Guest Blog

In an article in the St. Catharine’s Standard (“Brock University reviewing sociology Professor’s blog posts,” The Standard, March 15) political science professor Emmett McFarlane is quoted as saying that if Professor Kitossa were “saying something like, all Jewish people are genocidal, that might trip Canada’s hate speech laws, but to say the State of Israel is genocidal—and even to assert that Zionism is a genocidal ideology — doesn’t.” And he adds: “Not all Zionists are Jewish and not all Jewish people are Zionist.
Zionism is an ideology and people are free to criticize that no matter how offensive or even repugnant some of that might be.”

The so-called “racial reckoning” that went on in the United States last year, inspired by the most recent shootings of unarmed Black people by police officers, but crystallizing around the murder of George Lloyd, has caused me to think a lot about comparisons that might be made between the country in which I was born and the country in which I now live. Whenever one of my American friends or colleagues good-naturedly or just benignly mentions that I am Canadian, I correct them, and tell them that I was born in Canada, it is true, but that never—not a single day
in my life—did I ever feel Canadian. My move to the United States almost nine years ago has helped me put into words what I have instinctively felt since I was a child, usually as the only Black kid in my class, sometimes in my grade. The difficulty in coming up with the accurate
words to describe this feeling of dislocation from what others might call their home results from a fundamental distinction that I have recognized between being made to feel like a visitor in a country when you are, in fact, a visitor, and being made to feel like a visitor in the country of your birth. Put another way—I don’t mind feeling like a visitor in the US, since I did not grow up here and there are more aspects about everyday American life than I can count that remind me that I didn’t grow up here. This seems as it should be. But being made to feel that I don’t belong should never have been an acceptable part of my life in the country of my birth.