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When words wound, to borrow critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s phrase, the first injury is confusion. How do we understand the link between the word and the wound? Is it the physical manifestation of intention that injures us? Or is it the historical context and origin—the discursive nature—of a word that lacerates our sense of belonging in this world? What if the language used was our own language appropriated against us?

Yet we must constantly keep in mind the historical reality of Kafka’s time: he was not speaking metaphorically. A man could go to sleep an employed Jew and wake up the next morning as vermin. A Jew could study at the university and yet find himself called a dog. In German and Austrian anti-Semitic political publications, Jews were frequently referred to as “rats,” “mice,” “insects,” and “vermin.” If a person can go to sleep a Jew and wake up transformed into some kind of “vermin,” what is to prevent an animal going to sleep a dog and waking up a person? It is as if Kafka took that reality, the ever-present possibility of being referred to as some sort of animal, and pondered what it would be to truly become an animal.

[T]he evidence we have of racism and sexism is deemed insufficient because of racism and sexism. Indeed racism and sexism work by disregarding evidence or by rendering evidence unreliable or suspicious – often by rendering those who have direct experience of racism and sexism unreliable and suspicious.

The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that the problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a sure way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one’s position is more important than another one’s pain. People who say “stop complaining” always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.

The figure of the angry person of color has a defensive function: for example, if critiques of racism are ‘just’ an expression of our anger, then our anger is heard as without reason. It is as if we talk about racism because we are angry, rather than being angry because of racism.

[I]t is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. […] [A]nything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous.

Until white people are ready to relieve themselves of an all-consuming belief in a colorblind legal system, ready to recognize the violence at the core of the ideology of whiteness (which is, I hope you hear me saying, different from calling all white people violent), ready to adopt a new framework, we can’t talk. We can’t talk because y’all can’t hear me. To remix the words of Trayvon’s mom, since you can’t hear us, we will make you feel us, through our protests, through our acts of civil disobedience, through our stoic faces that refuse you the comfort of our smiles. And in the words of Notorious B.I.G., ‘if you don’t know, now you know.’

The racial profiling thing, in our case in France, is directly inherited from France’s colonial past. You know, I know the U.S. — I went to school in the U.S., so I’m quite familiar with the romantic view people have of France and you know, hugs and you know, perfume, etc. But the reality is that France is a colonial republic. And the current republic we live under, called the Fifth Republic, had its constitution adopted in 1958 in the midst of the bloody repression of the liberation movements in the colonies, which means that our institutions today work according to a colonial model. So, it is no coincidence that if you are a black or an Arab person in France, you are 20 times more likely of being racially profiled by the police. If you are a Muslim person in France, you are four times less likely of receiving a positive answer to your job application.

Biases persist in Canadian workplaces. In one field experiment, published in 2011, University of Toronto researchers Philip Oreopoulos and Diane Dechief sent almost 8,000 résumés to employers in Canada’s three largest cities, from applicants with either anglophone or foreign-sounding names. They found that job seekers with names like Matthew Wilson were 35 per cent more likely to get a callback than those with a name like Samir Sharma – regardless of work experience, education or language proficiency. Health disparities persist, in both countries. In a study published this year, Prof. Siddiqi and a team found racial inequalities exist in health outcomes (such as heart attacks, hypertension and obesity) in Canada and the U.S. The magnitudes differ though – the gap between blacks and whites is greater in the U.S. than in Canada. However, the indigenous-white disparity is larger in Canada than in the U.S. In terms of hate crimes, Canada has a higher recorded rate than the United States – 1,295 in 2014, or a rate of 3.7 per 100,000 people, according to Statscan. By comparison, the FBI recorded 5,479 hate crimes in the same year in the U.S., 1.84 per 100,000 people. Forty-seven per cent of hate crimes were racially motivated in both countries. In Canada, blacks and Arabs were most frequently targeted and the types of crimes ranged from threatening phone calls and public incitement of hatred, to harassment and assault. In Canada, as in the United States, problems in policing are thorny issues. In July, the RCMP pulled over and questioned a black man in Bathurst, N.B., after they received calls about a “suspicious man.” He had, in fact, just been reading a book. In the same month, Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali-Canadian man, died in Ottawa after a confrontation with police.

While African-Canadians make up three per cent of the general population, they account for 10 per cent of the federal prison population. The recent report also indicates that while in prison, Black inmates are overrepresented in segregation, and that they are subject to nearly 15 per cent of all use-of-force incidents. In a case study released in 2014 on the Black inmate experience, the office of the correctional investigator points out that “despite being rated as a population having a lower risk to re-offend and lower need overall, Black inmates are more likely to be placed in maximum security institutions.” […] According to Morgan, the silence around the issue stems from our willful denial of the situation, and our conviction that Black incarceration is a uniquely American problem—not a Canadian one. “It has a lot to do with what I’ve called Canadian racial exceptionalism,” says Morgan. “If America is having a conversation about the hyper incarceration of Black males, in order to maintain our sense of moral superiority, we can’t look into those issues as we experience them here in Canada,” he says. Morgan notes that, in reality, overrepresentation of the Black population in prisons is slightly more pronounced in Canada than in the U.S., where African-Americans account for 37 per cent of the prison population and 13 per cent of the general population. “We’re not, as a country, ready to contest that,” Morgan continues, “because of the myths we tell ourselves about multiculturalism, and thinking that we have it all figured out. The truth of the matter is, when you look in our prison systems, if you go to our courthouses, if you go at children’s aid offices, to school detention halls, it is overwhelmingly Black kids who are being criminalized and punished. I think the generalized silence has to do with what we want to believe about ourselves as Canadians.”

“Because we also tend to individualize acts of injustice. I’m thinking about the coverage - which I think is really good that we’ve been seeing on the Trayvon Martin case, however, what distresses me is the fact that is not linked to the overall historical context of such racist policy. The media have been approaching it as if the only challenge is to understand every single fact in that particular case. And by so myopically focusing on that one case we forget that we’re not simply talking about an individual case, we’re talking about something that is structural, something that is historical.

Whiteness is a social and political construct rooted in white supremacy. Drawing from the work of Frank Wilderson, I understand white supremacy as a structure and system of beliefs rooted in European and US imperialism in which certain racialized bodies (non-white) are selected for premature negation whether through cultural, physical, psychological genocide, containment or other forms of social death. White supremacy is at the heart of the US social system and civil society. In short, white supremacy is not just a series of practices or privilege, but a larger social structure and system of domination that overly-values and rewards those who are racialized as white. The rest of us are constructed as undeserving to be considered human, although there is significant variation within non-white populations of how our bodies are encoded, treated and (de)valued […] [W]hite people need to be willing to have their very social position, their very relationship of domination, their very authority, their very being…let go, perhaps even destroyed. I know this might sound scary, but that is really not my concern. I am not interested in making white people, even those so-called good-hearted anti-racist whites, comfortable about their position in struggles that shape my life in ways that it will never shape theirs.

And who are “they” in the poem? It was this word, in the poem’s very first line, that made me realize that I, as a Chinese-American reader, was excluded from it. Because the “they” can only be the Chinese themselves, with “their” provinces and “their” food brought to “our” tables. And the “we,” by implication, can only be white American diners.