i.
pace across city streets under the full light of moon
like the coyote in winter, coat the colour of dirty snow
not knowing one day beyond
the next, moving with unconscious,
habitual desire, carrying only
the fear of loud noises
and an intimate knowledge of the cold.

ii.
return to a time
when you thought about
something
other than pain
or the tapping of trees
on your window.

iii.
strain
for intinction
in the cry
of every magpie
and crow.

iv.
make love
to anyone
with a kind
face

v.
watch yourself
sleep
from a distance

vi.
lay your head on soft
skin

vii.
wait without speech—

A VISIT FROM THE PRIME MINISTER, KANDAHAR

you stand at attention.
he walks between the
soldiers, row by row,
stopping to ask the odd
woman or man where they
are from, how long
they have been away,
whether they have visited
the new tim horton’s
yet. you are surprised
by the way his belly
protrudes, like a swollen
dog’s stomach. pale winter
of his face swaying like
fishflesh on the bottom
of the ocean floor.
he wears a vest of many
pockets and as he passes
by you cannot imagine
whose lives     what life
the pockets contain.

Kristen was in high school. Mackenzie was 23. Jess made a pros and cons list. Each woman had an abortion. Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada centres around a woman’s right to choose. In this five-part series, women share their personal stories, alongside a detailed history of the criminalization of abortion in Canada. Editor Shannon Stettner powerfully tends to the intimate—and sometimes political—conversation first ignited in the 1960s when cis men wrongly dominated and interrupted the abortion debate. The collection is at times grim, harrowing and passionate, but it ultimately solidifies the notion that a woman’s body is solely hers—point, blank, period.

With its third time at bat, Toronto Comics Anthology has come into its own. Toronto Comics Anthology Volume 3 features 30 comics from 46 writers and artists—each reflecting on Toronto in some way. Besides that, the genres run the gamut, from true tales, to superheroes, horror, and more. The anthology shows maturity by tackling a variety of topics in creative and elegant ways. In “A Work in Progress,” writer Gwen Howarth chronicles the history of Toronto Pride’s Trans March through her transition. In “The Dark,” co-authors Aaron Feldman and Josh Rosen tell the story of a woman who reveals her terminal illness to her girlfriend while dining in the dark. For those who prefer something a little lighthearted, let Ricky Lima and Kelvin Sue reveal the secret lives of Toronto landmarks in “Architecture.” Through its variety of diverse narratives, this volume stretches the bounds of what comics can be.

The Two Sisters
Written by E. Pauline Johnson, illustrated by Sandra Butt
Waterlea Books, $19.95

Poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) died more than a century ago. But B.C.-based illustrator Sandra Butt revived one of Johnson’s iconic poems—“The Two Sisters”—in her picture book of the same name. This retelling of a First Nations’ legend takes readers back thousands of years to the story of two sisters who bravely seek peace at a time when “war songs broke the silences of the nights.” Supplemented by a reference section educating readers on the rich history of the Pacific Northwest peoples, The Two Sisters is a beautiful addition to both children and adults’ bookshelves.

The Nearly Girl by Lisa de Nikolits is many things, but predictable isn’t one of them. Broken into a few chapters, The Nearly Girl tells the story of an unusual family, including a daughter named Amelia, who inherited her father’s peculiarities and is confronted with a grim reality when she is forced to deal with her issues.

De Nikolits’ novel reads like a movie. It’s fast paced and full of colourful, loud characters, but Amelia is certainly the stand-out. Her fascination with the unusually beautiful fuels her need to prove that she, like her father, requires an unorthodox way of living to truly be happy.

The Nearly Girl is brimming with bright story lines and vivid themes. The story becomes a commentary on life through the artist’s mind and the impermanence of happiness.

Fashion is often mistaken as temporary, nothing but a wave of passing fads—but not in Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels From Cleopatra to Lady Gaga by Jennifer Croll. In her vividly illustrated book, Croll takes us through fashion contextually. Readers get a chic inside look at artists, queens, musicians, and designers who didn’t just change fashion—they challenged it. From Marie Antoinette, who used fashion as a way to prove her influence, to Lady Gaga, who used her outfits as protest, Croll reminds readers: “fashion is anything but frivolous.”

A couple of years ago, a stranger approached me while I was volunteering at a film festival in Toronto. She motioned to a group of friends standing nearby. They placed a bet on my ethnicity, she explained, and wanted to know where I was from. I smiled and patiently regurgitated my now-rehearsed response: I was born in Scarborough, Ont., but my mother and grandparents are of mixed ethnicity from South Africa. She nodded and said my answer made sense—they knew I was “something like that.”

Her question was one I was all-too accustomed to answering. Growing up in a variety of Ontario suburbs, I constantly faced questions about my ethnicity. People asked me: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? What are you? I was left confused and conflicted. I didn’t have trouble identifying with my mom’s side of the family. They raised me to feel proud of my ethnicity and our family’s history of fighting apartheid. But I didn’t have a sense of belonging to my Latinx roots. I didn’t have a relationship at all with my dad, who was from Uruguay.

My parents divorced when I was a baby. By the time I reached elementary school, I wanted to know more about my dad: his life, what music he listened to, what his parents were like. I wanted to know more about Uruguay. There were few Latinx students in our grade; I had no Latinx teachers and no Latinx family members at home. At school, when we filled out family trees, we were asked about our parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. I left half of my tree blank. While my mom answered my questions as best as she could, I had questions about who I was. With my dad gone, I always felt something was missing.

I turned to movies and television for guidance. I was obsessed with pop culture—it allowed me to explore the world, imagined and real, beyond my life. Maybe there were Latinas on TV, I thought, or people like my dad who I could learn from. I learned fairly quickly, though, that movies and TV wouldn’t bring me any closer to my dad. But this deflating realization didn’t discourage me from questioning the way Latinx were portrayed on screen. Even as kid, I could tell the Latinx characters in movies and television were often negatively portrayed—if they were even portrayed at all.

***

In the 1970s, 7,000 refugees fled Chile and other Latin American countries to live in Canada. While it was common for refugees to flee countries under political unrest, many from Latin America also migrated to Canada for better economic stability. As of 2001, with almost a quarter of a million Canadians of Latin American origin living in the country, the Latin American community is growing “considerably faster” than Canada’s overall population, according to Statistics Canada. As of 2011, the Statistics Canada National Household Survey reported 381,280 visible minorities of Latin American origin, many of them with Mexican, Chilean, or Salvadoran roots. Yet, despite being one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in Canada and the U.S., Latinx are largely absent from mainstream English-language television and film.

Certainly, there’s a general dearth of inclusion in Hollywood, and a growing awareness that many audiences experience whitewashing, racism, and erasure first hand. There are “disturbing patterns” in representation of women and people of colour in television and film, concluded a 2016 report from the University of Southern California’s (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Assessing inclusion on camera and behind the scenes within 10 major media companies between 2014–2015, the study found that out of 109 films, 50 percent had no speaking Asian characters and 18 per cent had no speaking Black characters. Behind the camera, 87 percent of film directors and 90 percent of broadcast directors were white.

Other studies have reported similarly dismal representation and portrayal. “The Latino Media Gap,” Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race 2014 study, found 24 percent of Latino characters on U.S. television were linked to crime and made up a whopping zero percent of leading roles between 2012–2013. The numbers concerning Latinos working behind the scenes aren’t optimistic either: in film, from 2010– 2013, Latinos consisted of just two percent of directors, two percent of producers, and six percent of writers.

This may also help us understand why the majority of Latinx characters in mainstream television and film are stereotypes: Latinx are seldom included in the creative process deciding how they’re represented on screen. As pointed out by “The Latino Media Gap,” most of the memorable maids in television and film from the past 20 years are Latina (think: Maid in Manhattan, Family Guy, and Will & Grace.) These numbers only account for representation in U.S. media—when we look at representation in Canada, we don’t fare any better.

“[Latino Canadians are] not shown enough on screen as much as we exist in Canada. There’s a serious shortage,” says Maria del Mar, an elected council member of the Toronto branch of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, who has worked as a professional actor for 25 years in Canada and the U.S. She says when American productions are filmed in Canada, a Canadian Latinx is still rarely cast in a lead role. What’s more, these productions typically reflect American life. “It’s almost like we’re invisible. We’re not worthy of telling our stories or our experiences,” she adds. “That can have a very negative effect on everybody because it basically gives you the impression we’re not worthy of being represented.”

In conversations about diversity, I’ve struggled to name a mainstream movie or television show reflecting the experience of a Canadian Latinx or starring Canadian Latinx talent. At the same time, I’ve had no trouble naming stereotypical, whitewashed, and racist portrayals of Latinx people in U.S. media, like West Side Story, Crash, Suicide Squad, and Hot Pursuit. A 2013 study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found, in relation to their percentage of the U.S. population, Hispanics (their wording) “clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry.”

That’s not to say there are no contemporary mainstream Latinx pop stars, writers, filmmakers, and actors from Canada. They include season four Canadian Idol winner Eva Ávila; actress and Mexican Hooker #1 author Carmen Aguirre; and urban-pop singer Fito Blanko. The country also boasts several film and culture events dedicated to celebrating Canadian Latinx art, including aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival and Expo Latino, Western Canada’s largest outdoor Latin festival. We have a rich history of Canadian Latinx produced works like La Familia Latina, a 1986 documentary feature film about Latin American immigrants in Quebec, and I Remember Too, a 1973 documentary about children of Chilean refugees exiled in Canada. All of this is encouraging, but it’s not enough to quell the overall lack of representation—never mind that many aspiring and accomplished Canadian Latinx still face obstacles breaking into the mainstream.

Rosa Carrera, a Vancouver-based actress and model, has difficulty branching out from stereotypical Latino roles. Although she did background work as a child for the 1987 show 21 Jump Street, in the past two years she auditioned for three maid roles—each written for someone with “Hispanic” or “ambiguous” ethnicity. Despite these obstacles, Carrera won’t give up. “You can’t move mountains, but you definitely go through them slowly,” Carrera says. “An industry is not going to change tomorrow, as long as it does change slowly.”

Some casting directors blame the underrepresentation on a supposed lack of Canadian Latinos in the arts, del Mar says, but that doesn’t reflect reality. It’s an age-old excuse those in positions of power use to dismiss calls for inclusion. But this mentality negates the fact that Latinx in Canada do exist— and they deserve to be seen. “There’s a wave of Latinos out there that need to be recognized,” del Mar says. “[Latino Canadians] are a force to be reckoned with. We are becoming a huge part of the population.”

***

When I was five, two of my favourite movies, Clueless and First Wives Club, featured Latinx maids or housekeepers. Later, it struck me that both were stories filtered through the perspective of wealthy white women. The problem with diversity in pop culture is not only how many Latinx characters were (and are) featured in my favourite movies and TV shows—but also how they’re portrayed.

Silvia Argentina Arauz, co-chair of Toronto’s Latin American Education Network, teaches media literacy to Toronto youth. In a workshop called “Putting the Me Back in Media,” Arauz draws a pair of aviators. Using herself as an example, she depicts the “me on TV” on one lens and the “me in reality” on the other. She asks students what they assume about her based on the image in the media. “Unfailingly, I’m told I do drugs, I carry drugs, I’m a single mom possibly on welfare, I have a drug dealer boyfriend, I haven’t gone to school or I’m a high school drop out, I’m promiscuous,” Arauz says. When she asks for their opinion about what they see in person, however, the students say she’s nice, educated, and nonaggressive. “What happens when so many people don’t meet me in reality and all they have is the me on TV?”

In high school, I encountered people who referred to me as “their” spicy or sexy Latina—a trope I’m certain they plucked from movies and television. Non-Latinx people, assuming my ethnicity, spoke to me in Spanish—and condescended me when I couldn’t speak back. As per Arauz’s metaphor, I was caught in a double bind between the real me and the images non-Latinx people saw in pop culture. Studies show repeating stereotypes of Latinx have a negative effect on how they are perceived. In 2012, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Latino Decisions studied how stereotypes in media affect non-Latinx’ attitudes toward Latinx and immigrants. The respondents reported Latinx were portrayed as maids, criminals, and gardeners “very often” and nurses, teachers, and lawyers “sometimes” and “not too often.” While there’s nothing, of course, inherently wrong with being a maid or gardener, in pop culture, these characters are often minor, one-dimensional, and menial. The result? “People exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos and/ or immigrants hold the most unfavourable and hostile views about both groups.”

What’s more, people who often don’t know anything about us write simplified versions of our diverse, complicated histories and identities, which also effects how non-Latinx people view us. In 2005, when The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series was a big deal, my friends decided I was the Carmen Lowell (America Ferrera) of our friend group. At first I was confused—if I was like any character, it was the snarky Tibby. Plus, despite us both being Latinx, Ferrera and I looked nothing alike. I quickly realized as the token Latinx in our group, I was automatically viewed as the Latinx in the Sisterhood. My friends probably didn’t realize Ferrera wasn’t the only U.S.-Latinx actress in the movie: Alexis Bledel, who plays Lena Kaligaris, is of Argentinian descent.

I couldn’t blame my friends for their blunder. Although Latinx are incorrectly referred to as a race, we are actually an ethnic group composed of diverse races, languages, and cultures. The mainstream media, however, typically ignores these complexities and our diversity in favour of lazily painting people of Latin American descent as one and the same. This catchall attitude toward Latinx suggests we not only look the same, but that we face the same stereotypes. Many Latinx experience some form of prejudice and erasure, but we each experience them differently. While U.S.-Latinx actresses like Cameron Diaz, Bledel, and Aubrey Plaza may not appear often in “Latina-specific” roles, they are also more often given the chance to play characters outside their ethnicity.

Most films and television shows featuring Latinx people also don’t reflect Latin America’s diversity—the various cultures, countries, and races that make up Latin American countries and the U.S.-Latinx population. The recycled stereotypes—the hyper-sexualized Latinx, maids, and drug dealers—are roles that are almost exclusively shelled out to Latinx of colour. These characters are rarely portrayed as complete people with lives and back-stories like their counterparts, only as the butt of the joke, the sidekick, or the villain.

Even Spanish-language television in the U.S. is guilty of favouring white Latinx over Latinx of colour, often portraying the latter in racist or stereotypical roles. In 2014, Proyecto Más Color, an awareness campaign founded by sisters Sophia and Victoria Arzu, urged Univision and Telemundo to include more positive portrayals of afro-Latinx in their programming. Most Americans don’t know afro-Latinx exist, Victoria argued in a video for their petition, and when Black people are portrayed on Spanish-language soap operas, they’re often maids, gunmen, prisoners, security guards, or drug dealers. “We have the same right to shine on television as anyone else,” Victoria said.

In Canada, despite the dearth of Canadian-Latinx representation on television and film, I still found a handful of characters, albeit American, that positively affected my childhood. I watched the Disney Channel to catch reruns of the movie Gotta Kick It Up! starring Ferrera and Camille Guaty. And as a teenager, I devotedly watched My So-Called Life every Monday night because I loved Rickie Vasquez. Played by Wilson Cruz, Rickie was one of the first openly gay teenagers in a recurring role on U.S. television. Rickie was a troubled teen who experienced stigma, homophobia, and homelessness. But unlike stereotypical Latinx characters that are criminalized or ridiculed, Rickie was humanized and given significant airtime.

Latinx advocates all over the U.S. and Canada are mobilizing for change. In 1998, Latinx successfully advocated for the retirement of a Seinfeld episode that depicted the burning of a Puerto Rican flag; in 1999, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts organized a “brownout” to boycott four major networks in response to the “virtual absence of Latino images on television;” in 2009, news host Lou Dobbs retired from CNN after surmounting pressure from Latinx advocates who challenged Dobbs’ anti-immigration rhetoric “in relation to undocumented Latino immigrants.” And, several contemporary U.S. television shows like Jane the Virgin and Devious Maids are subverting tired tropes to comment on the way media portrays Latinx.

Even with these considerable strides, some studies report Latinx representation is actually getting worse. In 2016, as a follow up to “The Latino Media Gap,” co-authors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Chelsea Abbas helmed “The Latino Disconnect: Latinos in the Age of Media Mergers.” Looking at recent mergers between telecom and cable providers, the researchers found, after the 2011 Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, stereotypical Latinx roles on television rose from 34 percent in the 2008–2009 season to 52 percent in the 2014– 2015 season; in film, stereotypical Latinx roles reached an alltime high of 66 percent in 2013.

As for Canada? There’s no up-to-date or sufficient data offering insight into how Canadian Latinx are represented in Canadian English-language television and film. The lack of information available—paired with the near invisibility of our diverse communities reflected on the screen—suggests a want for something more. We need to continue promoting diversity, del Mar says, and teaching Latinx children they can grow up to be directors and writers. It’s hard, she adds, to convince people Canadian characters can also be Latinx—they think they may not appeal to a broad audience. “The truth is, the broad audience needs to be reflected,” she says. “The way to do that is to encourage more Latinos and to cast more Latinos in the industry.”

I’ve learned in order to discover new Latinx artists, I need to look past Hollywood and the mainstream, which still struggles to keep up with decades-old conversations about diversity. Still, I have hope. After all, Uruguayan-born filmmaker Fede Álvarez directed the summer horror hit Don’t Breathe. In the weeks the film debuted, I was ecstatic to see the words “Uruguayan director” in dozens of mainstream news headlines, some even praising Álvarez for reinventing horror. Maybe someday everyone will realize Latinx everywhere deserve to be seen.

Near the beginning of Stone Story, a documentary that straddles Stone’s 70th and 71st years, he addresses the camera: “Close your eyes and pretend that the world does not contain poverty, racism, inequality, injustice,” he says. “If by living the way I do, is taking a step in that direction, then I’m going to go for it.”

If Stone’s story originally epitomized a kind of racial and class privilege—“Look at me, not conforming to middle-class expectations”—by 2016, its meaning has shifted, and his initial choice to eschew normalcy has given way to inescapable familial and economic consequences. Acutely aware of this, filmmaker Jean-André Fourestié centres the film not on Stone, but on the broader family dynamic—what the stone rolled over in its quest to gain no moss. While his ex-wife and daughters own homes in the U.S., where they visit, eat meals, and celebrate together, Stone rents, living paycheque to paycheque, working part-time as an overnight security guard at a soulless condo in the burbs. Stone’s communal lifestyle in Mile End may now have as much to do with economic necessity as a desire to live out hippie precepts.

While she reminisces about meeting—and dancing with— Janis Joplin at Woodstock, Stone’s eldest daughter Debbie seems the most torn when it comes to her father’s choices. She recounts a story on the bus where the group had run out of food and money. They pulled over at a Jack in the Box, and sent Debbie and Jacquie inside to beg for food. When the girls returned with bags of cheeseburgers and fries, the adults gobbled them up—barely remembering to feed the kids who’d secured the meal in the first place. “They treated us like little people living grown-up lives,” Debbie tells us. “But we weren’t adults—we were children.” At one point, Debbie concedes that it may all have been worth it for the memories; at the same time, though, she calls her stepfather Alan Katz “dad” more often than she does Martin.

For his part, Stone asserts that he wanted to show his kids that a different value system was possible. (And, to his credit, according to a short pre-screening introduction Fourestié gave at Cinema Parc in Montreal, Stone wanted his family to feel free to share their unadorned perspectives on his great hippie experiment.) Intentions aside, though, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what comprises Stone’s alternative value system. Communal meals? Jam sessions? Smoking pot on a balcony, surrounded by plants? Stone is open with his friendships, with his home, with his overtures of a better tomorrow—but his friendships seem fleeting, his family relationships, strained. It’s easy to see what Stone has lost—deeper relationships, financial security—but it’s harder to see what he’s gained. Occasionally, his naivete borders on the painful-to-watch—he mentions that he never locks his door, for example, and then proceeds to dox his address in stages over the course of the film.

In the latter third of the film, we learn that Stone’s youngest daughter is struggling with an illness that has threatened her life. Stone, unsure if he can handle seeing her sick, hasn’t visited her in years. Meanwhile, Debbie’s years of hard work have finally paid off, and she’s purchased a rural hobby farm in Canada with a new partner—bringing her physically closer to her father, whom she visits. Martin, who has rented the same apartment for 40 years—along with an estimated one hundred roommates—has just received a notice of lease non-renewal from his landlord. After a quick catch-up, Martin presents Debbie with the notice. She holds it in her hands for a moment, folds it up and gives it back. While she says, later, that she finds her father’s situation “sad,” she isn’t willing to step in and fix his problems. Her father has abdicated his familial responsibilities her whole life, and she’s done picking up the slack.

Stone Story’s pacing is a bit erratic, its conclusion lacking, its parallel storylines meander side by side, interacting only clumsily. It’s not a great film—in fact it’s easy to see how Fourestié could have cut it differently, interposing narration instead of relying on parallels to make narrative points—but it is a profoundly sad film, with a profoundly sad takeaway: the economic realities of capitalism are inescapable, and they catch up to us whether we want them to or not.

When it comes to Muslims, even the good news stories can turn ugly. Take this example from September 2016: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited a mosque during Eid, one of the holiest celebrations in the Islamic calendar, to pay his respects. The story morphed into something sinister and malevolent.

Several newspapers owned by Postmedia reported that the mosque our prime minister was stepping into—and the imam who leads it—have ties to terrorism; that the mosque is sexist for separating men and women; and that the PM can’t really be a feminist if he is prepared to speak before such a gathering. “If Canada’s prime minister were a woman, she wouldn’t have been permitted where Justin Trudeau stood earlier this week: on the ground floor of a gender-segregated Ottawa mosque for Eid al-Adha celebrations,” wrote one columnist erroneously in the National Post.

The contention that women couldn’t speak anywhere in the mosque was refuted a few days later by a female Liberal MP who shared her own experience of appearing at the front of that very mosque on various occasions. Irrespective of the truth, the mosque and those who frequent such spaces were framed as being at odds with Canadian “values,” considered a threat to be marginalized and avoided. The stories led to at least one hateful and threatening email that was reported to police, never mind the vitriol spewed in various comment sections and on social media.

In the public imagination, the mosque symbolizes a space representative of the more than one million Canadian Muslims who call this country home. And that not all mosques are the same, or that there are many Muslims working to make these spaces more inclusive and welcoming doesn’t always matter when it comes to media coverage.

Some media outlets and personalities view stories like this one as an opportunity to perpetuate stereotypes and stoke fear. They seem to bank on heightened anxiety around violent extremism, Syrian refugees, xenophobia, and divisive political rhetoric calling into question the loyalty of Muslim minorities in the Western world, reinforcing the harmful narratives promoted by violent extremists: that Muslims can never belong here.

No one has studied the roots of this phenomenon in Canada, but according to an in-depth U.S. study, it’s estimated that seven American foundations have spent more than $42.6 million between 2001–2009 to promote anti-Muslim narratives. “The efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts were amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse,” says the report, “Fear, Inc. 2.0.” Our borders are porous in more ways than one; these “perspectives” influence Canadians too.

All of this despite the fact that polling indicates a majority of Canadian Muslims are deeply proud of this country, a democratic and prosperous nation where religion can be practiced freely, citizens can contribute positively to the wider communities without fear of discrimination, and where it isn’t impossible to dream of opportunities for oneself or one’s family—theoretically, at least.

As Canadians confront painful truths about this country—its treatment of First Nations, ongoing racial profiling, sexism in our institutions, and countless other social justice travesties—we turn to the media to understand the various sides of an issue and to find solutions to our myriad social inequities and challenges. But that’s not always the way media producers handle this immense responsibility, desperate for clicks and in a constant rush to capture fleeting attention in a 24-hour news cycle where speed often matters more than accuracy or balance. These compromised standards of journalistic ethics and integrity seem to erode further when it comes to talking about Muslims in Canada.

***

There was clearly a deliberate attempt at scoring political points by suggesting that Trudeau had no feminist backbone in speaking before a segregated prayer space during Eid. But the story was presented to bolster these negative connotations, even if the supposed offences weren’t actually rooted in fact. For one, there were women at the front of the room that day, despite reports that stated otherwise; at least one columnist had to change her piece when notified of the obvious error. And separation between men and women occurs primarily during prayer services, as with most religious prayers in other faith communities. It quickly became evident that suggesting separation is sexist only when in the context of Muslim prayer space was an attempt to reinforce stereotypes.

Muslims are more frequently becoming a proxy for political manoeuvrings, as seen in the last federal election and in the last Quebec provincial election, with all the talk of banning religious clothing from citizenship oaths and workplaces. The challenge in even speaking to such slanted stories means there’s little room for nuance. Addressing universal struggles for greater female empowerment, for example, could be used as evidence of rampant patriarchy if mentioned in this context. It’s too often a lose-lose.

These Islamophobic themes in our media mean that struggling for social justice within our own faith spaces and calling for change can be a challenge. Fellow community members might see it as “airing dirty laundry” at a time when our communities are under intense scrutiny. Others might view it as fuelling the Islamophobes. We’re left wondering what we can safely say, and how we can call for positive change in such a divisive climate.

To top it all off, a third of Canadians have a negative perception of Islam and Muslims, according to the recent Environics Survey of Muslims in Canada. Other polling shows that people who actually know a Muslim will be far more likely to have a positive impression. But when our daily media diet is persistently negative, painting Muslims as a fifth column, barbaric, sexist, dangerous, deceptive, and problematic, how can we blame people for simply wondering—even on a most basic level—what gives?

***

Just a few weeks prior to the mosque “controversy,” the Canadian Press ran a terribly damaging story about a so-called report by a couple of self-proclaimed researchers with the headline, “Mosques and schools in Canada filled with extremist literature: study.” How such a study was published at all is a mystery: it wasn’t peer-reviewed, and it did not contain any actual data, other than a few anecdotes clearly aimed at scaring people. “Many of those present during the visits to the libraries seemed sullen and sometimes angry. The traditional greetings of friendship were absent,” one particularly ridiculous section reads. “This is consistent with the increasing general angriness of Islamist/extremist views being advanced in some local mosques.”

Canadian Press editor-in-chief Stephen Meurice issued something of a mea culpa, admitting the story required actual responses from Canadian Muslim organizations before being published. But it was too little, too late. The Toronto Star also had to apologize for accompanying the piece with a picture of an unrelated Toronto mosque.

Most other media organizations that ran the original article didn’t publish a follow-up piece with responses from Canadian Muslim organizations countering the claims in the so-called study. In fact, an academic who wanted to share her own experience researching an Islamic school wasn’t able to find a single editor who would publish her commentary. She resorted to posting it on a Huffington Post blog. Writing for VICE, Davide Mastracci was the only journalist to do a full take-down in a piece aptly titled, “That Study About Extremist Mosques in Canada Is Mostly Bullshit.”

Do editors fail to see how such lopsided negative coverage impacts Canadian Muslims? Do people think we live in some kind of vacuum—that what is said on television or online won’t directly affect how we’re treated at work, by our neighbours, or on the streets? Hate crimes against Muslims in this country are rising at an alarming rate, doubling between 2012–2014 as they decline overall by comparison to other targeted communities. Sure, media are supposed to be “neutral,” but being fair and responsible doesn’t negate that neutrality.

The Toronto Star, despite its recent fault with the mosque story, actually leads the way when it comes to coverage of Islam and Muslims. Last spring, the country’s largest newspaper concluded that using the Islamic State to describe the violent extremist group was wrong. The newspaper decided to use Daesh, the Arabic acronym of the group, instead. It’s the term used by foreign leaders around the world, even recently adopted by our own government as the most accurate term to describe this “multinational gang of killers and rapists” as described by the Star’s editor-in-chief, Michael Cooke.

And yet, even after Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale made the announcement in August 2016 that Daesh is the right label to use, most Canadian media outlets continue to use the other term, feeding into a violent extremist myth: that this group is Islamic and that it is a state.

And there are studies that demonstrate how disproportionate negative coverage of Islam and Muslims can be. One American study published in the Journal of Communication found that between 2008–2012, 81 percent of stories about terrorism on U.S. news programs were about Muslims, while only six percent of domestic terrorism suspects were actually Muslim. A Canadian study looked at New York Times headlines over a 25-year span and found that Muslims garnered more negative headlines than cocaine, cancer, and alcohol. It’s quite likely that Canadian media are similarly inclined. Here in Canada, author and academic Karim H. Karim has described much of the media framing of Islam and Muslims as constructing “an Islamic Peril.”

More recently, a series of articles in the Spring 2016 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism (RRJ) points out grave deficits in Canadian media’s ability to reflect and report fairly on diverse communities. “Questioning the intentions of journalists is fundamental to admitting that Canadian news has a race problem, but it doesn’t mean all outlets will be quick to address it,” concluded Eternity Martis in a piece exploring media coverage of Toronto’s gang and gun violence and the perpetuation of stereotypes related to Black communities. To scapegoat an entire group for the violent actions of a few sounds eerily familiar, even if nonsensical.

***

Where does that leave us? We could talk about diversifying newsrooms, but that doesn’t fully solve the problem. Muslim journalists and writers can also face soul-destroying hate mail and attack, and even harassment from fellow colleagues, as has been reported to the National Council of Canadian Muslims, where I work. Though, no doubt, “building diversity is a collaborative effort,” as Anda Zeng rightfully concludes in a RRJ piece titled “Token Effort.”

For those of us engaged in the struggle, we should keep pushing back, writing commentary pieces, speaking out. But, again, there are limitations. Sometimes even reacting to a particular narrative frame confirms that you and your community are a problem to sort out. After all, “even though some Western media try to provide fair and balanced representations of Muslims, stereotypical media depictions of them are more common in Western societies,” notes University of Ottawa academic Mahmoud Eid in a 2014 collection, Re-Imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Western-Muslim Intersections.

The good news is that Islamophobia is finally being acknowledged as a real concern in this country. With the rise in police-reported hate crimes, and in an increase in the number of Canadian Muslims who are reporting experiences of discrimination and fears of stereotyping, others are taking notice. There is a growing realization that fighting against this form of hatred is right up there with fighting against all other forms of intolerance. More and more people are also hearing the multitude of voices speaking out against violent extremism, and confronting the false interpretations that seek to justify criminal behaviour in the name of our faith.

Equally hopeful is the growing number of young people taking to their microphones, their pens, their video cameras and their phones, putting new narratives forward, creating new characters, and sharing new and authentic experiences to change attitudes and perceptions. “Pop culture has the biggest chance of countering Islamophobia,” said author and commentator Reza Aslan in March 2016 during a panel on Islam and the media in Oshawa, Ont. He’s totally right. Whether we’re talking about Muslim characters in the hugely successful past series Little Mosque on the Prairie (which broke CBC’s record of audience viewership during its debut), or in the teenage drama Degrassi, people want to be entertained. It’s a bonus if one can both entertain and deconstruct stereotypes— kind of like when moms blend vegetables into spaghetti sauce.

But we can’t sit back and wait for more cultural arts to feature Muslim perspectives and realities. That will take time, encouragement, and investment. For now, news media must check their own biases when choosing which stories to run, which voices to feature, and which sides to ignore. It isn’t just a matter of ethical journalism. It’s a matter of being on the right side of history and not inadvertently on the side of those who aim to construct figurative divides.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of writer Davide Mastracci. This regrets the error.