#this blog has been unactive for quite a while
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15.09.2017 // starting over, and a quite obvious whatâs in my pencil case?
post em portuguĂȘs no final, em negrito e itĂĄlico
So, as you can see, Iâve been quite unactive for the last 9 months. I retreated from studyblr (and tumblr in general) for a lot of reasons, and Iâll try to explain it later.Â
First of all, I simply did not have the time or what to post about. Enem (a huge test for high schoolers) was coming up and I had lots of work to do in addition to that, because high school was ending as well. (spoiler: you will not miss it in the slightest.) I graduated and all, was approved in an university, and then, because of occupations and professorsâ strikes, my classes did not start until may 2017. Then I had nothing to put in a studyblr.
The most important reason, I guess, is that studyblr was really depressing for me. I donât know, maybe it was seeing all those rich girls buying muji everything and having expensive stuff and taking pretty pictures, and I thought that I would never be so cool as them - quite ironic in a place where the goal is to get everyone motivated. The same thing happened in a larger scale when i joined the lettering community. So I just logged off.Â
But then why come back? Because, although my first semester in college is already over, I thought âI have pretty cool stuff to shareâ. I also thought I could give really useful tips about studyblr in a budget for brazilian blogs, something I always saw from the US perspective and did not apply to me at all. So, brazilian folks, Iâm here for you! (Maybe not with study tips because I am myself trying to do it.)
EntĂŁo, dĂĄ pra ver que eu sumi nos Ășltimos 9 meses. Eu sumi do studyblr (e do tumblr em geral) por vĂĄrios motivos, e vou tentar explicar.
Primeiramente  [fora temer] eu simplesmente nĂŁo tinha tempo ou o que postar. O Enem tava chegando e eu tinha um monte de coisa pra fazer junto porque o ensino mĂ©dio tava acabando (spoiler: vocĂȘ nĂŁo vai sentir falta). Eu me formei, passei numa universidade, e aĂ, por causa das ocupas e greves, minhas aulas nĂŁo começaram atĂ© maio de 2017. E aĂ eu nĂŁo tinha nada pra colocar num studyblr.Â
E acho que o maior motivo foi que o studyblr tava ficando muito deprimente pra mim. Sei lĂĄ, deve ser todas essas meninas ricas comprando um monte de coisa da muji e tendo coisas caras e tirando fotos bonitas e eu pensei que nunca ia ser legal igual elas - meio irĂŽnico num lugar onde o objetivo Ă© supostamente deixar todo mundo motivado. A mesma coisa aconteceu numa escala maior quando eu comecei a fazer lettering. EntĂŁo eu sĂł desloguei.Â
âEntĂŁo por que voltar?â Porque, apesar de o meu primeiro perĂodo jĂĄ ter terminado, eu pensei que tinha umas paradas bem legais pra mostrar. TambĂ©m acho que eu podia dar boas dicas sobre studyblr quando se Ă© poor and brazilian, algo que eu sĂł vi da perspectiva estadunidense e que nĂŁo funcionava pra mim. EntĂŁo, pessoas Brasil, tĂŽ aqui! (Mas nĂŁo pra dicas de estudo.)
I thought the first part in the affordable study guide would be a whatâs in my pencil case - because all the stuff for a backpack one isnât here and i like whatâs in my pencil case right now. So letâs go:
Eu escolhi fazer primeiro um whatâs in my pencil case porque nĂŁo tem tudo da minha mochila aqui e eu gosto das coisas que tem na minha bolsinha. EntĂŁo vamo:
The case - I bought this one for less than ten reais, and thatâs why the pictures are all upside down. It is really great despite being so cheap, I had it for almost three years and the insides are barely damaged. I got the keychain when I bought my glasses, two years and a half ago.Â
A bolsinha - eu comprei por menos de 10 reais e por isso os desenhos sĂŁo de cabeça pra baixo. Apesar de ser barata Ă© bem bpa, tem quase trĂȘs anos que eu tenho e ela mal começou a estragar por dentro. Eu ganhei o chaveiro quando comprei meus Ăłculos, tem dois anos e meio.Â
The non-pen stuffÂ
- two scissors, because itâs useful and because the bigger one is also for household stuff like opening milk cartons. I use then for quite everything.
- one stapler, because my mom bought one for me when I moved out. Itâs really tiny and works really well and I donât know how much she spent on it. I staple summaries and stuff like tickets to my bullet journal and also school papers.Â
- one little box, for paperclips and little stickers and stuff I can use in my bullet journal or notebooks and cannot be left on the open of my pencil case. My post-it flags are there too (and yup, thatâs an aro pride flag on the top.)
- one flash drive, because you really need it. Mainly for printing stuff at the university,Â
- one pencil sharpener, which i got for less than um real at the market. It doesnât hold the dirt, but you can always erase your pencil into the trash can (or into the pencil case if youâre filthy like me.)
- one crayon, because theyâre so much better at highlighting than actual highlighters. It doesnât bleed into the page, for starters, I thought about getting a full box of them, but then realised it was expensive and I didnât need it.
- one eraser, that i found in the ground.Â
Tudo que nĂŁo Ă© caneta:
- duas tesouras, porque eu sou prevenida e porque a segunda eu uso pra outras coisas, tipo abrir caixa de leite. Eu uso pra quase tudo.
- um grampeador, que a minha mĂŁe comprou pra mim quando eu me mudei. Ă minĂșsculo e funciona muito bem, mas eu nĂŁo sei quando custou. Eu grampeio resumos e coisas tipo ingressos de cinema no meu bullet journal e trabalhos tambĂ©m.Â
- uma caixinha, pra clipes e adesivinhos e coisas que då pra usar no meu bullet journal e no caderno e que não då pra deixar largado na bolsinha. Meus marcadores de pågina tão aà também (e sim, é uma bandeira do orgulho arromùntico em cima.)
- um pen drive, porque vocĂȘ vai precisar. Principalmente pra imprimir coisas na xerox.Â
- um apontador, que eu comprei por tipo um real no mercado. NĂŁo tem caixinha, mas sempre dĂĄ pra apontar no lixo (ou dentro da bolsinha se vocĂȘ for nojent feito eu)
- um giz de cera, porque é um marca texto melhor que um marca texto. Pra começar, não vaza no papel. Eu ia comprar uma caixa com mais cores, até ver que era caro e eu não precisava.
- uma borracha, que eu achei no chĂŁo.
The pen stuff:
- one double-ended permanent marker, which I love and paid just six reais for. It is from Pilot, in black, and while the upside part is like a regular sharpie, the down one is a fineliner. I use it mostly in my bullet journal and for lettering. (I will make a bullet journal post too, one day.)
- one blue-ink pen, from a Bic set with four. I usually use Compactor blue pens, but mine were so bad, so I got this one from my sisterâs stuff.
- one black pen and one red pen, from the same set from Faber-Castell.Â
- green, light  blue, purple and dark pink pens from a Bic set with four. I had those for about two years, and theyâre far from ending - and I use them regularly. These are used for note taking and bullet journaling.Â
- orange pen from Faber-Castell. Bought along with the Bic pens, and isnât ending yet.Â
- light pink pen from Compactor - what I think is a âgirlyâ set of pens - I wouldnât know because I found it in the ground. It is really great but doesnât appear in pictures.Â
- pink pen from Compactor, also found in the ground, really great.
- pencil from Staedler, which I had for one year and is really good because it has a rubbery grip. The lead doesnât break easily, too.
- pen white-out, from Faber-Castell, also found in the ground and I had it for about two years now. Lasts longer than liquid white-out, and I donât use it much anymore (I became fond of scribbling words out.)
Tudo que Ă© caneta:
- uma caneta de duas pontas, da Pilot que eu amo demais e sĂł custou seis reais. Ela Ă© preta e a ponta maior Ă© um marcador permanente e a menor Ă© uma caneta de ponta fina. Eu uso pra bullet journal e lettering.
- uma caneta azul de um kit com quatro da Bic. Eu costumo usar canetas azuis da Compactor, mas as minhas estavam bem ruins entĂŁo roubei essa da minha irmĂŁ.Â
- canetas preta e vermelha do mesmo kit com 3 da Faber-Castell.Â
- canetas verde, azul clara, roxa e rosa escura do mesmo kit com 4 da Bic. Eu comprei elas tem dois anos e elas estĂŁo longe de acabar, e isso porque eu uso regularmente. Uso pra anotaçÔes e no bullet journal.Â
- caneta laranja da Faber-Castell. Comprei junto com as da Bic e nĂŁo acabou ainda.Â
- caneta rosa clara da Compactor, eu acho que de um kit de canetas âfemininasâ - nĂŁo tem como eu saber porque achei no chĂŁo. Ela Ă© muito boa mas quase nĂŁo aparece em fotos.Â
- caneta rosa da Compactor, tambĂ©m achei no chĂŁo, muito boa.Â
- lĂĄpis da Staedler, que eu tenho hĂĄ um ano e Ă© muito bom porque Ă© emborrachado.  A ponta tambĂ©m nĂŁo quebra fĂĄcil.Â
- corretivo de caneta da Faber-Castell, tambĂ©m achei no chĂŁo. Eu tenho ele tem dois anos e corretivo lĂquido nĂŁo costuma durar esse tempo todo. Eu nĂŁo uso mais tanto assim porque virei daquelas que rabisca palavras erradas.
So, thatâs it, Hope you liked it despite the ugly pictures taken at night with my phone camera.Â
EntĂŁo, Ă© isso. Espero que tenham gostado apesar das fotos feias tiradas Ă noite com a cĂąmera do celular.
#studyblr#brazilian studyblr#studyblr brasileiro#studyspo#postuguese#what's in my pencil case#textpost#langblr
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Ask mun about their Tumblr experience!
1. How many blogs have you ever had in total?
I think the count is sommat like 76 by now if I count personals, fanblogs, roleplay blogs, specific random blogs that specialise in aesthetics or mental health, etc. Iâm a bit of a madman.
2. How many active blogs do you currently have?
My personal, and then sommat like⊠seven roleplay blogs. So about eight or nine, give or take a few.
3. Show us the blog that has the biggest number of followers.
Thatâs this one that Iâm on right now, currently sitting pretty at 434. Still donât know why any of you people are here.
4. What is your second most followed blog?
Not counting inactive ones, probably my canon multimuse over at @voices-ringing-out or my Lincoln over at @have-a-little-faith. Theyâre both somewhere in the 120s.
5. How long have you been using Tumblr?
I had an account in 2010 or something but I left after a time. I came back about⊠three years ago and Iâve been here ever since. Not roleplaying, but Iâve been here for a few years now regardless. Iâve only been roleplaying here for about a year and a half.
6. When exactly was this current blog created?
November 30th, last year.
7. Have you made any friends on Tumblr?
Many. Yourself, obviously. @bethewhitecanary / @heartsunknxwn is one of my best friends whom I met here. @coldnofeelings, @mancnfire / @ofanescapist, @algidcalc, @drcwningvoices, @legendsofkrypton, @keeperoftheliars, @spacebii, the list could go on and on. If you see me interact with someone on here, theyâre almost certainly a friend.
8. Have you ever met a person that you know in real life on Tumblr?
Nope. Not unless I met them outside of Tumblr, and then we exchanged Tumblr URLs.
9. Have you ever made a post that got more than 1000 notes?
Yes. A few, actually. I think all of them were male positivity since there isnât much of it on this site. A good portion of the notes are people telling me Iâm stupid and men are horrible though so does it really count. The other post is a list of reasons to stay alive; I think that oneâs close to 10,000 notes but not quite yet.
10. Have you ever made a post that surpassed 10 000 notes?
No. I donât think so anyway.
11. How much time have you spent searching for a theme for this current blog?
I spent ages trying to find one, ended up with one that wasnât too great, and then @drcwningvoices made me the stunning one I have now.
12. Have you ever blocked someone?
Yes. A few people who post too much hate for Mick or Coldwave, and a few personals who wonât stop reblogging RP threads. Outside of here, Iâve blocked other people; mostly hateful folks or ones who try to talk shit about my positivity posts.
13. Have you ever received a fan mail?
Hah! I think I may have years ago in 2010, but that died out a while ago, dinnit?
14. How often do you receive anon hate? Or maybe someone had sent you hate without anon?
Alllllll the time, mate. All the time. And yes, once or twice. Mostly itâs on anon though.
15. How many blogs do you currently follow on this account?
386. I need to clean my followers out though honestly. I follow people who havenât been active in years or who ignore me every time I try to interact with them so what really is the point of following them, honestly?
16. Have you ever been a part of fandom (or some other) drama on Tumblr?
God, yeah. Never intentionally. I got a tonne of hate for a ship I adore in the Psych fandom⊠I had someone in the SPN fandom get really upset at me for literally no reason and proceed to harass me⊠there was that time people over here kept hating on Mick and there was a huge fuss about it⊠I somehow always get dragged into drama without wanting to be.
17. Had your Tumblr Senpais ever noticed you? Have you interacted?
I mean, you and @mancnfire and @coldnofeelings and @coldstruck and a bunch of others have somehow interacted with me so Iâd say this is a hard yes.
18. Have you ever deleted a blog or account?
No. I hoard everything. Eternally. Forever.
19. Do you have a blog(s) that has been unactive for a long time but you still donât want to delete?
Yes. Many.
20. What do you think, what is your reputation on Tumblr/in your community?
I have no idea. âThat stupid guy who posts too many selfies and never sleeps and is always involved in drama is online again for once in his lifeâ? Hell if I know, man.
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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |Â 12 minutes (2,912 words)
I wouldnât call Canada racist. Iâm not being nice when I say that, Iâm being polite. Canadians are like that. That kind of polite where you hear a racial slur and pretend it didnât happen. Or you see some bro get too close to a woman and you walk right by because itâs not your affair. This is not a confrontational country. I remember one recent Toronto subway ride where a white workman fresh off some job site, boots muddy, reflector bib on, interrupted two men â one brown, one white â who were about to brawl. You could feel the entire car getting progressively more tense as their voices escalated. But the workman got between them. âCome on guys, weâre all tired. Chill,â he said. And they did. And when it was my turn to get off, I thanked him. âItâs just what you do,â he said. I assume he was from out of town.
With all the free health care, the gun control, the less-extreme wealth disparity, Canadians can convince themselves that theyâre superior to Americans. But none of that makes them any less racist, it just makes the racism easier to overlook; with a country that does so many things right, how can they be wrong? Our media is a microcosm of this denial, a lesson in what happens when your industry contracts to a handful of major newspapers and magazines, one major national broadcasting corporation, a smattering of websites, and one watchdog â and is only getting smaller. More than one fifth of Canadaâs population is made up of people of color, but the popular press acknowledges that about as much as it acknowledges that the industry itself is overpoweringly white. The result is a media landscape that is overwhelmingly conservative â politically, and in every other way â and overwhelmingly lacking in perspective about it.
Outside of broadcasting, our newsrooms are supposed to self-regulate and yet there are no â zero â updated reports on their demographics. But a new study published by The Conversation last month analyzed two decades of the countryâs three biggest newspapers, looking specifically at news and politics op-ed pages where journalistsâ identities are clear. âOver the 21 years, as the proportion of white people in Canadaâs population declined, the representation of white columnists increased,â Asmaa Malik and Sonya Fatah reported. Since 2016, whites have been overrepresented by 11 percent in these newsrooms. As Macleanâs Andray Domise, long one of the few black columnists in the country, writes, âToo many of my white colleagues in journalism still seem to believe their profession and the assumed stance of objectivity places them at a distance from white supremacy.â That these journalists canât see their own means they canât see anyone elseâs. This is why I donât work in Canadian media. It doesnât really see me or anyone else who isnât white.
* * *
I was genuinely shocked to get this job. I had written one story for Longreads â fittingly, a reported feature about Justin Bieberâs vacillation between Canada and America â and a few months later, the siteâs editor called me from New York and offered me a weekly column. For most of the phone call I was confused. I think I literally said, âSo this is an actual job?â I didnât understand how this could happen. Thirteen years into a journalism career and I had never once been handed anything. Not even one story. I was inured to 13 more years of proving myself over and over and over again, even with the same editors at the same publications. And yet this guy had decided, after I had only written once for his site, that I deserved an actual job. That would NEVER happen to me in Canada. It HAS never happened to me in Canada.
In a now 14-year media career, Iâve landed 14 job interviews in Canada (that I can remember) and only once secured a position. I was repeatedly told not to take it personally, but from my first internship on, itâs been Sisyphean. I was recently told by an old journalism professor, unprompted, that I was one of my graduating yearâs most promising, but the industry kept insinuating the opposite. I just assumed the white guys in my class, and a good number of the white girls, were getting jobs because they were exponentially better than me. I wrote for white editor after white editor, met with white exec after white exec, and nothing seemed to stick. Not too long ago, a friend of mine at the CBC â an older white guy â helped me get a job interview, which went well ⊠until it veered into the details of my Pakistani history. Another (white) editor asked me to coffee, invited me to pitch, and never took anything I did, while their (white) spouse continued to appear prominently in their pages. Yet another group of editors, all white, declined to give me a job (which went to a white journalist), then offered me a short series of articles â about race, obviously â one of which they mismanaged so badly that we never worked together again. One major newspaper commissioned so many features from me in a row that I asked my editor to be made a permanent employee; they tried to lower my rate instead. As the years passed, I watched white woman after white woman, younger, less experienced, get staff job after staff job and thought: Oh, shit, do I just suck?
Canadian media is designed so that journalists of color give up. In 2017, black columnist Desmond Cole loudly resigned from The Toronto Star, having had his space reduced and his activism questioned. âMy contributions to the Star are in sharp contrast with the lack of tenure, exposure, support, and compensation I have received in return,â he wrote on his blog. (Coleâs first book, The Skin Weâre In, is out next year). Also in 2017, freelance journalist Septembre Anderson revealed she had given up journalism and was turning to web development after hitting her head against a walled-off industry for seven years. âRacialized voices just arenât being heard,â she wrote in Torontoist. âThey arenât making decisions nor are they carrying them out.â In 2018, The Globe and Mail reporter Sunny Dhillon also resigned, despite having nothing else lined up. âI have worked as a journalist in this country for the last decade and with the solutions as obvious as they are unacted upon â hire more people of color, hear their voices, elevate them to positions of power or prominence â I cannot say I am particularly optimistic,â he wrote on Medium. Shriveling newsrooms usually shed their newest, usually more-marginalized staffers first, but a 2017 Public Policy Forum report on Canadian media questioned âexactly how many jobs have been lost in journalism â and how much frustrated talent has fled.â
Iâm still in journalism not because of Canadian media but in spite of it. It was the editors outside of the country who hired me for their newsrooms: as a film and art editor at Time Out Dubai, as an entertainment editor at The New York Daily News. In Canada, it was the women who threw me a bone, mostly freelance assignments (though one woman actually hired me as an editor for AOL Canada). To fill in the blanks â too many to count â there was my mother. Because as much as this is about media with a dearth of opportunities for nonwhite journalists, it is about which journalists have the financial support to keep going anyway. Early last month, an Excel sheet circulated in which a number of American journalists anonymously revealed their salaries. Most of the journalists were white, and many of them reported wages too meager to survive on in the big cities where they were living. A number of people noted the discrepancy and wondered what kind of financial support these journalists were getting from their families that so many people of color were not.
So here it is: I am a woman of color and my mother is the reason I could do an unpaid internship in California, which got me my first job, which got me my second job, which got me my third â and, in between, she floated me when I couldnât quite make ends meet. I wasnât living off of her, but she was keeping me alive. On the one hand you could call her a patron, on the other hand sheâs a vexing reminder to a number of journalists who are probably better than me that they do not have this extra support â a disproportionate number of whom are people of color like me. An extreme version of this leg up, of course, is nepotism, something I have not experienced but that so many white journalists in Canada have. Highly positioned media people whose families are also highly positioned in media, include: Toronto Life editor in chief Sarah Fulford, whose father, journalist Robert Fulford, has the order of Canada; former Walrus editor in chief Jonathan Kay, whose mother is National Post columnist Barbara kay; not to mention all those CBC staffersâ spouses who secured CBC contracts.
In September, the publicly funded Canadian educational channel TVO aired an episode of current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin, asking, âIs Canadian Media Losing Its Touch?â The panel was made up of Paikin, who is white, and two other journalists, a man and a woman, both also white. All three of them focused on the shrinking industry, never once mentioning its racism. But just three months prior, several mainstream media organizations were excoriated for belittling the landmark National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Final Report, the more-than-1,000-page document of 2,000+ testimonials outlining how colonialism in Canada has systematically destroyed First Nations communities. Instead of white Canadians grappling with the countryâs long-awaited admission that they not only live on stolen land but have also helped decimate the people to whom Canada actually belongs, they diverted attention to the term âgenocide.â Canadaâs two largest newspapers, the Globe and the Star, published board-wide editorials denying those three syllables, while the Post had a Catholic priest doing the same. As journalist Justin Brake tweeted: âColonialism is ubiquitous. Even in journalism.â
That was already clear two years ago when the (now ex-)editor of the Writersâ Union of Canada magazine, in an issue meant to celebrate Indigenous writing, called for white journalists to aspire to a nonexistent âcultural appropriation prizeâ in order to enrich their work. In response, high-ranking members of the countryâs leading media companies â the Post, Macleanâs, CBC, Rogers â offered cash for its coffers. More recently, there have been several incidences in which newsroom photographs have circulated on social media showing a sea of white faces. In October, the Globe was sideâeyed for hiring a white woman, Robyn Urback, from the CBC to add to its prodigiously white team â reporter Robyn Doolittle quipped, âRobyn, I look forward to everyone confusing us in the years to come.â â which only got whiter once South Asian columnist Denise Balkissoon left earlier this month for a higher-ranking position at Chatelaine magazine.
âSince working my first paid jobs as a journalist in 2007, I have been constantly told, explicitly and implicitly, that nobody will care about stories about people who are elderly, Aboriginal, racialized, queer, living with a disability or chronic health condition, or living with an active addiction or mental health concern,â University of British Colombia writing instructor and former magazine editor Jackie Wong told rabble.ca in 2016. This irresponsible coverage is being predominantly identified by journalists of color, who are also the ones principally assigned to write racialized articles. The Starâs Tanya Talaga has named the requirement to constantly advocate for and be a workplaceâs symbol of diversity âthe invisible workload.â Journalists of color are often siloed into multicultural media spaces like the Aboriginal Peopleâs Television Network or smaller publications. Vicky Mochama, now the culture, society, and critical race editor for The Conversation, had a column for Metro until 2018, while Sarah Hagi wrote for Vice until she didnât, then a site called Freshdaily, until it unceremoniously dumped its entire editorial staff after two weeks. Meanwhile, Kyrell Grant, the freelance writer and Twitter deity who coined the term âbig dick energy,â occasionally publishes in places like Hazlitt. âBlack women are consistently thought leaders whose uncited ideas regularly appear in mainstream media,â Anderson wrote in Torontoist, âbut itâs increasingly apparent that our bylines donât.â
White journalists, meanwhile, are increasingly insulated from critique. Macleanâsâ Domise apologized for being a gatekeeper, for instance, while those who actually created the gate to keep the likes of him out remain silent. Itâs virtually impossible to fix the problem in mainstream Canadian media because it wonât even acknowledge that there is one. What it will do is apologize for suggesting that white people could be at fault for anything. Last month, correspondent Jessica Allen of The Social (Canadaâs The View) was forced to apologize for saying hockey players tended to be white and tended to be bullies, both of which are true. âWe would like to apologize to everyone who was offended by the remarks,â CTV announced in a statement. In a recent interview with the newsletter Study Hall, BuzzFeedâs Scaachi Koul admitted she was professionally ostracized after she tweeted in 2016 that BuzzFeed Canada was looking for pitches, particularly from ânot white and not maleâ writers: âI cannot tell you how many conversations Iâve had with executive-level editors in Canada who wouldnât work with me because they thought I was racist against white people.â Koul now works in New York.
* * *
I suppose it follows that my favorite place to work in Canada is not in fact a media company. Hazlitt is an online literary magazine run by a publishing company, Penguin Random House, and its long-form nonfiction skews experimental. Itâs probably no coincidence that Hazlitt is where Koul got her start and where plenty of other people of color like me can write long, rambling essays on the nature of everything, something a media landscape as homogenous as Canadaâs has no appetite for. Both of the editors I worked with â the editor in chief and senior editor â are white, but theyâre what you might call allies if youâre so inclined, and they understand writing at a molecular level. Hazlitt is equivalent to a magazine like The Believer or a site like Grantland. Itâs there that I got my only National Magazine Award nomination in 2016. But the site is small, and you canât live off it. My job search to supplement my work there included a failed interview to write news for an elevator screen and naming 500 color swatches for a marketing company. Then Longreads called. Did I mention the guy who hired me is not white?
Iâm not really sure what to say to Canadian journalists of color who donât have that opportunity or the support to create it. Because itâs not really about them. Itâs about the white Canadians who are hogging all the power positions and refusing to admit that, let alone step aside. Itâs about their refusal to make it a priority to hire people of color from top to bottom because they refuse to see these journalistsâ absence as an issue. Domise has credited his column at Macleanâs to a âhandful of editorsâ who recognized the magazineâs lack of diversity. But the columnists around him are still majority white. Our media seems to have a really hard time reflecting 20 percent of our population, of not overrepresenting whiteness to the point of implying its supremacy.
In June, the CBC and Radio-Canada announced that by 2025, they would have at least one non-white person working as a key creative â producer, director, writer, showrunner, lead performer â on each of their programs. One. More recently, a friend who works at one of the bigger media companies in Toronto mentioned that they were hiring but that all of the applications âsucked.â Knowing the number of journalists who have lost their jobs over the past 10 years, I was baffled. Considering the same white people are often shuffled around the industry over and over again, I asked if they had gone beyond submitted applications to ask peers, to check social media, to look into other publications that have recently closed down. My friend looked at me in embarrassment. Thatâs the look that I think every white journalist in this country is missing.Â
Canada is racist: there I said it. My country is racist and its media is racist and its journalists are racist. Not saying it doesnât make it any less true. Canada is multicultural, yes, that doesnât mean its media is; the industry that is supposed to inform this country is whitewashed, and its information is whitewashed too. Politically, socially, economically â in every way â Canada misrepresents itself. What results is an entirely misinformed public but, more than that, a public represented by an industry that cloaks itself in white and believes that saying nothing will make it invisible. Youâre not invisible. You may not see us, but we see you.
* * *
Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.
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The Great White Nope
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |Â 12 minutes (2,912 words)
I wouldnât call Canada racist. Iâm not being nice when I say that, Iâm being polite. Canadians are like that. That kind of polite where you hear a racial slur and pretend it didnât happen. Or you see some bro get too close to a woman and you walk right by because itâs not your affair. This is not a confrontational country. I remember one recent Toronto subway ride where a white workman fresh off some job site, boots muddy, reflector bib on, interrupted two men â one brown, one white â who were about to brawl. You could feel the entire car getting progressively more tense as their voices escalated. But the workman got between them. âCome on guys, weâre all tired. Chill,â he said. And they did. And when it was my turn to get off, I thanked him. âItâs just what you do,â he said. I assume he was from out of town.
With all the free health care, the gun control, the less-extreme wealth disparity, Canadians can convince themselves that theyâre superior to Americans. But none of that makes them any less racist, it just makes the racism easier to overlook; with a country that does so many things right, how can they be wrong? Our media is a microcosm of this denial, a lesson in what happens when your industry contracts to a handful of major newspapers and magazines, one major national broadcasting corporation, a smattering of websites, and one watchdog â and is only getting smaller. More than one fifth of Canadaâs population is made up of people of color, but the popular press acknowledges that about as much as it acknowledges that the industry itself is overpoweringly white. The result is a media landscape that is overwhelmingly conservative â politically, and in every other way â and overwhelmingly lacking in perspective about it.
Outside of broadcasting, our newsrooms are supposed to self-regulate and yet there are no â zero â updated reports on their demographics. But a new study published by The Conversation last month analyzed two decades of the countryâs three biggest newspapers, looking specifically at news and politics op-ed pages where journalistsâ identities are clear. âOver the 21 years, as the proportion of white people in Canadaâs population declined, the representation of white columnists increased,â Asmaa Malik and Sonya Fatah reported. Since 2016, whites have been overrepresented by 11 percent in these newsrooms. As Macleanâs Andray Domise, long one of the few black columnists in the country, writes, âToo many of my white colleagues in journalism still seem to believe their profession and the assumed stance of objectivity places them at a distance from white supremacy.â That these journalists canât see their own means they canât see anyone elseâs. This is why I donât work in Canadian media. It doesnât really see me or anyone else who isnât white.
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I was genuinely shocked to get this job. I had written one story for Longreads â fittingly, a reported feature about Justin Bieberâs vacillation between Canada and America â and a few months later, the siteâs editor called me from New York and offered me a weekly column. For most of the phone call I was confused. I think I literally said, âSo this is an actual job?â I didnât understand how this could happen. Thirteen years into a journalism career and I had never once been handed anything. Not even one story. I was inured to 13 more years of proving myself over and over and over again, even with the same editors at the same publications. And yet this guy had decided, after I had only written once for his site, that I deserved an actual job. That would NEVER happen to me in Canada. It HAS never happened to me in Canada.
In a now 14-year media career, Iâve landed 14 job interviews in Canada (that I can remember) and only once secured a position. I was repeatedly told not to take it personally, but from my first internship on, itâs been Sisyphean. I was recently told by an old journalism professor, unprompted, that I was one of my graduating yearâs most promising, but the industry kept insinuating the opposite. I just assumed the white guys in my class, and a good number of the white girls, were getting jobs because they were exponentially better than me. I wrote for white editor after white editor, met with white exec after white exec, and nothing seemed to stick. Not too long ago, a friend of mine at the CBC â an older white guy â helped me get a job interview, which went well ⊠until it veered into the details of my Pakistani history. Another (white) editor asked me to coffee, invited me to pitch, and never took anything I did, while their (white) spouse continued to appear prominently in their pages. Yet another group of editors, all white, declined to give me a job (which went to a white journalist), then offered me a short series of articles â about race, obviously â one of which they mismanaged so badly that we never worked together again. One major newspaper commissioned so many features from me in a row that I asked my editor to be made a permanent employee; they tried to lower my rate instead. As the years passed, I watched white woman after white woman, younger, less experienced, get staff job after staff job and thought: Oh, shit, do I just suck?
Canadian media is designed so that journalists of color give up. In 2017, black columnist Desmond Cole loudly resigned from The Toronto Star, having had his space reduced and his activism questioned. âMy contributions to the Star are in sharp contrast with the lack of tenure, exposure, support, and compensation I have received in return,â he wrote on his blog. (Coleâs first book, The Skin Weâre In, is out next year). Also in 2017, freelance journalist Septembre Anderson revealed she had given up journalism and was turning to web development after hitting her head against a walled-off industry for seven years. âRacialized voices just arenât being heard,â she wrote in Torontoist. âThey arenât making decisions nor are they carrying them out.â In 2018, The Globe and Mail reporter Sunny Dhillon also resigned, despite having nothing else lined up. âI have worked as a journalist in this country for the last decade and with the solutions as obvious as they are unacted upon â hire more people of color, hear their voices, elevate them to positions of power or prominence â I cannot say I am particularly optimistic,â he wrote on Medium. Shriveling newsrooms usually shed their newest, usually more-marginalized staffers first, but a 2017 Public Policy Forum report on Canadian media questioned âexactly how many jobs have been lost in journalism â and how much frustrated talent has fled.â
Iâm still in journalism not because of Canadian media but in spite of it. It was the editors outside of the country who hired me for their newsrooms: as a film and art editor at Time Out Dubai, as an entertainment editor at The New York Daily News. In Canada, it was the women who threw me a bone, mostly freelance assignments (though one woman actually hired me as an editor for AOL Canada). To fill in the blanks â too many to count â there was my mother. Because as much as this is about media with a dearth of opportunities for nonwhite journalists, it is about which journalists have the financial support to keep going anyway. Early last month, an Excel sheet circulated in which a number of American journalists anonymously revealed their salaries. Most of the journalists were white, and many of them reported wages too meager to survive on in the big cities where they were living. A number of people noted the discrepancy and wondered what kind of financial support these journalists were getting from their families that so many people of color were not.
So here it is: I am a woman of color and my mother is the reason I could do an unpaid internship in California, which got me my first job, which got me my second job, which got me my third â and, in between, she floated me when I couldnât quite make ends meet. I wasnât living off of her, but she was keeping me alive. On the one hand you could call her a patron, on the other hand sheâs a vexing reminder to a number of journalists who are probably better than me that they do not have this extra support â a disproportionate number of whom are people of color like me. An extreme version of this leg up, of course, is nepotism, something I have not experienced but that so many white journalists in Canada have. Highly positioned media people whose families are also highly positioned in media, include: Toronto Life editor in chief Sarah Fulford, whose father, journalist Robert Fulford, has the order of Canada; former Walrus editor in chief Jonathan Kay, whose mother is National Post columnist Barbara kay; not to mention all those CBC staffersâ spouses who secured CBC contracts.
In September, the publicly funded Canadian educational channel TVO aired an episode of current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin, asking, âIs Canadian Media Losing Its Touch?â The panel was made up of Paikin, who is white, and two other journalists, a man and a woman, both also white. All three of them focused on the shrinking industry, never once mentioning its racism. But just three months prior, several mainstream media organizations were excoriated for belittling the landmark National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Final Report, the more-than-1,000-page document of 2,000+ testimonials outlining how colonialism in Canada has systematically destroyed First Nations communities. Instead of white Canadians grappling with the countryâs long-awaited admission that they not only live on stolen land but have also helped decimate the people to whom Canada actually belongs, they diverted attention to the term âgenocide.â Canadaâs two largest newspapers, the Globe and the Star, published board-wide editorials denying those three syllables, while the Post had a Catholic priest doing the same. As journalist Justin Brake tweeted: âColonialism is ubiquitous. Even in journalism.â
That was already clear two years ago when the (now ex-)editor of the Writersâ Union of Canada magazine, in an issue meant to celebrate Indigenous writing, called for white journalists to aspire to a nonexistent âcultural appropriation prizeâ in order to enrich their work. In response, high-ranking members of the countryâs leading media companies â the Post, Macleanâs, CBC, Rogers â offered cash for its coffers. More recently, there have been several incidences in which newsroom photographs have circulated on social media showing a sea of white faces. In October, the Globe was sideâeyed for hiring a white woman, Robyn Urback, from the CBC to add to its prodigiously white team â reporter Robyn Doolittle quipped, âRobyn, I look forward to everyone confusing us in the years to come.â â which only got whiter once South Asian columnist Denise Balkissoon left earlier this month for a higher-ranking position at Chatelaine magazine.
âSince working my first paid jobs as a journalist in 2007, I have been constantly told, explicitly and implicitly, that nobody will care about stories about people who are elderly, Aboriginal, racialized, queer, living with a disability or chronic health condition, or living with an active addiction or mental health concern,â University of British Colombia writing instructor and former magazine editor Jackie Wong told rabble.ca in 2016. This irresponsible coverage is being predominantly identified by journalists of color, who are also the ones principally assigned to write racialized articles. The Starâs Tanya Talaga has named the requirement to constantly advocate for and be a workplaceâs symbol of diversity âthe invisible workload.â Journalists of color are often siloed into multicultural media spaces like the Aboriginal Peopleâs Television Network or smaller publications. Vicky Mochama, now the culture, society, and critical race editor for The Conversation, had a column for Metro until 2018, while Sarah Hagi wrote for Vice until she didnât, then a site called Freshdaily, until it unceremoniously dumped its entire editorial staff after two weeks. Meanwhile, Kyrell Grant, the freelance writer and Twitter deity who coined the term âbig dick energy,â occasionally publishes in places like Hazlitt. âBlack women are consistently thought leaders whose uncited ideas regularly appear in mainstream media,â Anderson wrote in Torontoist, âbut itâs increasingly apparent that our bylines donât.â
White journalists, meanwhile, are increasingly insulated from critique. Macleanâsâ Domise apologized for being a gatekeeper, for instance, while those who actually created the gate to keep the likes of him out remain silent. Itâs virtually impossible to fix the problem in mainstream Canadian media because it wonât even acknowledge that there is one. What it will do is apologize for suggesting that white people could be at fault for anything. Last month, correspondent Jessica Allen of The Social (Canadaâs The View) was forced to apologize for saying hockey players tended to be white and tended to be bullies, both of which are true. âWe would like to apologize to everyone who was offended by the remarks,â CTV announced in a statement. In a recent interview with the newsletter Study Hall, BuzzFeedâs Scaachi Koul admitted she was professionally ostracized after she tweeted in 2016 that BuzzFeed Canada was looking for pitches, particularly from ânot white and not maleâ writers: âI cannot tell you how many conversations Iâve had with executive-level editors in Canada who wouldnât work with me because they thought I was racist against white people.â Koul now works in New York.
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I suppose it follows that my favorite place to work in Canada is not in fact a media company. Hazlitt is an online literary magazine run by a publishing company, Penguin Random House, and its long-form nonfiction skews experimental. Itâs probably no coincidence that Hazlitt is where Koul got her start and where plenty of other people of color like me can write long, rambling essays on the nature of everything, something a media landscape as homogenous as Canadaâs has no appetite for. Both of the editors I worked with â the editor in chief and senior editor â are white, but theyâre what you might call allies if youâre so inclined, and they understand writing at a molecular level. Hazlitt is equivalent to a magazine like The Believer or a site like Grantland. Itâs there that I got my only National Magazine Award nomination in 2016. But the site is small, and you canât live off it. My job search to supplement my work there included a failed interview to write news for an elevator screen and naming 500 color swatches for a marketing company. Then Longreads called. Did I mention the guy who hired me is not white?
Iâm not really sure what to say to Canadian journalists of color who donât have that opportunity or the support to create it. Because itâs not really about them. Itâs about the white Canadians who are hogging all the power positions and refusing to admit that, let alone step aside. Itâs about their refusal to make it a priority to hire people of color from top to bottom because they refuse to see these journalistsâ absence as an issue. Domise has credited his column at Macleanâs to a âhandful of editorsâ who recognized the magazineâs lack of diversity. But the columnists around him are still majority white. Our media seems to have a really hard time reflecting 20 percent of our population, of not overrepresenting whiteness to the point of implying its supremacy.
In June, the CBC and Radio-Canada announced that by 2025, they would have at least one non-white person working as a key creative â producer, director, writer, showrunner, lead performer â on each of their programs. One. More recently, a friend who works at one of the bigger media companies in Toronto mentioned that they were hiring but that all of the applications âsucked.â Knowing the number of journalists who have lost their jobs over the past 10 years, I was baffled. Considering the same white people are often shuffled around the industry over and over again, I asked if they had gone beyond submitted applications to ask peers, to check social media, to look into other publications that have recently closed down. My friend looked at me in embarrassment. Thatâs the look that I think every white journalist in this country is missing.Â
Canada is racist: there I said it. My country is racist and its media is racist and its journalists are racist. Not saying it doesnât make it any less true. Canada is multicultural, yes, that doesnât mean its media is; the industry that is supposed to inform this country is whitewashed, and its information is whitewashed too. Politically, socially, economically â in every way â Canada misrepresents itself. What results is an entirely misinformed public but, more than that, a public represented by an industry that cloaks itself in white and believes that saying nothing will make it invisible. Youâre not invisible. You may not see us, but we see you.
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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.
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