We have abysmally failed to ensure justice and safety in our society. Our failure is clearly judged by the needless deaths of innocent lives taken because of white supremacy. This week, those lives belonged to 15-year-old Yumna Afzaal, her mother, Madiha Salman, her grandmother, Talat Afzaal, and her father, Salman Afzaal. This spring, the lives belonged to eight people in Atlanta, Georgia. Last summer it was George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And, in 2016 it was Colten Boushie, an unarmed teenager hanging out with his friends.

The news of these violent racist attacks is incessant.

Instead of “performing outrage,” Canadians should demand a reevaluation of discriminatory federal laws as well as biased news media and a steady diet of pop culture that vilifies Islam. Today, in The Conversation Canada, Jasmeet Bahia from Carleton University outlines the ways in which Canadian society is complicit in the deaths of Salman Afzaal’s family. She writes, “Since 9/11, Islamophobia has grown in western society and has fed into a fear of people who look Muslim.” She explains that this dehumanizing of our fellow Canadians is bolstered by Canadian laws and attitudes, and means that some see “all brown people as the same.” Here, she says, the “discrimination is not connected to a specific racial or ethnic group — rather, brown skin has become representative of deviance and danger.”

Will this extreme act of violence spark the action needed to end the cycle of hate that “continues without any disruption?”

Also today:

• Uncovering anti-Blackness in the Arab world
• Why Colombians are taking to the streets to protest state violence
• Getting ‘unstuck’: Women who care for others should feel OK stepping back
• How cities can avoid ‘green gentrification’ and make urban forests accessible

Regards,