![]() ![]() In doing so, we will continue the process of decolonization and hasten the end of its legacy wherever it remains in our laws and policies.” If you go to Canada’s Department of Justice website today, you’ll find this remarkable statement: “The Government recognizes that Indigenous self-government and laws are critical to Canada’s future, and that Indigenous perspectives and rights must be incorporated in all aspects of this relationship. So why move our children here? Why not make our stand where we have a large, layered community of friends and family? There is a specific element of Canadian governance that made us hopeful that our American dreams might be better realized in Canada. These aspects of Canadian history have driven modern racist attitudes and continuing disparities in wealth, land ownership, and political power. When I was a child visiting cousins in Toronto, the epithet “Paki,” for South Asians, was ubiquitous. Like America, Canada interned ethnically Japanese people during World War II. Like America, Canada has a legacy of Black enslavement and Indigenous genocide, as well as a long history of residential schools and police brutality. Recent surveys and reports all suggest that Black and Indigenous Canadians continue to experience widespread discrimination in jobs, education, and social services, health disparities, and disproportionate rates of incarceration and violence. Nor is Canada utopian for other racialized groups. In 2019, Quebec passed Bill 21, banning certain public workers from wearing visibly religious symbols, widely understood as an attempt to prevent Muslim women in such positions from wearing hijab, though also affecting those who wear turbans, for example, or kippas. There was another mosque shooting just last week in Toronto. The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in Quebec tripled that year. Even non-Canadians likely remember the Quebec City mosque shooting of 2017, in which 6 men were killed and 5 others injured by a 27-year-old named Alexandre Bissonnette. It’s not that Canada is utopian for Muslims. Unwilling to navigate a landscape in which it was dangerous for my six-year-old to be openly Muslim at school and seeing that this sentiment was increasingly normative in our nation’s culture, we began to plan our departure. While it was likely the instruction was meant to be protective, it was nonetheless worrying. The teacher who told her this was Muslim herself, the only other Muslim at the school in any capacity. I first noticed the uptick in these trends after 9/11 and then again in 2015, when my kindergarten-aged daughter was told not to say she was Muslim at school. It attributes this spike to religious discrimination and a reluctance among American Muslims to seek mental health treatment. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2021 found that American Muslims are now twice as likely to have attempted suicide than Americans of other religious affiliations. It is also increasingly clear that anti-Muslim attitudes in America are durable, as attitudes towards other racialized groups have also been.Īll of the myriad ways in which American Muslims experience anti-Muslim bias, threats, and discrimination appear to be having serious impacts on our mental health. ![]() It’s increasingly clear that the appropriate comparison for the rate at which American Muslims are experiencing discrimination is not with other religious groups, but other racialized groups. At the airport, those figures are 44% for Muslims contrasted with 5% of the general public, applying for jobs, it’s 33% for Muslims and 8% for the general public. 5% among those of other religious affiliations reported religious discrimination while receiving health care. In 2021, Muslims reported experiencing institutional discrimination at levels much higher than other religious groups, for example 25% of Muslims vs. In almost a third of those cases, the perpetrator was a teacher or school official. In 2020, half of all Muslim parents reported having a school aged child who experienced bullying related to their religious identity in the previous year. ISPU has been a boon to American Muslims, who had previously lacked good data about themselves, helping us see more clearly how we’re faring. Recent studies and surveys by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) tell us our concerns were justified. We worried for their physical safety, but also for the sense of themselves they were developing at four and six years old. There was something malignant about the leap from ordinary, private Islamophobia to a state sponsored anti-Muslim agenda that made leaving feel urgent, for me and for my husband, but especially for our children. We left America in 2017, eight months into Donald Trump’s term in office. ![]()
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