intersections occurs—is a largely stagnant experience for those who face the oppression. The first time I heard McIntosh’s list, I was in a first-year social work class that I thought would be an exciting elective.

I cringed as it was read aloud, point by point. My professor seemed to relish in the instant revelations of white students, telling them about her own experience grappling with the list as an undergraduate student. What manifests is white people and model minorities learning, while the rest of us hold our breaths. After this particular class, white students dominated the conversation, expressing feelings of guilt and surprise. Three years later, in the first and only woman studies course I have ever taken, a white student brought up how every time she reads McIntosh’s list she cries. Guilt with little action does not do anything. Unpacking the list for people of colour and watching white people express their guilt over it always feels like an out-of-body experience.

The 50-point list, if you haven’t read it, touches on points of privilege like, “I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” And, “I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.” Or, “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ colour and have them more or less match my skin.”

Many people of colour know these harsh points of privilege exist from as early as junior kindergarten, yet we pay the same amount of tuition to sit through classes, conferences, workshops, and training that all teach this list. It’s a list a white woman wrote, touted as a golden, comprehensive document—in itself about white privilege, and yet a white academic coined it, and gets the credit and monetary gain of its popularity as a teaching tool. Can we not use a racialized person’s work instead? Why are such attempts at diversity so blatantly half-hearted?

Whenever I get invited to be a token presenter at a university conference (usually on either religious identity, ethnicity, feminism, or all three), white people feel compelled to let me know they are “different,” how they “feel sorry for their people’s behaviour,” and how they “never thought about it that way.” Yet, would-be allies get very upset when people of colour or queer communities ask for identity-specific spaces. They don’t seem to understand we want to feel safer, that these safe spaces allow us to reach the heart of issues—like racial profiling—that we are all too familiar with. But we are not their specimens. They don’t get to use us as tools in anti-oppression training.

Currently, allies occupy opportunities that should belong to the “other.” But, I have hope for those working in solidarity with minorities. Diversifying more course syllabi is a start, but advancing equity in higher education also demands a few more actions. We need a critical generosity amongst peers and we need to create safe classrooms where we can have the much-needed difficult conversations.

Institutions that were not created for people of colour need to finally start consulting and listening to people of colour. We need to practice compassionate accountability and move away from an academic industrial
complex, toward a collective future. Emotional accountability to our peers is also vital. Often more privileged peers ask if they can “pick my brain,” but use my knowledge without credit, presenting it as their own. This invasive excavation of a life needs to stop. We need to strive for equitable learning environments.

How we all experience a space is different. Often defending our work becomes defending ourselves for many who are marginalized. For many it is never just an academic exercise. It is never just a project. We invest our stories, identities, and lives but also our communities. During my first master’s degree course this year, focusing on race, gender and the environment, a white man said his hope for the class was “to learn about white privilege.” I held my breath.