Months of criticism following the release of Carleton’s Commission on Inter-Cultural, Inter-Religious and Inter-Racial Relations report prompted a panel discussion Feb. 5 featuring members of Carleton’s staff, alumni, and student body.
The report released in October “denied the true experiences of the diverse student, staff and faculty population on this campus,” organizer Emma Slose said as she introduced the event to a packed conference room in Dunton Tower.
The discussion was organized by the Ontario Public Interest Research Group’s (OPIRG) Carleton branch, and aimed to look at the issues of oppression and colonization, as well as explore the issues distinct groups had with the report.
Attendees listened intently to panelists such as fourth-year public affairs student Rabita Sharfuddin, who has been an active member of Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) for three years.
Sharfuddin highlighted the importance of discussing this report at a time when she said “social justice and human rights at Carleton are really being undermined.”
She said that during her time with SAIA, Carleton’s administration had made numerous attempts to “really silence our voices and prevent us from carrying out our awareness campaigns.”
While Sharfuddin agreed with the mandate of the report, which was to examine relations on campus between different cultural, ethnic and religious groups, she argued the implementation of this mandate was flawed.
“I talked about my experiences of racism and Islamophobia in the classroom, in my law classes, my policy classes, etc, and I didn’t feel reflected in this report at all,” said Sharfuddin, who identified herself as a “racialized woman.”
The biggest issue Sharfuddin said she had with the report was that she believed it didn’t distinguish criticism of the state of Israel from anti-Semitism.
Carleton sociology professor Nahla Abdo, another panelist, expanded on this.
She said the report wanted to silence “voices that are critical [of] the state of Israel . . . voices that are supporters of peace in the Middle East, or Palestinian rights, and would like to debate freely the issue of Israel without being confined or constricted by any limitations.”
The report also used aboriginal causes as a cover up, and other groups with numbers higher than the dissatisfied Jewish group were ignored, Abdo said.
Panelist Dillon Black, an advocate for the opening of a sexual assault support centre on campus chose to focus on colonization.
One of the first points Black brought up was that Dunton Tower was currently located on unceded Algonquin territory.
“This report is part of an ongoing process of colonization and colonialism, and this report does not just affect us or some people ‘over there,’” Black said, referring to Israel and Palestine. “It affects and concerns everyone.”
Black also referred to the report as a “violent tool that dictates whose experiences are justified and whose bodies are not,” citing administrative violence as a problem. Moving forward should involve remaining critical and challenging the administration, according to Black.
Patrizia Gentile, director of Carleton’s Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, said she found the framework of the report the most problematic. Different conclusions could have been reached if the report had taken an intersectionality approach, she said.
“If the question had been, ‘How is racialized violence experienced on campus?’ as opposed to, ‘Which group is most racialized on campus’ . . . the report would have been about experiences with racialized violence and not which groups experience the most violence,” Gentile explained.
Clips from panelist Melissa Santoro Greyeyes-Brant’s film Kinamagawin : Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom were screened at the beginning of the event.
Greyeyes-Brant, a Carleton alumna and formerly a member of the commission, said she had the utmost respect for her former colleagues.
Greyeyes-Brant noted that her film, which documents the stories of aboriginal students on campus, is being screened to train new faculty at Carleton’s Centre for Aboriginal Culture and Education. She referred to this as a positive baby step in terms of the report.
“Baby steps are most important because the amount of work that can be done is daunting,” Greyeyes-Brant said.
It is important that the recommendations for the commission are coming from the students and faculty, Greyeyes-Brant said.
The discussion kicked off a call for submissions for an upcoming journal created by OPIRG-Carleton
The journal, titled “Let’s Decolonize Campus,” will feature the struggles and experiences of members of the Carleton community.
