What is racism? Where does it come from? How can we fight it? These difficult questions are at the heart of a new podcast series that aims to scientifically dissect racism and its implications.
The new addition to Projet Mégaphone, a thematic series that combines scientific knowledge and experiential knowledge of young people in vulnerable situations, Where does racism come from? has been presenting five episodes of situations experienced by Quebec teenagers from immigrant backgrounds since June. In workshops, These young people aged 12 to 16 are asked to share encounters, experiences or other anecdotes under the attentive ears of the facilitators Sophie de Cordes and Anne-Marie Savoie and a guest researcher. Here, a teenager recounts an interaction with a bus driver. There, a teenager describes young people pretending to be terrorists. Through various stories, the listener “learns about the scientific aspect, but he learns about [aussi] on the young,” explains M.me Savoy.
The scientific side gives an “angle that approaches the subject head on, but not [de façon] personalized,” notes Mme de Cordes. “Linking people’s experiences to scientific facts already helps us to break out of isolation,” she believes.
If the theme changes, the concept remains the same. The workshops led by Projet Mégaphone are not only designed to provide knowledge. They also aim to better equip young people at various stages of their lives. “These are not young people who have very positive experiences in their careers,” emphasizes Mme de Cordes. “There is a real social recovery, in terms of skills, in terms of confidence.”
Understanding to better denounce
Université de Montréal professor Sophie Hamisultane, an expert in interculturality invited by Mégaphone to talk about racism, insists on the need to study the historical evolution of the concept to understand it properly. While in the Middle Ages, the word race referred to the difference between nobles and the people, Europeans redefined it during the colonial period on the basis of skin colour. The discovery of DNA confirmed that the notion of race had no biological basis. “All human beings were of the same race — there is only one human race, so there is no need to differentiate between humans,” the researcher emphasizes.
This type of learning allows participants to discuss their own experiences with a renewed understanding. Many young people did not believe, for example, that a joke based on racial stereotypes was truly a racist act. With these workshops, participants better understand the importance of denouncing. “To have a scientist say ‘you’re right, it’s racism, it’s not funny’, that really equips them, gives themempowerment ” concludes M.me of Strings.
Still unknown
Project Megaphone, founded and run full-time by the two women, began operations less than a year ago and remains little known for the moment. “We have about a hundred followers on Facebook and Instagram,” says M.me of Strings.
The future of the project seems assured, however. Mégaphone’s activities are in fact entirely funded by NovaScience, a program for promoting scientific culture of the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy, and this financial support will continue. That said, “we both have the ambition [d’élever notre projet] across Quebec,” say the co-founders.
The six workshops whose excerpts form the basis of the podcast series’ content also require the participation of several other stakeholders. In addition to recruiting researchers who want to participate in two of the workshops, the facilitators call on youth support organizations to conduct the workshops on their premises. In the case of the podcasts on racism, the participants attended the Pointe-Saint-Charles YMCA.
To describe their mission, Mme Savoie and Mme de Cordes express their “faith in education as a vector of social equality” and their desire to “rehabilitate science, which has been mistreated.”