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Issue 4 of 5  - February 2021
 
Step Forward is a digital communication and podcast series that challenges anti-Black racism within Ontario’s community-based HIV response.

Throughout the podcast series, we are speaking with Black leaders from diverse professional and personal backgrounds. 

In this issue, we're continuing to share tools, conversations, and resources to help our members to embed Black liberation work in their agencies.  


Listen to the
Step Forward TRAILER and our previous episodes to learn more about the podcast. 
ISSUE 4 AT A GLANCE
IN THIS ISSUE
FEBRUARY IS BLACK FUTURES MONTH
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
As we continue our work toward liberation of Black lives and Black people, the Ontario AIDS Network joins our partners in marking Black Futures Month and Black History Month. Throughout this month and over this coming year, we ask our Members, stakeholders and partners to identify their commitments to Black liberation, to self-educate and reflect; and to meaningfully and equitably engage Black communities in their work. We ask our Members to recognize that HIV work is Black liberation work and to Step Forward to challenge anti-Black racism in all aspects of the HIV response. 

Black History Month is a month-long observance and celebration of the resistance and achievements of Black people in Canada and beyond. It is a time to remember the people, events and the history of the African diaspora.

Black Futures Month is a time to envision, build and define the Black future,
where Black people are liberated and share what that would look like. Black Lives Matter envisions a "A future where our opportunities are abundant, we are thriving, and our lives are safe from police violence. We deserve a future where we are fully free. Where we are seen and valued as our full selves — mothers, fathers, teachers, students. Where politicians create policy and platforms to address the issues that impact our daily lives. Where we are not targeted and killed by law enforcement."

 



African, Caribbean and Black Canadian HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, February 7, 2021
This year marks the seventh annual African, Caribbean and Black Canadian HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in Canada. February 7, is a day for Ontario's HIV sector to pause for conversations and increase awareness; to highlight the work of Black HIV organizations and the work being done to reduce HIV in African, Caribbean, and Black communities. It is a day to reflect on how our organizations can take action toward embedding Black liberation work into our HIV work. 
 

How to Post Events and Share Information
The OAN will be highlighting Black History Month and Black Futures month events and activities happening across our network through our social media, newsletter, and our events webpage.

Subscribe to the OAN's bi-monthly newsletter to learn more.

Visit the OAN
events page to see events, or message Precious Maseko to share information about a Black History Month or Black Futures Month event.
 STEP FORWARD PODCAST EPISODE 4
Episode Excerpt
"You are going to make mistakes. You are going to say the wrong thing. You are probably going to hurt somebody; you are probably going to offend somebody. And you know what? Thats okay, because you're going to be accountable around that. You're going to be able to have a process where you can be clear that you don't know everything but you're willing to learn and you're willing to say 'I messed up, I will do better and this is what it's going to look like and this is what it's going to mean'. Because the silence is unaccpetable. the silence turns into apathy, apathy turns into lack of action, lack of action means--which we know from our statistics--the death of Black people."
Episode Four: Beth Jordan
Beth Jordan is founder and principal of Adobe Consulting Services and has deep practical and strategic experience as a trusted organizational developer and management consultant. She has consulted extensively to municipal, provincial and federal levels of government and NGO’s on the issues of violence against women, HIV/AIDS, social justice policy and the integration of anti-racism and anti-oppression frameworks. She has been instrumental in facilitating broad-based advocacy initiatives and has been active in a wide range of committees and coalitions.

This series, hosted by Kondwani Mwase is a collaboration spearheaded by the Ontario AIDS Network and produced by 54Lights podcast
 
Listen to Episode 4
#StimulusConnect PANEL: DEFUNDING POLICE
Canadian Drug Policy Coalition: Stimulus Connect 6
Have you considered why most harm reduction and drug policy activists support the movement to Defund the Police? How are harm reduction philosophy, drug policy reform and the movement to defund the police linked? How do the police benefit from the criminalization of people who use drugs?

Defund the Police has been a strong rally cry in the US and Canada.
#StimulusConnect will discuss why defunding the police is an essential part of harm reduction based practice. Join this group of Canadian panelists for Defunding the Police, a moderated discussion.
DOCUMENTARY: MLK/FBI
MLK/FBI follows Martin Luther King Jr. as he is investigated and harassed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
MLK/FBI is a 2020 American documentary film directed by Sam Pollard, from a screenplay by Benjamin Hedin and Laura Tomaselli.

Synopsis
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as an American hero: a bridge-builder, a shrewd political tactician, and a moral leader. Yet throughout his history-altering political career, he was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies like an enemy of the state. In this virtuosic documentary, award-winning editor and director Sam Pollard lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fuelled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover.


Watch the documentary at home. 

RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
How Far Has the FBI. Gone to Protect White Supremacy?

From WNYC Studios, hear MLK/FBI director, Sam Pollard, in discussion with writer and historian, Jelani Cobb, about this film.

This year, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was on January 18. 
TOOLS 
Defining White Culture

This one-page PDF resource provides a basic understanding of the term 'white culture'. It includes succinct, easy-to-understand definitions and examples of how white-dominant culture manifests and marginalizes racialized people inside organizations. Source: Racial Equity Tools

Worksheet: White Dominant Culture and Something Different

Learn to identify the characteristics of white dominant culture using a 'norms of white dominant culture' matrix/table. See how they play out in within an organization and learn about antidotes and alternatives to white supremacist culture using the 'Something Different' matrix/table. Source: Racial Equity Tools

White Supremacy Culture & Remote Work

White supremacy culture, as defined by Tema Okun (Dismantling Racism Works), can be mirrored and perpetuated in remote environments. In order to mitigate white supremacy culture in virtual work, we (Remote DEI Toolkit) created a crosswalk and resources to explore the intersections of both sets of practices.
ARTICLES 
The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards
By Aysa Gray

Professionalism has become coded language for white favouritism in workplace practices that more often than not privilege the values of white and Western employees and leave behind racialized people.

In the workplace, white supremacy culture explicitly and implicitly privileges whiteness and discriminates against non-Western and non-white professionalism standards related to dress code, speech, work style, and timeliness.

We are taught to identify white supremacy with violent segregationist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and their modern-day equivalents. Okun and Jones, however, introduce a different approach to thinking about white supremacy. In their definition, the term describes a series of characteristics that institutionalize whiteness and Westernness as both normal and superior to other ethnic, racial, and regional identities and customs. While people often don’t view this theorization of white supremacy as violent, it can lead to systemic discrimination and physical violence.

Dismantling White Supremacy in Nonprofits: a starting point
By Jarell Skinner-Roy

The nonprofit sector is a special place, where passionate professionals are all-too-often overworked and underpaid at an organization that is likely under-resourced. While I’m hopeful that progress will continue towards improving this, these tough current realities cannot be an excuse for us to both ignore the prevalence of white supremacy in the nonprofit sector and refuse to put in the personal and organizational work necessary for its dismantling.

Even when the majority of us nonprofit professionals have big hearts, white supremacy is a well-oiled machine with a pernicious nature, fuelled by ignorance and undisturbed by good intentions.

RECOMMENDED READING
The Hanging of Angélique
By Afua Cooper
Writer, historian and poet Afua Cooper tells the astonishing story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave woman convicted of starting a fire that destroyed a large part of Montréal in April 1734 and condemned to die a brutal death. In a powerful retelling of Angélique's story — now supported by archival illustrations — Cooper builds on 15 years of research to shed new light on a rebellious Portuguese-born black woman who refused to accept her indentured servitude. At the same time, Cooper completely demolishes the myth of a benign, slave-free Canada, revealing a damning 200-year-old record of legally and culturally endorsed slavery.

Sister Outsider
By Audre Lorde 
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. 

These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”

THICK: and Other Essays
By Tressie McMillan Cottom
In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically “thick”: deemed “thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,” McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick “transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women” (Los Angeles Review of Books) with “writing that is as deft as it is amusing” (Darnell L. Moore).
The Body is Not an Apology
By Sonya Renee Taylor
Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies. 

The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.
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The Step Forward series is delivered in service to our 40+ member organizations and to Ontario’s African, Caribbean, Black Latinx, and Black people living with and affected by HIV. This series is created by the Ontario AIDS Network in collaboration with Breakfast Culture54Lights podcast and our featured guest speakers. 

The OAN's Step Forward newsletter is released on the first monday of each month. It is intended for Members, Affiliates and friends of the Ontario AIDS Network who are interested in learning about and addressing anti-Black racism in the HIV sector.

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