New anti-racism website started local and grew

New anti-racism website started local and grew
By Michael C.K. Ma
April 16, 2010

From: http://www.rabble.ca/news/2010/04/new-anti-racism-website-started-local-and-grew


Rachel Gurofsky was working late one night, trying to meet a deadline. In the morning she was going to jump on the TTC and meet her boss at Union Station on Front Street in Toronto and hand over the research she was doing.

Although it was only partly finished, she knew that the new anti-racism website plan was going to be a great resource. She had sifted through hundreds of similar sites that dealt with issues relating to racism and diversity, and what struck her most about these sites was how un-user-friendly they were, how difficult to navigate, and how information was often not well organized and scattered across numerous sites. She promised herself that the website she had in mind would be better.

The boss she was meeting that morning was me. The site we later launched became The Anti-Racism Resource Centre.

We wanted the website to be a clearinghouse of information related to ending hate crime, racism and discrimination in Peterborough and surrounding areas. The impetus for this website came from a series of racially motivated attacks on Asian-Canadian anglers in southern and central Ontario in the summer of 2007, attacks which continued into the summer of 2009.

It is a user-friendly site designed for educators, employers, students, and the community-at-large. Although the site is hosted and updated by a local institution, Community and Race Relations Committee of Peterborough, the information is applicable across many sectors and provinces.

The site organizes anti-racism resources for web users under six headings:

• Racism 101: Where users are provided with a no-nonsense plain language explanation of issues and terms. An extensive glossary of terms is also provided,
• What are My Rights?: Employee rights and human rights are explained,
• For Employers: Information and resources are provided to help employers better understand and implement anti-discrimination and diversity policies in the workplace,
• For Educators: Useful educational resources for teachers and students are provided,
• Global Issues: Provides an international context for issues regarding race and racism,
• Youth Strike Back: Action orientated activities are profiled showing how a younger generation are responding to issues of racism.

As the co-ordinator of the CRRC, my job was to outreach and organize around issues pertaining to race and racism. In the fall of 2007, my board of directors instructed me to make an online version of the resources that we offer through our local office. Little did I know that a few years later we would launch this significant resource -- made possible from a grant from the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. It far exceeded our original intentions.

At first, the goal was simple: to make a website that would serve Peterborough only, but after Gurofsky presented her findings, which showed that the web lacked a good site aggregating useful information regarding racism, we both knew that we had a chance to make a site that could have a much bigger scope, bigger potential, and be able to serve both users in Peterborough and outside. The need seemed great.

We then sought out a web designer to help us organize the content for the web. We knew what we wanted, and we had an idea of how the information should be organized, but the hard part was knowing how to visually realize that in a user friendly interface.

But it wasn't as straightforward as we first thought.

"It is easy to design something specifically for youth, or for employers, or for employees, but it is another thing to design one site that can do all those things at once, and do it well," said Teena Aujla, who was eventually brought in as the designer.

"For example, a worker looking for information regarding their rights might need specific workplace information. But then in another section, for youth, the user might just want to find out about more general issues regarding racism for a school project. Younger users might be interested in finding out about a cool YouTube videos, but an employee looking for info on workplace issues won't be interested. You have to keep in mind you're serving multiple types of users... It was a balancing act."

Since we launched we have been getting around 600 unique visitors a month -- a good start. Interestingly, and as we expected, the majority of users are from outside the Peterborough area, with 10 per cent coming from the United States, and five per cent coming from other parts of the world -- including Singapore, The Republic of Korea, South Africa, Uganda, and Mexico.

It shows the need for such a resource.

Michael C.K. Ma is an activist scholar who researches and works on issues pertaining to social justice, ethno-racial politics, community activism, and immigrant resettlement. He teaches in the department of criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, B.C.

Hari Sharma - Anti-Racist Activist (1934- 2010)

Hari Sharma


It is with deepest sorrow that we announce the death of our friend and comrade, Hari Prakash Sharma, on March 16 following a prolonged battle with cancer. Hari took his last breath in his home of 42 years at Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), British Columbia, surrounded by his comrades Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, and Chin Banerjee. All of them had come together in 1976 to form the Vancouver Chapter of the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA), which had been founded by Hari and many others at a meeting in Montreal in 1975.

Hari was born on [November 9], 1934 at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh though his family came from Haryana. His father was a railway employee, so he moved from one place to another wherever his father was posted. Hari received his BA from Agra University and his Master’s in Social Work from Delhi University. The insight into the social life of India Hari got from his travels by train enabled by his father’s employment in the railways and his extensive travels by foot through the villages of India stimulated Hari to start writing short stories in Hindi. Hari is regarded as one of the finest writers of short stories in Hindi and many people had urged him to resume his writing in Hindi. One of his stories was adapted as a play and staged in New Delhi.

Hari moved to the US in 1963 for further education and did his Master in Social Work from the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964 and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1968. He taught briefly at UCLA before accepting a position at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia in 1968, where he stayed till his retirement in 1999. He was honored by the University as Professor Emeritus.

Hari, like many enlightened academics of the 1960’s plunged in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and Canada. This is also the period when he espoused Marxism, which ideology he held dearly and steadfastly until his death.

As a member of the Faculty of Simon Fraser University he became a champion of the academic rights of colleagues who were faced with the threat of dismissal for their support of the student-led movement for democratizing the university. He became an associate and friend of another Marxist Kathleen Gough, who was suspended for her political activities. Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma co-edited the 469-page book, Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, which was published in 1973 by the Monthly Review Press, New York. The book was sought by political activists of that time and many people know of Hari as an eminent leftist scholar because of that book.

The 1960’s were a period of international revolutionary upheaval. The Naxalbari peasant uprising happened in the spring of 1967. Hari was greatly inspired by it. He went to India and visited Naxalbari area. It is then he got committed to the path opened by Naxalbaaari and retained his faith in its ultimate success until his last days, while many of his comrades had simply written off Naxalbari as a thing of the past. Hari developed contact with peasant revolutionaries and maintained a living contact till his last days.

While associating with the Naxalbari movement in India, Hari carried on anti-imperialist work in Vancouver through the weekly paper, Georgia Straight, published by the Georgia Straight Collective, of which he was a founding member. In 1973 Hari went to the Amnesty International in London and the Commission of Jurists in Geneva and sent a written representation to the UN Human Rights Commission to publicize the condition of more than thirty-thousand political prisoners in Indian jails.

In 1974 he and his comrade Gautam Appa of the London School of Economics organized a petition of international scholars to protest the treatment of political prisoners in India, which he handed to the Indian Consulate in Vancouver, BC on August 15 of the same year.

In 1975 Hari enthusiastically accepted an invitation from his friends in Montreal. He along with many others founded the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) on June 25, 1975, exactly on the same day on which Indira Gandhi declared the State of Emergency in India. Hari’s tireless work against dictatorship in India and in defense of political prisoners and oppressed peoples, and his energetic organization of progressive people across North America in the struggle against Imperialism and for social justice, led to the revocation of his passport by the Indira Gandhi government in 1976.

Having engaged in various anti-racist struggles in the 1970s, IPANA in Vancouver, under Hari’s leadership became a primary force in the formation of the British Columbia Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR: 1980), which proved to be an extremely effective instrument against the tide of racism in the province at the time. Hari and IPANA also played a leading role in the formation of the Canadian Farmworkers’ Union (CFU: 1980), which for the first time took up the cause of farm workers who had been historically excluded from protection under the labour laws and any protective regulation.

From the 1980s Hari’s work also began to focus on the condition of minorities in India, which came to a crisis with the attack on the Golden Temple and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Hari stood firm in his defense of the human rights of Sikhs and, increasingly of Muslims who became the primary targets of the rising Hindutva forces gathered under the banner of the Bhartiya Janata Party. He organized a parallel conference on the centralization of state power and the threat to minorities in India to coincide with the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver in 1987.

In 1989 Hari brought large sections of the South Asian community together to form the Komagata Maru Historical Society to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident, in which Indian immigrants traveling to Canada on a chartered ship were turned away from the shores of Vancouver by the racist policies of the Canadian Government. As a result of the society’s work a commemorative plaque was installed in Vancouver. In 2004, during a screening of the documentary film on this incident by Ali Kazimi, Continuous Journey, the Mayor of Vancouver presented a scroll to Hari dedicating the week to the memory of Komagata Maru.

Following the attack on Babri Masjid in December 1992 Hari became the prime mover in the formation of a North American organization dedicated to the defense of minority rights in India called, Non-resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD). This organization brought together Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians of origin in South Asia through educational and cultural activities. It had its most significant moment in Vancouver in 1997, when it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the independence of India from colonial rule by bringing together people from the entire spectrum of the South Asian community to focus on how much remained to be done on the subcontinent and the urgent need for peace between Pakistan and India.

Recognizing the need to build a North American front against the growing menace of Hindutva fascism in India, Hari travelled to Montreal in September 1999 to join the founding of International Soth Asia Forum (INSAF). He became is first President and organized the Second Conference in Vancouver from Augst10-12, 2001.

Hari’s leadership again led to the development of NRISAD into South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) in Vancouver to embrace the necessity of going beyond a focus on India to the entire South Asian region in the quest of peace and democracy based on secularism, human rights and social justice. SANSAD has pursued these goals vigorously, condemning the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (for which he was denied a visa to go to India), championing the human rights of Kashmiris, promoting peace between Pakistan and India, supporting the rights of women in Pakistan, condemning violence against journalists and academics in Bangladesh, supporting the movement for democracy and social justice in Nepal, and defending the human rights of Tamils under the attack of the Sri Lankan state.

Besides being an able political organizer and a gifted writer of short stories, Hari was also a talented photographer. He photographed the common people of India, their lives and struggles. His photpgraphs hang in many homes and have been displayed in many exhibitions. He proved himself to be an excellent director of political drama.

Political ideals remain steadfast. However, there has, naturally been, divergence of opinion on the strategy and tactics of achieving these ideals. During the course of long political activity of more than 50 years, Hari made many friends and comrades. It is natural that among these comrades there also arose disagreements on many issues. Nevertheless, Hari remained a comrade or a friend of all of them and they all are deeply saddened by his passing away.

Hari leaves behind him a legacy of activism in the service of the oppressed. He is an inspiration to engagement in the struggle for a better world, to a never-flagging effort to create a world without exploitation, without imperialist domination, without religious, caste, ethnic or gender oppression, a world that Marx envisioned as human destiny.


Chin Banerjee

Harinder Mahil

Raj Chouhan

Daya Varma

Vinod Mubayi



http://www.anti-racism.ca/content/hari-sharma-anti-racist-activist