By Maximilian Pereira

I remember the first time I experienced discrimination; I remember the visceral emptiness in my stomach. I was a child growing up in 1980’s London (UK). Without provocation, an older boy approached me in the school playground and asked me, “Oi! What are you? Are you half-cast or something?” I had never heard the term ‘half-cast’ before and had no idea what it meant. Despite this, the derogatory and aggressive question elicited the intended feeling. My stomach sank, and I somehow felt less than, unsure of myself. That night’s conversation over dinner stripped a layer of innocence away as my parents revealed that I was likely to be treated differently due to the colour of my skin and texture of my hair. My father laid down a litany of his negative experiences living in England since the early 60’s, from having a failed paper in college overturned to a distinction by an independent review, to the signs on the doors of pubs stating “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish!”

Racism and discrimination were par for the course growing up in London in the 80’s. You just dealt with it, eventually being called the ‘N’ word had zero to little effect. However, I never expected to experience it from my own people. As I got older and gained acceptance into private school, suddenly I wasn’t ‘black’ enough. My parents always insisted that I spoke ‘properly’ and they did not tolerate cockney slang. In the early 90’s I picked up a job at a local liquor store, where another incident occurred that would profoundly affect me. One evening a Jamaican man walked into the store. He brought his beer cans to the check out, looked at me disdainfully, and aggressively stated, “You know white bwoy cyan ‘av ‘airstyle like dat!” (I had a high top fade.) There was that feeling again: I felt the nasty intent. Why was this man attacking a teenager for his hairstyle? Perhaps, judging by his thick accent, he felt insecure in a foreign country and chose to project that insecurity. That was the last time I felt that emptiness inside; in fact, it was the catalyst for me accepting myself just the way I am.

You can imagine my shock when an emotion long forgotten, filed away under ‘ancient history’ resurfaced. At first I couldn’t identify the feeling in my stomach. But as a familiar whiff of perfume or cologne sets the mind racing to identify a distant memory, I looked inward. There it was again: I was being discriminated against. But how could this be? In Canada, in 2021?

My children and I were recently walking through the lobby of our building, unmasked. As we approached the elevator area, a woman engaged in conversation shouted for all to hear, “You’d better back up, they’re not masked!” I was instantly aware of my children’s discomfort. What were we, some kind of sub-human pariahs? The intent was vicious, the tone rude and disrespectful. Then, as the media circus continued to whip up the uninformed populace into a fear frenzy, I noticed that people started to become more vocal in public spaces when I didn’t wear a mask. Recently, I entered the elevator and courteously held the door open for a woman following behind me. She was about to get on the elevator and stopped herself and said in a derogatory fashion, “Oh no, you’re not wearing a mask!” I replied, “But yours works, right?” If looks could kill, I would be playing a harp on a cloud right now. Her glare was hateful.

Where is the Canada to which I emigrated in the mid 90’s? The open, friendly, tolerant, accepting, multicultural Shangri-La, where when someone asked where I was from they were genuinely interested in where I was from? What happened in sixteen months to the calm, peaceful inclusive society that was the envy of the world? People from all over the world have fled oppressive communist regimes to find their freedom in this amazing country. Yet here we are, sixteen months after “Just two weeks to flatten the curve,” a society transformed and divided. Labels bandied about with irreverent carelessness: ‘Anti-masker,’ ‘Anti-vaxxer,’ ‘Conspiracy theorist.’ The age-old ‘divide and conquer’ playbook plays out in predictable fashion. Are we so malleable, so programmable, so easily controlled through behavioural modification techniques and neuro-linguistic programming? How did a society turn on itself within a year? Families and friends at odds, intolerance and judgement based on pseudo-science, rhetoric and hyperbole? What happened?

In 1987, I had the opportunity to visit Israel. I have a certificate stating that I am a Pilgrim of Jerusalem. In order to have that distinction, a number of sites have to be visited and studied; one of which was Yad Vashem. Not one person exited the museum with a dry eye the day I was there. The overriding consensus was that this heinous crime, this colossal failure of humanity, must never be allowed to be repeated. The coach ride back to the hotel was silent.

When societies would rather conform and ‘virtue signal’ to avoid the oppression their silence and complicity enables, personal liberty is in perilous jeopardy. When an individual judges another individual based on superficial information, it is discrimination. Discrimination has always been an effective tool to maintain the hegemony that has dominated this planet for so long. ‘Un-masked’ and ‘un-vaccinated’ are just the latest linguistic weapons in the repertoire of societal prejudice that lends itself to fanaticism.

You see, the Holocaust didn’t start with box cars, camps and showers. It started with fear, bigotry and intolerance. Slavery didn’t start with ships, whips and plantations. It started with the misguided concept that one group of people is considered inferior or superior to another. The travesties of our human history have not solely been the result of an extraneous evil. Atrocities occur when good people turn their backs on their own inherent moral decency rather than stand up and do what is right.