Livestreamed on May 30th, 2021 

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Full Transcript:

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Beverly Bain: 

Good afternoon. I'm Beverly Bain.

 

Min Sook Lee: 

And I'm Min Sook Lee.

 

Beverly Bain: 

Welcome to the second day of Scholar Strike Canada, Anti-Asian racism undone. Before we get started with our second day of amazing, critical, stimulating and engaging conversations, I'll do the land acknowledgement. This land and this space we are meeting in is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis. This area is covered by the Dish with One Spoon treaty. The Dish with One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishnabe, the Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. 

 

Our activism and organizing as Blacks, Asians and racialized peoples, and the violence we experienced are intricately linked to the extensive and pervasive effects of colonialism, settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. As people situated on what the Haudenosaunee people of the longhouse called Turtle Island, we must understand our own roles and responsibilities to the Indigenous peoples of this land. The clear links between colonization and slavery, and all other forms of violence, highlight the need for us to be in solidarity in Indigenous peoples’ struggle for sovereignity land and freedom.

 

Min Sook Lee: 

Thank you Beverly for that land acknowledgement. Scholar Strike Canada's Anti-Asian Racism Undone program has been supported by some really fantastic community and academic partners. We've got the support from the President's Office of OCAD University, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT, and the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Department at Concordia University and CUPE Ontario. So we're pleased to have the community and faculty and labor support for this critical program. 

 

We made a decision to decline support from the University of Toronto in support of the CAUT censure. And we did so because we wanted to make sure that the position that we take is clearly articulated, and the partnerships and the relationships that we forged in our programming. But we also acknowledge that censure shouldn't be exercised in a punitive way, it should be exercised according to the means of the participating individuals and organizations. So the application of censure that negatively impacts those who are most precarious among us, it's not in the interest of the broader social justice goals, foundational to this act of censure. We invite you to find out more information about the CAUT censure of the University of Toronto, you can visit censureuoft.ca. And we've also conducted a panel discussion with U of T faculty from the law program, and Dave Robinson from CAUT, and that panel discussion is available on our website. So please check that out. 

 

So we're launching into day two of anti-Asian racism undone. The programming has been so far spectacular. If you missed day one from yesterday, you can access all of the panels on our website, and they are also available on YouTube and on Facebook. The program for this afternoon is really really fantastic. At 2:30 we have “My Anger Is A Gift Sex Worker Rights Strategies And Knowledge.” And that will be moderated by Larissa Lai, Elene Lam from Butterfly, Mercedes Eng, and Mina Do will be participating in that panel. And at 2:30 we have a panel called “Artists in Dialogue” Past, Present, Futures” moderated by Richard Fung. Participating in that panel will be Jin-me Yoon, Patrick Salvani, Immony Mèn, Shellie Zhang, Amy Lam, and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn. And then at 4:30 we have the panel “Creating Otherwise Worlds: Relations, Abolition And Freedom,” moderated by Beverly Bain. Harsha Walia, Robin Maynard, Erica Violet Lee, and Ian Tian will be participating in that. 

 

So as you can see, we've got a full program, the two days of Anti-Asian Racism Undone is very much a provocation to think critically, to organize, to agitate, and to be part of the revolution that's underway all around us. So thank you for joining us. And we do want to thank the support for this program that's behind the scenes. Our technician Rajean Hoilett, Lokchi Lam who’s been helping us with our website design and our communications. And today's captioner is Denise, so thank you to that team as well. We'll see you soon, and check out the program at 12:30.

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