Angela Bowden on yesterday’s sentencing of Shawn Wade Hynes. the white man who shot a staple gun at young Nhlanhla Dlamini: “Hynes’ crimes were cushioned by his best interests (potential rehabilitation and trauma), while it paid lip service to the actual trauma he caused his victim. I wonder why Shawn Hynes’ character was granted the benefit of the doubt straight in the face of his clear anti-Blackness?”

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald: “There is, from our perspective, a flawed and dangerous risk to Bill C-7 that may not as yet have been considered—in particular the consequences of societal sexism and relational violence. It is our concern, experienced over the past 28 years of developing supportive care for women who have suffered massively as a consequence of being born into families or having married a male spouse who were non-state torturer-traffickers.”

PSA: Unknown individuals are placing unattributed adhesive stickers around Halifax that promote conspiracy theories and foment hatred toward vulnerable groups, especially using COVID-19 as a starting point. Independent Jewish Voices condemns this spate of hate and is calling on people of good will to report these affronts so that we can monitor their proliferation and messages and take measures to stop them.

Black youth on the South Shore are organizing a Black Lives Matter picnic with their supporters on August 30 at 3pm at Hutt Lake in Chester, please come. This picnic is a Black youth response to the hate crime that happened August 15, 2020 at Hutt Lake, a local swimming spot in Chester, NS when a group of families including a Black man and 9 year old child were threatened by local youth waving a noose and confederate flag who made racists threats in person and publicly online.

Raymond Sheppard in this very personal essay describes how an injury to one is an injury to all, how acts of racism targeting an individual traumatize the entire African Nova Scotian community. “During the past fifty years of my life I have personally experienced racism and injustice. Like most African peoples, I have felt the pain, frustration, anxiety, and panic attacks caused by racism. This suffering never goes away because racism never goes away,” he writes.