Juno News - February 12, 2023


Racially segregated events in Canada?


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

203.59442

Word count

506

Sentence count

24

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What on earth is going on with the increase in racially segregated events happening in Canada and particularly on Canadian university campuses? In this episode of Campus Watch, we discuss the phenomenon of Black-only events happening at Canadian universities and colleges.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 What on earth is going on with the increase in racially segregated events happening in Canada
00:00:06.040 and particularly on Canadian university campuses? Yep, you heard me right. No, we're not talking
00:00:12.400 about white-only events. We're talking about black-only events that are appearing at a lot
00:00:18.080 of universities across Canada. Here at True North, we run a series called Campus Watch where we
00:00:22.940 write about some of the more bizarre or quirky or just generally problematic things that are
00:00:28.600 happening at university and college campuses. And in recent weeks, we've written a number of stories
00:00:34.100 about racially segregated events happening on campus. What's going on here? Well, the basic
00:00:38.780 answer is that February is Black History Month. And of course, there are events that are more about
00:00:43.600 celebrating, acknowledging, recognizing various issues to do with Black History Month. And
00:00:48.900 naturally, a number of those events will be geared more towards a predominantly black audience. Okay,
00:00:53.240 fine. Black History Month is certainly nothing new. But what does appear to be new is putting these 0.98
00:00:58.420 qualifiers on who can attend the events and saying that this is for a black identifying audience
00:01:05.080 only. Those sorts of phrases are what they use there. Is this something that we're going to see
00:01:10.340 become more commonplace? A lot of people just aren't aware of what's happening on university campuses
00:01:15.320 because, well, they're adults and they're out in the world not paying attention. It's one of the
00:01:18.960 reasons we have the Campus Watch feature to say, hey guys, here's what's happening on campus. And
00:01:23.340 I think as we've learned historically, some things that start in academia, they become writ large and
00:01:28.820 they become broader phenomenon elsewhere. Now, we did have a broader example of this happening. The
00:01:33.620 National Arts Center in Ottawa, a cultural institution, putting on a black-only evening
00:01:39.020 of theater for one production of a play they have going on. And there was a lot of public outcry. A lot
00:01:44.000 of people saying, what? We don't feel very good about this. Seriously, asking a lot of questions about,
00:01:48.860 well, what if a white person does purchase a ticket? Are they allowed to show up? Or if there is a
00:01:53.360 mixed-race couple who would like to attend the event together? Is someone going to be barred from
00:01:56.980 going? I mean, a lot of head-scratchers, people saying this just doesn't feel right. And National
00:02:02.040 Arts Center doing a bit of a backtracking on it. And that event is no longer happening, at least to the
00:02:06.700 degree that they had previously described it. So, are we going to see a backlash about what's going on
00:02:11.500 at university campuses? Is this just a flash-in-the-pan thing that's just happening this year,
00:02:15.540 maybe a bit next year, and then we'll forget about it? Or is it a sign of things to come?
00:02:19.720 I think most people would say they're not crazy about seeing a greater prevalence of these events.
00:02:24.860 But we shall see, because right now, they're happening at university, and there's a lot of them.