Kimia Tahaie was an opinions staff writer of the Silhouette from 2021-22.
The Silhouette: Please introduce yourself.
Kimia Tahaie: My name is Kimia and I'm a third-year arts and science student. I'm also double majored in communication and media studies. I'm doing a semester abroad in Amsterdam to do journalism courses because that's what I'm going to pursue professionally.
Could you tell us a short summary of what the situation in Iran is like right now?
This all started with the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini. It's very important to note that this was not the first killing that happened under this Islamic regime in Iran. This is one of many. With the protests that have been happening in Iran, they're happening within shorter time frames. The gap is getting shorter and shorter. It just shows how sick and tired the people are of living in the regime. They're trying their best to stop us but people have been very persistent and they're protesting and even going out on the streets every night even though there's a very large chance of getting murdered. But there have been consistent acts of protest. There has been a continuous movement.
It's just been so many years of oppression. I feel like a lot of people don't know the extent of oppression we've been facing during these past years. We are deprived of the simplest rights as a society, men and women. For example, we can't have pets. If you have a dog, the dog will be taken away from you because that's haram. Iranian women can't bike, Iranian women can't sing, Iranian women can't go on the streets without a hijab. So there are so many elements that have just built up to these protests. That's why I am strongly against a lot of Muslim influencers who are coming out and saying that what Persian women are doing is inherently Islamophobic. That could not be further away from the truth. I think what really needs to be understood is that for me, that's not a hijab. For us, it's a piece of cloth that has been forced on our heads for years and years and years. To us, this is a symbol of freedom. We're not saying to ban the hijab; we're saying to give women the freedom to wear what they want and, in the bigger picture, to give freedom to the people of Iran.
I think what really needs to be understood is that for me, that's not a hijab. For us, it's a piece of cloth that has been forced on our heads for years and years and years. To us, this is a symbol of freedom. We're not saying to ban the hijab; we're saying to give women the freedom to wear what they want and, in the bigger picture, to give freedom to the people of Iran.
Kimia Tahaie
A lot of people think this is a women's movement. This is a human rights movement. Freedom for all. I think in America, Europe and Canada, everyone's very desensitized to Middle Eastern issues. I think this is very well-done propaganda because it groups us as poor people far away — the poor Middle Easterners that we can't do anything about. This can't be further away from the truth. This is not just the Middle Eastern issue: with the freedom of Iran comes the freedom of many countries. This is something I feel like people are forgetting. We have largely funded Russia, meaning that they can bomb Ukraine. This is not "just another Middle Eastern issue". This is way bigger than that. This is a very global issue. If we believe that, it will lead to the freedom of many, many other countries.
What can people outside of Iran do to help?
It's so important to not read what's happening in Iran as just another headline.
My people are literally giving their lives in the hopes of achieving very basic human rights. There’s an Internet shutdown in Iran so don't let [Mahsa Amini's name] stop circulating. Because the day that this dies down is the day that the regime can completely take over.
A lot of my friends, even those who aren't Persian, have asked their professors if they could have a few minutes to talk about what's happening. Consistently keeping yourself in the loop with what's happening and spreading awareness on social media is the most important thing. Also, just checking up on your Persian friends because they're not okay.
By: Eden Wondmeneh
As a first-year student in social sciences, the bulk of my tutorial grade is determined by my participation in discussions. For someone who would rather be restricted to eating at Centro than be forced to speak in public, tutorials are not my ideal environment.
As the fall semester progressed, I noticed that some of these discussions supported learning while others were downright problematic. Speaking to other students in social sciences, specifically students of colour, it was clear that teaching assistants, who greatly influenced whether tutorial discussions were the former or the latter, were overwhelmingly white.
The lack of diversity in TAs is often juxtaposed with a somewhat diverse student group — where students of colour bond over the shared discomfort or hilarity of the awkwardness that settles across the room anytime a ‘hot topic’ like white privilege is brought up.
Discussions about race are often excluded from acceptable topics in an environment that claims to encourage academic discourse, especially when initiated by a person of colour: a fact that aided in my decision to stay relatively quiet in tutorials.
Regardless of their intentions, these TAs are in a position of power where they facilitate discussions about systems of oppression that they themselves benefit from and resultantly teach students through this narrow-privileged lens. If topics of race are not dismissed after a moment of awkward silence, they always seem condescending; what qualifies non-POC TAs to lead these discussions?
I have a friend whose TA explained how common sense differs between cultures using a blatantly racist analogy of African children never having seen a stove thus not knowing that it is unsafe to touch. When called out for their ignorance, the TA’s response was some variation of, “I’m not racist”.
The Teaching in an Accessible and Inclusive Community section of McMaster University’s 2013 TA guide shows that the diversity and inclusion issue in tutorial sessions is much worse than it appears. The university is aware of the power imbalances that are inherent to the limited diversity amongst TAs — they just aren’t doing anything about it.
Despite their ability to recognize that acknowledgment of systemic racism is not enough to let them off the hook, they boldly state that McMaster staff and faculty work “against often invisible systems of privilege and oppression,” without giving TAs any guidance in how to further this effort within their own tutorials. In fact, the guidebook makes it clear that it is naïve to believe that even a well-intentioned TA could use any tips provided to create an equitable space within their tutorials.
To be clear, I don’t think that TAs are intentionally leading their tutorials to isolate students of colour and validate the dominant privileged narrative that exists within our society. I do believe though that the hiring process for TAs is flawed, as it works directly against McMaster’s “fight against invisible systems of privilege and oppression”.
There should be a great number of Black TAs who are able to lead tutorials with a different perspective, engage with Black students and have important conversations about race when the course calls for it.
Aside from increasing the diversity amongst TAs, there should be mandatory anti-oppression workshops and training. It is unrealistic to hope that TAs will suddenly diversify, but it is not unrealistic to hope that current TAs have an understanding of their bias and are able to react to being called out productively — not through cries of, “I am not racist”.
For myself to feel comfortable to contribute freely within these tutorials, I need there to be measures in place for the inevitable awkwardness that ensues when race is discussed and a guarantee that Black children won't be used in racist examples.
We don't live within a vacuum. To create the “inclusive and accessible learning environment” that McMaster desires, TAs need to reflect this inclusivity and accessibility students are meant to find.
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Edward Lovoquintanilla
The Silhouette
Following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, many outside observers - whose purview extends only as far and wide as their television screens - waited expectantly for social breakdown and looting. Instead, most communities had rapidly mobilized to deliver mutual aid before the arrival of foreigners. Throughout Haiti, foreign aid did not arrive for days, weeks in other places, yet Haitians reached for whatever was in grasp and dug themselves out of the rubble, often with their bare hands. With a barely functional government, the people of Haiti themselves tended to the injured, set up camps, fed one another, sang, prayed, and mourned together.
This self-mobilization has a long history that stretches back into the postrevolutionary period when Haitians transformed traditions of farming inherited from Africa into innovative ways of the management of the land, despite an almost indifferent leadership. Century upon century of foreign intervention and manipulation layers the history of Haiti, never quite able to extinguish the fires of self-determination beneath its sands.
Nation after nation, corporation after corporation have sought to suckle the milk from Haiti’s soil by the sweat of its people. In the presence of French warships, the Baron de Mackau coerced the President of Haiti, without further consultation, into buying the freedom of Haiti for 150 million francs; which is no freedom at all, but the bonds of economic dependence.
The bonds forged by economic dependence have become Haiti’s garment industry, owned by the white and lighter-skinned elite, some of whose production belongs to Wal-Mart and Gildan Active Wear. The workers are paid nearly a third less than the minimum wage, coerced into working more than the legally allowed work-week, rendering food unaffordable; eating, a practical question the worker faces every mealtime.
Not only is Haitian law broken in the treatment of workers, but it also violates the code of conduct of the corporations whose production is in Haiti’s garment industry. In fact, it also violates the ethical purchasing policy of the McMaster Students Union, who purchases clothing from Gildan Active Wear.
Can we conscionably stand idly by while our student government contributes to the current chapter of this centuries-long story of dependence, extortion and exploitation? Ethical purchasing is a question that is being raised by McMaster students, and we are waiting for the answer.
Edward Lovo / Silhouette Staff
Resistance resides in the critique; action propels it forward. The critical activist exists in the space between actuality and possibility. In the consummation of what may be, there runs the risk that the latter in an effort to have it lose its critical function; to pacify all momentum of resistance that traces the movement, absorbs the possibility to which actuality is opposed.
The success of the absorption of possibility into actuality removes the activist from a critical space to a miasma that suffocates the cries of opposition.
Critical activists speak in the language of critique; the language of critique is forged in the fires of the struggle for equity.
In a move to quench the fire, those in power assimilate the language of critique into an extension of the language of power: the watermark of absorption. At once, to develop a new language of critique becomes imperative for the critical activist in order to not hand over the strings to those in power to puppeteer the understanding of equity. Failure to do so buttresses those in power with a masquerade of equity, pantomiming a show of justice while muting the oppressed as obstructive and divisive in their own chase for justice.
Divisiveness characterizes the struggle for equity; the struggle for equity is the raison d’être of divisiveness. A struggle that does not challenge the existence of those in power is not a struggle, but a cooperative effort that ultimately serves their interests.
To challenge the existence of those in power is also to challenge the mechanisms by which the disenfranchised are disenfranchised, or produced perpetually by the same mechanisms that accord power to some.
Threads of history and culture are laced through our person, so from the beginning we are not entirely our own—there is so much unbecoming just so that a person might chance becoming. Critical activists unravel our existences - a painful process which is the reason for divisiveness. Without an examination of existence, the element of resistance constitutive of the struggle for equity is lost to oblivion.
Activists who caricature the dynamic of struggle between their critical counterparts and those in power as a lamentable antagonism begin to speak in the language of power.
Unwittingly, these activists hold a basin of tears collected from the oppressed to wash the hands of those in power from responsibility.
Neither divisiveness nor discomfort is an omen but evidence of the dismantling of the structures of power, which are the conditions of the existence of the dynamic between oppressor and oppressed.
Critical activists refuse to crack their soul by the mallet of compromise, to shatter to the pieces that give their core of self the semblance of crystal—we are not so fragile.
The lightning of resistance surges through our words and movements “working with” those in power; those in power will never know of complicity in the struggle for equity.
