The International Day for the Elimination of Racism was this week and it’s worth taking a moment to look at some of the reasons why the United Nations’ General Assembly decided to ask the world to observe it.

Sixty-four years ago, South African police opened fire onto a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville who had gathered to protest the “dompas,” a pass card required by Black Africans to move freely between cities and rural areas. Police shot and killed 69 men, women and children, and many more were injured.

Here in Canada, a similar pass system existed for 60 years, under the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs. Actually, the South African apartheid pass laws are thought to be inspired by the Canadian ones. For Indigenous Peoples, punishment for leaving the reserve could lead to imprisonment.

Although the term apartheid was first used to describe the system in South Africa, the term – which means enforced racial segregation, and can include the oppression and deprivation of one racial group by another – has been taken up by the international community to point to unequal systems anywhere. This has included Palestine, a region we look at in today’s podcast.

In this week’s Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast episode, we speak with Hilal Elver, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and current research professor of Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, about the looming famine in Gaza after months of Israeli attacks.

On Monday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Israel denies these allegations which were some of the strongest words against Israel we have heard from a western power about the situation in Gaza since October. His words come on the heels of a UN-backed report that warns that more than one million people — half of Gaza’s population — face catastrophic starvation conditions. The report goes on to say that without an immediate ceasefire and a major influx of food especially into areas cut off by fighting, famine and mass death in Gaza are imminent. Scholars say intentional starvation of a population is a war crime according to international law.

It’s a lot to take in — but with Elver as the expert at your side — it becomes an informative, compelling and urgent conversation.

Also today:

• The stakes could not be higher as Canada sets its 2035 emissions target
• Ethnic diversity is still a serious issue at the top level in accounting firms
• Measles is highly contagious, but vaccine-preventable: A primer on recent outbreaks, transmission, symptoms and complications, including ‘immune amnesia’
• Whether it’s Trump or Biden as president, U.S. foreign policy endangers the world
• AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions

All the best.