Category: Society

Grave Decisions

“When Rob Mark’s father-in-law died suddenly in a workplace accident, Mark and his wife were in shock. As they grieved, something else began to dawn—they were going to have to go to a funeral home, and no matter what their budget, it wouldn’t come cheap. And they were right. ‘It felt like I was buying a used car from a dodgy dealership,’ Mark recalls.”

Vincenzo Ravina – Maisonneuve – January 2019

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Race, Privilege, and the Canadian Wilderness

“Little black boys don’t make compelling sharks, or at least, that’s what I thought growing up in Scarborough. We don’t have gill slits or multiple rows of replacement teeth, and the proportions from our heads to our trunks to our tails are all wrong. I suspect that’s why I failed Shark Level in swimming lessons. It simply wasn’t in the cards. Prior to that moment, I’d successfully convinced people that I was a pollywog, a tadpole, a sunfish, and even a dolphin. Becoming a shark, however, was far more difficult.”

Phillip Dwight Morgan – The Walrus – January 2019

Educating Grayson: Are inclusive classrooms failing students?

“Lisa Kahn developed a daily routine this fall. She’d eat breakfast, feed her family and get her two children ready for school – Grayson, a seven-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, and his older sister, Avery. After she dropped them off, she’d practise deep breathing with help from an app on her watch. And then she would brace herself for the phone call.”

Caroline Alphonso – The Globe and Mail – January 2019

Two Truths and a Lie

“The game seems simple—until you realize most people don’t have interesting facts about themselves stored away for when a whimsical get-to-know-you game erupts. Though our class was made up of aspiring writers, we seemed to forget our imaginations entirely within the constraints of the exercise. Instead, we relied on safe, sanitized facts that didn’t reveal anything about us as people, but increased our chances of ‘winning’ the game.”

Alicia Elliott – The Puritan – November 2018

An explosive gender revolution is under way. So why isn’t it changing anything?

Anne Kingston – Maclean’s – November 2018

15 minutes of shame

“Hal Hannaford sits in a wing chair in his book-lined study in a former manse, with its worn Oriental carpet, antique oak pulpit and stained-glass window of St. George the dragon slayer, mounted on a white horse. In a crisp mint shirt, brown tie co-ordinated with his mustard wool blazer, he looks calm and poised, the way the headmaster of an elite Toronto boys school should. But it has been a terrible week. Mr. Hannaford, 49, has expelled three boys and suspended four others from Royal St. George’s College. He has held four student assemblies, chaired an emotional parent-information night and met with the director of community relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress. He also has faced a daily onslaught of media fascinated with the convergence of upper-crust schools, anti-Semitism, the 60th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat and an unmanageable beast called cyberspace.”

Jan Wong – The Globe and Mail – May 2005

The making of a Black man

“My hatred was not instilled in me by cultural factors like the hip-hop music I listened to, and I didn’t turn my life towards writing because I made a conscious choice to move back toward ‘mainstream morals.’ Rather, my choices were affected by the difficulty that I’ve had—as many Black men have had—dealing with a masculinity that is a binary between crime and what Jivani describes as ‘mainstream morals,’ a masculinity so often defined by the male role models in our lives, or by their absence altogether. Our choices are a fight against destructive forces, in the struggle to construct a version of masculinity that enables our survival.”

Andray Domise – Maclean’s – October 2018