{"id":59971,"date":"2020-07-17T16:15:16","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T16:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59971"},"modified":"2020-07-17T16:15:18","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T16:15:18","slug":"the-man-striving-to-be-the-canadian-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59971","title":{"rendered":"The Man Striving to Be the \u2018Canadian Obama\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Man Striving to Be the \u2018Canadian Obama\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2020-07-10<\/p>\n

Dan Bilefsky<\/strong><\/a>, Canada Correspondent<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\u201cThe abuse of power has plagued brown and Black people, and we have had enough,\u201d Balarama Holness<\/a> said. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Balarama Holness<\/a>, 36, a law student and community organizer who once played professional Canadian football<\/a>, is becoming a leading voice against systemic racism in his country.<\/em><\/p>\n

MONTREAL<\/a> \u2014 For Balarama Holness<\/a>, the defining moment of his life happened four years before he was born. It was at a Bob Marley<\/a> concert in Montreal, when the eyes of his Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois<\/a> mother and his Jamaican father interlocked as the singer wailed, \u201cGet up, stand up, stand up for your rights!<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the final year of the freewheeling 1970s, and his adventurous Francophone mother and ascetic Anglophone father were strangers in a sprawling hockey arena. But Mr. Holness said barriers of language and race momentarily collapsed as the Marley anthem washed over the crowd \u2014 a rare alchemy that he said he had spent his whole life chasing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe music dissolved fictitious divisions in society,\u201d Mr. Holness said, \u201cand somewhere between the dreadlocks<\/a>, the Jamaican patois<\/a> and Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois French, the seeds of my existence were sowed, along with my future as a rebel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Educator, broadcaster, law student and former championship-winning professional Canadian football<\/a> player, Mr. Holness, 36, aspires to be a \u201cCanadian Obama\u201d \u2014 another \u201cbiracial lawyer,\u201d he observes, who cut his teeth as a community organizer. His other role model is Colin Kaepernick<\/a>, the Black quarterback whose kneeling during the American national anthem before N.F.L.<\/a> games became a potent symbol against racial and social injustice.<\/p>\n

Mr. Holness\u2019s outsized swagger and ambition are perhaps inevitable \u2014 he noted that because of his parents\u2019 respect for Hindu tradition, they named him Balarama, considered by some a god with extraordinary strength. A first cousin, Andrew Holness<\/a>, is Jamaica\u2019s prime minister.<\/p>\n

In Balarama Holness\u2019s case, he has grabbed Canadian headlines after mobilizing a grass-roots movement over the past two years that pushed Montreal\u2019s City Hall<\/a> to hold hearings on systemic racism. That is no small accomplishment in Quebec<\/a>, a French-majority province where the government has repeatedly denied the existence of systemic racism<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Balarama Holness, 36, a law student and community organizer who once played professional Canadian football, is becoming a leading voice against systemic racism in his country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,8,26],"tags":[31035,31036,8462,10071,11629,2327],"class_list":["post-59971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-politics","tag-balarama-holness","tag-dan-bilefsky","tag-montreal","tag-new-york-time","tag-quebec","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59971"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59973,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59971\/revisions\/59973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}