Ahmad Saidullah

Ahmad Saidullah is an executor of CASSA’s Say No To Hate project and the producer of It’s About Time webmag.

IAT: A word from you about the genesis of the Say No To Hate project…

Ahmad: It took a long time. I believe it was a year and a half after Lalita and I took the project to CASSA that it got funded by National Crime Prevention Centre and Ontario Trillium Foundation. CASSA had been doing work on hate crime. It had a hate crime hotline and had developed an intake form among other things.

My motivation for the project was to produce something on hate crime that was different from other approaches. If you talk to police and funders and others about hate crime, the chances are that most of what you will hear will be about extremist groups etc. Now those forms of violence and its associations are scary and are rightly deplored.

However, there may be an over-investment of energy and resources in tackling it that way. Evidence suggests that in the US, UK and Canada, it is very much is a systemic issue. A huge percentage of hate crimes are committed by persons without any links to these fringe groups or direct knowledge of the victim. I felt we needed a new approach. We’ve suggested that it’s a systemic issue which has been present since South Asians arrived here.

The topic of our inaugural issue of the webmag is not accidental. You’ll find on this website stuff explaining why the Reena Virk case is so important. It’s certainly been there before 9/11 even if that brought it to national attention.

Here you have a quandary. Although race hatred is the primary motivation and South Asians, particularly the young or the isolated, are at risk there was little in terms of resources that are specific to the community. So there was a service and capacity issue which interested CASSA which wanted to extend its work on hate crime. We have seen how serious the problem is.

IAT: What has been the impact of the project?

Ahmad: The approach to the project was to develop the capacity of the agency, the participants involved, and the communities targeted—not just to produce the deliverables, through the project. In the first phase, youth learned by doing stuff on the video and the SNTH website, both of which were part of the Train the Trainer training design. There was a ripple effect philosophy built into the training which means that communities which had been out of the loop would now have access to knowledge and actions.

Again, my emphasis in designing the training was to take a systemic approach to identifying and analysing the problem of hate crime and its solutions. This would mean developing a shared understanding of the problem, its differences with racism (with which it is often confused), an analysis of the so-called remedies, and ways of generating different community solutions to it. I hope it has been successful. The reactions have been very positive.

I guess the most visible product of the project so far has been the award-winning video that was produced by Lalita. It’s an amazing piece. It was launched with a freestyle rap competition at last year’s Masala Mehndi Masti festival last summer at Harbourfront. By the way, the video has come out now in different languages.

The SNTH website is still there with tons of resources on hate crime. There was feedback, overwhelmingly positive. There is a comprehensive training program too. Now the training has been turned into different modules as well for any number of audiences. CASSA has carried this training in other cities too.

The project in this phase has a wider usability than it did in the first phase in terms of linguistic and other communities’ access to the resources. CASSA is moving to creating a response network to hate crime in the form of service supports among professionals in agencies. I am working on the design for developing a small group of agencies that would work together.

The hope is that after the response network is finalized we will produce a business card tool in different languages. Someone, say a student or a senior, could slip it in their bag and would have phone numbers etc. at hand if they were attacked or knew someone who had become the victim of a hate crime. Most folks do not know what to do. During the course of this phase, we will produce two other issues of the web mag.

The It’s About Time website has, I believe, exciting potential in terms of involving a wide cross-section of interests and contributors. We hope that it will grow and that everyone who comes across it finds it interesting to read and respond to.