Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.

I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape. 

Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism. 

Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity. 

Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”

Sitting at Northwood on Bloor Street West over a mocktail and beer, Gillian asks, “Did you notice suddenly becoming invisible to men around age forty?” 

Me: “Nope.”

“Yeah, but you are beautiful.”

“So are you.”

“But I noted it and it was sudden.” Gillian is smart, gorgeous, accomplished, white, a writer, and one of my mentors during my MFA. 

Good for her, I thought, as mostly I found myself far too visible. Still. A constant imposition or a weight lay upon me. Except, that is, when I wanted medical or legal care or psychological or academic care for me or my child—then I became eminently less visible, categorically unseen, a giant perplexity for someone who looked at me blankly, or with sexually laced assumptions or suspicion. 

This is not unlike my trip to a walk-in medical clinic for extreme rib pain that had me hobbled. After an hour wait, I was sent to an examining room. The doctor entered. I sat twisted in pain and pointing at my chest. His face turned to scorn, the absence of concern. “Get out,” he said. “Just, just go,” he said, waving me and my pain away. 

It happens to women of all ages and races, this shifting state of value and visibility. Gillian noted herself as suddenly unseen at a certain age. My Blackness, however, ensures that eyes remain on me. This disappears, however, when I am due for a promotion or in need of care. Then I am fucking invisible.

I did not respond in real time at the clinic. My thoughts were blunted by pain, shock, and confusion. This medical assault surprised and shocked me, and yet it did not surprise me at all. The doctor assumed I was there for opiates. …

The doctor got paid by our state for that visit. For my pain-infused walk to and presence in that clinic, I got nothing. The next day, after another pain-filled night, I took more time off from my job and visited a naturopath who was also a chiropractor. I paid for this visit myself. Upon a physical examination that took approximately two minutes, he determined I had a dislocated rib. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “This is a body response. Have you been under extreme stress?” 

“You have no idea,” I responded. 

That was exactly the lesson I learned at that workshop all those years ago: I can try my best to understand every day. And I do try. Every day. It’s literally the least I can do. But no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never really have any idea. 

That’s the reality that all of us need to integrate into our lives and reflect on every day for the rest of our lives. Adding this excellent book to the library of books and movies I continue to accumulate—not just in the years since that workshop, not just in the months after George Floyd’s murder, not just during Black History Month, but every month of every year I continue to be alive—is one small way to continue trying. 

It’s not enough, of course. I doubt anything will be enough in my lifetime. But to paraphrase a very wise woman I once knew: How do you start fighting racism? You just start.

Other books that deal with racism:

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly Conlin

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Recovered a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish