In recent years, Canada has seen an alarming rise of hate crimes and anti-immigrant sentiments. This is particularly relevant for the city of Hamilton, which has the highest rate of hate crimes observed in the year 2019 (CBC News). In 2019 the Hamilton Pride celebration and Parade of the LGBTQ+ community faced a massive disruption and physical confrontation from an anti-group of people where several individuals received minor injuries (CBC News). The Pride parade committee had already foreseen such a disruption and alerted its members with a Social media message populated. This incident certainly speaks to the growing nature of intolerance towards not just the Queer communities but also towards the cultural and ethnic ‘Others’ in Hamilton in a larger context. It also says a lot in the context of how this city and many other cities in Canada are changing in the logic of the right-winged, rich communities. These incidents have added to the already existing polarization in the Canadian social fabric, where the far-right political parties are promoting anti-racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric coupled with a ‘white’ nationalist ideology.
The ‘normative’ vision of Canada as a white man’s country is still pervasive which one can argue seeks to reinstate itself through the prosecutions of the minority. Baldwin and et al in the collection entitled “Rethinking the Great White North” argue that unlike liberal proponents of “post-racism” discourse, race is still an important thing to think about. Multiculturalism. the persistence of racialized social relations – including the racialization of poverty, environmental racism, “white” neighbourhoods, racist law and immigration policy, and racialized discourses” (Baldwin et al 4).
This also raises questions on whether true inclusion at all exists in Canada and whether what we have in Canada is a kind of ‘token multiculturalism’. The multicultural initiatives of the Canadian government are also disputed since the 1988 Multiculturalism Act defines itself as “the right of all to identify with the cultural heritage of their choice, yet retain full and equitable participation in the shaping of all aspects of Canadian society” (Justice Law Website). Solidarity in such a political, social climate can be hard to achieve. Under such grounds, the initiatives taken up by Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion (HCCI) to create an online hate crime reporting system seem a practical approach to address the complex mechanism of hate crimes experienced by the ethnic ‘Other’ populace of Hamilton.
Hate predominantly remains unnamed, unexamined, and unaccounted in the current context, with little scope to situate such incidents within the larger socio-historical context and connect to systematics forces of oppression that intend to sustain hierarchical categorizations and fundamental relations of power
Exploring the Necessity and Feasibility of on Online Hate Reporting System.
Formulation of a third-party, confidential, online reporting system can serve as an inclusive and effective alternative to study and infer the prevalence and patterns of hate-motivated incidents and to underscore the deleterious impact such events have on target communities.
Exploring the Necessity and Feasibility of on Online Hate Reporting System.
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