How Can You Not Be Racist If You're Born and Raised in a Racist Empire
Viviane Saleh-Hanna and Ashanti Alston talk about Strategies for Combating Racism at Queen’s

Presented by OPIRG Kingston
613-533-3189, info@opirgkingston.org

Monday, March 16, 2009
7:30pm - 10:30pm
Robert Sutherland Room JDUC Queen's University
Union and University Sts. John Deutch University Centre
Kingston, ON

Description:

*The Queen's University Muslim Students Association (QUMSA) office and prayer space was broken into and money was stolen from

*A sign was vandalized to read "all Muslims should die"

*Female Muslim students have reported being yelled derogatory remarks at and since they have come forward with their stories, many more have as well

*A South Asian female professor was harassed at the Good for Life Fitness downtown after being asked if she was a Muslim and yelled at for being a "terrorist"

*The Queen’s University Muslim Students Assoc. office and prayer space was almost broken into again. This time with a saw and the door is now broken beyond repair. Luckily, because of security measures put in place after the last break in, this attempted break in did not succeed.

*Recently the President of the Arts and Science Undergraduate Society (ASUS), Jacob Mantle, commented publicly on the social networking tool Facebook about a photograph of two non-Muslim students wearing a hood and a scarf on their heads saying "I like your Taliban picture".

*A Jewish student’s car was defaced with a swastika

*A young Asian man is attacked on a downtown Kingston Street. Three people yelled racial epithets and told him to "go back to where you came from"

Kingston ranks #2 in Canada for police- reported hate crimes per capita.

Viviane Saleh-Hanna and Ashanti Alston talk about Strategies for Combating Racism at Queen’s

Viviane Saleh-Hanna
Dr. Saleh-Hanna is an Assistant Professor of Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. She is an activist scholar who has done anti-colonial work with prisoners around the world. Prior to moving to the United States, she lived in West Africa and worked with prisoners in Nigeria, Ghana and the Gambia. Her book Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first publication on prisons in West Africa. More recently, in her scholarly and organizing work, she has been highlighting the role music plays in black liberation struggles. She is a Pan-Africanist, a Pan-Arab and a penal abolitionist.

Ashanti Alston Omowali
Anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, and former member of the Black Panther Party. He was also member of the Black Liberation Army and spent more than a decade in prison after police captured him and he was convicted of armed robbery. Alston, like most anarchists, disputes the moral issues of property and terms his activity in the BLA "bank expropriation". Alston is the former northeast coordinator for Critical Resistance, a current co-chair of the National Jericho Movement (to free U.S. political prisoners), a member of pro-Zapatista people-of-color U.S.-based Estacion Libre, and is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.