This wonderful Weekend Video traces the more than 200-year the Downey family has been in Nova Scotia. To say its members left their mark on the province is an understatement.
Black activists write a letter asking that carding be stopped, and nobody in power wants to talk about it. No way, says the chief of police. Can’t have politicians telling the police what to do, says Stephen McNeil. “Fix the tool, don’t throw out the toolbox,” says mayor Savage.
Why it’s called carding, not street checks, and why it should stop.
How does environmental racism manifest in Nova Scotia? How do you establish a direct link between health issues in a community and the landfill down the road? We speak with Dr. Ingrid Waldron of the ENRICH project. and meet with two scientists who looked at water quality issues in Lincolnville, an African Nova Scotian community situated near a large landfill.
Residents of the South End, a black community within the Town of Shelburne, fear for their health because a nearby landfill has been allowed to operate without many constraints for most of its 75-year existence. The Town isn’t really listening to their concerns, they say.
This weekend’s featured video is In Whose Backyard?, a documentary about people dealing with environmental racism all over Nova Scotia. The documentary came out of Ingrid Waldron’s ENRICH project. It premiered in 2014, and that’s also when I wrote this article. Check it out.
Dr. Ingrid Waldron explains how environmental racism operates in partnership with other forms of structural violence to disproportionately harm African Nova Scotian communities. In doing so, she provides some much-needed context to the recent reports on violence in the African Nova Scotian community.
The city should stop pretending that the Africville case was settled in the courts. It never was.
An open letter to premier Stephen McNeil and mayor Mike Savage suggests that there is much more these politicians can do to address issues that helped cause the recent violence in the Black community. “The African Haligonian community, is now hemorrhaging, and yet it is called upon to solve its own problems. We do not see that happening to other communities when they are hit by a crisis,” she writes in an open letter to the politicians.
This weekend’s video is a spoken word poem by the young and very talented Guyleigh Johnson, about community and growing up in North Dartmouth. Not to be missed.