On Sept. 16, Grévin Montréal, the famous Montreal wax museum, permanently closed its doors. It had been temporarily closed since March 2020 as public health protocols forbade non-essential activities like cultural exhibitions from fully opening. Numerous Black-owned businesses faced similar circumstances after being deemed “non-essential,” exposing how such arbitrary labelling[Read More…]
Tag: culture
Finding new words for my identity
It took me until I was 12 to realize that my father’s English was accented. Before that, it was just my father’s voice: Familiar and melodic, a vestige of his first, tonal language. Like many mixed kids, I was hyper-aware of the racial categories I fit into from a young[Read More…]
The ubiquity of human song
From songs on the radio to birds chirping outside, humans are constantly surrounded by music. However, while making music appears to be a universal phenomenon, the vast diversity of music across different cultures also seems to point toward variation. Furthermore, human song’s global similarities have never been proven through research. [Read More…]
The lecture hall: The space where my two cultures met
I was born in Iran, but my family and I moved to Canada when I was four-years-old. Although Farsi was my first language, English quickly became my dominant one and, even though I was surrounded by Iranian culture at home, at school I was being exposed to a completely different[Read More…]
Pork before synagogue: Growing up at a cultural crossroads
Born in Queens, my mom was raised in Westchester county, New York, a predominantly-Jewish area surrounded by fellow first and second-generation Ashkenazi relatives. Meanwhile, my Arkansas-born father was growing up with Methodist parents who have deep southern roots and distant Scottish ancestry. So, when they married in 1992, a strange[Read More…]
National Geographic’s race cover story misconstrues multiraciality
When I first read Patricia Edmonds’ cover story on Millie and Marcia Biggs—half-black, half-white fraternal twins—for National Geographic’s April 2018 Race Issue, I felt conflicted. As a person of mixed race, with a father from Hong Kong and a mother of largely Scottish descent, I was happy for this family’s[Read More…]
McGill Quebec Studies: Maintaining an international university’s local roots
The existence of McGill’s Quebec Studies Program is currently up for debate, due to its low registration rates. It may seem logical to cut a niche program that does not attract many students. Quebec Studies is particularly specialized—it is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on a specific locality, and because[Read More…]
In search of a nice Jewish boy
When I was 13, my mother told me that she would kick me out of the house if I got a tattoo, or if I married non-Jewish. Her first fear never came to fruition, and her second was something I supported—if not ideologically—at least pragmatically. I grew up in a[Read More…]
Where are you from? In defence of seeing race
“Where are you from?” is a loaded question. At McGill, depending on who is asking and who is being asked, the meaning of ‘where are you from?’ can range from an ambivalent, ‘where did you grow up?’ to a watered down, ‘why aren’t you white?’ As a person of colour[Read More…]
English versus French: A false dichotomy
Having grown up a son of French and Tunisian immigrants in the West Island, a mostly English-speaking part of Montreal, I have had a curious experience with language. Although Bill 101, The Charter of the French Language, was at first necessary to preserve the French language in Quebec, current attempts[Read More…]
