Between right and wrong, vaccinated and unvaccinated — is our humanity

I grew up on the wrong side of the story.

One of my earliest memories is watching then-president Ronald Reagan rail against welfare mothers as the epitome of what was wrong in America. I was sitting in front of our little black and white TV, eating some of that rubbery cheese stuff that came with our food subsidy as my “welfare” mom popped popcorn for our dinner in the other room. A feeling rose up in me like I was dirty from the inside.

I’d feel that again.

I felt it when I was caught holding my little brother’s hand at the fair and two boys screamed “n***** lover.” Or when my mother told me the story of being pulled over by the police for driving with my brother in the passenger seat. My mother is white. My brother is Black. That’s not a crime in the U.S. — or it’s not on the books as a crime. They did it “for her own good.”

I felt it every time somebody shared some racist thought with me because my skin is white and my eyes are blue. Like the stepmom who said she didn’t have “anything against Black people, it’s just that they should only have babies with their kind.”

I felt it when I was told that one of my “uncles” had tried to gas himself to death after he was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. He’d already lost his family, his job, and his housing. We didn’t blame him when he succeeded because the alternative was everywhere in the media: the slow, lonely, ostracized death. This was before we acknowledged that gay people had human rights.

And then I went to the most liberal of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. I was fed a steady diet of identity politics along with science, history, and ecology. There I learned at least two things: we don’t hear the stories of the minority voices and few will applaud you if you try to tell the stories of a group to which you do not belong.

I left the U.S. for Canada and swore my oath as a Canadian citizen on World Peace Day. A day when all humanity commits to building a culture of peace. The judge reminded us that as a Canadian that included making reconciliation an active part of our lives.

Today, I am a writer, a mother, an immigrant. I am also white, middle-class, and possess an advanced degree. When I think about reconciliation, I think about the girl I once was and the vast expanse of privilege that separates us. She’d want to know what I was doing to ensure that we not only learn the history of the wrongs that came before but also those that continue to be perpetuated in systems created from empires that primarily valued the white, male, landowner; in institutions created to serve these systems; and in individuals that get stuck in inherited values, fears, prejudices.

We are all more than what we appear on the outside, under the title of any one label, or that can be summed up in any one story. Whose job is it to tell the stories that make us human to each other?

In the U.S., the media is considered so important to a functional democracy and limiting the powers of the government in favour of the people, that it’s often referred to as the Fourth Estate. The constitutional amendment that governs it says: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

Similar precedent exists in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but with less clarity. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, Justin Trudeau affirmed the importance of the press saying: “A free-thinking, independent, and respected media is the cornerstone of any democracy. One cannot exist without the other.”

The International Press Institute concluded as early as 2020 that the pandemic was disrupting this lofty goal, saying the “public health crisis has allowed governments to exercise control over the media on the pretext of preventing the spread of disinformation.”

As a member of the media these days, I feel that same horrible feeling as I did when I was a child. The storyline may be different today, but the plot is the same. Somebody is right and somebody is wrong. The right side is the one that the white man on the TV (or screen of choice) endorses. If you aren’t on his side, you are endangering our children/elders/health/nation/democracy.

Perhaps you are the type to want to stand up for, or at least listen to, the underdog. I am still filled with shame for the little me who wondered why the welfare mothers didn’t get jobs, who dropped my brother’s hand when I was screamed at, who didn’t hug my HIV-positive “uncle” and never let go. Who is the scapegoat today? Perhaps it is the unvaccinated nurse who lost her job, the trucker who bet everything to stand up for his unvaccinated buddy, or the “fringe minority” of Canadians ready to protest to end all COVID mandates.

Either way, we benefit from hearing all of the stories. It’s our job as Canadians to ask the person most different from us: What is it that I do not know? It’s my job as a writer to tell the stories that aren’t being told, even if I fail to do it perfectly. It’s your job as a reader to demand more than the stories from those who the majority believe is “right.”

Somewhere in there — between right and wrong, vaccinated and unvaccinated, most and few — is our humanity, and she wants to be heard.