After seven seasons and 65 episodes, we really want to meet our listeners. So we’re going to be taking the podcast on the road, and recording some live episodes across Canada with a live audience. You can expect the same thoughtful conversations with scholars, shining a light on how systemic racism permeates our society.

And we’ll be bringing those episodes to our feed in the New Year.

Follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast to learn more about these events, and how to attend - including the first one coming up on Thursday, November 14th in Toronto.

You can also stay in touch by re-listening to past episodes, or by signing up for our biweekly newsletter on news stories that intersect with race and racism.

We’ll see you back here in 2025!

Official reports have been declaring systemic racism in North America’s education system for more than 30 years. What will it take to change?

Even before COVID-19, education experts were sounding the alarm about the future of racialized children in our schools. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored — even deepened — the divide.

On this episode of Don’t Call me Resilient, we speak with Kulsoom Anwer, a high school teacher who joined us from her classroom in one of Toronto’s most marginalized neighbourhoods. With her is Carl James, professor of education at York University. Together we discuss the injustices and inequalities in the education system and, in the conversation, we also explore some possible ways forward.

Every week, we highlight articles that drill down into the topics we discuss in the episode. This week, both articles say that combating racism in schools is not only possible, but also that solutions are in the hands of educators.

To make change, teachers must not only question existing power dynamics, but they must also acknowledge and validate the racism that is experienced by Black, Indigenous and racialized youth.

For more information and resources, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of the episode can be found here: TRANSCRIPT

In this reflective and personal episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, Prof. Cheryl Thompson of Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Beauty in a Box untangles the wending history of hair relaxers for Black women — and the health risks now linked to them.

For decades, Black women have been using hair relaxers to help them “fit into” global mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them. More recently, research has linked these relaxers to cancer and reproductive health issues — and a spate of lawsuits across the United States, and at least one in Canada, have been brought by Black women against the makers of these relaxants.

Prof. Thompson and I get into it: including her own relationship to using relaxers as a Black woman, the lawsuits and the wending history and relationship between these relaxants and Black women. We also — for obvious reasons — dip into The Other Black Girl, the novel that is also now a horror-satire streaming series about mind-controlling hair products.

For more information and resource, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of the episode can be found here: TRANSCRIPT